But Mr. Malone--and, being the first investigator, he would, doubtless, have been followed, as he has been, whatever the result of his inquiries--Mr. Malone, in spite of the silence of the authorities to whose {086}pages he had recourse, not only assumed all he could not find authority for, but undertook to tell us the precise dates at which his Stratford lad composed the plays themselves. Among other achievements he constructed an admirable "chronology" of the Shakespearean plays; which--with such fanciful variations as have been made to it from time to time since--is an authority with the Sliakespeareans even to this day. To be sure, Mr. Malone did not rely entirely upon external evidence for this apochrypha. He often appeals to the text, as when, for example, he settles the date at which the "Merchant of Venice" was composed--as 1594, because Portia says:= ```"Even as a flourish when true subjects bow ```To a new crowned monarch,"= referring of course, says Mr. Malone, (and this guesswork he not only called "commentary," but has actually succeeded in making all his successor "commentators" accept him as final) to the coronation of Henry IV., of France! Again, in the "Merry Wives of Windsor" he finds the words, (Act I, scene iii) "Sail like my pinnace to these golden shores." "This shows," says Mr. Malone, "that this comedy must have been written after Sir Walter Raleigh's return from Guinia, in 1696. And so on." We will not rehearse the scope and burden of Mr. Malone's painstaking and wonderful labors, but, from one instance of the credulity which, once it has overmastered the ablest mind, can suppress and subordinate reason, judgment, and common sense to a zealous and silly search, we can judge of the calm historical value of his "discoveries." In 1808, Mr. Malone published {087}a pamphlet--"An Account of the Incidents from which the Title and Part of the Story of 'The Tempest' were derived, and the Date ascertained." * * By Edmond Malone. London: printed by C. & R. Baldwin, Newbridge street, 1808. The "Tempest" is the most purely fanciful and poetical of the Shakespearean plays, but the commentators determined to show that there is nothing fanciful or poetical about it; that it is all real: the "Magic Island," a real island; the magician Prospero, a real portrait; the "monster," a real, living curiosity, which happened to be on exhibition in England in the days when the play either was written or about to be written, (it makes no difference to these gentlemen which) and the storm at sea--as if the brain which conceived the play could not have conceived--what is not, now-a-days, at least, the most uncommon thing in the world-- a storm at sea!--a real historical hurricane!