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DELIA BACON

A BIOGRAPHICAL SKETCH

" What a wounded name, Things standing thus unknown, shall live behind me ! If thou didst ever hold me in thy heart, Absent thee from felicity awhile, And in this harsh world draw thy breath in pain, To tell my story."

BOSTON AND NEW YORK HOUGHTON, MIFFLIN AND COMPANY

Copyright, 1888, By THEODORE BACON.

All rights reserved.

The Riverside Press, Cambridge •• Electrotyped and Printed by 11. 0. Houghton & Co.

AN ACKNOWLEDGMENT.

The letters written by the subject of this vol- ume to Nathaniel Hawthorne were, at the cost of diligent search, found by his daughter, Mrs. Rose Hawthorne Lathrop, carefully preserved among his papers, and were entrusted to me for the use which has now been made of them. The over- sight by which this helpful service failed to be mentioned in a marginal note in the body of the book is the less regretted that it has given occa- sion for this more conspicuous acknowledgment, that Hawthorne's patient kindness to one who received so much from him was not exhausted in his lifetime, but passed by inheritance to the gen- eration that follows him.

THEODORE BACON.

Rochester, N. Y.,

November 17, 1888.

CONTENTS.

PAGB

An Acknowledgment , , iii

An Apology for this Book vii

I. Parentage and Birth 1

II. Babyhood and Childhood ; The School, and

the Beginning of the Long Warfare . 9

III. Early Essays in Letters 18

IV. The Instruction of Women . .' . . 23 V. A Sorrow that left its Shadow ... 32

VI. The Shakspere Drama : The Philosophy con- tained in it, and the Authorship needed

FOR IT 35

VII. Counsel and Help from Emerson ... 47 VIII. The Journey to England .... 56

IX. At Work in England : London, St, Albans, Hatfield ; The Friendship of the Carlyles ; The Book ready for a Publisher ... 60 X. The " Putnam " Article : " William Shakspere

and his Plays : An Inquiry concerning them." 98 XI. Disappointment and Perseverance . . . 156

XII. News through Emerson 161

XIII. The Entrance of Ha\vthorne .... 164

XIV. Hawthorne's Visit 216

XV. Sickness akd Privation. The Flight to Strat- ford, The Book to be Published at last . 235 XVI. The Refuge in Stratford. The Designs against the Tomb. The Troubles and Patience of

Hawthorne 247

XVll. The Book Appears. Haavthorne's Preface . 284 XVIII. The Reception of the Book .... 296 XIX. The Strained Bow Breaks : " Last Scene of

All" 301

Index 319

This is the story of a life that was neither splendid in achievement or adventure, nor success- ful, nor happy. It began deep in a New World wilderness, in the simplicity of a refined and hon- ored poverty ; it continued for almost fifty years of labor and sorrow, and ended amid clouds of disappointment and distraction. Neither the sub- ject of it, nor those to whom in her lifetime she was very dear by ties of kindred, would easily have consented that the world should know more of her than could be learned from her gravestone : that she was born, and died. Yet because she was of rare intellectual force and acuteness, of abso- lute sincerity and truthfulness, of self-annihilating earnestness and devotion in whatever work she entered upon ; and because the world is deter- mined that it will speak of her as if it knew her, supplying its lack of knowledge with conjecture or with fable, I purpose to tell it something of Delia Bacon : of what she was, from inheritance and environment ; and what she did.

DELIA BACON.

I.

Of wheat ancestry she may have come, earlier than the six generations through which it is easy to trace her descent from an Enghsh colonist, there is no reason to believe that she ever asked or greatly cared. The whim which some have been pleased to indulge, that her opinions may have had their source in some fancy that she was herself of common blood with the greatest Eng- lishman who had borne her family name, is utterly without substantial foundation. Even less, while she lived, was known than can now be told of the plain yet honorable race of which she was born ; nor had any one pretended to trace for it a con- nection with the great Norfolk family which had become illustrious so shortly before the Puritan exodus began. Except so far, therefore, as knowledge of her descent through two centuries of New England Puritans, and pride in such de- scent, made her so strong a New Englander that she brought to Elizabethan English thought and literature a sympathy keener and warmer than that of most Englishmen, and in making her such

2 DELIA BACON.

a New Englander gave direction to her studies and imaginations, she received from her family name neither prepossession nor suggestion. But as the influences which made her, unconscious of them as she was, were operating long before her birth, something may properly be told of them.

Within twenty years after the first disastrous venture at Plymouth, within fifteen after the colony upon Massachusetts Bay was begun, there was living at Dedham in that colony, in 1640, one Michael Bacon. He was a man of more than ordinary substance, and of such social dignity as was implied by the rank, which he had held before his migration, of captain of yeomanry. From what part of the dominions of Charles I. he had come, no one now seems able to tell. His first name, which has not been a common one in England, was repeated in several generations after him, and might afford a clue to his English kin, if it could be assumed to have been a family name before him. Late researches, indeed, have dis- closed the fact that the great Chancellor's half- brother Edward had among his many children a Michael, born in 1608; and for a moment it had seemed possible that this younger son of a younger son might have been the captain of yeomanry seeking better fortune in the New World. But when it was discovered that the Lord Keeper's grandson Michael died while yet a child, even this shadowy link of connection to a great family, a

DELTA BACON. 3

link of which Delia Bacon never so much as heard, disappeared in the light of fact.

These Puritan Bacons seem to have prospered and contented themselves for several generations in Dedham, and Stoughton, which was a part of Dedham, and Billerica, and Woburn, before they were set in motion again by the westward impulse of their Teuton, English, New England blood. In 1764, however, Joseph, great-great-grandson of the first Michael, went into the wilderness, and in the border town of Woodstock, which just in those years was passing out of the jurisdiction of Massa- chusetts into that of Connecticut, he married Abi- gail Holmes. Though they lived a little while in Stoughton, before 1771 they had fixed themselves in Woodstock, among the original proprietors of which the name of Holmes was found almost a hundred years before. In that absolutely rural community, containing in its population (presuma- bly of from one to two thousand) no man, perhaps, who was not a land-holder and a land-tiller, not excepting its parish minister of the established Congregational order, its physician, and possibly a general trader and an artisan or two, there was, nevertheless, strong and high thinking with plain living. There, in 1761, was born (himself after- ward a clergyman of distinction and an author of merit) the father of Samuel Finley Breese Morse, inventor and perfecter of the electric telegraph. There, in 1763, was born (also to become, in due

4 DELIA BACON.

time, an eminent divine and author) the father of OHver Wendell Holmes. And there, in 1771, was born to Abigail Holmes (whose consanguinity to those who have made her maiden name famous was not too remote to be traceable) a son David, the father of Delia Bacon.

It was an unsettled life, after all, into which this child David was born. In several New England towns his parents lived, a while in each, during his childhood and youth ; not prosperous in busi- ness, it seems, yet able to train their children with such education of mind as well as of morals that they need not shrink from any station into which the simple democratic life of those communities might bring them. An older son became a physi- cian of great eminence. This one, becoming in- flamed in the last years of the century with that fire of self-devotion which forced from the mis- sionary-apostle his cry of " Woe is me if I preach not the Gospel ! " set himself to the work of study for such service, that he might give himself espe- cially to the instruction and civilization of the Indians in the northwestern wilderness.

How this laborious training went on : with what courage, when it was completed, this enthusiast confronted the perils of a wilderness as remote in those days, and almost as savage, as equatorial Africa is now : with what fortitude and serenity he suffered hardship in many forms until death took him from weariness and disappointment long be-

DELIA BACON. 5

fore old age, it is not necessary now to speak. The story is a beautiful and a moving one, but it has been fully written by a competent filial hand.^

At the beginning of this century the interior of America, from the Hudson River westward, was almost an untried wilderness. There were, it is true, the ancient Dutch settlements along the Mohawk ; and some rich valleys of eastern New York had received the first touches of colonization. But beyond were unknown wilds, except that the great lakes and rivers had been rudely mapped. A hundred years before, indeed, the wise fore- thought of French military statesmen had estab- lished a trading post and fort on the strait be- tween Lakes Huron and Erie, which was to be one in the chain of strongholds from the St. LaAvrence to the Gulf of Mexico by which English power on this continent was to be restrained. That post, now the splendid city of Detroit, in 1801 held a motley population of a few hundred. But at "Buffalo Creek" this young missionary, waiting for days for a vessel to take him westward, found nothing but an encampment of savages on the site of the great city of Buffalo, which now numbers almost a quarter of a million inhabitants.

There at Detroit, at the even remoter post of Mackinac, upon the Maumee River, and else- where, for five years the Connecticut evangelist struggled in competition with the frontier rum-

^ Sketch of the Rev. David Bacon. By Leonard Bacon, D. D., LL. D. Boston : Consxresational Board of Publication. 1876.

6 DELIA BACON.

sellers for some effectual influence upon a wild and violent race, with which communication was enormously difficult from diversity of language. With him he had taken his young wife, a delicate girl of eighteen, whose refined and gentle dignity in old age there are some who remember still. Children had already come to them when, chang- ing somewhat his earliest plan, but still devoted to the spread of the religion of which he was a min- ister, he determined, leaving the employment of the Connecticut Missionary Society, to establish in the Ohio woods a colony of New England men, after the New England type.

From east to west, across the northern part of what is now the State of Ohio, stretches the belt of land which, included between the north and south lines of the colony of Connecticut prolonged westwardly, was within the terms of the original ro}' al grant to that colony ; for that grant was lim- ited on the west only by " the South Sea." The sovereignty which by virtue of this grant was asserted by the colony was, upon the establish- ment of a national government, ceded to it by the State ; but proprietary rights were reserved, and the tract to which they attached was long after- ward known indifferently as " New Connecticut," or the " Western Reserve." In this region, then a dense and almost unbroken forest, the adventur- ous missionary chose for his new enterprise a tract of five miles square, some thirty miles south of the point where now the great city of Cleveland

DELIA BACON. 7

looks out upon Lake Erie ; and there, having him- self laid out with eminent skill and judgment the roads and public places of the future community, he built of logs the Httle cabin which was its first house, and established in it his household.

In this town of Tallmadge, in the log cabin which beo-an the town, was born to David and Alice Ba- con, on the 2d of February, 1811, their fifth child.

Many years afterward the child recalled, and put into words, her vague impressions of the scenes which surrounded her infancy. She was speaking of the forces which drove Sir Walter Ealeigh west- ward, and made of him the pioneer of the New World ; and especially of " the new power of the religious Protestantism." " It was that too," she says, " which would begin erelong to pierce the great inland forest with its patient strength, sprinkling it with bright spots of European cul- ture, but culture already beginning to be modified by the new exigencies, going deeper and deeper with its little helpless household burthens that the tomahawk and the scalping-knife must long en- circle, going deeper and deeper always into its old savage heart, and breaking it at last with those soft rings of patient virtues and heroic faith and love. It was that which was working still, when in its fiercest heart, — in the valley of the old Indian ' River of Beauty,' where the mission hut had pursued the tomahawk, and the 'Great Trail ' from the Northern lakes to the Southern gulf went by the door, and wild Indian faces

8 DELIA BACON.

looked in on the young mother, and wolves howled lullabies, the streets and squares of the town were pencilled and the college was dotted on that trail, and the wild old forest echoed with Sabbath hymns and sweet old English nursery songs, and the children of the New World awoke and found a new world there, old as from everlasting;." ^

In the rural town of Mansfield in Connecticut, where the father of this child had sojourned for a while before departing upon his western mission, there was among his friends a lawyer named Salter. Student-at-law with him was also a friend of the student of divinity, Thomas Scott Williams, afterwards chief justice of Connecticut. Remov- ing, soon afterward, to Hartford for the practice of his profession, the future chief justice married the daughter of one who had himself been chief justice of the United States, Delia Ellsworth.

Remembering, in the wilderness, these friends of his younger manhood, the missionary com- bined their names in that of his child, and called her Delia Salter. Almost to the close of her life she continued to use both names thus given her in baptism ; but when she began to contemplate closely the publicity which she was to confront, she seems — though it was never spoken of by her — to have thought of a certain ludicrousness in the sounds thus brought together, and then, for the first time, she dropped out of use the second name.

^ From A Study of the Life of Raleigh, unpublished.

II.

The enterprise which had been undertaken by this frontier missionary, wise as it has been proved by its results after not many years, in the estab- lishment of an agricultural community unsur- passed in America for comfort, prosperity, intelli- gence, and moraUty, was, nevertheless, too great for his unaided strength. Without capital of his own, he had undertaken the purchase upon credit of the broad tract of land upon which he had traced the roads and allotted the farms of the future colony. The sale of the farms to the Con- necticut men, whose emigration he himself solicited, was to enable him, he hoped, to meet the liabili- ties he had incurred. But close upon his pur- chase, in full peace with all nations, came the Em- bargo which closed the ports of New England to the world, and which was more ruinous to the prosperity of New England than even the war with Great Britain, which followed close upon it. The plan which founded the town ended, so far as the founder was concerned, in utter and heart- breaking disappointment within a few months after this little Delia was born. But the town itself went on growing in numbers and wealth and

10 DELIA BACON.

beauty ; and it remembers and honors its founder. The site of the cabin, which was its earliest house, was marked by the townsmen in 1881 with a great granite bowlder — an "erratic" block — with an inscription upon its face that tells of the gathering there of the First Church in Tallmadge, '' in the house of Rev. David Bacon, January 22, 1809."

For almost a year of the little girl's babyhood, her father had been in Connecticut, engaged in a last endeavor to restore an undertaking already ruined. When that, too, had failed, as his eldest son has written, " with difficulty he obtained the means of returning to his family, and of removing them from the scene of so great a disappointment. All that he had realized from those five years of arduous labor was poverty, the alienation of some old friends, the depression that follows a fatal defeat, and the dishonor that waits on one who cannot pay his debts. Broken in health, broken in heart, yet sustained by an immovable confi- dence in God, and by the hopes that reach into eternity, he turned away from the field of hopes that had so sadly perished, and bade his last fare- well to Tallmadge and the Western Reserve." In May, 1812, with his almost girlish wife and their brood of little ones, of whom the oldest was but ten, he began his slow journey of six hundred miles throu£i:h the wilderness to his old home. There, in Old Connecticut, for a little w^hile he

DELIA BACON. H

lingered, preaching and teaching : in Litchfield, Prospect, Middletown; and at last he laid down his weary life, in its forty-sixth year, in August, 1817.

It was a very helpless family that he left be- hind him. By what management or magic this young widow, absolutely without inheritance other than the resolute and devout spirit which had come through many generations of English Puri- tans, contrived to feed and clothe her six children and herself; to supply them all with the highest education and culture which that simple commu- nity afforded ; and to enable the two sons to pass through Yale College and into learned professions, no one now living can tell. It was, however, a painful part of the process that it became neces- sary to accept a home for this little Delia, six years old, in the family of her namesake, Mrs. Williams, in Hartford. Here, for several years, she was cared for as a daughter of the house, while yet she maintained, by all means of commu- nication, frequent intercourse and warm affection for those of her own blood from whom she was parted for a while. There can be no doubt of the calm and constant kindness of patronage which the fatlierless child received here ; but its calm- ness may have been somewhat stern and grim.

It was not long after Delia had thus found an asylum in Hartford that a school for girls was opened there which made no small mark upon the

12 DELIA BACON.

generation then coming on. It was that of Cath- erine Beecher, whose father, Lyman Beecher, was a minister of the Congregational churches which were just then ceasing to be " by law established " in Connecticut, and one whose fame for homiletic and polemic power is far from extinct. Into this school Delia entered as a pupil, and with her was the teacher's sister, Harriet, a year her junior, who was destined to attain extraordinary renown and success in literature, not long before her schoolmate's life of unsparing toil ended in disap- pointment and failure. Through all her life, how- ever, she retained the constant friendship of both sisters, the teacher and the fellow-pupil. Nearly thirty years afterward Catherine Beecher thus described the child who now came under her charge :

" If the writer were to make a list of the most gifted minds she has ever met, male or female, among the highest on the list would stand five young maidens, that were then grouped around the writer, in that dawning experience of a teach- er's life. And never did a teacher watch the un- foldings of intellect and moral life with more interest and delight. Of this number, one was the homeless daughter of that Western home mis- sionary.

" Possessing an agreeable person, a pleasing and intelhgent countenance, an eye of deep and ear- nest expression, a melodious voice, a fervid imagi-

DELIA BACON. 13

nation, and the embryo of rare gifts of eloquence in thought and expression, she was preeminently one who would be pointed out as a genius ; and one, too, so exuberant and unregulated as to de- mand constant pruning and restraint. With this was united that natu]:al delicacy and purity of mind, which frequently not only protects the young maiden from all coarseness and indecorum, but, even to full womanhood, renders it impossible for her even to conceive what impurity may be.

" In disposition she was sensitive, impulsive, and transparent, possessing a keen longing for approbation, a morbid sensibility to criticism or blame, an honest truthfulness, and an entire free- dom from all that could be called management or art."

" In this period of her mental history, had her future career been anticipated by the data of I»ier natural endowments and probable circumstances, it would have been predicted that her genius, her confiding frankness, her interesting appearance, her gifts of eloquence, and her sincere aspirations after all that is good and pure, would make her an object of attention, and probably of excessive flattery. On the other hand, her keen sensibility to blame or injustice, her transparency, sincerity, and impulsiveness, the dangerous power of keen and witty expression, and the want of the guid- ance and protection of parents and home, would make her an object of unjust depreciation

14 DELIA BACON.

The persons who were objects of her regard, and to whom she confided her thoughts and feelings, would almost inevitably become enthusiastic ad- mirers, while those who in any way came into an- tagonism w^ould be as decided in their dislike."

The sketch thus drawn by the clear-minded teacher, strong and sharp as it is, needs yet some filling up of its outlines. I cannot speak irrever- ently of the terrors with which the prevalent reli- gion of New England, from the beginning down to very recent times, sought to persuade men to live purely and think rightly. Half a century hence, when it has been proved that better, stronger, and truer men and women have been nurtured under the relaxation of those old-time rigors than those whom the seventeenth, the eighteenth, and the first quarter of the nineteenth century in New England produced, scorn and indignation at the ancient Puritan errors will at least not be un- timely. But even the most loyal New Englander may doubt the wholesomeness of the exercises of self-examination and introspection into which devout parents and teachers guided their infant charges. It touches close upon sacrilege to in- vade the confidence of a 3'oung religious soul, seeking for illumination under the menace of eternal wretchedness ; but the woman whose story is told cannot be known without knowledge of the girl. There is extant a letter from her to her brother, then a student of divinity, when she was

DELIA BACON. 15

a child of ten. It covers one side of a half sheet of foolscap, yellow with age, and ruled with pen- ciled lines. "Your sister," says this little child, " has resisted the Holy Spirit and He has departed from me. 0 Avhat a deplorable state ! what a dreadful situation ! When I think of it I tremble ; bnt my fears are of short duration. Like Felix I say, go thy way for this season ; but oh ! what will become of me when I shall leave this vain transitory world and rise before my God in judg- ment ! Cease not to • pray for me ; I have neg- lected the offers of salvation ; I have despised my dear Redeemer ; but still there is mercy with him who is able to save." (Sept. 29, 1821.)

