were not recognized as immortal by the generation of their composer that is the miracle; neither were the songs of Homer. Perhaps, so far as experience goes, this is rather the rule than the exception. The miracle is, that in all the world of London and of England nobody knew that there _was_ any Shakespeare, in the very days when the Drama we hold so priceless now was being publicly rendered in a play-house, and printed--as we shall come to consider further on--for the benefit of non-theater-goers! But, it is said, the great fire of London intervened and burned up all the records--that is how we happen to have no records of the immortal Shakespeare. Then, again, there is the lapse of time--the ordinary wear and tear of centuries, and the physical changes of the commercial center of the world. But how {080}about Edmund Spenser? That we have his poetry and the record of his life, is certain. Or, how about Chaucer? Did the great fire of London affect his chronicle and his labors? The records of Horace, and Maro, of Lucretius, of Juvenal, and Terence, had more than a great fire of London to contend with. But they have survived the ruin of empires and the crash of thrones, the conflagrations of libraries and the scraping of palimpsests. And yet the majesty and might of the Shakespearean page, how greater than Horatius or Maro, than Juvenal and Terence! If it all were a riddle, we could not read it. But it is not a riddle. It is the simplest of facts--the simple fact that the compilers of the Shakespearean pages worked anonymously, and concealed their identity so successfully that it lay hidden for three hundred years, and defies even the critical acumen, the learning and the research of this nineteenth century. But to return to Edmund Malone. He is not deterred by his failure to find a poet of the name of Shakespeare. Determined that a poet of that name there shall be, and not being at hand, he proceeds--and he has the credit of being the first to undertake the task--to construct an immortal bard. And a very pretty sort of fellow he turns out, too!--one that, with such minor variations as have, from time to time, suggested themselves to gentlemen of a speculative turn of mind, has been a standard immortal William all along. For they who seek will find. Had Mr. Malone searched for the Stratford "shaughraun," who ran off and became an actor (as capably respectable a profession as any other, for the man makes the profession, and not the profession the man); who revis{081}ited his native haunts--on the lookout, not for king's and cardinals, not for dukes and thanes and princes--but for clowns and drunkards and misers to dovetail in among the Hamlets and Othellos that passed under his adapting pen; * had he searched for the {082}Stratford' butcher's son, who was the Stratford wag as well, and who never slaughtered a sheep without making a speech to his admiring fellow-villagers, here he was at his hand.