The appeal to history not only declines to set aside, but affirms, with costs, the verdict rendered upon the evidence. And the sum is briefly this: If William Shakespeare wrote the plays, it was a miracle; every thing else being equal, the presumption is against a miracle; but, here, every thing else is not equal, for all the facts of history are reconcilable with history and irreconcilable with the miracle; if history is history, then miracle there was none--in other words, if there were one miracle, then there must have been two. If there had lived no such man as William Shakespeare, that "William Shakespeare" would be as good a name as any other to designate the authorship of the Shakespearean page, who will consider it worth while to {128}question? But to credit the historical man with the living page demands, in our estimation, either a willful credulity, or an innocence that is almost physical blindness! {129} PART III. THE JONSONIAN TESTIMONY. [Illustration: 9135] UT what is the summing up on the other side? Merely the following copy of verses: TO THE MEMORY OF MY BELOVED, THE AUTHOR, MASTER WILLIAM SHAKESPEARE, AND WHAT HE HATH LEFT US. ```To draw no envy, Shakespeare, on thy name ```Am I thus ample to thy book and fame; ```While I confess thy writings to be such ```As neither man nor muse can praise too much. ```'Tis true and all men's suffrage. But these ways ```Were not the paths I meant unto thy praise; ```For seeliest ignorance on these may light, ```Which, when it sounds at best, but echoes right; ```Or blind affection, which doth ne'er advance ```The truth, but gropes, and urgeth all by chance; ```Or crafty malice might pretend this praise ```And think to ruin where it seemed to raise. ```These are as some infamous bawd or whore ```Should praise a matron; what could hurt her more? ```But thou art proof against them, and, indeed, ```Above the ill fortune of them, or the need, ```I, therefore, will begin: Soul of the age, ```The applause, delight, and wonder of our stage! ```My Shakespeare rise! I will not lodge thee by ```Chaucer, or Spenser, or bid Beaumont lie ```A little further to make thee a room. ```Thou art a monument without a tomb, ```And art alive still while thy book doth live ```And we have wits to read and praise to give. ```That I not mix thee so, my brain excuses. ```I mean with great but disproportioned muses.= {130} ```For if I thought my judgment were of years, ```I should commit thee surely with thy peers, ```And tell how far thou didst our Lyly outshine, ```Or sporting Kyd, or Marlowe's mighty line; ```And though thou hadst small Latin and less Greek, ```From thence to honor thee I would not seek ```For names: but call forth thundering Æschylus, ```Euripides and Sophocles to us. ```Pacuvius, Accius, him of Cordova dead, ```To life again to hear thy buskin tread ```And shake a stage; or, when thy socks were on ```Leave thee alone for the comparison