It will not lighten this new difficulty to rule out the prose and leave in the poetry, for we can not annihilate Francis Bacon nor yet William Shakespeare from their places in history. If, however, the Jonsonian poetry _were_ wiped out, the Jonsonian prose would receive, at least, a negative corroboration, as follows: {147}At the same time that Bacon and Shakespeare are living, unknown to each other respectively, in London, there also dwell there three other gentlemen--Sir Walter Raleigh, Edmund Spenser, and Sir Tobie Matthew. We, therefore, actually have four well-known gentlemen of the day in London, gentlemen of elegant tastes--poets, men about town, critics--who, if the town were being convulsed by the production at a theater of by far the most brilliant miracles of genius that the world had ever seen, ought not, in the nature of things, to have been utterly uninformed as to the circumstance. We do not add to this list Southampton, Essex, Rutland, Montgomery, and the rest, because these latter have left no memorandum or chronicle of what they saw and heard on manuscript behind them. But the first four have left just precisely such memoranda of their times as are of assistance to us here. Bacon, in his "Apothegms," Spenser in his poems, * and Raleigh and Matthew in their re{148}mains--especially Matthew--who, like Bacon, kept a diary, who wrote letters and postscripts, and was as fond of playing at Boswell to his favorites as Jonson himself--appear to have stumbled on no trace of such a character as "Shakespeare" in all their sauntering about London. * Spenser's well-known lines in "Colin Clout's come Home again," written in 1591, are: And there, though last not least, is Ætion, A gentler shepherd may nowhere be found, Whose muse, full of high thought's invention, Doth--life himself--heroically sound." "Æton" is generally assumed by commentators to stand in the verse for "Shakespeare." But it is difficult to imagine how this can possibly be more than mere speculation, since Spenser certainly left no annotation explanatory of the passage, and it does not identify itself as a reference to Shakespeare. In "The Tears of the Muses," line 205, there is an allusion which on a first glance appears so pat, that the Bard of Avon has long been called "our pleasant Willy" on the strength of it. It runs: "And ho, the man whom Nature's self had made, To mock herself and truth to imitate With kindly counter under mimick shade, Our pleasant Willy, ah, is dead of late: With whom all joy and jolly merriment Is also deaded, and in dolour dreut."