صور الصفحة
PDF
النشر الإلكتروني

tigations serves to remove a blemish from his portrait; and were it not that fresh calumnies are invented as the old ones disappear, a defence of our great national bard would be at this moment unnecessary. Vain is it for this last assailant of the reputation of the mighty dead to plead the controversy that has arisen respecting the authorship of the Letters of Junius at his excuse for starting this question. Junius was a writer who did not wish to be known, and the public were, naturally enough, anxious to strip off the mask; but we have no reason for entertaining the slightest doubt that Shakespeare was the author of at least the majority of the dramas that bear his name.

The writers who laboured to establish the identity of Junius endeavoured to clear up a mystery, in the solution of which all Englishmen had an interest. He was an

anonymous censor, who gloried in his secret, boasting that he would carry it with him to the grave; and he thus threw out a challenge to every member of the community. It was a fair game at hide-and-seek between him and the public; the former did his best to evade detection, the latter to unearth the literary fox. Circumstances pointed at various times to different persons; and even when a mistake was made, no great harm was done. A temperate denial from some one able to speak with certainty upon the matter, or the silent yet not less certain testimony of evidence called circumstantial, turned pursuit in another direction; and if to this hour the authorship of those Letters, that created a wonderful sensation at the time of publication, and have excited so many keen encounters of wit, and provoked such animated controversies at intervals during the last fifty years, remains to a certain extent a mystery, the memories of the dead lie under no grievous imputations on that account. An anonymous author is one thing; and a man who appropriates the reputation that does not belong to him another.

If the dramas of Shakespeare were really written by Bacon, the former is the greatest of all impostors, and the latter the basest of deceivers. Mr. William Henry Smith seeks to consign these men to eternal degradation; he would have us believe that the lives of both were a series of palpable deceits, an acted lie. To the hour that Mr. William Henry Smith poured forth his dark suspicions, no critic, commentator, nor editor, had ventured to hint that William Shakespeare was not the author of the dramas published under his name. Certain crude and disconnected pieces, that have been foisted upon him by interested publishers, were indeed rejected by the most discerning critics; but the question, as it now stands, deals not with particular dramas, but the whole collection. The English people are asked to subscribe to the preposterous theory, that the poet, whom, of all others, they admire and respect, is no poet at all, and that for two centuries, students and commentators have been groping in the dark, and erecting a monument to a man who practised one of the vilest deceptions of which human nature is capable; and who added to the degradation of being a base-minded upstart, that of seeking to appropriate to himself the fame and the honour which belonged by right to another.

What the public in general think of the matter, will be seen from the following letter, published in the Illustrated London News, of January 10, under the signature of "John Bull :”

"I won't have Bacon. I will have my own cherished 'Will.' I have borne a great deal, and never changed my faith. I have seen him chipped, mauled, befribbled and overdone. I have seen upholsterers and classic managers cloud his glories in fustian and explanations. I have heard shouts against his anachronisms, and anathemas against his want of the unities and ignorance of Greek; but never thought that an Englishman, and a 'Smith,' would try to prove that he was a swindler, a

thief, a jackdaw, and died, in the odour of sanctity, the pilferer of Bacon. Have we no literary police-no pen jealous of the honour of our immortal bard?' Oh, for an hour with the giant Christopher North! Oh, for some swashing blows of his rhetorical cudgel to crush this fungus! I know the pestilent vapour will pass away, and the steady glories of Will. Shakspeare blaze forth again; but in the mean time we shiver under the passing cloud. First, a College of Monks wrote Shikspur; now it's the jurisprudist Bacon. Why not Sir Walter Raleigh? Why not Queen Elizabeth herself? But, as I began, we won't have 'Bacon !'"

11

CHAPTER II.

THE ASSAILANTS OF GENIUS, AND THE VARIOUS METHODS BY WHICH THEY CARRY ON THE ASSAULT.

"Ah! how the poor world is pestered with such water-flies ; diminutives of nature."-TROILUS AND CRESSIDA.

HAPPILY, in the quaint language of Sir Thomas Browne, this is " a fallacy that dwells not in a cloud, and needs not the sun to scatter it;" and before proceeding to refute the same, we may glance for a moment at the two principal classes by which the reputations of the good and the gifted have been invariably assailed, as well as at the manner in which their hostility has been manifested. These classes are the over-learned, who account for everything upon theory, and the hopelessly ignorant, whose very souls shudder at every kind of mental superiority. They are the assailants of genius, in whatever form it may develop itself; and to which of these the latest detractor of Shakespeare belongs, or whether he is to be regarded as the founder of a new school of cavillers, my readers may decide for themselves. The former get entangled in the cobwebs which they weave from their own brains; the latter vent their rage upon everything calculated to give grace and dignity to our fallen nature.

We cannot, therefore, wonder that our most illustrious author-if not, indeed, the master-spirit of all timeshould incur their fierce resentment. Meaner intellects have at least one consolation; if they cannot create, they may succeed in destroying. He who would build up some glorious edifice of learning and wisdom, must be possessed of great mental endowments; industry, which

no amount of toil can weary; and patience and longsuffering, bestowed upon few out of the many millions of human beings who play their parts upon the theatre of this world; but for the work of destruction, none of these qualifications are required.

The veriest tyro can assault a time-honoured institution or bespatter with mud the noblest monument of genius. • Indeed the lower the position such a detractor occupies in the intellectual scale, the better fitted will he be for the performance of his unseemly task. Dirty work requires its peculiar instrument; and none more readily assail the literary fame of others than those who have no literary reputation of their own to lose. The leveller has generally but little to boast of: he would not be so anxious to pull down and destroy, did he possess anything worthy of defence. It is the same in literature as in the commonweal he who has possessions will carefully uphold the rights of property.

To create requires the skill of the master, but to overthrow that which other men by patient labour, unwearied diligence, and great ability, have erected, is an easier task. Thus the authors of those sublime productions of genius, which have formed the delight and wonder of successive generations, have in all ages been the subjects of the most envenomed and the vilest attacks. Nor have these attacks been confined to the works of man,-those coming directly from God, and stamped with the impress of His holiness, have been subjected to similar treatment. As the literature of a country is its most enduring possession, its productions of course come in for the principal share of the hostility of such narrow-minded despoilers. The greatest treasures of universal literature are, it will, we imagine, be admitted without dispute, the Bible, the works of Homer, and the dramas of William Shakespeare.

The assault upon the Scriptures has been waged in various ways. While some have sought to suppress them, to make them a sealed book, and thus to rob man

« السابقةمتابعة »