Ben Jonson was a poet and a pedant; Greene, a university-bred man. And we may go through the list and verify the records of them all, and find in each some quality or training from which to reasonably expect fruitage. But nobody has ever ventured to hazard so wild a theory as that any of them wrote the anonymous immortal plays to which the best of their own acknowledged masterpieces are mere rubbish. But a butcher's boy, lately from Stratford, happens to be manager of a contemporary theater. He, there{114}fore, must be the writer, and there can not be the slightest doubt of it. The story that this boy ever stole deer is rejected as resting on insufficient evidence. But no evidence is required to prove his authorship of the topmost works in the history or the literature of England. We have seen the monopoly that overruled the press. We have seen that the Stationers' Company insisted upon recording the name and ownership of every printed thing; and their record-books are still extant, and bear no trace of any such claimant as William Shakespeare. We have weighed the surmises of the Shakespeareans as to these times, and seen their probable value; and have found it just as impossible to connect the immortal fragments we call the Shakespearean plays to-day with William Shakespeare, of Stratford, as we have already found it to imagine him as having access to the material, the sealed records, and the hidden muniments employed in their construction. Is there any more evidence to be examined?