From time to time appear, among her brother's most sacredly treasured papers, letters showing continual like struggles and miseries, with alter- nating hope and despair, resulting at last, at some time before her fifteenth birthday, in a formal " profession of faith," in the First Church in Hart- ford.

From the spring of 1826 the shelter and sup- port which she had for years received in the Wil- liams household were to be hers no longer. With a very sad young heart she looked out upon the world in which, at fifteen, she was to begin a life- long struggle. At the close of February she writes to her eldest brother, who, young as he was, stood in a father's place to her : " I have but nine weeks more to remain in my present home," and then, " I shall have no home in all the wide,

16 DELIA BACON.

wide world I can call ray own." " The future seems very dark to me, and I cannot imagine what I am to do. I know I am to depend upon my own exertions for subsistence, and were there any field for these exertions I would not fear. But there seems to me none, and every way I turn I am disappointed and perplexed." (Feb. 26, 1826.)

At last, after much inquiry in various direc- tions for a place in which a school could be main- tained (the only resource in those days for women who would help themselves), after some small work in a school in Hartford, this child, with a sister but little older, began a school in the village of Southington, Connecticut.

Almost at the beginning of 1827, when Delia was not yet sixteen, the Southington enterprise was begun. It seems to have been for girls of ages up to the highest school limit ; yet here, and in the other places where new experiments were made, the head of the school was Delia, and her elder sister was subordinate.

It would be profitless to reproduce from her letters the assiduous toil, the continuous strug- gle of pinching economy with dire poverty, in which these years of girlhood were worn away. In Southington, only the time from January to September was needed to demonstrate the failure of their project. At Perth Amboy, in New Jersey, they had learned by May of the next year (1828) that the sanguine hopes with which they had been

DELIA BACON. 17

attracted thither by the townspeople were unwar- ranted, and they had fallen a little further into debt than when they came. At Jamaica on Long Island, twelve miles from New York, the prospect set before them was still more glowing than be- fore. Their undertaking was to be larger. Not only were they to teach a greater number of young ladies, but they were — these two girls — to maintain a household of which some of the scholars should be inmates.

The encouragement which inspired them in be- ginning here, in May, 1828, was certainly substan- tial. There was a refined and cultured society there, which appreciated and welcomed the refine- ment of the girl teachers. Especially did they find support in the cordial friendliness of John Alsop King, whose father, Rufus King, had been one of the most eminent statesmen of the post- revolutionary period, and who became himself governor of New York in later years. But even here, two years sufficed to prove their powers in- adequate to their task ; and in the summer of 1830 an end came, in disappointment, exhaustion, sickness, and hopeless insolvency, to this last at- tempt. And in telling the fatal story to their eldest brother, Leonard, who was all they had for counselor, comforter, and helper, Delia begins by saying : " Our letters must still be what they al- ways have been, a tale of blasted hopes, realized fears, and unlooked-for sorrows."

III.

There were no more daring enterprises in es- tablishing and carrying on schools, with all the responsibilities, cares, and hazards of proprietor- ship. Here and there, however, Delia was able now to maintain herself by teaching in the schools of others. At Hartford once more, immediately after the Jamaica disaster ; at Penn Yan, in West- ern New York, after which she frankly declares, "I will never live again in a place with such a heathenish name, unless I go on a mission " (June 16, 1832) ; perhaps in the rural village of West Bloomfield, not far from there, where at any rate she was for many months with her married old- est sister; and perhaps elsewhere. But during these years she was getting into her mind notions of better means of self-support than teaching school.

In the thickest of the toil and trouble at Ja- maica she had prepared for the press, if a pub- lisher could be found, her first adventure in let- ters. It was not strange that the history of the Anglo-American Puritans should strongly hold the attention of one who was so completely theirs by descent and by sympathy; and the series of

DELIA BACON. 19

short stories which were to make her book was founded upon incidents in their history. In the spring of 1831 there was published in New Haven, by A. H. Maltby, " Tales of the Puritans," a duo- decimo of three hundred pages. The author's name was not given, but such credit as belonged to it was soon awarded to Delia Bacon. Nor was it by any means without merit, especially, as she herself said of it shortly afterward, " considering it as written without experience, without knowl- edge of the subjects of which it treated, with scarcely a book to refer to beyond the works made use of in school." (Dec. 12, 1831.) The three stories contained in it were " The Regi- cides," "A Fair Pilgrim," and " Castine," which she had at first called " The Catholic." The first was an adaptation, far from unskillful or uninter- esting, of the romantic story of the three judges of Charles I. who found shelter in New Haven, and of the pursuit of them after the Restoration, ingeniously defeated by sympathizing officials and people. The next seems to have been suggested, but little more, by the fate of the Lady Arbella Johnson, daughter of the Earl of Lincoln, who came to die in the wilderness, at Salem, in 1630; and the subject of the last was the French settle- ment of the Baron Castine upon the Penobscot, late in the seventeenth century.

This experiment, attempted in the stress of poverty and debt in the hope of retrieving the

20 DELIA BACON.

impending losses from the school, seems to have achieved for her little more than the succes d'es- time vi^hich was quite unquestionable. The credit, indeed, which the girl got for it, in those days when the girls were rare who saw themselves in print, may have done little good in sharpening the hunger for literary success which shrewd Cath- erine Beecher had already discerned in her as a child at school. " From her childhood," her oldest brother wrote of her long afterward, " she has had a passion for literature, and perhaps I should say a longing, more or less distinct, for literary celeb- rity." So it was not long before she was at work, in the intervals of teaching here and there in schools, or (this she liked much better) select classes of young ladies in her own apartments, upon a new venture based upon an incident of American history. This was to have been a drama, and at first ambition had inspired the hope, at which indeed her Puritan soul was rather aghast, that it might be acted upon the stage. Friendly criticism, however, and especially, as her letters show, that of her brother, convinced her, after she had exhausted herself with labor upon it, that it lacked essential dramatic qualities; and at last, when she had rewritten and greatly altered it, the form of dialogue being yet retained, it was pub- lished in New York, late in 1839, by S. Colman. Its title was " The Bride of Fort Edward : A Dra-

DELIA BACON. 21

matic Story." It was based upon the pathetic story of Jane McCrea, a beautiful American girl whose lover was a loyalist officer in Burgoyne's army, just before its surrender at Saratoga. Cap- tured by a party of Burgoyne's Indians, she prom- ised them, in her terror, a large reward if they would take her safely to the British camp. " It was a fatal promise," says Irving. " Halting at a spring, a quarrel arose among the savages, in- flamed most probably with drink, as to whose prize she was, and who was entitled to the re- ward. The dispute became furious, and one, in a paroxysm of rage, killed her on the spot. He completed the savage act by bearing off her scalp as a trophy." ^

This episode and its effect, which was certainly very great, in stimulating the patriotic rage of the revolutionary army, are the theme of the book. The dialogue is mostly in prose, with passages interspersed of blank verse, not always correct; and it continues for almost two hundred pages of rhapsody and apostrophe and curiously mistaken familiar speech of common people. That partial theatrical friends — her letters even mention Miss Ellen Tree, one of the most famous of her day — should ever have fancied that it contained so much as the germ of an acting play, is inconceiv- able when one reads it now ; and even the read-

^ Life of Washington, iii. 153.

22 DELIA BACON.

ing of it is far from being a recreation. It was a failure, every way ; it brought debt instead of money, and no renown ; but it did the great ser- vice of ending, for a time, her attempts at liter- ary work, and turning her back to study and in- struction.

IV.

In all these years, beginning with a severe and prolonged course of an epidemic fever at Jamaica in 1828, the girl, maturing into womanhood, had been waging a sharp though intermittent warfare with ill-health. Sometimes, indeed, the high spir- its and animation which seem to have been natural to her indicated a vigorous physical state ; but often there were intense, prolonged, and prostrat- ino; headaches, or ao;onizino^ attacks of neuralo-ia. Against this, however, she carried on with high courage her struggle to be something and to ac- complish something. She writes to her brother of being " resolved to correct the defects of her early education, so far as it is possible for earnest and patient effort to accomplish it ; " and so of her reading on vegetable physiology, on political econ- omy, on the elements of ideology. (Dec. 12, 1831.) At another time she is renewing her school acquaintance, such as it was, with Latin ; and again, with little help from teachers, she is trying to learn Greek.

But in the midst of it all — sickness, studying, writing of stories and plays that cannot be played — she carries on the work of instruction, from

24 DELIA BACON.

which alone, in those days, a woman could earn her living, if she could not work with her hands. This she did, not in the perfunctory fashion which seems alone to have been known to the pedagogy of the time, but in a Avay of her own devising. She gathered about her, in her own apartments, or in some larger room when her own proved in- sufficient, young ladies whose school-days were ended, and many, even, who were no longer young. These she taught, in literature some- times, but above all in history. One who seems to have thought it a privilege to be her pupil has written thus of her instruction :

" She imparted to them new ideas ; she system- atized for them the knowledge already gained ; she engaged them in discussion ; she taught them to think. * What books do you use in Miss Ba- con's class ? ' A question often asked and impos- sible of answer. Her pupils had no books — only a pencil and some paper. All they learned was received from her lips. She sat before them, her noble countenance lighted with enthusiasm, her fair white hands now holding a book from which she read an extract, now pressing for a moment the thoughtful brow. She knew both how to pour in knowledge and how to draw out thought. And there are few listeners, I think, who can give keener and more critical attention than the former members of Miss Bacon's class.

" In many of the Eastern cities " these historical

DELIA BACON. , 25

lectures " called out deep interest and enthusiasm. Hundreds of the most cultivated flocked to hear them. Graceful and intellectual in appearance, eloquent in speech, marvelously wise, and full of inspiration, she looked and spoke the very muse of history. Of these lectures she wrote out noth- ing— not even notes. All their wisdom came fresh and living from the depth of her ready intel- lect. And for that very reason there is now no trace of what would he so valuable." ^

Since these pages are written only to tell those who care to know what Delia Bacon was, it may be well to adduce further the testimony of this pupil.

" Delia Bacon was a woman of a genius rare and incomparable. Wherever she went, there walked a queen in the realm of mind. To converse with her was to be carried captive. The most ordinary topic became fascinating when she dealt with it, for whatever subject she touched she invested with her own wonderful wealth of thought, and illustration, and association, and imagery, until all else was forgotten in her magical converse.

" In personal appearance she was of middle stat- ure, graceful, fair, and slight. Her habitual black dress set off to advantage the radiant face, whose fair complexion was that uncommon one which can only be described as pale yet brilliant.

1 Article "Delia Bacon : " by Sydney E. Holmes [Mrs. Sarah E. Hensliaw]: The Advance (Chicago), Dec. 26, 1867.

26 . DELIA BACON.

Intellect was stamped on every feature. Genius looked from brow and eye. The hair was a pale brown, gold tinted ^ — fit shading for such a coun- tenance. The eye blue-gray, clear, shining, and passing rapidly through all expressions, from the swimming softness of tender sympathy to the flash that revealed the inspiration within.

" Meeting her in a crowd, you glanced over and thought — 'a graceful woman.' But your eye unconsciously sought her again, and the second time you felt rather than thought — ' a remark- able woman.' * Who is that lady ? ' asked a newly appointed college official, — ' that lady whom I meet occasionally in the street.' He went on to paint her. There was no mistaking the description. ' That,' was the reply, ' is Miss Bacon.' 'That Miss Bacon!' he exclaimed. *I knew it was some one remarkable ! — I never saw such an eye in my life ! and how young she is ! '

" No one could know and appreciate Delia Ba- con, without placing her in his estimation among the most highly endowed women whom he ever saw or heard of. Was philosophy the subject of her discourse ? She dealt with abstract truth as but one woman does in generations. Weighing, balancing, analyzing, and comparing, she knew all systems, and had their resemblances and their

1 This detail is certainly erroneous. The hair was of a brown which was nearer to black than is often found with blue or blue-gray eyes. — T. B.

DELIA BACON. 27

differences clearly defined, distinctly remembered, and ready at her call. Her mastery of the sub- ject astonished you ; you were sure she had given her chief time and thought to that alone.

" Was it history ? She was equally at home, and showed an insight that illustrated her great intel- lectual powers. Chronology, geography, narra- tive — all its facts were familiar to her. Know- ing what she knew of these, most people would have considered themselves thoroughly versed in historic lore. But history to her was not these — these were to her only the beginning. They were the husk, the rind, the outward covering of a philosophy, which she delighted to educe for duller minds to recognize. So with poetry and art. By her own originality and genius, she set forth each with new thoughts, or with old ones in new combinations. And a deep veneration for what is good, a clear recognition of God and his providence, underlay all her teachings. This is no high-sounding praise. Let those who knew her best make answer." ^

For some years together — exactly when the period began or ended it is hard to say — these courses of instruction were given by her with great approval. In New Haven, where her brother was minister of the ancient " First Church," and was also in official relation to Yale College, she had certain marked advantages of acquaintance and

1 Article " Delia Bacon " : The Advance, uhi supra.

28 DELIA BACON.

introduction; and here her classes are said to have numbered one hundred, while they included be- yond doubt all that was most refined and culti- vated in the society of that university town. In Hartford, the home of her childhood, her success was gratifying to her reasonable pride. In Bos- ton, in Cambridge, and in New York and Brook- lyn — these last, in 1852 and 1853, seeming to end the list — she continued this congenial but ex- hausting labor of oral instruction, and even found the new sensation, in the last season of this period, of earning money enough to make substantial pay- ments upon the debts incurred in former years.

It was in Boston that she became acquainted with one of those who have recorded in public the impression she made. In " Recollections of Sev- enty Years," ^ of which the first of several editions appeared in 1865, Mrs. Eliza Farrar, who had come to know her well before she died, devotes her closing chapter to the story, so far as it had been within her knowledge, "of a highly gifted and noble-minded woman " (p. 331).

" The first lady whom I ever heard deliver a public lecture was Miss Delia Bacon, who opened her career in Boston, as teacher of history, by giving a preliminary discourse, describing her method, and urging upon her hearers the impor- tance of the study.

1 Boston : Ticknor & Fields.

DELIA BACON. 29

" I had called on her that day for the first time, and found her very nervous and anxious about her first appearance in public. She interested me at once, and I resolved to hear her speak. Her person was tall and commanding, her finely shaped head was well set on her shoulders, her face was handsome and full of expression, and she moved with grace and dignity. The hall in which she spoke was so crowded that I could not get a seat, but she spoke so well that I felt no fatigue from standing. She was at first a little embarrassed, but soon became so engaged in recommending the study of history to all present, that she ceased to think of herself, and then she became eloquent.

" Her course of oral lessons, or lectures, on his- tory interested her class of ladies so much that she was induced to repeat them, and I heard several who attended them speak in the highest terms of them. She not only spoke, but read well, and when on the subject of Roman history, she de- lighted her audience by giving them with great effect some of Macaulay's Lays.^

"I persuaded her to give her lessons in Cam- bridge, and she had a very appreciative class as- sembled in the large parlor of the Brattle House. She spoke without notes, entirely from her well- stored memory ; and she would so group her facts as to present to us historical pictures calculated to

1 It should be remembered that the " Lays " had then but just appeared, and were not yet commonplaces. — T. B.

30 DELIA BACON.

make a lasting impression. She was so much ad- mired and liked in Cambridge, that a lady there invited her to spend the winter with her as her guest, and I gave her the use of my parlor for another course of lectures. In these she brought down her history to the time of the birth of Christ, and I can never forget how clear she made it to us that the world was only then made fit for the advent of Jesus. She ended with a fine climax that was quite thrilling.

" In her Cambridge course she had maps, charts, models, pictures, and everything she needed to illustrate her subject. This added much to her pleasure and ours. All who saw her then must remember how handsome she was, and how grace- fully she used her wand in pointing to the illustra- tions of her subject. I used to be reminded by her of Raphael's sibyls, and she often spoke like an oracle.

" She and a few of her class would often stay after the lesson and take tea with me, and then she would talk delightfully for the rest of the evening. It was very inconsiderate in us to allow her to do so, and when her course ended she was half dead with fatigue" (pp. 319-321).

The instruction, however, which for almost a decade of years she was thus giving by oral dis- course and conversation to classes of ladies, while general history was perhaps oftenest its subject,

DELIA BACON. 31

was by no means restricted to the history of events. She taught, in like manner, with high enthusiasm and with great acceptance, the history of hterature and the arts, and the history and principles of criti- cism. More and more, indeed, through all this period of exhausting toil for self-support, under the burden of sickness and penury and debt, her interest and her inclination were turning toward pure literature and literary criticism ; so that when, in 1852, her historical lectures in Boston and Cambridge were ended for the season, she seems to have hoped that they would never be, as in fact they never were, resumed.

V.

