probably means, if it means any thing, precisely what it says, namely, that when he read the plays, he swore {133}that they were certainly Apollo's. And if the comments of Henry Chettle, Sir John Davies, Leonard Digges, Hugh Holland, and the rest, do not read to the same effect, they have a meaning beyond what they express. But panegyric is not history--at least it can not override history. Between the affirmative theory of the Stratfordian authorship, then, and the demonstration of its utter impossibility and absurdity, there actually remains but the single barrier of the Jonsonian testimony, contained in the copy of verses entitled "To the Memory of my Beloved, the Author, Mr. William Shakespeare, and what he hath left us," written by Mr. Ben Jon-son, and prefixed to the famous folio of 1623. If this testimony should ever be ruled out as incompetent, there would actually remain nothing except to lay the Shakespearean hoax away, as gently as might be, alongside its fellows in the populous limbo of exploded fallacies. However, let it not be ruled out merely on the ground that it is in rhyme. We have no less an authority than Littleton--"auetoritas philosopho-rum, medieorum et poetarum sunt in causis allegan-dæ et tenendæ" *--to the effect that the testimony, even of poets, is sometimes to be received. It is to be ruled out rather by a process akin to impeachment of the witness--by its appearing that the witness, elsewhere in the same controversy, testifies to a state of facts exactly opposite. For the truth is that, whatever Ben Jonson felt moved to say about his "pal" William Shakespeare, whenever, "as a friend, he {134}dropped into poetry," he was considerably more careful when he sat himself down to write "cold prose." * "Co. Lit.," 264 A. Just as "Bully Bottom," fearing lest a lion should "fright the ladies," and "hang every mother's son" of his troupe, devised a prologue to explain that the lion was no lion, but only Snug the Joiner, "a man as other men are," so Master Ben Jonson, however tropical and effusive as to his contemporary in his prosody, in his prologue in _prose_ was scrupulous to leave only the truth behind him. Mountains--Ossian piled on Pelion--of hearsay and lapse of time; oceans of mere opinion and "gush" would, of course, amount to precisely nothing at all when ranged alongside of the testimony of one single, competent, contemporary eye-witness. No wonder the Shakespeareans are eager to subpoena Ben Jonson's verses. But, all the same, they are marvelously careful _not_ to subpoena his prose.