* The story of Elizabeth's order for "Falstaff in Love," resulting in the production of "The Merry Wives of Windsor" (which would prove that, whatever else she was, Elizabeth was no Anthony Comstock), is, to our mind, another sample of the same procession. Hazlitt (Lit. of Europe, Part iii., chap. 6, sec. iii., note,) is especially incredulous as to the King James letter. The truth is that Shakespeare, far from being flattered by James, was actually in disgrace, and not so much as to be mentioned in that monarch's hearing, from having permitted a representation of the sacred person of royalty on his stage, as is authenticated by the well- known lines of Davies: "Hadst thou not played some Kingly parts in sport, etc., etc." But, under all the circumstances, it is vastly improbable. At any rate, we fancy it would not be easy to conceive of {151}three Englishmen in London to-day, in 1881--let us say Mr. Gladstone, Mr. Browning, and Mr. Swinburne--without collusion, writing down a list of their most illustrious contemporaries, and not one of them mentioning Mr. Tennyson! Or, assuming that Tennyson is the admitted first of poets of the Victorian age (as Mr. Ben Jonson and all the commentators at his heels, down to our own Mr. Grant White, tell us that "William Shakespeare" was the admitted first of poets of his contemporary Elizabethan age), it would not be the easiest thing in the world to conceive three chroniclers--Mr. Gladstone, Mr. Browning, and Mr. Swinburne-sitting themselves down to an enumeration, not of their illustrious contemporaries in general, but of their contemporaneous men of letters only, and, by a coincidence, omitting any mention of the great first of poets of their day! Either, then, it seems to us we are to infer that three such men as Raleigh, Bacon, (who, Emerson says, "took the inventory of the human understanding, for his time,") and his satellite Matthew, had never so much as heard that there was any Shakespeare, in an age which we moderns worship as the age of Shakespeare, or that there was no "Shakespeare" for them to hear about; that "William Shakespeare" was the name of an actor and manager in the Globe and Blackfriars play-houses, of a man not entitled, any more than any of his co-actors and co-managers in those establishments, to enumeration among the illustrious ornaments of an illustrious age, the stars of the golden age of English!