This was not a normal or healthful life for a girl and woman of an exquisitely sensitive nervous organization, of fine intellectual powers, of strong affections. With the warmest instinct of domestic love for the family into which she had been born, and in which privation and hardship and separa- tion had only strengthened the mutual attachment of its members, she yet had never known a home, except the stern and conscientious hospitality which sheltered her for the few years before she became fifteen. With a keen sense of admiration, and with personal attractions so marked, that although she did not seem conscious she could not have been ignorant of them, her girlhood was grimly shut out from even the temperate social joys that Connecticut Puritanism allowed. Out of such social life, had not the necessity that was laid upon her forbidden it to her, there might have come in her womanhood the home which she was never to know, and the ties and the occupations which would have turned the current of her life into a placid, serene, and undistinguished domes- ticity. But there was no room in her crowded life for the passages that lead to marriage. Such

DELIA BACON. 33

addresses as had been openly paid to her she was observed to receive with amusement rather than seriously, and then to decline. Afterward, indeed, when she was mature in age, she underwent a most cruel ordeal, and suffered a grievous and humiliating disappointment. So keen was the exasperation, and so deep the humiliation to which her highly sensitive and already overwrought nature was subjected in the face of a wide and critical circle of acquaintance, that it would not have been strange if the new strain had broken it down completely. Exquisitely sensitive as she was, however, she was no less proud and brave ; and if from the sharp and prolonged distress of the years 1846 and 1847 her mind did in fact undergo some permanent harm that took open effect in later years, there was little sign of it then. Sus- tained by the womanly pride that was born in her, and by the religious principle in which she had been so diligently trained, she was able to write, not long afterward, to her brother from Ohio, al- most from the very spot where she was born in a missionary's cabin : " I begin to look upon the world, and its toil and strife, somewhat as those do who have left it forever. Objects which once seemed very large to me appear now, in the men- tal perspective which this distance creates, absurd- ly little. ... In that calm of heart and soul to which God by his providence and by his grace has at length conducted me, I can afford to wait until * the lying lips are put to silence.' "

34 DELIA BACON.

More than ever before was the tender and watchful care of those to whom she was especially bound by ties of nature or affection centred upon her during these years of suffering and of threat- ened prostration, and the years that closely fol- lowed them. Cheered though they were, how- ever, by her courage and fortitude, there were those among them who began already to discern upon her, even if they sounded no note of warn- ing, the approaching shadow of a dark and dread- ful cloud.

VI.

Stu£)Ying and teaching for many years not merely the history of events, but the history and criticism of literature, it is not strange that the strongly English mind of this New England woman became gradually fixed upon the greatest work of English letters, the drama of the Elizabethan and Jacobean age. So complete, indeed, was the spell of fascination under which she fell in the study especially of the plays which bear the name of Shakspere, that after the beginning of 1853 she could no longer endure the burden of her histori- cal lessons, in which she seemed to have achieved a permanent success, sure to bring her, if only she should continue them, prosperity and credit.

To whom it first occurred to doubt the title of William Shakspere to the authorship of the plays commonly bearing his name is a question which will not be much discussed in this sketch.

Certainly no dispute of authorship was rife in his lifetime. A good reason for this was that there was no assertion of authorship by any one. It is true, that as early as 1589, when Shakspere was twenty-five years old, he had become a play-actor, and one of the sixteen owners of the Blackfriars

36 DELIA BACON.

play-house. It is even guessed that as early as that, one of the plays which were afterward called his had been performed, in that house or else- where ; although it is hardly surmised that any one of them was printed earlier than 1694. And inasmuch as the general agreement seems to be that half of all that go commonly by his name, in- cluding many of the noblest, were never printed at all while he lived, or until seven years after his death, since there was no assertion of authorship, contention could hardly arise against it.

Nor was it until very long after an author was first openly nominated for these plays in the publi- cation of the folio edition of 1623, that either liter- ary or historical criticism could easily turn itself to a discussion of the claim, if any one had thought of suggesting such a discussion. It might, indeed, be said that for a century afterward neither liter- ary nor historical criticism existed in England ; and there were other reasons why the intellectual activity of England concerned itself little, for many years, with the plays of Elizabeth's time or their authors. When the folio of Heminge and Condell appeared, the great political struggle of the seventeenth century, to prepare the way for which the acted plays had already done so much, was on the point of passing from its first stage of discussion and lawful agitation into open and revo- lutionary outbreak. Two years after, the death of James I. and the accession of his son gave new

DELIA BACON. 37

intensity to the conflict already engaged ; and from that time onward to half of England a play, a play-house, or a play-writer was sinful ; while for all England there was graver work than read- ing plays or speculating upon their authorship. Then, when the anti-Puritan reaction came with the Restoration, the dramas of a past generation had little chance of a hearing in competition with the witty abominations of Congreve and Wycher- ley ; and the stiffening classicism of the time of Anne and the Georges afforded little tolerance for " Fancy's child," by whatever name he might be called, if he warbled to it only " his native wood- notes wild."

And yet it is not altogether untrue to say that the authorship of the Shakspere drama has always been in controversy. From the beginning until now, w^hile almost all men were agreed that Shak- spere wrote plays, it was hard to find two who agreed what plays he wrote. The folio of 1623 contained thirty-six plays. Of these, eighteen were then for the first time printed. Yet, while the aim of the editors is to present a complete collec- tion of his plays, they wholly disregard at least seventeen which during the author's lifetime had been published under his name, without any dis- avowal by him so far as is known. Upon these last therefore, at all events, men's opinions differed in Shakspere's time and afterwards. They differed, also, upon the play of " Pericles," which the folio

38 DELIA BACON.

omitted as not his; but which modern editors judge to be his, either partly or wholly. Then the wisest critics of to-day, with the keenest sensi- tiveness for Shakspere's name, do not fear to dis- cuss, as though they were not laying profane hands on the ark of the covenant, the question whether one and another of the Shakspere plays are really his: as the three parts of "King Henry VI." ; as "Pericles"; as " Titus Andronicus " ; so that one critic has been able to satisfy himself that but five can be rightly called his, and that all others are falsely or mistakenly imputed to him.

While there was hardly a play of them all to the authorship of which Shakspere's title had not been at some time either wholly ignored or sharply questioned; while there were many more plays which in his lifetime or for sixty years afterward were openly imputed to him, so that the authentic canon of the Shakspere drama has always been, is now, and perhaps ever will be the subject of fierce contention ; yet none of the critics went so far as to sum up the several disputations of all the critics by maintaining that all were right, at least in part, and that the play-actor wrote none of them.

Many readers, indeed, from the time when criti- cism began a century and a half ago, found them- selves confronted with difficulties elsewhere un- known. The personality of this dramatist glowed through his w^ork with a force and brightness found nowhere else in literature. It seemed, in-

DELIA BACON. 39

deed, a multiplied personality. There was in it not only marvelous insight, but exquisite cultiva- tion and refinement, profound learning, and a practical knowledge of men, of the world, and of affairs such as all men were apt to say had never before been joined in any one man. When Cole- ridge called him the " myriad-minded," he simply put into a felicitous phrase what all men had loYig been thinking. Many, indeed, had declared their wonder that any one mind could produce creations so diverse in character as "Julius Caesar" and " The Merry Wives of Windsor," as " The Comedy of Errors" and " Macbeth." In general, however, a single student would content himself with a demonstration which, alone, might have served to solve the difficulty found by every one, but which, when involved with like demonstrations by others, only multiplied perplexity. To prove from the plays that their author must have been a lawyer, as Lord Campbell did, was far from difficult, and would have been very helpful if the demonstration had stood alone. True, there was no historical record of Shakspere's ever having seen a law-book, a court-room, or a lawyer's chambers ; and there was some trouble in imagining how the play-actor and theatre-manager, who was writing immortal dramas before he was thirty, and died, after volu- minous authorship, at fifty-two, could have ac- quired what Lord Campbell calls " the familiar, profound, and accurate knowledge he displayed of

40 DELIA BACON.

juridical principles and practice." It was only making a wonder more wonderful, however ; and the new wonder was established by demonstration, and by the authority of a great lawyer's name. But when the eminent Dr. Bucknill, not contro- verting the argument of Lord Campbell, proved as clearly that Shakspere " had paid an amount of attention to subjects of medical interest scarcely if at all inferior to that which has served as the basis" of the proposition that he "had devoted seven good years of his life to the practice of law," he hindered rather than helped to understand the real life of the dramatist. So when another proves that in the few years before the play- writing began the poet, so well versed w^as he in warfare, must have served a campaign or two in the Low Coun- tries ; another, that he must have been a Roman Catholic in religion, while another shows him to have been necessarily a Puritan ; another, that his prodigious wealth of allusions to and phrases from the then untranslated Greek and Latin authors proves his broad and deep erudition ; the under- standing consents to one demonstration after an- other, but may possibly be staggered if called to accept them all together. It might well be that weak souls, invited to believe so much of one man, sought refuge and repose in refusing to believe even what would not otherwise have overtaxed credulity.

There were other things, besides, that had

DELIA BACON. 41

seemed strange in the relations of this man to these plays. No word or hint seems ever to have escaped him to show that he cared for, or even owned, the miraculous offspring which had fallen from him. There is no word or syllable in all the world to indicate that the man whose multi- farious learning is the wonder of the third century after him ever owned a book, or ever saw one, although he brought together and left behind him a fair estate. Nor is there to be found in all the world, of this profuse and voluminous author, of this bosom-friend of poets and printers and actors, so much as the scratch of a pen on paper, except the three signatures upon his Will, wherein, by an interlineation which shows that he had at first overlooked the wife of his boyhood, he leaves her his " second-best bed." Yet of his less famous contemporaries there are autograph manuscripts in abundance. Even of his forerunners by cen- turies there are extant writings infinitely more plenty than the scanty subscriptions to a legal in- strument. Petrarch died two centuries and a half, Dante three centuries, before him ; yet the manu- scripts of both abound, while of him who was greater than either, and was almost of our own time, there is nothing but the mean and sordid Will to show that he ever put pen to paper.

But while the difficulty of fixing the canon of the Shakspere text had long been such as to in- volve the authorship of every part of the text in

42 DELIA BACON.

more or less doubt ; while all men had wondered that so little should be known of the actual man Shakspere, and that what little was known should be so far remote from any ideal one could form of the author bearing the name : so that Coleridge should exclaim : " Are we to have miracles in sport ? Does God choose idiots by whom to con- vey divine truths to men ? " and Emerson : " I cannot marry this fact to his verse. Other admi- rable men have led lives in some sort of keeping with their thought ; but this man, in wide con- trast;" yet avowed disbelief went commonly no further. Once, it is true, there was a public asser- tion that Shakspere's alleged authorship was im- possible. In 1848 there was published by the Harpers, in New York, a light and chatty account of a voyage to Spain, entitled " The Romance of Yachting," by Joseph C. Hart. The incidents of the voyage are interspersed with discussions alto- gether foreign to it ; and upon a trivial pretext the authorship of the plays is considered, with no small acuteness and vigor, upon the pages from 208 to 243. It is summarized, however, in a few of the earlier sentences : " He was not the mate of the literary characters of the day, and none knew it better than himself. It is a, fraud upon the world to thrust his surreptitious fame upon us. He had none that was worthy of being trans- mitted. The inquiry will be, who were the able literary men who wrote the dramas imputed to him f

DELIA BACON. 43

The plays themselves, or rather a small portion of them, will live as long as English literature is regarded worth pursuit. The authorship of the plays is no otherwise material to us than as a matter of curiosity, and to enable us to render exact justice ; but they should not be assigned to Shakspere alone, if at all."

If there be any merit, therefore, in having been the first to doubt this authorship, it cannot be awarded to Delia Bacon. There is no reason, how- ever, to believe that the speculations which have just been quoted ever came to her knowledge. The ideas, or fancies, which soon after this pos- sessed her, were, as she profoundly believed, her own discovery — indeed, she would rather have said, a revelation direct to her.

Revelation, discovery, or fancy, however, — whatever it was, an utterly subordinate part of it all, though an essential part, was that which con- cerned merely the authorship of the plays. If they were indeed, as they had been commonly re- ceived, a casual collection of stage-plays, knocked together by a money-making play-actor, play- wright, and theatre-manager for the money there was in them and to be got out of them, it was a trivial question by what name the playwright should be called ; it should not tax credulity to "marry this fact to his verse," however fine the verse might be, if they were nothing more than verse. But to her, studying the plays with a keen-

44 DELIA BACON.

ness of natural insight and a burning intensity which have not often been appHed to them, much more than splendid poesy began to gleam within them. Finding in them a higher philosophy, even, than in the "Advancement of Learning," a broader statesmanship, a profounder jurisprudence, and, above all, a bolder courage than in all the avowed writings of the great Chancellor, she only obeyed the teachings of that Inductive System which he had expounded, in seeking an adequate authorship for so magnificent a creation. But that all these things were in the plays — this was the main fact that concerned her ; this was what she cared to discover first for herself, and then to communicate to the world. If indeed she found them there, it could not but follow, as the night the day, that some better paternity must be admitted for the plays than that of Lord Leicester's groom.

Nor was it enough for her to discover bits and gleams of philosophy and political science in the plays, however frequent or brilHant. To her eager inquiry they came to be revealed at last, not as fortuitously collected though mutually unre- lated plays, but as an entire dramatic system, in which the New Philosophy was to be inculcated in unsuspicious minds, under the vehement despotism of the last Tudor and the dull pedantic oppression of the first Stuart. If the plays were really such a system of philosophic teaching, not only was it difficult to accept the competency for it of the

DELIA BACON. 45

Stratford poacher and London horse-boy; it was hardly less trying to credulity to impute so vast an enterprise, added to all the gigantic intellec- tual labors which he avowed, even to the greatest Englishman of his age. She judged, therefore, that as there had been collaboration before and since in literary work, so here the most brilliant and philosophic minds of the Elizabethan Court cooperated in the work which was too great for one, and consented together, for their common safety, to the imputation of their united work to the theatre-manager who brought out the plays, and whose property they were because they had been given to him.

Keasons why these courtiers and politicians — Bacon, Kaleigh, Spenser, and whatever others made up the illustrious coterie — should not have wished to acknowledge the work of which they might well have boasted, were not far to seek. It comported ill with dignity of rank and place to be known as a writer of plays : but to be known to such a queen as Elizabeth, or to such a king as James, as author of such plays as " Coriolanus " or " Julius CaBsar " — the eager ambition of Ba- con would have been quenched by it long before the day when his office was wanted for Williams ; upon Raleigh, living for fifteen years under his unexecuted death sentence, the headsman's axe would have fallen earlier than it did.

But while Delia Bacon thoroughly believed that

46 DELIA BACON.

such a worthy coterie, and not the unworthy player, produced the EHzabethan drama, and hid in it the philosophy which it would have been fatal to publish openly ; and while she was no less sure that in some cryptic form there was truth involved in these works which was yet to be surrendered to faithful and intelligent study, it is scant justice to her memory to say, that, as the mere authorship of the plays was to her but a small part of the truth concerning them, so she never devoted herself to whims or fancies about capital letters, or irregular pagination, or acrostics, or anagrams, as conceal- ing yet expressing the great philosophy which the plays inclosed. Her mind, it now appears, was already overwrought; before many months it gave way completely ; but its unsoundness, when- ever it may have begun, never assumed that form.

VIL

It is not easy — and perhaps it is not important — to determine just when disbelief in the accepted authorship of the Shakspere plajs established itself absolutely in her mind. Certainly in 1852, while she was delivering her instruction in Cambridge with singular success, she had startled some of those who knew her best by her audacious utter- ances on the subject. To Mrs. Professor Farrar, whose reminiscences have been already quoted,^ she then expressed a desire to visit England, not, it seems, for historical study, but, as Mrs. Farrar remembers, " to obtain proof of the truth of her theory that Shakspere did not write the plays at- tributed to him." The intimations thus thrown out met, indeed, only with compassionate discour- agement there. The two or three ladies who alone seem to have heard them were wholly without sympathy for them, and regarding them even as indications that might in time become monomania, sedulously avoided all speech with her upon the subject thereafter.

In the same year, 1852, however, she entered upon an acquaintance and correspondence which

1 Supra, pp. 28-30.

48 DELIA BACON.

acted far otherwise upon her fancy and her pur- poses and hopes than the chilHng avoidance of the subject by the two or tliree ladies of Cambridge, friends and admirers though they were. Just by what formaUty of introduction she first communi- cated with Ralph Waldo Emerson does not appear ; but Cambridge was not far from Concord, even upon the map ; and it was still nearer in spirit, at least in those days. The letter with which she opened correspondence, if it existed, would be her earliest writing on the subject. It must have been just before the 12th of June, 1852 ; but as in Au- gust she asks him to return it to her, speaking of it as a " voluminous note," it is not among her other letters to Emerson.^ The answer to it, however, was certainly not such as to silence or repel her.

Concord, 12 June, 1852.

My dear Miss Bacon", — Your letter was duly received, and its contents deserved better leisure and apprehension than I have at once been able to command. The only alternative w^as to let it wait a little, for a good hour. And now I write, only that I may assure you it has been received and is appreciated. In the office to which you have in the contingency appointed me, of critic, I am

^I beg leave to acknowledge Uie courtesy of Mr. Emerson's family, and of his literary executor, Mr. J. Elliot Cabot, in delivering to me all Miss Bacon's letters to him, neatly folded and docketed by his own hand, and in formally acquiescing in the publication of all his letters to her, after inspection of copies of them. — T. B.

DELIA BACON. 49

deeply gratified to observe the power of state- ment and the adequateness to the problem, which this sketch of your argument evinces. Indeed, I value these fine weapons far above any special use they may be put to. And you will have need of enchanted instruments, nay, alchemy itself, to melt into one identity these two reputations (shall I call them ?) the poet and the statesman, both hitherto solid historical figures. If the cipher ap- prove itself so real and consonant to you, it will to all, and is not only material but indispensable to your peace. And it would seem best that so radi- cal a revolution should be proclaimed with great compression in the declaration, and the real grounds pretty rapidly set forth, a good ground in each chapter, and preliminary generalities quite omitted. For there is an immense presumption against us which is to be annihilated by battery as fast as possible. And now for the execution of the design. If you will send me your first chap- ter, I will at once make my endeavor to put it into the best channel I can find, " Blackwood " or " Fraser " I think the best. But this, taking it for granted that you decide on trying your fortune in a magazine first, — which, I suppose, is fame, rather than fortune. On most accounts, the eligi- ble way is, as I think, the hook or brochure, pub- lished simultaneously in England and here. I am not without good hope of accepting your kind in- vitation to visit you in Cambridge, though I very

50 DELIA BACON.

rarely get so far from home, where I am detained by a truly ridiculous complication of cobwebs. With great respect, yours faithfully,

R. W. Emerson.

Miss Bacon.

P. S. What is the allusion in the " Literary World " of last week to criticism on Shakespeare ? Does it touch us, or some other ?

What the " theory " was which had been set forth in the missing first letter can be determined only inferentially. But though it would seem from an expression in the foregoing letter to have emphasized especially the supposed relation of Bacon to the plays, it is fair to beUeve that her theory was here, as everywhere in her writing and speaking afterwards, a theory of plural author- ship, so far as mere authorship was concerned. This is her next letter, so far as appears, to Emer- son :

Cambridge, August 4 [1852].

