for "an amazing genius which could pervade all nature at a glance, and to whom nothing within the limits of the universe appeared to be unknown;" * and his instinct should have assured him that.--however the works which such a genius had left behind him might travel under the name of the butcher's boy--it was not the pen of the butcher-boy that had written them; that the composer of pages "from which, were all the arts and sciences lost, they might be recovered," ** was {083}no "jack-of-all-trades," and could not have lived and publicly presented his compositions nightly, year in and year out, in the glare of a metropolis crowded with courtiers, play-goers, and students--in the age and days of Bacon and Raleigh and Elizabeth--unknown save to a handful of his pot-fellows, and faded out of the world, unknown and unnoticed, fading from the memory of men, without the passing of an item in their mouths! * Whalley. ** Ibid. A curious instance of this familiarity--to be found in the Shakespearean dramas--with the least noticed facts of science, and which, so far as we know, has escaped the critics, we might allude to here: In one of Jules Verne's realistic stories wherein he springs his romantic catastrophes upon scientific phenomena--"Michael Strogoff"-- he makes Michael fall among enemies who sentence him to be blinded. The blinding is to be accomplished with a heated iron, but Michael sees his mother at his side, and, tears suffusing his eyes, the heat of the iron is neutralized, and fails to destroy the sight. So, in "King John," Act IV., Scene 1, Arthur says to Hubert: The iron of itself, though heat red-hot, Approaching near these eyes would drink my tears And quench his fiery indignation. This may be mere coincidence, but the dramas are crowded with such coincidences, and for that, if for that only, are marvelous. In either case, according to the Shakespereans, we have only to go on, for the rest of time, in discovering new truths in nature and facts in science, only to find that the Stratford butcher's boy knew all about them three hundred years ago--was familiar with all that we have yet to learn, and that to his unlettered genius our wisdom was to be sheer foolishness.