As for Earlom, who copied the picture, Boaden says: "He had lessened the amplitude of the forehead; he had altered the form of the skull; he had falsified the character of the mouth; and, though his engraving was still beautiful, and the most agreeable exhibition of the poet, I found it would be absolutely necessary to draw the head again, as if he had never exercised his talent upon it" (page 195). Mr. Boaden specifies further the picture laid to have once decorated the pair of bellows belonging to Queen Elizabeth's {103}own private apartments, besides still one other, both of which he rejects as spurious. Thus, it has taken an army of novelists, painters, engravers, and essayists to erect simple William Shakespeare of Stratford into the god he ought to have been; and, on the best examination we are enabled to make, and according to the Shakespeareans themselves, there is only one picture of William Shakespeare extant which has the even assumed advantage of having been pronounced a likeness by any one who ever saw William Shakespeare himself in his (William Shakespeare's) lifetime. Even if--as Mr. Steevens surmises--this eye witness never saw the engraving, but only the original portrait from which it was copied, the Droeshout still enjoys an authentication possessed by no other so-called likeness, and, if rejected--as it infallibly is by all devout Shakespeareans--there remains nothing of certitude, nothing even of the certitude of conjecture, as to the features of the Stratford boy, whoever he was, and whatever his works. One further effort was, however, made, so lately as 1849, to clinch this "young lady's argument," by yet one more genuine discovery. This time it was a "Becker 'death mask!'" A plaster mask of an anonymous dead face is found in a rubbish-shop in Mayence, in 1849. Regarded as a mask of William Shakespeare, it bears a certain resemblance to the Stratford bust; and, regarded as a mask of Count Bismarck (for example), it would be found to bear a very strong resemblance to Count Bismarck. (We write from an inspection of photographs only, never having seen the mask.) Having always been annoyed that a creature so immortal {104}as they had created their Shakespeare left no death-mask, the Shakespeareans at once adopt this anonymous mask as taken from the face of the two-days defunct William Shakespeare, who died in 1616. _Credat Judams!_ Either William Shakespeare, at his death, was known to be an immortal bard or he was not. If he was, how could the sole likeness moulded of departed greatness be smuggled away from the land that was pious to claim him as its most distinguished son and nobody miss it, or raise the hue and cry? If he was not, to whose interest was it to steal the mask from the family who cared enough about the dead man's memory to go to the expense of it? But, at any rate, in 1849 it falls into the hands of jealous believers. They search upon it for hairs of auburn hue, and for the date