much too remote, and, in your own classical style, "all this is just
a little mixed." {201b} With what Mr. Dowdall heard in 1693, and Mr.
William Hall (1694) heard from a clerk or sexton, or other illiterate
dotard at Stratford, I have already dealt. I do not habitually
believe in what I hear from "the oldest aunt telling the saddest
tale,"--no, not even if she tells a ghost story, or an anecdote about
the presentation by Queen Mary of her portrait to the ancestor of the
Laird,--the portrait being dated 1768, and representing her Majesty
in the bloom of girlhood. Nor do I care for what Rowe said (on
Betterton's information), in 1709, about Shakespeare's schooling; nor
for what Dr. Furnivall said that Plume wrote; nor for what anybody
said that Sir John Mennes (Menzies?) said. But I do care for what
Ben Jonson and Shakespeare's fellow-actors said; and for what his
literary contemporaries have left on record. But this evidence you
explain away by aetiological guesses, absolutely modern, and, I
conceive, to anyone familiar with historical inquiry, not more
valuable as history than other explanatory myths.

What Will Shakspere had to his literary credit when he died, was
men's impressions of the seeing of his acted plays; with their
knowledge, if they had any, of fugitive, cheap, perishable, and often
bad reprints, in quartos, of about half of the plays. Men also had
Venus and Adonis, Lucrece, and the Sonnets, which sold very poorly,
and I do not wonder at it. Of the genius of Shakespeare England
could form no conception, till the publication of the Folio (1623),
not in a large edition; it struggled into a Third Edition in 1664.
The engouement about the poet, the search for personal details, did
not manifest itself with any vigour till nearly thirty years after
1664--and we are to wonder that the gleanings, at illiterate
Stratford, and in Stage tradition, are so scanty and so valueless.