needed him, as a most useful and excellent fellow, a very factotum, and a man of great promise; while those who disliked him and found him in their way, and whose ears were wounded by his praises, set him down as an officious and conceited upstart. He saw at once the coarse, unnatural, feeble, and inflated style of the men whom he found in possession of public favor, and he treated them to a little good-natured ridicule, of which we find traces in some of his plays, as in Hamlet and A Midsummer-Night's Dream, and in some of his burlesque bombastic characters, as in Pistol and Nym. Now, men may love their enemies and do good to them that hate them; but men will never love their critics, or do anything but evil to them that ridicule them. As to criticism men are unwise; but in regard to ridicule they have some reason. Accusation of crime is trifling in comparison. Say that a man has murdered his mother; and if he has not done the deed, your slander will recoil upon your own head, bringing him consolation in your infamy. But make him ridiculous, and he simply is ridiculous, and there is an end; except that he is your enemy for life. Ridicule can neither be refuted nor explained away. For which reason, although it is a fair weapon against words and acts, (however poor a test of truth,) against persons it is the fit resort of cowardice and malice; a distinction, however, which many men cannot or will not

make; and consequently an author often resents the ridicule of his writings as if it were directed against himself. This was Shakespeare's experience. But not content with criticism and caricature, he began to outstrip his victims in favor with the public. Now, such conduct is always resented as an insult. There is no surer, as there can be no sadder, evidence to a man that he is rising in the world's consideration, than an outcry from the little souls around him that he is receiving that of which he is not worthy. How they strive by protests (always in the interests of truth), by sneers, and by all the little artifices of detraction, even silence, to show that he is as small as they are, only showing the while how much he is their superior! Goodness divine and wisdom infinite could not escape such scoffing. "Is not this the carpenter's son? is not his mother called Mary? and his brethren James, and Joses, and Simon, and Judas, and his sisters, are they not all with us? Whence then hath this man all these things? And they were offended in him."

That such was Shakespeare's lot we are not left to conjecture, hardly to infer. One of the playwrights whom he found in high favor when he reached London, and with whom, as a youthful assistant, he began his dramatic labors, stretched out his hand from beyond the grave to leave a record of his hate for the man who had supplanted him, and who, he saw, would supplant his com

panions, as a writer for the stage. The drunken debauchee, Robert Greene, dying in dishonorable need, left behind him a pamphlet written on his death-bed, and published after his burial. It was called A Groatsworth of Wit bought with a Million of Repentance, and was better named than its author, or its editor, Henry Chettle, probably supposed. But Greene, though repentant, with the repentance of sordid souls when they are cast down, was not so changed in heart that he could resist the temptation of discharging from his stiffening hand a Parthian shaft, barbed with envy and malice, and winged with little wit, against young Shakespeare. In the pretended interests of truth and friendship, he warned his companions and co-workers, Marlowe, Lodge, and Peele, that the players who had all been beholden to them, as well as to him, would forsake them for a certain upstart crow, beautified with their feathers, who supposed that he was able to write blank verse with the best of them, and who, being in truth a Johannes Factotum, was in his own conceit the only Shake-scene in the country.* Greene was right, as his surviving friends ere long discovered. Their sun had set; and it was well for them that they all died soon after. They could not forgive

* See the passage in question, given verbatim and in full, and its significance with regard to Shakespeare's early labors set forth, in the Essay on the Authorship of King Henry the Sixth, Vol. VII. pp. 408-412 of the author's edition of Shakespeare's Works.

Shakespeare his superiority; but he forgave at least one of them his envy; for when, a few years after, he wrote As You Like It, he made Phebe say of Marlowe, quoting a line from Hero and Leander, "Dead Shepherd, now I find thy saw of might,

6

Who ever loved that loved not at first sight?'"

Greene sank into his grave, his soul eaten up with envy as his body with disease; but he was spared the added pang of foreseeing that his own name would be preserved in the world's memory only because of his indirect connection with the man at whom he sneered, and that he would be chiefly known as his slanderer. Had he lived to see his book published, he would have enjoyed such base and pitiful satisfaction as can be given by revenge. His little arrow reached its mark, and the wound smarted. As the venom of a sting often inflicts more temporary anguish than the laceration of a fatal hurt, such wounds always smart, although they rarely injure; and few men are wise and strong enough to bear their suffering in dignity and silence. Whether, if Greene had been alive, Shakespeare would have publicly noticed his attack, can only be conjectured; but I feel sure that he would have been kept from open wrangle with such an assailant by his reticence and self-respect. Yet, although he was above petty malice and recrimination, he was sore and indignant; and he, and others for him, protested against the wrong which had been done him in Greene's pamphlet.

He did not protest in vain; for Chettle, Greene's editor, although he treated with great contempt a like complaint of disrespect on the part of Marlowe, whom Greene had also slurred, apologized to Shakespeare in a tract called The Kind Heart's Dream, which he published immediately afterward, saying that, although he was personally guiltless of the wrong, he was as sorry as if the original fault had been his own to have offended a man so courteous, so gifted, and one who, by his worth and his ability, had risen high in the esteem of many of his superiors in rank and station.* Greene died in the autumn of 1592, and his pamphlet and Chettle's were both published in the same year. Thus Shakespeare, within six or seven years of his departure from Stratford a fugitive adventurer, had won admiration from the public, respect from his superiors, and the consequent hate of some, and, what is so much harder of attainment, the regard of others, among those who were his equals, except in his surpassing genius.

These two pregnant passages, which we owe to the malice of a disappointed rival, are the first public notice of Shakespeare, and our earliest authentic record of his presence in London.t By

* See Chettle's apology in full and verbatim in the Essay on the Authorship of King Henry the Sixth, Vol. VII. p. 410, as above.

† In 1835 Mr. John Payne Collier published a small volume entitled New Facts regarding the Life of Shakespeare, in which he brought to notice six documents as having been found at Bridgewater House among the papers of Lord Ellesmere, who was