Mr. Sidney Lee admits that the Earle of Southampton is the only patron of Shakspere that is known to biographical research (p. 126). By what fact, or facts, may we ask, is the authenticity of the Earl’s friendship or patronage attested? Southampton was the standing patron of all the poets, the stock-dedicatee of those days. It was the fashion of the times to pester him with dedications by poets grave and gay. They were after those five or six pounds, which custom constrained his Lordship to yield for having his name enshrined in poet’s lines. All the poets of that age were dependents, and there is, with few exceptions, the same display of pharisaic sycophancy, greediness, and on the part of dedicatee an inordinate desire for adulation. Every student of Elizabethan literature and history should know that the Southampton-Shakspere friendship cannot be traced biographically. The Earl of Southampton was a voluminous correspondent, but did not bear witness to his friendship for Shakspere. A scrutinous inspection of Southampton’s papers contained in the archives of his family, descendants and contemporaries, yields nothing in support of the contention that Southampton’s friendship, or patronage, is known to biographical research, and it is as attestative as that other apocryphal story preserved by Rowe “which is fast disappearing from Shakespearean biography.” “There is one instance so singular in its munificence that if we had not been assured that the story was handed down by Sir William Davenant, who was probably very well acquainted with his affairs, we should not venture to have inserted that my Lord Southampton at one time gave him (Shakspere) a thousand pounds, to enable him to go through with a purchase which he heard he had a mind to.” (Davenant was the man who gave out that he was the natural son of Shakspere). A present of a thousand pounds which equals at least twenty-five thousand dollars to-day! The magnitude of the gift discredits the story nevertheless, the startled Rowe, is the first to make it current, but does not give his readers the ground for his assurance. Be it what it may, he could hardly satisfy the modern reader that this man, a son, who insinuatingly defiles the name and fair fame of his own mother, is a credible witness, or that such a man is “fit for wolf bait.” What purchase did Shakspere “go through with?” Not New Place in 1597, for the purchase money was only sixty pounds. Neither could it have been the Stratford estate in 1602, for at that time Southampton was a prisoner in the Tower. In fact, the whole sum expended by Shakspere did not amount to a thousand pounds in all. The truth is, the social Rules of Tudor and Jacobin times did not permit peer and peasant to live on terms of mutual good feeling. Almost all the poets in hope of gain, penned adulatory sonnets in praise of Lord Southampton. In those times they had a summary way of dealing with humble citizens. Jonson, Chapman