Dear Sir, — Confirmations of my theory, which I did not expect to find on this side of the water, have turned up since my last communication to you, in the course of my researches in the libra- ries here and in Boston. But I am going to leave Cambridge in a few days, and if it is not too much trouble, I wish you would be so kind as to inclose to me, by the next mail, my voluminous note to you on this subject. I think it is possible that I

DELIA BACON. 51

may be able to make some use of it, while I am quite sure of its being good for nothing to you. Very truly yours, Delia S. Bacon.

Mr. R. W. Emerson.

But while she was forming such new and help- ful friendships as this one, kindly tolerant, if not more, of her great idea, she was finding, as she thought, foes of her own household. A letter to her oldest brother, dated that same month, makes it plain that she had broached her theory to him also; that his grave, cool judgment had refused to entertain it, and that frankly and with force, as his nature was, he had so declared, dissuading her from cherishing it, as a delirious fancy. But his remonstrances had only the effect to estrange her, for the few remaining years of her life, from that relative who had always been her most helpful, judicious, and affectionate friend.

From the village of Cuba, in Western New York, where she was visiting a sister, she wrote to Emerson, September 30, 1852 :

"It is certainly very extraordinary that the generous expressions of sympathy and interest which your last two letters contain should remain so long unacknowledged, and that, too, when I have all the time been so deeply sensible of the kindness which dictated them. ... I know very well what a presuming step it was to intrude

52 DELIA BACON.

these speculations upon such time as yours, and what an embarrassing responsibility it was to throw upon one so preoccupied. For I suppose that no previous familiarity with the Shakespeare writings would qualify one to decide this question satisfactorily without much revision and scrutiny, not only of these works themselves, but of all that appertains to the subject. I think most persons in these circumstances would have dismissed the question without much consideration ; and I do not believe there is any one else in the world who could have met it, under all the disadvantages which attended its introduction to you, as you have done, — with such brave decision, — with such generous discrimination. ... I have been constantly wishing and intending to adopt your suggestion in reference to a summary statement on the subject, but since the arrival of this last quite unexpected proof of your regard I have not been well enough to accomplish even this.

" I had intended to remain here in this rude little town, which you never heard of before I suppose, until I had quite finished the statement I had before commenced, for I have a sister here, whose home, be it where it will, is always mine. But I find I cannot persist in this resolution, for it would be merely suicidal. This study is so very absorbing, and it consigns me to such complete solitude, that I find all my progress in it is made at a most ruinous expense to my life and health ;

DELIA BACON. 53

while those which I pursue with my classes have just the contrary effect upon me. Indeed but for this resource I think I should have died long ago. I cannot tell you with what reluctance I relinquish it again. My only consolation is that I cannot help it. The choice is not mine. I am not dis- couraged, but sometimes I think if I can only succeed in committing the work effectually to stronger hands it is all I ought to think of.

" In the course of my researches last summer I found, quite unexpectedly, a very clear historical basis for the conclusions which my Shakspere study had forced upon me. I found, too, the most astounding corroborations, to the minutest partic- ulars, of new versions of contemporary events, which I had rejected in the cipher, on account of their disagreement with what I supposed to be well authenticated historic fact. Be assured, dear sir, there is no possibility of a doubt as to the main points of my theory. What was wrong in it came from my attempts to patch over, and recon- cile with what I knew before, things which seemed to me impossible. Whether I live to accomplish it, or not, a little investigation in the right direc- tion will demonstrate that these marvelous phenom- ena, so unlike all other human works, are after all not wholly miraculous — not of the air merely. Properly traced, according to that law of investi- gation which requires causes for effects, they will prove the index to a piece of history which glis-

64 DELIA BACON.

tens out even now very plainly from the contem- porary historical documents, though it has not yet found its way into the story constructed from them. . . . Most gratefully yours,

Delia S. Bacon."

At the close of the following November she be- gan, at the Stuyvesant Institute in New York, a course of historical instruction — " lessons, rather than lectures " — to ladies. A copy of the printed prospectus, with commendations from Washington Irving and George Bancroft among others, is found carefully indorsed and preserved among Emerson's papers. This was followed, upon most flattering solicitation, by a similar course of evening lessons at the same place, on " The Ori- gin of the Oriental Element in our Civilization " ; and to this, gentlemen, as well as ladies, were admitted. Upon like invitation from Brooklyn a series of lessons began there, " at Professor Gray's Lecture Room, 90 Montague Place," Feb- ruary 17, 1853 ; and when this ended, her life among men and women was closed.

In the midst of this, however, there are signs that she is intent upon the work to which she was prepared to dedicate what remained to her of life and strength. Among the warmest and most ad- miring of the friends she had made at Boston and Cambridge was Miss Elizabeth P. Peabody, whose sister was the wife of Nathaniel Hawthorne. It is

DELIA BACON. 55

to her that the following note, which soon found its way to the subject of it, was addressed.

Concord, 26 March, 1853.

Deae Miss Peabody, — I send you a letter for Mr. Putnam, which, if you like, you shall send, if you dislike, and want another, you shall burn, and tell me so. I talked with Hawthorne who did not seem to think that he was the person ; but if Miss Bacon would really come to Concord, and board with Mrs. Adams, as, I doubt not, is practicable, we would make him listen, and she should make him believe. With my kindest salutations and respects to Miss Bacon, your ever obliged servt.

R. W. Emeesgis'.

At the end of this letter Mr. Emerson adds : " I can really think of nothing that could give such eclat to a magazine as this brilliant paradox."

VIII.

If there were none of her own blood to receive with favor the strange notions which she had now begun to avow, there was elsewhere no lack of sympathy, encouragement, and aid. To Mrs. Farrar she had already intimated her strong desire to pros- ecute in England researches in support of her hypothesis which would be impossible elsewhere. The help, indispensable for this purpose, which her own family neither could nor, to her strong resent- ment, would afford was offered during her last season of instruction in New York by a gentleman of large wealth and high standing in every way, whose name, however, was long unknown to her relatives, Mr. Charles Butler.

On the 2d of April, 1853, she announced to her brother, in a letter of not unkindly tone, her ex- pectation of " going to England as soon as I can get myself ready," but with no intimation of her purpose in going, or of the source of her means for going. " All that I can say is that the money I appropriate to that object could not be honorably appropriated to any other. I have ample means placed at my disposal, and shall go so supported as to be able to command whatever attention I may

DELIA BACON. 57

need. ... I cannot tell how long I shall be absent ; perhaps five or six months. My plans do not reach beyond England at present."

Emerson's letter to Mr. Putnam the publisher, over which he had given Miss Peabody such broad discretion, she had evidently " liked " and " sent." For on the 14th of April Delia Bacon wrote to Emerson from Brooklyn : " Your letter to Mr. Put- nam was all that I could have desired. It was in- deed most truly kind. I cannot be satisfied with- out attempting to thank you for it, but I do not know how to do it adequately. I can only hope that you will find your generous interest in the subject justified by the result." And then she shows him how his letter to Mr. Putnam, and Mr. Putnam's proposal induced by it, — a proposal, in- deed, which she had felt obliged to decline, — had so impressed a friend that he had resolved to provide her with the means for her journey. Emerson's answer and the letter of farewell that followed her to the steamer are these :

Concord, 13 April, 1853.

My dear Miss Bacon, — I was cordially grati- fied by the good news your note contained, that you were going forward with your studies, and really decided to prosecute them in England ; and I was not a little flattered by being made however accidentally and insignificantly a party to the transaction. I am glad also that you will trust me

58 DELIA BACON.

farther with insights of your results. By all means, let it be so ! And, by all means do you go forward to the speediest comjDletion ! Now let me not fail of my communication. I grieve very often — seldom so much as now — at the disheartening infirmities and invalidity of my wife, which makes it most part of the time quite out of question to invite any worthy mortal to visit my house. I do not know that I can come to New York, — and yet I am not sure but I shall make the time to do so, if there is no other way. But, if you are coming to Boston or Cambridge before your departure, have the goodness to apprise me now of the fact, and when, and where. In assured hope and with constant respect, Yours,

R. W. Emerson.

Miss Bacon.

Concord, 12 May, 1853.

My dear Miss Bacon, — I wrote to Sumner, but have as yet no answer. Perhaps he has directed his answer, as I suggested, to Mr. Butler. I enclose a letter to Mr. Martineau, to whom, if you have good opportunity, I think I would frankly open the general design of your inquiries ; but you will judge best on seeing him. I send a letter also for Carlyle, to find Spedding. I think I will write myself again to Carlyle, as I shall need, per- haps, in a few days. I enclose a letter to John Chapman. Perhaps you will find his house a good

DELIA BACON. 59

home for you, in London. I took rooms and board there, and was well accommodated.

I have not yet written, for want of time and a little mountain to get over to write to him, — to Helps. Leave me your London address, and I will yet write. Mrs. Emerson is mortified at her heedlessness in putting you to sleep in a chamber certain to be disturbed by too- early-rising washers in the night. She never remembered it would be so, nor thought of it till next day. But Fare well and fare gloriously ! With best hope,

R. W. Emerson.

Miss Bacon.

On the 14th of May, 1853, she sailed from New York in the steamer " Pacific," and arrived in Liv- erpool on the Queen's birthday, the 24th.

IX.

England must have been a very strange land to the lonely woman who then first touched its shore. In almost five years which she afterwards passed there she did but little to enlarge her acquaintance. Of the letters of introduction which she bore, some are found unused among her papers : as one to Arthur Helps, from Emerson ; one to Sir Henry Ellis, principal Librarian of the British Museum ; one (from Edward Everett) to Mr. A. Panizzi, chief of the Printed Book Depart- ment. But she was not long, after going at once to London, in beginning, by the help of one of Emerson's letters, the friendship with Carlyle and his wife, which was to bring her much kindness and comfort in her solitude. This seems to be an answer to the letter of introduction :

5 Gt. Cheyne Row, Chelsea, 8 June, 1853.

My dear Madam, — Will you kindly dispense with the ceremony of being called on (by sickly people, in this hot weather), and come to us on Friday evening to tea at 7. I will try to secure Mr. Spedding at the same time ; and we will delib- erate what is to be done in your Shakspere afiair.

DELIA BACON. 61

A river steamer will bring you within a gunshot of us. You pronounce " Chainie " Row ; and get out at Cadogan Pier, which is your first landing

place in Chelsea. Except Mrs. C. and the

chance of Spedding, there will be nobody here. Yours very sincerely,

T. Caklyle.

And this followed it at no long interval :

Chelsea, 14 June, 1853.

My dear Madam, — Mr. Collier, it seems, does not habitually reside in Town at present ; but comes from time to time. If you forward the inclosed Note to him, merely adjoining your own card with your address on it, I am given to expect he will appoint some day to call on you, and have some talk about the Shakspere affair. I do not know Mr. Collier ; the writer of that Note is John Forster (Editor of the "Examiner," &c., &c.), a friend of his and mine.

Richard Monckton Milnes, of whom you may have heard, wishes to see your Paper on Shak- spere which is now in my hands ; if you give me permission, I will send it to him ; not otherwise.

My Wife reports the finding of a beautiful Pockethandkerchief which was left by you here ; she keeps it safe against your return to us, — not a distant date, as we hope. Any day at 3 p. m., (or most days), I am to be found here ; my wife,

62 DELIA BACON.

on fine days, is not certain, I apprehend, after 1 p. M. ; and very generally in the evenings we are quietly at home. Believe me, Dear Madam, Yours very sincerely,

T. Carlyle.

Some account of the visit invited by Carlyle's letter of June 8, and referred to in that of the 14th, is given with familiar confidence to her sis- ter, under date of several weeks later.

" My visit to Mr. Carlyle was very rich. I wish you could have heard him laugh. Once or twice I thought he would have taken the roof of the house oft". At first they were perfectly stunned — he and the gentleman he had invited to meet me. They turned black in the face at my presumption. * Do you mean to say,' so and so, said Mr. Carlyle, with his strong emphasis ; and I said that I did ; and they both looked at me with staring eyes, speechless for want of words in which to convey their sense of my audacity. At length Mr. Car- lyle came down on me with such a volley. I did not mind it the least. I told him he did not know what was in the Plays if he said that, and no one could know who believed that that booby wrote them. It was then that he began to shriek. You could have heard him a mile. I told him too that I should not think of questioning his authority in such a case if it were not with me a matter of

DELIA BACON. 63

knowledge. I did not advance it as an opinion. They began to be a little moved with my coolness at length, and before the meeting was over they agreed to hold themselves in a state of readiness to receive what I had to say on the subject. I left my introductory statement with him. In the course of two or three days he wrote to me to ask permission to show my paper to Mr. Monckton Milnes, who had expressed a wish to see it, invit- ing me to come there again very soon. He told me I had left a beautiful handkerchief there which Mrs. Carlyle would keep till I came. He also enclosed to me a letter of introduction to Mr. Col- lier, which he had taken the pains to obtain for me from another literary gentleman. I have not yet sent it. That was five weeks ago."

[Carltle to D. B.]

Chelsea, 12 August, 1853.

My dear Madam, — Here is the Panizzi letter, which I did not shew to Milnes, as quite superflu- ous in his actual state of knowledge about you ; and will now return to avoid risks of losing it.

I yesterday delivered your Paper to Parker the Publisher of " Fraser's Magazine," — with such a testimony about it as you desired ; name, country, sex, all is left dark ; and Parker's free judgment of the MSS., " Fit for ' Fraser,' or not fit ? " is the one thing he is requested to deliberate upon, and then pronounce to us. You, of course, shall

64 DELIA BACON.

hear of it the instant it arrives here ; which ought to be in some two or three weeks ; probably early next month, for I think the September No. must be already made up and in the Printer's hands. We will not anticipate his verdict ; he is a clever little fellow {our " clever," and yours too, I believe) ; and his voice will in some considerable degree represent for us that of the " reading public " of England.

On Wednesday I forgot to say that the printed Harley MSS. Catalogue, which I spoke of your buying, lies for consultation on its table in the Museum; and that you can examine it to all lengths, either as a preliminary or as a final meas- ure. If you can find in that mass of English

records (the main collection that exists) any docu- ment tending to confirm your Shakspere theory, it will be worth all the reasoning in the world, and will certainly surprise all men.

Finally come and see us, whenever it is not dis- agreeable, — without misgiving, in spite of nerves ! Almost every evening we are both of us at home (tea at 7) ; and at 3 any day I am visible here.

Believe me, Dear Madam,

Yours very sincerely, T. Caelyle.

The impression made by this lonely stranger on Carlyle is not to be learned from his letters to her alone. In September of this year he wrote thus to her introducer, Emerson : '' As for Miss Bacon,

DELIA BACON. 65

we find her, with her modest shy dignity, with her soUd character and strange enterprise, a real ac- quisition ; and hope we shall now see more of her, now that she has come nearer to us to lodge. I have not in my life seen anything so tragically quixotic as her Shakspere enterprise ; alas, alas, there can be nothing but sorrow, toil, and utter disappointment in it for her! I do cheerfully what I can, — which is far more than she asks of me (for I have not seen a prouder silent soul) ; but there is not the least possibility of truth in the notion she has taken up ; and the hope of ever proving it, or finding the least document that countenances it, is equal to that of vanquishing the windmills by stroke of lance. I am often truly sorry about the poor lady ; but she troubles nobody with her difficulties, with her theories ; she must try the matter to the end, and charitable souls must further her so far." ^

There is little among her papers to show where she was living during this year, 1853, except that it was in London, and in lodgings to which the friendly guidance of George Peabody had directed her. She changed them indeed, as this next letter shows ; and, with the almost fierce pride which was innate to her, was so far from presuming upon the affectionate hospitality which the Carlyles were urging upon her, that she did not even tell them of her removals.

^ Correspondence of Carlyle and Emerson, vol. ii. 228-9.

66 DELIA BACON.

The Grange, Alresford, Hants, (The Lord Ashburton's), 10 December, 1853.

Dear Miss Bacon, — We are here since Mon- day, on a visit, and are not to be in Chelsea again till Christmas pass.

Some days before leaving, I received from Par- ker a Parcel, with which his man appeared to have tried first at your old Chelsea lodging ; my ad- dress had then been put upon the cover ; it con- tained your MS. and an open letter to Miss Bacon, full of the due civility, admiring, regretting, &c., and in fine returning the offered Paper. As you say, he might have decided sooner ! I found that the smallest urging on my part would have made him insert the Piece ; but this you had prohibited ; nor do I know that it was any way desirable ; at any rate, here now is his decision, and with him we have done. Not knowing your new address, I locked the Parcel into a safe place ; and there, were Christmas over, it will lie awaiting your con- venience, and can be sent at any time.

I am sorry to hear from my wife of your head- aches and distresses in that solitary place ; I hope you will appear again some morning soon after our return, and shew Chelsea that those were but temporary clouds. Pray be not so shy of us ! We cannot much help you, indeed ; but there is no want of will, were a possibility offered. Believe me always,

Yours sincerely, T. Carlyle.

DELIA BACON. 67

On the last day of November, 1853, she took lodgings at St. Albans, attracted, no doubt, by its association with the great Chancellor, to whom it gave a title and a tomb. It was during her stay there that she sought through Sir Edward Bulwer Lytton, as a note from him indicates, an introduc- tion to Lord Yerulam. As the bearer of that title was then not a Bacon but a Grimston, there would seem to have been little help from him to be hoped for. Carlyle's friendly mindfulness of her and his keen apprehension of the methods by which she was evolving and maintaining her hy- pothesis appear from a letter of his to Emerson, April 8, 1854 : " Miss Bacon has fled away to St. Albans (the Great Bacon's place) five or six months ago ; and is there working out her Shak- spere Problem, from the depths of her own mind, disdainful apparently, or desperate and careless, of all evidence from Museums or Archives ; I have not had an answer from her since before Christ- mas, and have now lost her address. Poor Lady ! I sometimes silently wish she were safe home again ; for truly there can no madder enterprise than her present one be well figured." ^

This prolongation of her stay abroad was be- yond her own original reckoning, or that of her friends. At midsummer her generous patron put at her disposal a sum ample to pay what she owed and to bring her home. But her work was not

1 Correspondence, etc., vol. ii. 240, 241.

68 DELIA BACON.

done. At the end of September she wrote from St. Albans to Emerson that her work was prosper- ing, and telling how she managed to stay. " I am enabled to stay here so long, in consequence of having reduced my expenses as soon as I resolved upon this course. The money that I brought with me, which was supposed to be only enough for the first summer, was spun out by this process till the close of the second ; and now that I have begun to encroach upon the very ample sum al- lotted for my return, I am more prudent than ever. But I do not know that there will be any need of it for that purpose, and I am living here as economically as I could in America ; and as I think only of finishing my work, and have no other future, and this is enough and more than enough for that purpose, I do not see why I should spend so large a sum merely for the sake of being; in America. Not that it is not the best country in the world, — but ' there 's livers out of it,' and I don't forget that I heard Margaret Ful- ler's friends conclude among themselves that the storm which dashed her on its rocks, and pre- vented the chance of her landing among them, was a merciful dispensation of Providence. I have some beloved friends there, but my life was finished some time ago in every other respect but this, and as this is the world's work and not mine that I am doing, I suppose the expense of it will have to be paid in some way.

