discovery lies in an examination of the internal evidence and in inferential argument therefrom. I, for one, place more reliance on this method than on any amount of tradition handed down from a credulous and semi-barbarous age. For such, in spite of the fine writing of some modern enthusiasts, was the Age of Queen Elizabeth.

The evidence for this view is overwhelming, and I endeavoured to collect some of it in a book entitled Edmund Spenser and the Impersonations of Francis Bacon,1 which was offered to an unappreciative public in 1914. In considering this problem it cannot be too clearly kept in mind that the conditions of that age were wholly different from those obtaining to-day. In some of his remarks Mr. Crosse seems almost to forget this. There was, for instance, no publicity, no 'society' apart from the Court, no literary curiosity, little or no sense of literature as a profession. Professional writers were either dependents or they starved. Players were attached to companies in the service of some great person, whose livery they wore, or were treated as vagabonds. For a man of quality to be known as a writer of plays would mean social disgrace and, if he was an aspirant for a public position, ruin. To publish poems was regarded as beneath the dignity of a gentleman or even of a man of superior education.

What is the point of these remarks ? This, that under such conditions there would be no public curiosity about the authorship of plays. When Mr. Crosse writes' It puts rather too strong a strain on our credulity to be asked to believe that the secret was so well kept that not only had the rest of the world no suspicion of it at the time, but none of the parties to it ever let it out in later life when those principally concerned were dead,' he seems to be thinking in a world of personal paragraphs' and assuming a general interest in writings and writers where, in fact, none existed. He forgets too that anyone who might have had the temerity to suggest that the Lord High Chancellor of England was a writer of plays ran the risk of losing his liberty, if not his ears. Ben Jonson narrowly escaped mutilation for an offence which

1 Constable.

was not much greater.1 He may also have forgotten that Shakespeare's plays very soon went out of fashion at the Court, in view of the taste for the Masque evinced by James, and more particularly his Queen. And the rude multitude cared so little about their quality as to draw from Hamlet the stricture that they were 'for the most part capable of nothing but inexplicable dumbshows and noise.'

Samuel Johnson's remarks on the sale of Shakespeare's works further illustrate this point. Speaking of the slow sale and tardy reputation' of Milton's Paradise Lost, he says, 'But has the case been truly stated? Have not lamentation and wonder been lavished on an evil which was never felt?' and he proceeds:

The sale, if it be considered, will justify the public. Those who have no power to judge of past times but by their own, should always doubt their conclusions. The call for books was not in Milton's age what it is at present. To read was not then a general amusement; neither traders, nor often gentlemen, thought themselves disgraced by ignorance. The women had not then aspired to literature, nor was every house supplied with a closet of knowledge. Those, indeed, who professed learning, were not less learned than at any other time; but of that middle race of students who read for pleasure or accomplishment, and who buy the numerous products of modern typography, the number was then comparatively small. To prove the paucity of readers, it may be sufficient to remark that the nation had been satisfied from 1623 to 1664, that is forty-one years, with only two editions of the works of Shakespeare, which probably did not altogether make one thousand copies.

Johnson has some further remarks on the Elizabethan Age which are well worth attention, because he wrote nearer to those times than we are, and under conditions in England which were much more similar than are those of the present age. In the preface to his edition of the plays he writes:

1 A suitor who complained to the King in a pamphlet about Bacon when he was Lord Chancellor did, in fact, lose his ears-no doubt rather a different matter, but it shows what his power was.-Spedding, Life, vi., 311.

'In Tudor times and thereafter there were a few distinguished exceptions to this.

The English nation, in the time of Shakespeare, was yet struggling to emerge from barbarity. The philology of Italy had been transplanted hither in the reign of Henry the Eighth; and the learned languages had been successfully cultivated by Lilly, Linacre, and More ; by Pole, Cheke, and Gardiner; and afterwards by Smith, Clerk, Haddon, and Ascham. Greek was now taught to boys in the principal schools; and those who united elegance with learning, read, with great diligence, the Italian and Spanish poets. But literature was yet confined to professed scholars, or to men and women of high rank. The public was gross and dark; and to be able to read and write was an accomplishment still valued for its rarity, of a country

unenlightened by learning the whole people is the vulgar.

