But it is evident enough that no such prophetic vision was vouchsafed to them, and no such prophetic judgment passed. Nor is the phenomenon exceptional. The critic, does not live, even to-day, however learned or cultured or shrewd, who would take the responsibility of affirming upon his own judgment, or even upon the universal judgment of his age and race, that any literary composition would be, after a lapse of three hundred years, not only extant, but immortal, hugged as its birthright by a whole world. Such a statement would have been contrary to experience, beyond the prophecy of criticism, and therefore only to be known--if known at all--as a Fact. Moreover, it could only be known as a fact at the expiration of the three hundred years. Doubtless, few critics would care, in any case, to commit themselves upon record one way or the other in a matter so hypothetical and speculative as the judgment of posterity upon a literary performance, and certainly nothing of the sort occurred in Shakespeare's day, even if there were any dramatic or literary critics to speculate upon the subject. There can be no doubt--and it must be conceded {015}--that certain acted plays _did_ pass with their first audiences, and that certain printed plays, both contemporaneously and for years thereafter, did pass with the public who read them, as the compositions of Mr. Manager Shakespeare; and that probably even the manager's pot companions, who had better call to know him than any others, saw nothing to shake their heads at in his claim to be their author (provided he ever made any such claim; which, by the way, does not appear from any record of his life, and which nobody ever asserted as a fact). If they did--with the exception only of Robert Greene--they certainly kept their own counsel. On the one hand, then, the question of the authorship was never raised, and, on the other hand, if it had been, the scholars and critics who studied the plays (supposing that there were any such in those days) could not possibly have recognized them as immortal. If they had so recognized them, they would doubtless have left us something more satisfactory as to the authorship of the compositions than the mere "impression that they were informed" that the manager of the theater where they were produced wrote them; that they supposed he was clever enough to have done so, and they therefore took it for granted that he did. That is all there is of the evidence of Shakespeare's own day, as to the question--if it still is a question--before us.