DELIA BACON. 69

" So I do not trouble myself about it, and am as happy as the day is long, and only wish I lived in Herschel or Jupiter or some of those larger worlds, where it would not be time to go to bed just as one gets fairly awake, and begins to be in earnest a little. I have lived here nearly a year, and have not spoken to one of the natives yet, except by accident, but I have not felt my solitude. It has been a year of sunshine with me ; the harvest of many years of toil and weeping. I cannot tell you what pleasures I have had here. This poor perturbed spirit, that had left its work undone, and would not leave me alone till it had brought me here, seems satisfied at last. My work has ceased to be burdensome to me ; I find in it a rest such as no one else can ever know, I think, except in heaven. But that is not saying that the world will be pleased with it. I hope it will not disap- point the expectation of those who have made themselves responsible for it, in any manner ; and, above all, I hope that you will like it, and will have no occasion to regret the noble concern you have taken in it.

" It has been a great and constant help to me to have two such friends as yourself and Carlyle interested in it. Carlyle is as good and kind as he can be. He is very much troubled about my being here so long alone."

At the time this was written she was aarain, after an interval, putting herself in communica-

70 DELIA BACON.

tion with the Carlyles, as the following letter shows.

Chelsea, 4 October, 1854.

Dear Miss Bacon, — We are very glad to hear of you again, and that you are doing well, and getting that wild jungle of sticks victoriously tied into fagots. That is a right success, due to all faithful workers, and which nobody can deprive one of.

My wife cannot by any means recollect the least particular of Mrs. Spring's address at Hamp- stead, though she was once there, and saw the place with her eyes. However, she assures me it would have done nothing for your present enter- prise ; it was a place let (i<?ifurnished with servants) as a whole house ; was very dear, and also (as is thought) very dirty, — not at all like what you require. Other lodgings, no doubt, are abundant in Hampstead, especially at this season of the year; but neither of us here knows specially of any, nor can Jane bethink her just at once of any person whom she could confidently consult on the matter. — I myself do, at this moment, call to mind a certain Mrs. Dr. Wilkinson, an accomplished American lady withal, and wife of an accom- plished and truly superior man, who lives in that neighborhood, not quite in Hampstead, but on this side of it, — to whom I would offer you an intro- duction if you went towards that region. Hamp- stead is very airy, and has still a set of silent

DELIA BACON. 71

country walks, though the Bricklayer is fearfully busy there too in these last years ; you could have no real difficulty in getting a cleanly, honest, and tolerable lodging there ; the worst fault I know is that of the water ; very hard, all of it, from the chalk ; which fault, however, applies only to the Hill, or Old Village, as I suppose ? Nay, indeed there is no pure water to be had in this big Baby- lon itself, for all its wealth and faculty ; the Queen herself has to drink dirty water (as I often think) when she favors us with her company, — so ex- tremely wise a set of " successful men " are we

hitherto in these parts. Of lodgings about

Chelsea, or indeed, in all quarters urban and sub- urban, Jane thinks there can be no doubt of ample choice on every hand ; and she will very gladly give help whenever you embark on such a search. Her notion, in which I entirely agree, is at pres- ent. That whenever you decide on a removal you are simply to leave your things all packed at St. Albans, and come off at once to the vacant room I told you of as waiting to welcome you here, — therefrom to institute whatever search your fancy and judgment point to, under the favourablest auspices. This really is the wisest, and also the easiest; confess that it is, 0 you of little faith, and do it. 1 was just going out (by appoint- ment) yesterday when your letter came ; could not write till now.

Yours very truly, dear Miss B.,

T. Carlyle.

72 DELIA BACON.

The letter without date which follows seems to have been written at the holiday season of 1854-5.

Dear Miss Bacon, — I would go, with all the pleasure in life, to answer your letter in person, but the news that you are laid up ^^ finds me in the same " (as the maidservants write). I have been having a bad cold, off and on, for the last two months ; and gone on trying to put it down par vive force till finally it put down me. These last two weeks I have been confined to my room, and

sometimes to bed. 1 am getting better now

however, and hope to be what is called " about " again next week.

We have not been out of town this season. Mr. C. is dreadfully busy with his " Frederick," who I

beg into wish had never been born. He, Mr.

C, is never out but for a hurried walk after dark ; he declined the usual Christmas visit to the Ash- burtons. I was to have gone, however, this very day — to the Grange — on my own basis for a month — but the meeting of Parliament has been the means under Providence of putting off the party till the 19th of this month — otherwise I must have given it up altogether. We shall see how the world looks by the 19th — but in any case I hope to see you here or there before then. Yours truly,

Saturday. JaNE CaRLYLE.

5 Cheyne Row.

DELIA BACON. 73

These were busy days with her. If nothing else showed it, the paucity of her letters during these many months would. Until late in the fol- lowing March, this next is the only one which appears, either to her or from her.

Concord, Mass., November 20, 1854.

My deak Miss Bacoj^, — I am heartily grieved — but it is past help — at my silence and delays. There can be no forgiveness for it. I have had both your letters, and made ineffectual attempts to answer both. I was very happy to read the good news, which both contained, of your studies and enjoyments. And I heard collaterally from Carlyle, of his goodwill and respect. The state- ments in your last letter especially engage my interest, and it seems most honorable and most useful, — that which you say, that you can live and study in England for no more than it would cost in America, and that the supplies for one summer can be spun out to serve for two. I can hardly refrain from publishing the fact in the newspapers, for the benefit of all scholars. That your readings prosper, and that you confirm your- self in your conviction, is also good news ; for, though I think your hypothesis more incredible than the improbable traditions (and unexplained) it would supplant, yet you cannot maintain any side without shedding light on the first of all literary problems. Carlyle, too, I found, with

74 DELIA BACON.

decided interest and respect, had no faith in the paradox. I went to Phillips & Sampson the last time I was in town to engage their interest in the book. They considered it a promising enterprise, but could not think of it for themselves, and the better the book should be they said the worse for them. For they have several " firstrate " books, as they call them, now in press, or just out of press, and are afraid of a good book as likely to damage these ! do not wish to stand in their own light, or overlay their own children. I went to Ticknor & Fields, but with no better success. They are afraid, if I understand it, of a literary book, and answer steadily, "anytime hut now,^' as if now nothing but Russia, Australia, and Romance would have any attraction. These two are the best here, and 1 hesitate a little about the next step; yet shall take another. If you are sure of the book, you may easily be sure of a pub- lisher. I beg you will write me once more (not- withstanding my ill deserts) that it is ready, or that it will soon be, and when and how large it will be. I think of applying to Mr. J. C. Derby, of New York, of whom I hear much good. I meant to print my own tardy MSS. speculations on Eng- land in this month, but I doubt and delay. I am however extremely busy. With all congratula- tion and good hope,

R. W. Emerson.

DELIA BACON, 75

For eleven months, until the begmning of No- vember, 1854, she remained at St. Albans, pursu- ing her work with exhausting eagerness. For the next month she was at Hatfield, redolent of Elizabethan memories, ten miles beyond St. Al- bans ; and thence, at the beginning of December, she returned to London, "driven here," as she wrote to her sister, " by the terrible discomforts of those wretched country houses in winter." At Hatfield, she says (writing January 12, 1855), " I found it was uniformly colder in my room than it was out of doors in the daytime. The thermom- eter could not have been at all above 50. My hands and feet were aching and stiff with the cold, but since I have been here I have hardly known what the sensation was."

" Carlyle has been here to see me, though I am miles from him, to invite me to his house. I was out when he came, but he left word with the ser- vant, and there was no alternative but for me to go, and it was very very pleasant I went at five o'clock and stayed to dinner and tea, till eleven, and Carlyle spent all the time with us, though he is extremely busy now, finishing his ' Life of Fred- eric ' the Second, and refuses all invitations. I have real cosy pleasant times when I go there, but I am most heartily glad I have no other acquaint- ances here ; they would torment me to death."

Then, after some account of the manner in which she had been working, she proceeds : " If

76 DELIA BACON.

I had known, perhaps, when I was in America, how it would be exactly, and that I should have this book to write first of all, I might have felt tempted to stay with you and try to do it. But I don't think I could ever have written it there. I think the mere fact of my being here has had a great deal to do with my success. I have done what it seemed utterly impossible for me to do at home, — what I tried in vain to do there. My summer at Cambridge was wasted in vain efforts. I knew not how to relieve myself of this great responsibility. Think, if you can, what it is to feel that I am delivering myself from it at last, that here in this land of my fathers God has at last given me the utterance that I have all my life lacked, and that this great secret, in which the welfare of mankind is concerned, will not perish with me for want of the means of telling it. To go on with it, calmly and patiently, to work away at it, day after day, and year after year, as if it were the merest piece of ordinary drudgery, and without sympathy or counsel, that is what I have had to do, and what I thought I never could do at first. I would have given anything to have had you with me at times ; indeed, there have been mo- ments when I have felt that I could not endure it to the end. For you know what kind of health I had to undertake it with."

" On the 16th of this month I shall begin on my last hundred dollars, not without some misgiv-

DELIA BACON. 77

ings ; and if I were sure of being able to get into any spot where I should not lose in thne more than I should gain in the difference of price I would go at once to cheaper lodgings. But every change costs me so much time I am afraid to stir."

The letter which follows is to Emerson; and, like the one from which these last quotations are made, is dated at " 12 Spring St., Sussex Gardens, Hyde Park, London, March" [24, 1855]. It covers eight pages in her fine, compact, yet very legible handwriting, and gives a full account of what she has been doing and what she hopes to do. " The volume," she says, " which was to have been finished in December, was merely a history of the great work I have undertaken to interpret. But it was a history which contained the key of that interpretation. The particular application of it, in the exposition of the plays, was reserved for a future volume. I intended to have the history in one book, and the criticism in another." She pro- ceeds to tell how " criticism " had grown and over- mastered her ; how especially " Coriolanus " had thrust himself into her work in spite of her; but also how, although her historical work was thus diminished in proportion, the criticisms " serve to put the discovery on the most solid ground, and leave no room for any doubt in any mind. They put it where it is henceforth independent of further historical corroboration."

Then, having thus justified to Emerson what

78 DELIA BACON'.

Carlyle had already written to him of her seem- ing disdain " of all evidence from Museums or Archives," she proceeds to discuss arrangements with publishers in the two countries. As for America, Emerson had undertaken the burden of managing for her, so that the discussion was prop- erly full and detailed. " I cannot satisfy myself," she says, " as to the title. I wish you would help me a little. I send you my last attempt." [It is on a separate leaf :

(Age.) " Francis Bacon and his (Stage.) or. The New Philosophy. Including also the History of Sir Walter Ra- leigh and his connection with ' the Globe ' The- atre, together with a brief account of Shakspere the Player.

" All the world's a stage."]

"If I should call it ^ The New Magic' as I should like to, the work would sustain the title, but it might seem fanciful to one who has not read it, or read the ' Advancement of Learning,' and I wish to avoid any appearance of that kind."

It was upon reading this letter that Emerson, on the 17th of April, 1855, wrote thus to Carljde : ^ " Miss Bacon sends me word, again and again, of your goodness. Against hope and sight she must be making a remarkable book. I have a letter

^ Correspondence, vol. ii. 244.

DELIA BACON. 79

from her, a few days ago, written in perfect assur- ance of success! "

Nor does any other letter appear before this next one from Carlyle with its enclosure.

Chelsea, 7 June, 1855.

Deak Miss Bacox, — I am very glad you have got done with your Book, and are secure of an American Publisher on reasonable terms. These are two great points ; and we ought to be very thankful for these.

As to an English Publisher, in the present pos- ture of affairs, — at least as to getting any pecuni- ary profit out of an English Publisher, — I confess I foresee difficulty, and (in my bilious mood) am not without misgivings. This too, however, is part of the problem ; this too you must resolutely attempt, and solve to the extent possible.

Of our Publishers here Longman & Co. (Pater- noster Row) are probably the richest; perfectly respectable men, who publish a great many Books, but have not to my knowledge excelled their con- temporaries in detecting genius in MSS. Murray (Albemarle Street) is also a great Publisher, son of the Murray you used to hear of ; I find him often connected with scientific, didactic " Serials," as they are called ; Travellers' Handbooks, rail- way reading, and the like. Chapman (Chapman & Hall, 193 Piccadilly), he and Parker are the only two Publishers I have even a slight acquaintance

80 DELIA BACON.

with, who seem likely for you. — On the whole, all, or very nearly all, our English Publishers will, if they undertake, behave with perfect (shop- keeper) accuracy to you in fulfilment of their bar- gain ; but beyond the high shopkeeper spirit I do not know any of them that rises very decisively. I have, in late years, had less and less to do with any and all of them ; they will believe that Paper that I have written by way of testimony — or at least believe it better than they would most men's writing (knowing the nature of the beast, that he does not lie if he can help it) ; but that is really pretty much all I can do ; that and Emerson's letter (with some /ormaZ Note of Introduction by anybody acquainted with a Publisher) will pretty much put the man in possession of the case, and enable him to decide with his eyes open ; which is all we can reasonably want of the poor man. As to the formal "Notes of Introduction," except in the cases of Parker and Chapman, it seems to be probable you are acquainted with persons who can do that more appropriately than I, — though cer- tainly I too can do it, after a sort, and will cheer- fully if you find it needful.

In conclusion, I will wish you well through this final unpleasant part of the business ; and shall be very anxious to hear how you get along in it.

1 have been sunk in bottomless " vortexes of Prus- sian dust " these many months, my very senses al- most choked out of me with that and other mani-

DELIA BACON. 81

fold confusions, — bodily health too in general by no means above par. Hardly once have I been in any direction as far as your street, — and never once there (as is too plain ! ) though my wife has been often urging. She is in distress about an umbrella of yours which was left here ; I could hnYefoimd your street and house with the eye, but the name of it I could not communicate to the most urgent Helpmate, having forgotten the name !

The sooner you come down, through the fine Summer weather, and see my wife and self again, it will be the better, on several accounts. Except Sunday she is not certain to be at home after 1 p. M. ; but in the evening almost always, or before that time in the early day. — Believe me always, Dear Miss Bacon, Yours sincerely,

T. Caelyle.

[^Enclostire.2

Miss Delia Bacon, an American lady, of much worth and earnestness of mind, has devoted a great deal of serious study to Shakspere ; and believes herself to have made a singular and important dis- covery in regard to the history or origin of his works. To perfect this discovery, she came over to England about two years ago, introduced and recommended by some of the best people in Amer- ica; and here she has been ever since, working in the most earnest unwearied manner to demon- strate her idea as to Shakspere's works ; and has now completed, after much care and labour, what she had to say on that subject.

82 DELIA BACON.

An American Publisher has engaged the volume for America ; and Miss B., whose residence gives her copyright here, wishes to find a Publisher for England.

I have not myself examined or seen Miss B.'s present MS. ; but I can freely bear witness in gen- eral that she writes in a clear, elegant, ingenious and highly readable manner ; that she is a per- son of definite ideas, of conscientious veracity in thought as well as word, and that probably no Book written among us during these two years has been more seriously elaborated, and in all ways made the best of, than this of hers.

T. Carltle.

5 Gt. Cheyne Row, Chelsea, 7 June, 1855.

Soon after this there begin to come in the re- turns from the attempts now made to find a pub- lisher. In June, a note from John Murray ; in July, one from J. W. Parker ; in August, from G. P. Putnam of New York, and from Phillips & Sampson of Boston. These last make definite pro- posals to publish ; but all the rest, with courteous but sufficient excuses, decline. The two from the American publishers were forwarded by Emerson with his letter which follows :

Concord, August 5, 1855.

My dear Miss Bacon, — I give you joy on the good news you send me of the ending of your

DELIA BACON. 83

work. "What if it is only the beginning of another, it is also the pledge of power to do it. I hope and trust it is good news for us and all people also. And to this end I sent your two letters at once to both the Publishers, and enclose to you Mr, Put- nam's reply, which, indeed, I anticipated, as know- ing he had been long embarrassed in his trade, though retaining, I am told, the respect of his community.

In the shortness of the time we have to act in, I think it best also to send you Phillips & Samp- son's letter ; of which, otherwise, I should only send you a summary. I failed to see them, though I went to their compting-room. If you go on with them, you had better preserve their letter. They may seem to you timid, but they are as brave as their experience will allow them to be. Such is the advertising system under which they live, and the giving away of copies to every news- paper, that it costs them $150, I think they showed me, — before a single copy is sold, — for that expense alone. And they have been losers by many books.

You will see that P. & S. object to the title. I do not know but I put it in their heads. I think you can easily give the book a simpler name, simply descriptive, the plainer the better, with or without a motto, and let that not be italicized, as, the "Authorship of the Shakspere Plays," or the like. I who do not know the book cannot tell the title, — but wish it to be of stone.

84 DELIA BACON.

I am just running up to a country college to read a discourse to the Alumni, and therefore hasten to put these two notes together, lest they lose a steamer, and so cut short my billet. The best hap which ever awaits truth await you ! And let me hear and convey your decisions to these men. Yours faithfully,

K. W. Emerson.

Miss D. S. Bacon.

It is of little importance that among the men of letters with whom she entered into communica- tion was George Grote, the historian of Greece. Why it should have been thought that his studies or fancies would incline him to consider her specu- lations cannot now be known ; it is only certain that this letter from his wife is all that came of the communication. But it would hardly be right to withhold so stately and sonorous a piece of rhetoric as the answer of Mrs. Grote. One is not a little puzzled to understand that a lady who thus uttered the simplest facts in the most solemn way should have been an intimate friend and corre- spondent of Sydney Smith ; who nevertheless is said to have permitted himself the freedom to remark, as he first saw her entering a drawing- room crowned with a startling scarlet turban, that he now received a new impression of the meaning of the word Grotesque. The handwriting of the letter is as masculine as its style.