Of the uncritical credulity of this age those who have read the works of Nashe, who derides it, must be aware, and evidence for this state of mind is found at a later date in such a work as Aubrey's Brief Lives. It is glanced at in a preface to Gascoigne's Posies in the remark: 'Laugh not at this (lustie yonkers) since the pleasant dittie of the noble Erle of Surrey (beginning thus: In winters just returne) was also construed to be made indeed by a Shepherd.' Outrageous tricks were played on the public by booksellers, or by authors under the name of booksellers, in addresses masking their works under other people's names or initials, or professing that they had been accidentally discovered among somebody's papers or published without their knowledge and consent. This, of course, was due to social conditions, to the risks of publication under the restrictions of the press censorship, and the fear of the Star Chamber, but it proves how credulous people were. The sort of thing to which I refer is found even as late as Dryden. Johnson, with his usual critical sagacity, thus describes it:

The reason which he [Dryden] gives for printing what was never acted cannot be overpassed: 'I was induced to it in my own defence, many hundred copies being dispersed abroad without my knowledge or consent; and every one gathering new faults, it became at length a libel against me.' These copies, as they gathered faults, were apparently manuscript; and he lived in an age very unlike ours, if many hundred copies of fourteen hundred lines were likely to be transcribed. An author has a right to print his own works, and need not seek an apology in falsehood; but he that could bear to write the dedication felt no pain in writing the preface.

Elizabethan literature teems with similar examples, which, however, modern authorities are in the habit of accepting at their face-value. In this they seem to me to show great simplicity.

I will now give a few examples, taken from my book above mentioned, which show how little importance can be attached to contemporary opinion in literary matters, and therefore to the traditions derived from it, which Mr. Gordon Crosse would persuade us ought to be held to outweigh all inferences from internal evidence. These examples will also illustrate the statements made above as to literary conditions in England in those times, and the inducements there were for concealing authorship.

The Shepheardes Calendar was published anonymously in 1579-80, and the authorship of it was imputed by the poet George Whetstone (described by J. Payne Collier as 'a poet of much and not unmerited celebrity '), as late as 1587, to Sir Philip Sidney. He not only believed the poem to be his work but refers to it as the reputed work of S. Phil. Sydney,' indicating that it was so assigned by general reputation.

A few passages may be given in order to illustrate the motives for secrecy and mystification with regard to authorship which then prevailed. The first which I select is from the anonymous Arte of English Poesie (1589), which was dedicated to Queen Elizabeth and attributed at a subsequent date, though without any authority, to one George Puttenham :

And peraduenture in this iron and malitious age of ours, Princes are lesse delighted in it [the art of Poetry], being ouer earnestly bent and affected to the affaires of Empire and ambition, whereby they are as it were inforced to indeuour them selves to armes and practises of hostilitie, or to entend to the right pollicing of their states, and have not one houre to bestow upon any other civill or delectable art of natural or morall doctrine: nor scarce any leisure to thincke one good thought in perfect and godly contemplation, whereby their troubled mindes might be moderated and brought to tranquillitie. So as it is hard to find in these dayes of noblemen or gentlemen any good Mathematician, or excellent Musitian, or notable Philosopher, or els a cunning Poet: because we find few great Princes much delighted in the same studies. Now also of such among the Nobilitie or gentrie as be very well seene in many laudable sciences, and especially in

making' of Poesie, it is so come to passe that they, haue no courage to write and if they haue, yet are they loath to be a knowen of their skill. So as I know very many notable gentlemen in the Court that haue written commendably and suppressed it agayne, or els suffred it to be publisht without their owne names to it: as if it were a discredit for a Gentleman to seeme learned, and to show him selfe amorous of any good Art.

The motto of Gascoigne, Tam Marti quam Mercurio, is in itself evidence of the apprehension felt by a Gentleman' that in publishing verse he would lose caste and be classed as a common rhymer.'

The next passage is from Ben Jonson's Silent Woman ('Sir John Daw' has been supposed by some to stand for Sir Francis Bacon):

Sir Dauphine Eugene. Why, how can you justify your own being of a poet, that so slight all the old poets?

Sir John Daw. Why, every man that writes in verse is not a poet; you have the wits that write verses, and yet are no poets: they are poets that live by it, the poor fellows that live by it.

Dauphine. Why, would you not live by your verses, Sir John? Clerimont. No, 'twere pity he should. A knight live by his verses! He did not make them to that end, I hope.

Dauphine. And yet the noble Sidney lives by his, and the noble family not ashamed.

Clerimont. Ay, he profest himself; but Sir John has more caution: he'll not hinder his own rising in the State so much. Do you think he will! Your verses good Sir John and no poems.

(Sir Philip Sidney was dead when this was written, and the word 'lives' is therefore used in a punning sense, 'survives.")

A further illustration of the same point occurs in an anonymous play, Sir Thomas More, in one of the scenes which some authorities have attributed to Shakespeare":

Sir Thomas More. Erasmus preacheth gospell against phisicke.
My noble poet.

Earl of Surrey.

Oh, my lord, you tax me
In that word poet of much idlenes:

It is a studie that makes poor our fate;

Poets were ever thought unfitt for state.

1 Composing.

'See The Shakespeare Apocrypha, collected and edited by C. F. Tucker Brooke.