Greene’s address to his fellow craftsmen does not convey plagiary, or a furbishable, imputation, nor give color to, nor the slightest circumstance for, the conjecture that Shakspere’s authorial career had been begun as the amender of other poet’s plays anterior to the putative authorship of “Venus and Adonis.” Halliwell-Phillips, the most indefatigable and reliable member of the Congress of Speculative Biographers, says that not one such play has been found revised, or amended, by Shakspere in his early career. Still in their extremity, Shakspere’s commentators give hospitality to stupid conjectures that are not reasonable inferences from concurrent facts, and construe Greene’s censure of Kemp, (inferentially) as the first literary notice of Shakspere. It shows an irrepressible desire without proof to confer authorship upon Shakspere one hundred and fifty years after his death. The Shakspere votaries cannot point to a single word, or sentence, in this celebrated address of Robert Greene which connects the contumelious name “Shake-scene” (dance-scene) with the characteristics of either the true, or the traditional, Shakspere. The biographers of Shakspere never grow weary of charging Robert Greene with professional jealousy and envy. The charge has no argumentative value, even if granting Shakspere’s early productivity as a play-maker, or the amender of the works of other men, for Greene’s activities ran in other lines; play-making was of minor importance, a sort of by-production of his resourceful and versatile pen. The biographers of Shakspere are unfortunate in having taken on this impression, because there is _prima-facie_ evidence that Greene had forsworn writing for the stage a considerable time before the letter was written; thus he followed his friend Lodge, who in 1589 “vows to write no more of that whence shame doth grow.” The biographers and commentators, agreeing in their asperities, charge Robert Greene with that worst of passions, envy, basing it conjecturally on the assumption of Shakspere’s proficiency as a drama-maker, notwithstanding the sincere and earnest words contained in his most pathetic letter, addressed to three friends, in which he counsels them to give up play writing, which he regarded as degrading, placing their very necessities in the power of grasping shareholding actors, and rendering it no longer a fit occupation for gentlemen. They fail to see the dying should be granted immunity from this ignoble and base passion. Our own rule of law admits as good evidence the testimony of a man who believes himself to be dying, and so the letter states, “desirous that you should live though himself be dying.”