DELIA BACON. 85

London, 5 August, 1855.

Madam, — On reaching London late yesterday evening from Lincolnshire (where Mr. Grote and I have been all the week on business), I found your letter and enclosures, which I make it a duty to acknowledge without delay.

I gather from the contents of the letters that you desire some counsel and assistance in regard to securing a reputable Publisher for the work which has so long engaged your time and talents — and in this view I should be happy to concur, with Mr. Grote, in rendering such aid as we could furnish towards that desirable object. My own personal arrangements are, however, for this week incompatible with any London business. Intend- ing to stop one or two nights only in town on passing through to my country residence (about 24 miles distant in the County of Buckinghamshire),

1 have made engagements to receive friends at the latter place for a few days. So that, for the next 10 days it will be out of my power to invite you to meet me at our town residence. But should your affair require speedy agency, Mr. Grote will have much pleasure in seeing you on any forenoon between now and Friday next, before

2 o'clock, and will endeavor to assist you with his experience and discernment towards obtaining the purpose in view.

My presence in town will be needed for a day or two, about the 20th August, to arrange for

86 DELIA BACON.

workmen coming in on the 25th to paint the in- terior apartments, and if you could do me the honor to propose a day about that period, it will be my study to meet it, with every inclination to serve a lady whose talents and personal merit entitle her to the good offices of such of her own sex, as well as of the other, who value literary tastes and instructed industry in woman. I have the honor to be, Madam,

Your obedient humble servant,

H. Grote.

In September comes another declination, this time from Chapman & Hall, and without the cour- teous expressions of sympathy with which every other publisher was kind enough to soften the pain of rejection. These gentlemen alone put themselves on high moral ground. "As they can- not confess themselves converts to her views, they feel that it would not become them to be the in- struments for opening an attack upon one of the most sacred beliefs of the nation and indeed of all nations." They would, however, " be much pleased if they could wish her success in her bold and novel undertaking"."

All this delay and disappointment meant far more to her than pride abased or ambition dis- couraged ; more even than sorrow that a great discovery was thus withheld from a waiting world. Trusting to the returns which her work, into which

DELIA BACON. 87

her soul and life had been thrown, was to bring her, she had gone on consuming, though with hard self-denying frugality, the little fund given to bring her home, and she was now at an end of that. Late in October she wrote, from the same lodgings in Spring Street, a very long letter to Emerson, which was not completed until the first of Novem- ber. On that day she wrote also a short one to her brother in New Haven. In the two years and a half of her absence she seems, in her strong sense of the wrong his want of sympathy with her great discovery had done her, to have seldom commu- nicated with him. Even now, while the letter showed that she retained the absolute confidence in him which was one of the earliest sentiments of her Kfe, and even had not lost the affection of a sister, her pride restrained the faintest intimation of the nature of her work, which was nevertheless so well known to him that his disapproval of it had deeply estranged her from him. With it she sent him, under seal, the letter to Emerson and a packet of manuscript beside. " You must excuse," she says, " the liberty I take in sending this packet to your care. My living depends on my getting an early answer to it, and I should have to delay it unless I took just this course." She speaks of the finished manuscript in her hands " on a subject calculated to interest the American public very deeply," and of the hopes she had had of receiving something for its publication either in a magazine

88 DELIA BACON.

or as a book. " The first thing now is to provide for my immediate living, for the delay here has been disastrous to me in that respect. My posi- tion is better now than it ever has been before, because my work is now done instead of being to do. I have found the leisure which I never could find before for it, and I am glad I have used it as I have, let the consequences to me personally be what they may. And serious enough they are, for I do not now know how I am possibly to live, until I can get an answer to this. Unless the let- ter I have been depending on " [from Putnam the publisher, who she hoped would print one maga- zine article] " should arrive very soon, I shall be entirely at the end of my credit, as well as means." " I have sealed the pacquet, because I do not wish you to have any responsibility for the work — for reasons which you will understand by and by ; — it is better that you should not see a word of it in MS." — "I am sending my work in parcels as fast as I can copy it. But there is enough here to decide the question of its acceptance with Putnam, and if I can live to get a return from this the trouble will be over."

To Emerson, however, she recounts the alarm which fluttered the English publishers upon the mere suggestion to them of her subject, and pro- ceeds : " Perhaps the American publishers may be frightened too, and follow suit, and I may have to bury my work, and bide my time, as my betters have done.

DELIA BACON. 89

" These articles I enclose with this are properly the first three chapters of my work, or the first four rather, including the one I have already sent ; but on account of their length I have concluded to subdivide them. I propose now to send it in par- cels, as fast as I can copy it, till I get it all over. But if you read it, there is one point to which I beg leave to direct your attention beforehand. When I began to write it, I did not expect to be able to prove the discovery with it. I depended on further evidence for that. But I thought a book might be made of it as it stood then which would command some attention, and perhaps give me the means which I lacked of bringing the research to its proper conclusion ; and that which makes now the whole of the first book was writ- ten simply with that view and intention. I illus- trated my assertion with quotations from the Plays, which were freely interwoven with the story. But in copying I expanded the quotations and com- ments into regular criticisms, and took them out of the place to which they belonged, and made a separate book of them ; and it was when I began to do that, that the confidence I have since so freely expressed to you took possession of me. It did not, and does not, seem to me possible that any rational person, who will take the trouble to look at that part of the work, could differ from me as to the conclusion. . . . But as for that part of the work which I am now sending you, I have no such

90 DELIA BACON.

confidence. My only object there was to get the discovery fairly down on paper, to define it, to say what it is, not to prove it ; and what little demon- stration there was in it has been taken out. And I ask your attention to this point beforehand, because you will be disappointed if you expect to find there that ground of certainty of which I have spoken."

" As to that recent article in ' Fraser ' on the Minor Poems, I can only regard it as a case of ju- dicial blindness and hardening of the sensibilities on the part of the Editor. If that Article which I sent to you some three or four weeks ago has reached its destination, and is likely to get pub- lished, I shall be glad to have a few quotations from Mr. Fraser's last inserted in it, and it is per- fectly disgraceful to me to have omitted one point which he kindly brings out for me there, and I wish you would insert it somewhere if you can. I mean the consummation of that life which the author of the article in question claims as the true English type, frankly confessing that it is on that very account that the English cling to it so fondly, — the fact that the Poet fell a victim to this national characteristic at last, for his poetry was so successful, and his good things came in upon him so fast, in his retirement at Stratford, and so much beyond his individual faculty of appropriat- ing them, that he sank under it and died of over- eating ; actually perished by the judgment of God,

DELIA BACON. 91

in an attempt to get the worth of his poetry, in the only shape in which he could appreciate it; and it is on account of the very quality which finally assumes this consummate form in him, that his memory is embalmed in the grateful recollec- tions of his countrymen. So this Fraser man says, outright. It is not his poetry that they admire, it is his character. Anacreon died of a grape-stone. We have not the particulars here, but I suppose it was roast beef probably or plum pudding which put an end to this god of the English idolatry in the midst of his career, and prevented our having any more Macbeths or Lears or Tempests."

" I do not know where I shall be by the time your answer to this arrives, and if the work were all in your hands, I should not so much care. I can only ask you to direct to me here — perhaps you have already written in reply to my last, — I hope so ; for a letter on which I have been very much depending has not come for some reason or other, and as the month of November is at hand, I may be in need of all the encouragement which the case admits of, and the cheer which your good words have always given me. It would be very foolish to expect to have anything like this with- out paying for it, and so long as the demand does not involve impossibilities, I hope to be able to meet it. There's something gained at any rate, and if that is once secured it is not possible for one life to pay too dearly for it."

92 DELIA BACON.

Then follows some discussion of other means than magazines — weekly editions of the New York dailies — for getting some of her manuscript be- fore the public, and some compensation for it, — " and that would enable me to retain my connec- tion with this planet, perhaps, till the work is fin- ished, — if that should seem on the whole desir- able. However, there is the Atlantic Ocean to fall back upon, in the last resort,^ and the Providential scheme is not without its provisions for that class of persons that the land refuses to tolerate, — peo- ple who were not expected, and for whom there is in two hemispheres no place. I have been doing the very best thing I could, the most honorable, — the only honorable thing I could. And after a deliberate survey of the ground, I have decided to let things take their course. I am not going to abase myself because I have done my duty. I am not afraid to die in the w^ay of it ; when the road comes fairly to an end, I shall stop. I will make no further concession to the nonsense of this world. It has nothing to give me. Permission to finish my work is all I want of it."

Before the answer to this letter reached her she must have received news of the relief which was to come from the publication of the first part of her work. Joyful as the respite must have been to her, with such joy as rewards the heroic endur-

* There seems to be a reproduction here of her grim allusion to Margaret Fuller in an earlier letter (supra, p. 68).

DELIA BACON. 93

ance of a beleaguered garrison in extremity when the siege is raised, this was nevertheless the first and the last return, beyond the consciousness of faithful sacrifice, from the work to which she gave her life. The letter now given must only have confirmed to her the news which one from the magazine publishers had already brought.

Concord, 3 December, 1855.

Dear Miss Bacon", — I have only a few minutes, and perhaps no intelligence for you, and yet can- not let another steamer go in silence. I received your first chapter and read it, and sent it immedi- ately to Putnam, with all the Imprimatur I could add. I did not write you, for I have been un- comfortably, nay ridiculously, busy with printing, writing, and a correspondence of absurd extent, which my practice of lecturing creates. I delayed your letter day by day, until now comes your sec- ond parcel, and enclosed letter, giving so much to think of — really so much to think of, that I heartily wish the right man were here to think and counsel. Immediately on its arrival, comes at last a letter from Putnam's editor, signing himself Dix Edwards,^ saying, that he did duly receive the First Chapter, will print it at last as leading article on 1 January, and wishes Miss Bacon will follow it up, in their Monthly, as fast as she can. Mean-

^ Messrs. Dix & Edwards were publishers (not editors) of the magazine.

94 DELIA BACON.

time, I hoped that you would yet decide to print by Phillips & Sampson, and make the book at once. I ought to have explained to you, whilst their statement was fresh in my mind, that you are not holden to them by publishing by them any longer than you please. At the end of the first, or of the second, or whatever edition, you can take your copyright to a new publisher. Still, there is reason for holding on by them, namely, that they say they spend a great deal of money on each of their books before any remuneration comes. Also, they reply to your feeling of the in- justice of receiving only a tenth part of the price of the book to yourself, that they receive still less, unless and until the book is very successful ; for it costs no more to produce a book that sells fifty thousand copies than the one that sells one thou- sand.

Now you leave me, in your last letter, quite too much liberty. You have not said what I shall do. I am going to the Mississippi, as soon as, or before, my little book is out ; and am to read lectures in that country for six weeks perhaps, — through dire necessity, and not from any desire to that work. You must choose, then, whether to print the Book by P. & S., as the only offer in that form we have ; or, in Articles by Putnam. I much prefer the first mode. If I had my freedom, I should go to Boston or New York and read your letters and chapters to good men, and found a new Shakespeare Society

DELIA BACON. 95

to print the Book, and install the Author. But the mud of the Mississippi forbids ; and though you suggest several good journals, &c., which ought to exist here for us, they do not yet exist. The first chapter was excellent. So is the second. These are all that I have read. I have the other two, and, when I leave home, shall leave my wife charged to obey exactly the instructions you shall send, in case they arrive before my return, which perhaps will not be till 1 February. Still, what you write will be sent to me in the West. I have not time for another line, and only write this that I may not be heinously negligent where your genius and the high Fate that seem to accompany you have right to demand instant service. I shall strive to find a breathing time to say so much to your friends. Respectfully and gratefully,

R. W. Emerson.

Miss D. S. Bacon.

Before this relief, however, small as it was, could be expected, her extremity was already ab- solute. On the 20th of December an evidently hasty note, written both to her brother and a sis- ter, attests it. She writes asking for special care about her copyright, for which her solicitude has now a pathetic look, and proceeds : " Money from some quarter I must have immediatel}^ A little delay will make the difference between life and death to me, unless for the sake of my work I

96 DELTA BACON.

should conclude to apply to the American minis- ter ; nothing else would induce me to do it. I am clearly of the opinion that this work is that which is wanting, and I humbly hope that I may live to see it issued safely, but I do not expect the laws of nature to be altered on my account, though they do indeed seem to have been well-nigh mirac- ulously controlled, for I have lived for months in the lions' den, and thus far God has shut his mouth. . . . The morning of the longest night, and it is a very long one, is at hand."

It was on the 20th of November that dawn be- gan to gleam in the west, in the following letter from Messrs. Dix & Edwards :

10 Park Place, New York, Nov. 20, 1855.

Madame : We beg to say that the chapter of your inquiry into the authorship of Shakespeare's plays, with which we were favored through Mr. Emerson, will appear in the January number of "Putnam's Monthly," when it will be paid for at the rate of our most valued contributors, five dol- lars a page. We shall take the liberty to express in a note to this article the hope that the series may be continued in our pages, and we trust it may suit your convenience to forward a second chapter without any delay, in order that it may appear in the February number.

Moreover, should you have made no other arrangements, we shall be happy to treat with you

DELIA BACON. 97

for the publication of the whole after so much of it as you may desire shall have appeared in a serial form.

In the number for January, 1856, " Putnam's Monthly" began its seventh half-yearly volume. It was then the chief American magazine of the lighter literature; for the "Atlantic Monthly," which replaced it, did not begin until the follow- ing year. The opening article of the January number was that which follows.

X.

WILLIAM SHAKESPEARE AND HIS PLAYS : AN IN- QUIPtY CONCERNING THEM.^

How can we undertake to account for the liter- ary miracles of antiquity, while this great myth of the modern ages still lies at our own door un- questioned ?

This vast, magical, unexplained phenomenon, which our own times have produced under our own eyes, appears to be, indeed, the only thing which our modern rationalism is not to be per- mitted to meddle with. For here the critics themselves still veil their faces, filliug the air with mystic utterances which seem to say, that to this shrine at least, for the footstep of the common reason and the common sense, there is yet no ad- mittance. But how can they instruct us to take

^ In commencing the publication of these bold, original, and most ingenious and interesting speculations upon the real authorship of Shakespeare's plays, it is proper for the editor of Putnam's Monthly, in disclaiming all responsibility for their startling view of the ques- tion, to say that they are the result of long and conscientious inves- tigation on the part of the learned and eloquent scholar, their author ; and that the editor has reason to hope that they will be continued through some future numbers of the Magazine. \_Editorial Note."]

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off here the sandals which they themselves have taught us to wear into the inmost sekos of the most ancient sanctities ?

The Shakespeake Dkama, — its import, its limi- tations, its object and sources, its beginning and end, — for the modern critic, that is surely now the question.

What, indeed, should we know of the origin of the Homeric poems ? Twenty-five hundred years ago, when those mystic characters, which the learned Phenician and Egyptian had brought in vain to the singing Greek of the Heroic Ages, be- gan, in the new modifications of national life which the later admixtures of foreign elements created, at length to be put to their true uses, that song of the nation, even in its latest form, was already old on the lips of the learned, and its origin a tra- dition. All the history of that wonderful individu- ality wherein the inspirations of so many ages were at last united, — the circumstance, the vicissitude, the poetic life, that had framed that dazzling mir- ror of old time, and wrought in it those depths of clearness, — all had gone before the art of writing and memories had found its way into Greece, or even the faculty of perceiving the actual had begun to be developed there.

And yet are the scholars of our time content to leave this matter here where they find it ? With these poetic remains in their hands, the monu- ments of a genius whose date is ante-historical, are

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they content to know of their origin only what Alexander and Plato could know, what Solon and Pisistratus were fain to content themselves with, what the Homerids themselves received of him as their ancestral patron ?

No: with these works in their hands to-day, reasoning from them alone, with no collateral aids, with scarce an extant monument of the age from which they come to us, they are not afraid to fly in the face of all antiquity with their conclusions.

Have they not settled among them already the old dispute of the contending cities, the old dispute of the contending ages, too, for the honor of this poet's birth ? Do they not take him to pieces be- fore our eyes, this venerable Homer ; and tell us how many old forgotten poets' ashes went to his formation, and trace in him the mosaic scenes which eluded the scrutiny of the age of Pericles ? Even Mr. Grote will tell us now, just where the Iliad " cuts me " the fiery Achilles " cranking in ; " and what could hinder the learned Schlegel, years ago, from setting his chair in the midst of the Delian choirs, confronting the confounded children of Ion with his definitions of the term Homeros, and demonstrating, from the Leipsic Iliad in his hand, that the poet's contemporaries had, in fact, named him Homer the Seer, not Homer the Blind One?

The criticism of our age found this whole ques- tion where the art of writing found it two thou-

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sand five hundred years ago ; but because the Io- nian cities, and Solon, and Pisistratus might be pre- sumed beforehand to know at least as much about it as they, or because the opinions of twenty-five centuries in such a case might seem to be entitled to some reverence, did the critics leave it there ?

Two hundred and fifty years ago, our poet — our Homer — was alive in the world. Two cen- turies and a half ago, when the art of letters was already millenniums old in Europe, when the art of printing had already been in use a century and a half, in the midst of a contemporary historical illu- mination which has its equal nowhere in history, those works were issued that have given our Eng- lish life and language their imperishable claim in the earth, that have made the name in which they come to us a word by itself in the human speech ; and to this hour we know of their origin hardly so much as we knew of the origin of the Homeric epics when the present discussions in regard to them commenced, 7iot so much — not a hundredth part so much — as we now know of Pharaohs who reigned in the valley of the Nile ages before the invasion of the Hyksos.

But with these products of the national life in our hands, with all the contemporary light on their implied conditions which such an age as that of Elizabeth can furnish, are we going to be able to sit still much longer, in a period of historical inquiry and criticism like this, under the gross

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impossibilities which the still accepted theory on this subject involves ?

The age which has put back old Homer's eyes safe in his head again, after he had gone without them well-nigh three thousand years; the age which has found, and labeled, and sent to the mu- seum, the skull in which the pyramid of Cheops was designed, and the lions which '' the mighty hunter before the Lord " ordered for his new pal- ace on the Tigris some millenniums earlier ; the age in which we have abjured our faith in Romulus and Remus, — is surely one in which we may be permitted to ask this question.

