Unless it be assumed, therefore, that investigation is reliable in proportion to the distance from its subject at which it works, it would seem to {091}appear that, even if the William Shakespeare we have portrayed were our own creation, the creation is actually a nearer resemblance to the William Shakespeare known to those nearest to him in residence and time; than the inspired genius of the Shakespeareans, who, from Malone downward, have rejected every shred of fact they found at hand, and weaved, instead, their warp and woof of fiction (and that it is charming and absorbing fiction, we are eager to admit) around a vision of their own. Nor have the Shakespeareans rested their labors here. Having created a Shakespeare to fit the plays, it was necessary to proceed to create a face to fit the Shakespeare, and a cranial development wherein might lodge and whence might spring the magic of the works he ought to have written. This may, very fairly, be called "the young ladies' argument." * "Look on his portrait," say the Shakespeareans; "look at that magnificent head!"--and they point to the Chandos portrait--"is not that the head of a genius?" * So the young ladies of New York were of opinion that Stokes should not be hanged for the murder of Fisk, "because he was so awfully good-looking." {092}inspiration--the ideal of the artist, who conceives, in every case, his own "Shakespeare;" and if we were called upon for proof that "Shakespeare" is quite as much of an ideal to the most of us as a "Hamlet," or a "Lear," we could cite, perhaps, nothing more convincing than the latitude which is allowed to artists with any of the three--"Shakespeare," "Was there ever such a head?" We should say, yes, there might have been such another head created, even admitting the Chandos portrait to be the very counterfeit head of William Shakespeare. But it does not appear, on taking the trouble to look into the matter, either that the Chandos picture is a portrait, or that--with one exception--any other of the pictures, casts, masks, busts, or statues of William Shakespeare are any thing but works of art, embodying the individual "Hamlet," or "Lear," and the elaborate criticism to which a new "portrait" of either of them is subjected--criticism, which, in the case of a portrait of William Shakespeare, in no case pretends to be historical, but is always romantic, or sentimental, or picturesque: as to the proper pose of a poet, or the correct attitude for a man receiving efflatus directly from the gods; never as to the stage manager of the Blackfriars, or the husband of Anne Hathaway, or the son of John Shakespeare, of Stratford.