sixty to a hundred years after date. It is not in human nature that
what was incomprehensible to the grandsire should be remembered by
the grandson. Go to "Thrums" and ask for literary memories of the
youth of Mr. Barrie.

Yet {198a} the learned Malone seems to have been sorry that little of
Shakespeare but the calf-killing and the poaching, and the dying of a
fever after drink taken (WHERE, I ask you?), with Ben and Drayton,
was remembered, so long after date, at Stratford, of all dirty
ignorant places. Bah! how could these people have heard of Drayton
and Ben? Remember that we are dealing with human nature, in a
peculiarly malodorous and densely ignorant bourgade, where, however,
the "wit" of Shakespeare was not forgotten (in the family) in 1649.
See the epithet on the tomb of his daughter, Mrs. Hall.

You give us the Rev. John Ward, vicar of Stratford (1661-3), who has
heard that the actor was "a natural wit," and contracted and died of
a fever, after a bout with Drayton and Ben. I can scarcely believe
that THESE were local traditions. How could these rustauds have an
opinion about "natural wit," how could they have known the names of
Ben and Drayton?

When you come to Aubrey, publishing in 1680, sixty years after
Shakespeare's death, you neglect to trace the steps in the descent of
his tradition. As has been stated, Beeston, "the chronicle of the
Stage" (died 1682), gave him the story of the school-mastering;
Beeston being the son of a servitor of Phillips, an actor and friend
of Shakespeare, who died eleven years before that player. The story
of the school-mastering and of Shakespeare "knowing Latin pretty
well," is of no value to me. I think that he had some knowledge of