Shall this crowning literary product of that great epoch wherein these new ages have their begin- ning, vividly arrayed in its choicest refinements ; flashing everywhere on the surface with its cost- liest wit ; crowded everywhere with its subtlest scholasticisms ; betraying on every page its broad- est, freshest range of experience, its most varied culture, its profoundest insight, its boldest grasp of comprehension, — shall this crowning result of so many preceding ages of growth and culture, with its essential and now palpable connection with the new scientific movement of the time from which it issues, be able to conceal from us much longer its history ? Shall we be able to accept in explanation of it, much longer, the story of the Stratford poacher ?

The popular and traditional theory of the origin

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of these works was received and transmitted after the extraordinary circumstances which led to its first imposition had ceased to exist, because, in fact, no one had any motive for taking the trouble to call it in question. The common disposition to receive in good faith a statement of this kind, however extraordinary ; the natural, intellectual preference of the affirmative proposition at hand, as the explanation of a given phenomenon, when the negative or the doubt compels one to launch out for himself in search of new positions, — this alone might serve to account for this result, at a time when criticism as yet was not ; when the predominant mental habit, on all ordinary ques- tions, was still that of passive acceptance, and the most extraordinary excitements, on questions of the most momentous interest, could only rouse the public mind to assume temporarily any other attitude.

And the impression which these works produced, even in their first imperfect mode of exhibition, was already so profound and extraordinary as to give to all the circumstances of their attributed origin a blaze of notoriety tending to enhance this positive force in the tradition. Propounded as a fact, not as a theory, its very boldness — its start- ling improbability — was made at once to contribute to its strength ; covering beforehand the whole ground of attack. The wonderful origin of these works was, from the first, the predominant point

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in the impression they made, — the prominent mar- vel in those marvels around which all the new wonders that the later criticism evolved still con- tinued to arrange themselves.

For the discoveries of this criticism had yet no tendency to suggest any new belief on this point. In the face of all that new appreciation of the works themselves which was involved in them, the story of that wondrous origin could still main- tain its footing ; through all the ramifications of this criticism, it still grew and inwound itself, not without vital limitation, however, to the criticism thus entangled. But these new discoveries in- volved, for a time, conclusions altogether in keep- ing with the tradition.

This new force in literature, for which books contained no precedent; this new manifestation of creative energy, with its self-sustained vitali- ties ; with its inexhaustible prodigality, mocking nature herself ; with its new grasp of the whole circuit of human aims and activities, — this force, so unlike anything that scholasticism or art had ever before produced, though it came in fact with the sweep of all the ages, moved with all their slow accumulation, could not account for itself to those critics as anything but a new and mystic mani- festation of nature, — a new upwelling of the occult vital forces underlying our phenomenal existence ; invading the historic order with one capricious leap, laughing at history, telling the

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laboring ages that their sweat and blood had been in vain.

And the tradition at hand was entirely in har- mony with this conception. For to this super- human genius, bringing with it its own laws and intuitions from some outlying region of life not subject to our natural conditions, and not to be included in our " philosophy," the differences be- tween man and man, natural or acquired, would, of course, seem trivial. What could any culture, or any merely natural endowment, accomplish that would furnish the required explanation of this result? And, by way of defining itself as an agency wholly supernal, was it not, in fact, neces- sary that it should select as its organ one in whom the natural conditions of the highest intellectual manifestations were obviously, even grossly, want- ing ?

With this theory of it, no one need find it strange that it should pass in its selection those grand old cities where Learning sat enthroned with all her time-honored array of means and appliances for the development of mental resource, — where the genius of England had hitherto been accomplished for all its triumphs, — and that it should pass the lofty centres of church and state, and the crowded haunts of professional life, where the mental activ- ities of the time were gathered to its conflicts; where, in hourly collision, each strong individu- ality was printing itself upon a thousand others,

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and taking in turn from all their impress ; where, in the thick-coming change of that " time-better- ing age," in its crowding multiplicities, and varie- ties, and oppositions, life grew warm, and in the old the new was stirring, and in the many the one ; where wit, and philosophy, and fancy, and humor, in the thickest onsets of the hour, were learning to veil in courtly phrase, in double and triple meanings, in crowding complexities of con- ceits and unimagined subtleties of form, the free- doms that the time had nurtured ; where genius flashed up from all her hidden sources, and the soul of the age — " the mind reflecting ages past" — was collecting itself, and ready even then to leap forth, *' not for an age, but for all time."

And, indeed, was it not fitting that this new in- spiration which was to reveal the latent forces of Nature and her scorn of conditions, — fastening her contempt for all time upon the pride of human culture at its height, — was it not fitting that it should select this moment of all others, and this locality, that it might pass by that very centre of historical influences which the court of Elizabeth then made, — that it might involve in its perpetual eclipse that immortal group of heroes, and states- men, and scholars, and wits, and poets, with its enthroned king of thought, taking all the past for his inheritance, and claimins; the minds of men in all futurity as the scene and limit of his dominion ? Yes, even he — he whose thought would grasp the

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whole, and keep his grasp on it perpetual — speaks to us still out of that cloud of mockery that fell upon him when " Great Nature " passed him by

— even him — with his immortal longings, with his world-wide aims, with his new mastery of her secrets, too, and his new sovereignty over her, to drop her crown of immortality, lit with the finest essence of that which makes his own page immortal, on the brow of the pet horse-boy at Blackf riars, — the wit and good fellow of the Lon- don link-holders, the menial attache and eltve of the play-house, the future actor, and joint pro- prietor, of the New Theatre on the Bankside.

Who quarrels with this movement ? Who does not find it fitting and pleasant enough ? Let the " thrice three muses " go into mourning as deep as they will for this desertion, — as desertion it was — for we all know that to the last hour of his life this fellow cared never a farthing for them, but only for his gains at their hands ; let Learning hide as she best may her baffled head in this dis- grace, — who cares ? Who does not rather laugh with great creating Nature in her triumph ?

At least, who would be willing to admit, for a moment, that there was one in all that contempo- rary circle of accomplished scholars, and men of vast and varied genius, capable of writing these plays ; and who feels the least difficulty in suppos- ing that " this player here," as Hamlet terms him,

— the whole force of that outburst of scorn inef-

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fable bearing on the word, and on that which it represented to him, — who doubts that this player is most abundantly and superabundantly compe- tent to it ?

Now that the deer-stealing fire has gone out of him, now that this youthful impulse has been taught its conventional social limits, sobered into the mild, sagacious, witty " Mr. Shakespeare of the Globe," distinguished for the successful manage- ment of his own fortunes, for his upright dealings with his neighbors, too, and *' his facetious grace in writing," patronized by men of rank, who in- clude his theatre among their instrumentalities for affecting the popular mind, and whose relations to him are, in fact, identical with those which Hamlet sustains to the players of his piece, what is to hinder this Mr. Shakespeare — the man who keeps the theatre on the Bankside — from working him- self into a frenzy when he likes, and scribbling out unconsciously Lears, and Macbeths, and Hamlets, merely as the necessary dialogue to the spectacles he professionally exhibits ; ay, and what is to hin- der his boiling his kettle with the manuscripts, too, when he has done with them, if he chooses ?

What it would be madness to suppose the most magnificently endowed men of that wondrous age could accomplish — its real men, those who have left their lives in it, woven in its web throughout — what it would be madness to suppose these men, w^ho are but men, and known as such, could ac-

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complish, this Mr. Shakespeare, actor and manager, of whom no one knows anything else, shall be able to do for you in " the twinkling of an eye," with- out so much as knowing it, and there shall be no words about it !

And are not the obscurities that involve his life, so impenetrably in fact, the true Shakespearean element ? In the boundless sea of negation which surrounds that play-house centre, surely he can unroll himself to any length, or gather himself into any shape or attitude, which the criticism in hand may call for. There is nothing to bring up against him, with one's theories. For, here in this day- light of our modern criticism, in its noontide glare, has he not contrived to hide himself in the pro- foundest depths of that stuff that myths are made of? Who shall come in competition with him here ? Who shall dive into the bottom of that sea to pluck his drowned honors from him ?

Take, one by one, the splendid men of this Elizabethan age, and set them down with a Ham- let to write, and you will say beforehand, such an one cannot do it, nor such an one, — nor he, with that profoundest insight and determination of his which taught him to put physical nature to the question that he might wring from her her se- crets; but humanity, human nature, of course, had none worth noting for him ; — oh no ; he, with his infinite wit and invention, with his worlds of covert humor, with his driest prose, pressed, burst-

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ing with Shakespearean beauty, he could not do it, nor he, with his Shakespearean acquaintance with life, with his Shakespearean knowledge of men under all the differing social conditions, at home and abroad, by land and by sea, with his world- wide experiences of nature and fortune, with the rush and outbreak of his fiery mind kindling and darting through all his time ; he, with his Shake- spearean grace and freedom, with his versatile and profound acquirements, with his large, genial, gen- erous, prodigal, Shakespearean soul that would comprehend all, and ally itself with all, he could not do it ; neither of these men, nor both of them together, nor all the wits of the age together : — but this Mr. Shakespeare of the Globe, this mild, respectable, obliging man, this " Johannes Facto- tum " (as a contemporary calls him, laughing at the idea of his undertaking "a blank verse"), is there any difficulty here ? Oh no ! None in the world : for, in the impenetrable obscurity of that illimitable green-room of his, "by the mass, he is anything, and he can do anything, and that roundly too."

Is it wonderful ? And is not that what we like in it ? Would you make a man of him ? With this miraculous inspiration of his, would you ask anything else of him ? Do you not see that you touch the Shakespearean essence, with a question as to motives, and possibilities? Would he be Shakespeare still, if he should permit you to ham-

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per him with conditions ? What is t-he meaning of that word, then ? And will you not leave him to us ? Shall we have no Shakespeare ? Have we not scholars enough, and wits enough, and men, of every other kind of genius, enough, — but have we many Shakespeares ? — that you should wish to run this one through with your questions, this one, great, glorious, infinite impossibility, that has had us in its arms, all our lives from the begin- ning ? If you dissolve him, do you not dissolve us with him ? If you take him to pieces, do you not undo us, also ?

Ah, surely we did not need this master spirit of our race to tell us that there is that in the foun- dation of this human soul, " that loves to appre- hend more than cool reason ever comprehends," nay, that there is an infinity in it, that finds her ordinances too straight, that will leap from them when it can, and shake the head at her. And have we not all lived once in regions full of people that were never compelled to give an account of them- selves in any of these matters ? And when, pre- cisely, did we pass that charmed line, beyond which these phantoms cannot come ? When was the word definitively spoken which told us that the childhood of the race was done, or that its grown- up children were to have henceforth no conjurers ? Who yet has heard the crowing of that cock, " at whose warning, whether in earth or air, the ex- travagant and erring spirit hies to his confine " ?

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The nuts, indeed, are all cracked long ago, whence of old the fairy princess, in her coach and six, drove out so freely with all her regal retinue, to crown the hero's fortunes ; and the rusty lamp, that once filled the dim hut of poverty with East- ern splendors, has lost its capabilities. But when our youth robbed us of these, had it not marvels and impossibilities of its own to replace them with, yet more magical ? and surely, manhood itself, the soberest maturity, cannot yet be without these substitutes ; and it is nature's own voice and out- cry that we hear whenever one of them is taken from us.

Let him alone ! We have lecturers enough and professors enough already. Let him alone ! We will keep this one mighty conjurer still, even in the place where men most do congregate, and no- body shall stir a hair on his impossible old head, or trouble him with a question. He shall stand there still, pulling interminable splendors out of places they never could have been in ; that is the charm of it ; he shall stand there rubbing those few sickly play-house manuscripts of his, or a few, old, musty play-house novels, and wringing from them the very wine of all our life, showering from their greasy folds the gems and gold of all the ages ! He shall stand there, spreading, in the twinkling of an eye, for a single night in a dirty theatre, " to complete a purchase that he has a mind to," the feasts of the immortal gods; and before our lips

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can, by any chance, have reached even the edge of those cups, that open down into infinity, when the show has served his purpose, he shall whisk it all away again, and leave no wreck behind, except by accident ; and none shall remonstrate, or say to him, '• wherefore ? " He shall stand there still, for us all — the magician; nature's one, complete, in- contestable, gorgeous triumph over the impossibil- ities of reason.

For the primary Shakespearean condition in- volves at present, not merely the accidental ab- sence of those external means of intellectual en- largement and perfection, whereby the long arts of the ages are made to bring to the individual mind their last results, multiplying its single forces with the life of all ; — but it requires also the ab- sence of all personal intellectual tastes, aims, and pursuits ; it requires that this man shall be below all other men, in his sordid incapacity for appre- ciating intellectual values ; it requires that he shall be able, not merely to witness the performance of these plays, not merely to hear them and read them for himself, but to compose them ; it requires him to be able to compose the "Tempest," and "Othello," and "Macbeth," without suspecting that there is anything of permanent interest in them — anything that will outlast the spectacle of the hour.

The art of writing had been already in use twenty -five centuries in Europe, and a Shake-

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speare, one would think, might have been able to form some conception of its value and applica- tions ; the art of printing had been in use on the continent a century and a half, and it was already dartino; throucjh every civilized corner of it. and through England, too, no uncertain intimations of its historic purport — intimations significant enough " to make bold power look pale " already — and one would think a Shakespeare might have understood its message. But no ! This very spokesman of the new era it ushers in, trusted with this legacy of the new-born times ; this man, whom we all so look up to, and reverence, with that in- alienable treasure of ours in his hands, which even Ben Jonson knew was not for him, " nor for an age — but for all time," why this Jack Cade that he is must needs take us back three thousand years with it, and land us at the gates of Ilium ! The arts of humanity and history, as they stood when Troy was burned, must save this treasure for us, and be our means of access to it ! He will leave this work of his, into which the ends of the world have come to be inwrought for all the future, he will leave it where Homer left his, on the lips of the mouthing " rhapsodists ! "

Apparently, indeed, he will be careful to teach these " robustious, periwig-pated fellows " their proper relations to him. He will industriously in- struct them how to pronounce his dialogue, so as to give the immediate effect intended j controlling

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even the gesticulations, insisting on the stops, rul- ing out utterly the town-crier's emphasis; and, above all, protesting, with a true author's jealousy, against interpolation or any meddling with his text. Indeed, the directions to the players, which he puts into the mouth of Hamlet — involving, as they do, not merely the nice sensibility of the ar- tist, and his nervous, instinctive, aesthetic acquaint- ance with his art, but a thorough scientific knowl- edge of its principles — these directions would have led us to infer that he would, at least, know enough of the value of his own works to avail himself of the printing-press for their preserva- tion, and not only that, they would have led us to expect from him a most exquisitely careful revi- sion of his proofs. But how is it ? He destroys, we are given to understand, the manuscripts of his unpublished plays, and we owe to accident, and to no care of his whatever, his works as they have come to us. Did ever the human mind debase it- self to the possibility of receiving such nonsense as this, on any subject, before ? ^

He had those manuscripts ! He had those origi- nals which publishers and scholars would give mil-

^ Though the editors of the first folio profess to have access to these very papers, and boast of being able to bring out an absolutely faultless edition, to take the place of those stolen and surreptitious copies then in circulation, the edition which is actually produced, in connection with this announcement, is itself found to be full of ver- bal errors, and is supposed, by later editors, to have been derived from no better source than its predecessors.

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lions now to purchase a glimpse of ; he had the original Hamlet, with its last finish ; he had the original Lear, with his own final readings ; he had them all — all, pointed, emphasized, directed, as they came from the gods ; he had them all, all fin- ished as the critic of "Hamlet" and "Midsummer Night's Dream " must have finished them ; and he left us to wear out our youth, and squander our lifetime, in poring over and setting right the old, garbled copies of the play-house ! He had those manuscripts, and the printing-press had been at its work a hundred years when he was born, but he was not ashamed to leave the best wits and schol- ars of all succeeding ages, with Pope and Johnson at their head, to exhaust their ingenuity, and sour their dispositions, and to waste their golden hours, year after year, in groping after and guessing out his hidden meanings !

He had those manuscripts ! In the name of that sovereign reason, whose name he dares to take upon his lips so often, what did he do with them ? Did he wantonly destroy them ? No ! Ah, no ! he did not care enous-h for them to take that trou- ble. No, he did not do that! That would not have been in keeping with the character of this most respectable impersonation of the Genius of the British Isle, as it stands set up for us at pres- ent to worship. Some worthy, domestic, private, economic use, doubtless, they were put to. For, is not he a private, economical, practical man —

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this Shakespeare of ours — with no stuff and non- sense about him — a plain, true-blooded English- man, who minds his own business, and leaves other people to take care of theirs ? Is not this our Shakespeare ? Is it not the boast of England, that he is just that, and nothing else ? " What did he do with them ? " He gave them to his cook, or Dr. Hale put up potions for his patients in them, or Judith, poor Judith, — who signified her relationship to the author of " Lear " and the " Tempest," and her right to the glory of the name he left her, by the very extraordinary kind of " mark " which she affixes to legal instruments, — poor Judith may have curled her hair to the day of her death with them, without dreaming of any harm. " What did he do with them ? " And whose business is it ? Were n't they his own ? If he chose to burn them up, or put them to some private use, had not he a perfect right to do it ?

No ! Traitor and miscreant ! No ! What did you do with them ? You have skulked this ques- tion long enough. You will have to account for them. You will have to tell us what you did with them. The awakening ages will put you on the stand, and you will not leave it until you answer the question, " What did you do with them ? "

And yet, do not the critics dare to boast to us, that he did compose these works for his own pri- vate, particular ends only ? Do they not tell us, as if it were a thing to be proud of, and " a thing

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to thank God on," with uplifted eyes, and speech- less admiration points, that he did " die, and leave the world no copy " ? But who is it that insists so much, so strangely, so repetitiously, upon the wrong to humanity, the fraud done to nature, when the individual fails to render in his account to time of all that nature gives him? Who is it that writes, obscurely indeed, so many sonnets, only to ring the changes on this very subject, singing out, point by point, not the Platonic theory, but his own fresh and beautiful study of great nature's law, and his own new and scientific doctrine of conservation and advancement ? And who is it that writes, unconsciously no doubt, and without its ever occurring to him that it was going to be printed, or to be read by any one,

^'■Thyself and thy belongings Are not thine own so proper, as to waste Thyself upon thy virtues, them on thee " ?

For here is the preacher of another doctrine, which puts the good that is private and particular w^here the sovereignty that is in nature puts it : —

" Heaven doth with us, as we with torches do ; Not light them for themselves. For if our virtues Did not go forth of us, 'twere all alike As if we had them not. Spirits are not finely touched But to fine issues ; nor nature never lends The smallest scruple of her excellence, But, like a thrifty goddess, she determines Herself the glory of a creditor, Both thanks and use."

