Mr. White might have looked nearer home to more purpose. Nobody knows, nobody can know better than he, that what is called the "accepted" or "received" text of Shakespeare (if there is, to speak minutely, any such to-day) has been arrived at and made up piecemeal, and in the course of time, by the commentators selecting from the folios, and other original editions, such "readings" as the judgment of scholarship or the taste of criticism has, on the whole, adopted; and any body who cares to take the trouble to examine these original editions can see as much for himself. To suppose that this text, as it stands to-day, is the text as its author or authors wrote it, is, it seems to us, to suppose at least ten thousand coincidences, every one of which is, to say the least, improbable. Before proceeding any further, let us recapitulate {113}the three historical certainties to which we have arrived. First, that the state of the law was favorable, (indeed, it would be impossible to conceive of a state more favorable), to literary imposture or incognito. Second, that nobody stands on record as claiming to know the authorship of these plays, except the printers, who were able to sell them by using the name of the manager of a popular theater; and, therefore, whose interest it was to affix that name to them; and, Third, that there was never a period in which it was so reasonably an author's interest to be anonymous, or preserve his incognito, as these very years covered by the lifetime of William Shakespeare; when, between the Stationers' Company and the Star Chamber, it was a fortunate author, printer or reader, who escaped hanging, disemboweling, and quartering, with only the loss of ears or liberty. Who wrote these plays? London was full of playwrights, contemporary with William Shakespeare, many of them his friends and familiars; possibly, all of them submitting their manuscripts to his editorial eye. We have their works extant to-day.