Truly the man who writes in this style, with

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such poetic iteration, might put in Hamlet's plea, when his critics accuse him of unconsciousness : —

" Bring me to the test And I the matter will re-word ; which madness Would gambol from."

What infirmity of blindness is it, then, that we charge upon this " god of our idolatry " ? And what new race of Calibans are we, that we should be called upon to worship this monstrous incon- gruity — this Trinculo — this impersonated moral worthlessness ? Oh, stupidity past finding out ! "The myriad-minded one," the light of far-olf futu- rities was in him, and he knew it not ! While the word was on his lips, and he reasoned of it, he heeded it not ! He, at whose feet all men else are proud to sit, came to him, and found no reverence. The treasure for us all was put into his hands, and — he did not waste it — he did not keep it laid up in a napkin, he did not dig in the earth, and hide his Lord's money ; no, he used it ! he used it for his own despicable and sordid ends, " to complete purchases that he had a mind to," and he left us to gather up " the arts and fragments " as best we may. And they dare to tell us this of him, and men believe it, and to this hour his bones are canonized, to this hour his tomb is a shrine, where the genius of the cool, sagacious, clear-thoughted Northern Isle is worshipped, under the form of a mad, unconscious, intellectual possession — a do- tard inspiration, incapable of its own designs, want-

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ing in the essential attribute of all mental power — self-cogfnition.

And yet, who would be willing to spare, now, one point in that time-honored, incongruous whole ? Who would be willing to dispense with the least of those contradictions, which have become, in the progressive development of our appreciation of these works, so inextricably knit together, and thereby inwrought, as it were, into our inmost life ? Who can, in fact, fairly convince himself, now, that deer-stealing and link-holding, and the name of an obscure family in Stratford — common enough there, though it means what it does to us — and bad, or indifferent performances, at a Surrey theatre, are not really, after all, essential prelimi- naries and concomitants to the composition of a " Romeo and Juliet," or a " Midsummer Night's Dream," or a " Twelfth Night " ? And what Shakespeare critic, at least, could persuade him- self, now, that any other motive than the purchase of the Globe theatre, and that capital messuage or tenement in Stratford, called the New Place, with the appurtenances thereof, and the lands adjoin- ing, and the house in Henley Street, could by any possibility have originated such works as these ?

And what fool would undertake to prove, now, that the fact of the deer-stealing, or any other point in the traditionary statement, may admit of question ? Certainly, if we are to have an histor- ical or traditionary Shakespeare of any kind, out

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of our present materials, it becomes us to protest, with the utmost severity, against the least med- dling therewith. If they are not sufficiently mea- gre already — if the two or three historical points we have, or seem to have, and the miserable scraps and fragments of gossip which the painful explo- rations of two centuries have, at length, succeeded in rescuing from the oblivion to which this man's time consigned him ^ — if these points are to be en- croached upon, and impaired by criticism, we may as well throw up the question altogether. In the name of all that is tangible, leave us what there is of affirmation here. Surely we have negations enough already. If he did not steal the deer, will you tell us what one mortal thing he did do ? He wrote the plays. But, did the man who wrote the plays do nothing else ? Are there not some fore- gone conclusions in them ? — some intimations, and round ones, too, that he who wrote them, be he who he may, has had experiences of some sort ? Do such things as these, that the plays are full of, begin in the fingers' ends ? Can you find them in an ink-horn ? Can you sharpen them out of a goose-quill ? Has your Shakespeare wit and in- vention enough for that ?

But the man was a player, and the manager of a play-house, and these are phiys that he writes.

^ Constituting, when well put together, precisely that historic trail which an old, defunct, indifferent, fourth-rate play-actor naturally leaves behind him, for the benefit of any antiquary who may find occasion to conduct an exploration for it.

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And what kind of play is it that you find m them — and what is the theatre — and who are the actors ? Has this man's Hfe been all play ? Has there been no earnest in it ? — no acting in his own name ? Had he no part of his own in time, then ? Has he dealt evermore with second- hand reports, unreal shadows, and mockeries of things? Has there been no personal grapple with realities, here ? Ah, let him have that one living opposite. Leave him that single shot " heard round the world." Did not ^schylus fight at Sal- amis ? Did not Scipio teach Terence how to mar- shal his men and wing his words ? (A contempo- rary and confidant of Shakespeare's thinks, from internal evidence, that the patron WTote the plays, in this case, altogether.) And was not Socrates as brave at Potidaea and Delium as he was in the mar- ket-place ; and did not Caesar, the author, kill his millions ? But this giant wrestler and warrior of ours, with the essence of all the battles of all ages in his nerves — with the blood of a new Adam bubbling in his veins — he cannot be permitted to leap out of those everlasting buskins of his, long enoutrh to have a brush with this one live deer, but the critics must have out their spectacles, and be down upon him with their objections.

And what honest man would want a Shake- speare at this hour of the day that was not writ- ten by that same irregular, lawless, wild, reckless, facetious, law-despising, art-despising genius of a

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" Will " that did steal the deer ? Is not this the Shakespeare we have had on our shelves with our bibles and prayer-books, since our great-grandsires' times ? The next step will be to call in question Moses in the bulrushes, and Pharaoh's daughter.

And what is to become, too, under this supposi- tion, of that exquisite specimen of the player's merciless wit, and " facetious grace in writing," which attracted the attention of his contemporaries, and left such keen impressions on the minds of his fellow-townsmen ? What is to become, in this case, of the famous lampoon on Sir Thomas Lucy, nailed up on the park gate, rivaling in Shakespear- ean grace and sharpness another Attic morceau from the same source — the impromptu on " John- a-Combe " ? These remains of the poet, which we find accredited to him in his native village, " with likelihood of truth enough," among those who best knew him, have certainly cost the commenta- tors too much trouble to be lightly relinquished ; and, unquestionably, they do bear on the face of them most unmistakable symptoms of the player's wit and the Stratford origin.

No ! no ! We cannot spare the deer-stealing. As the case now stands, this one, rich, sparkling point in the tradition can by no means be dis- pensed with. Take this away, and what becomes of our traditional Shakespeare ? He goes ! The whole fabric tumbles to pieces, or settles at once into a hopeless stolidity. But for the mercurial

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lightning, which this youthful reminiscence im- parts to him — this single indication of a sup- pressed tendency to an heroic life — how could that heavy, retired country gentleman, late man- ager of the Globe and the Blackfriars theatres, be made to float at any convenient distance above the earth, in the laboring conceptions of the artists whose business it is to present his apotheosis to us ? Enlarge the vacant platitudes of that fore- head as you will ; pile up the artificial brains in the frontispiece to any height which the credulity of an awe-struck public will hesitate to pronounce idiotic ; huddle the allegorical shapes about him as thickly as you will ; and yet, but for the twinkle which this single reminiscence leaves, this one soli- tary " proof of liberty," " the flash and outbreak of a fiery mind of general assault," how could the old player and showman be made to sit the bird of Jove, so comfortably as he does, on his way to the waiting Olympus?

But, after all, it is not this old actor of Eliza- beth's time who exhibited these plays at his thea- tre in the way of his trade, and cared for them precisely as a tradesman would ; cared for them as he would have cared for tin kettles, or earthen pans and pots, if they had been in his line, in- stead ; it is not this old tradesman ; it is not this old showman and hawker of plays ; it is not this old lackey, whose hand is on all our heart-strings, whose name is, of mortal names, the most awe- inspiring.

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The Shakespeare of Elizabeth and James, who exhibited at his theatre as plays, among many oth- ers surpassing them in immediate theatrical success, the wonderful works which bore his name — works which were only half printed, and that surrepti- tiously, and in detached portions during his life- time, which, seven years after his death, were first collected and published by authority in his name, accompanied, according to the custom of the day, with eulogistic verses from surviving brother poets — this yet living theatrical Shakespeare is a very different one from the Shakespeare of our mod- ern criticism ; — the Shakespeare brought out, at length, by more than two centuries of readings and the best scholarly investigation of modern times, from between the two lids of that wondrous folio.

The faintly limned outlines of the nucleus which that name once included are all gone long ago, dissolved in the splendors, dilated into the infini- ties which this modern Shakespeare dwells in. It is Shakespeare the author that we now know only, the author of these worlds of profoundest art, these thought-crowded worlds, which modern read- ing discovers in these printed plays of his. It is the posthumous Shakespeare of the posthumous volume that we now know only. No, not even that; it is only the work itself that we now know by that name — the phenomenon and not its beginning. For, with each new study of the

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printed page, further and further behind it, deeper and deeper into regions where no man so much as undertakes to follow it, retreats the power, which is for us all already, as truly as if we had confessed it to ourselves, the unknown, the unnamed.

What does this old player's name, in fact, stand for with us now ? Inwrought not into all our lit- erature merely, but into all the life of our modern time, his unlearned utterances our deepest lore, which " we are toiling all our lives to find," his mystic page, the page where each one sees his own life inscribed, point by point, deepening and deep- ening with each new experience from the cradle to the grave ; what is he to us now ? Is he the teacher of our players only ? AVhat theatres hold now his school ? What actors' names stand now enrolled in its illustrious lists? Do not all our modern works incorporate his lore into their es- sence, are they not glittering on their surface everywhere, with ever new, unmissed jewels from his mines ? Which of our statesmen, our heroes, our divines, our poets, our philosophers, has not learned of him ; and in which of all their diver- gent and multiplying pursuits and experiences do they fail to find him still with them, still before them ?

The name which has stood to us from the begin- ning, for all this — which has been inwrought into it, which concentrates it in its unity — cannot now be touched. It has lost its original significance.

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It means this, and this only to us. It has drunk in the essence of all this power, and light, and beauty, and identified itself with it. Never, per- haps, can it well mean anything else to us.

You cannot christen a world anew, though the name that was given to it at the font prove an usurper's. With all that we now know of that he- roic scholar, from whose scientific dream the New World was made to emerge at last, in the face of the mockeries of his time, with all that apprecia- tion of his work which the Old World and the New alike bestow upon it, we cannot yet separate the name of his rival from his hard-earned tri- umph. What name is it that has drunk into its melody, forever, all the music of that hope and promise, which the young continent of Columbus still whispers — in spite of old European evils planted there — still whispers in the troubled earth ? Whose name is it that stretches its golden letters now, from ocean to ocean, from Arctic to Antarctic, whose name now enrings the millions that are born, and live, and die, knowing no world but the world of that patient scholar's dream — no reality but the reality of his chimera ?

What matters it ? Who cares ? " What 's in a name ? " Is there any voice from that hero's own tomb to rebuke this wrono; ? No. He did not toil, and struggle, and suffer, and keep his manly heart from breaking, to the end that those mil- lions might be called by his name. Ah, little know

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they, who thus judge of works like his, what roots such growths must spread, what broad, sweet cur- rents they must reach and drink from. If the mil- lions are blessed there, if, through the heat and burden of his weary day, man shall at length at- tain, though only after many an erring experience and fierce rebuke, in that new world, to some height of learning, to some scientific place of peace and rest, where worlds are in harmony, and men are as one, he will say, in God's name. Amen ! For, on the heights of endurance and self-renun- ciation, where the divine is possible with men, we have one name.

What have we to do with this poor peasant's name, then, so hallowed in all our hearts, now, with household memories, that we should seek to tear it from the countless fastenings which time has given it ? This name, chosen at least of for- tune, if not of nature, for the place it occupies, dignified with all that she can lend it, — illustrious with her most lavish favoritism, — has she not chosen to encircle it with honors which make poor those that she saves for her kings and heroes ? Let it stand, then, and not by grace of fortune only, but by consent of one who could afford to leave it such a legacy. For he was one whom giv- ing did not impoverish ; he had wealth enough of his own and to spare, and honors that he could not part with.

" Once," but in no poet's garb, once, through

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the thickest of this " working - clay world," he trod for himself, with bleeding feet, " the ways of glory" here, " and sounded all the depths and shoals of honor," and, from the wrecks of lost '^ ambition," found to the last " the way to rise in " : —

" By that sin fell the angels ; bow can man, then, The image of his Maker, hope to win by 't ? Love thyself last : cherish those hearts that hate thee ; Still in thy right hand carry gentle peace. To silence envious tongues. Be just, and fear not : Let all the ends thou aini'st at, be thy country's, Thy God's and truth's ; then, if thou fall'st, thou fall'st A blessed martyr ! "

Let the name stand, then, where the poet has himself left it. If he — if he himself did not scruple to forego his fairest honors, and leave his immortality in a peasant's weed ; if he himself could cansent to bind his own princely brows in it, though it might be for ages, why e'en let him wear it, then, as his own proudest honor. To all time let the philosophy be preached in it, which found " in a name " the heroic height whence its one great tenet could be uttered with such an em- phasis, philosophy — " not harsh and crabbed as dull fools suppose, but musical as is Apollo's lute," roaming here at last in worlds of her own shaping ; more rich and varied, and more intense than na- ture's own ; where all things " echo the name of Prospero " ; where, " beside the groves, the foun- tains, every region near seems all one mutual

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cry " ; where even young love's own youngest melodies, from moon-lit balconies, warble its argu- ment. Let it stand, then. Leave to it its strange honors — its unbought immortality. Let it stand, at least, till all those who have eaten in their youth of the magic tables spread in it, shall have died in the wilderness. Let it stand while it will, only let its true significance be recognized.

For, the falsity involved in it, as it now stands, has become too gross to be endured any further. The common sense cannot any longer receive it without self-abnegation ; and the relations of this question, on all sides, are now too grave and mo- mentous to admit of any further postponement of it.

In judging of this question, we must take into account the fact that, at the time when these works were issued, all those characteristic organi- zations of the modern ages, for the diffusion of in- tellectual and moral influences, which now every- where cross and recross with electric fibre the hitherto impassable social barriers, were as yet unimagined. The inventions and institutions, in which these had their origin, were then but begin- ning their work. To-day, there is no scholastic seclusion so profound that the allied voice and ac- tion of this mighty living age may not perpetu- ally penetrate it. To-day, the work-shop has be- come clairvoyant. The plough and the loom are in magnetic communication with the loftiest social

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centres. The last results of the most exquisite culture of the world, in all its departments, are within reach of the lowest haunt, where latent genius and refinement await their summons ; and there is no " smallest scruple of nature's excel- lence " that may not be searched out and kindled. The Englishman who but reads " The Times," to-day, puts himself into a connection with his age, and attains thereby a means of enlargement of character and elevation of thought and aims, which in the age of Elizabeth was only possible to men occupying the highest official and social position.

It is necessary, too, to remember that the ques- tion here is not a question of lyric inspiration, merely ; neither is it a question of dramatic gen- ius, merely. Why, even the poor player, that Hamlet quotes so admiringly, '' but in a dream of passion," his soul rapt and subdued with images of tenderness and beauty, " tears in his eyes, the color in his cheeks," even he, with his fine sensibihties, his rhythmical ear, with his living conceits, if nature has but done her part towards it, may compose you a lyric that you would bind up with " High- land Mary," or " Sir Patrick Spens," for immor- tality. And even this poor tinker, profane and wicked as he is, and coarse and unfurnished for the poet's mission as he seems, when once the in- finities of religion, with their divine ideals, shall penetrate to the deep, sweet sources of his yet

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undreamed of genius, and arouse the latent soul in him, with their terrific struggles and divine tri- umphs, even he, from the coarse, meagre mate- rials which his external experience furnishes to him, shall be able to compose a drama, full of im- mortal vigor and freshness, where all men shall hear the rushing of wings — the tread from other spheres — in their life's battle; where all men shall be able to catch voices and harpings not of this shore. But the question is not here of a Bun- yan or a Burns. And it is not a Bloomfield that we have in hand here. The question is not whether nature shall be able to compose thesCf without putting into requisition the selectest in- strumentalities of the ages. It is a question dif- ferent in kind ; how different, in the present stage of our appreciation of the works involved in it, cannot be made manifest.

It is impossible, indeed, to present any parallel to the case in question. For if we suppose a poor actor, or the manager of a theatre, or a printer, unlearned except by the accident of his trade, to begin now to issue out of his brain, in the way of his trade, wholly bent on that, and wholly indif- ferent to any other result, and unconscious of any other, a body of literature, so high above anything that we now possess, in any or in all departments ; so far exhausting the excellency of all as to con- stitute, by universal consent, the literature of this time ; comprehending its entire scope ; based on its

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subtlest analysis ; pronouncing everywhere its final word, — even such a supposition would not begin to meet the absurdity of the case in question.

If the prince of showmen in our day, in that stately oriental retreat of his in Connecticut, ri- valing even the New Place at Stratford in literary conveniences, should begin now to conceive of something of this sort, as his crowning specula- tion, and should determine to undertake its execu- tion in person, who would dare to question his ability ? ^ Certainly no one would have any right to criticise, now, the motive conceded, or to put in suspicion its efficiency for the proposed result. Why, this man could not conduct his business a day, he could not even hunt through the journals for his own puffs and advertisements, without com- ing by accident in contact with means of moral and intellectual enlargement and stimulus, which could never have found their way, in any form, to Elizabeth's player. The railway, the magnetic telegraph, the steamship, the steam-press with its journals, its magazines, its reviews, and its cheap literature of all kinds, the public library, the book- club, the popular lecture, the lyceum, the volun- tary association of every kind — these are all but a part of that magnificent apparatus and means of culture which society is now putting in requisi-

^ It should be stated, perhaps, that the above was written two or three years since, and that no reference to Mr. Barnum's recent ad- dition to the literature of the ajre was intended.

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tion in that great school of hers, wherein the uni- versal man, rescued from infinite self -degradations, is now at last beginning his culture. And yet all these social instrumentalities combined cannot, even now, so supply the deficiencies in the case supposed as to make the supposition any other than a violent one, to say the least of it.

The material which nature must have contrib- uted to the Shakespearean result could, indeed, hardly have remained inert, under any superin- cumbent w*eio;ht of social disadvantao;es. But the very first indication of its presence, under such conditions, would have been a struggle with those disadvantages. First of all, it would force its way upward, through them, to its natural ele- ment ; first of all, it would make its way into the light, and possess itself of all its weapons — not spend itself in mad movements in the dark, with- out them. Look over the history of all the known English poets and authors of every kind, back even to the days of the Anglo-Saxon Adhelm, and Caedmon, and, no matter how humble the position in which they are born, how many will you find among them that have failed to possess themselves ultimately of the highest literary culture of the age they lived in ? How many, until you come to this same Shakespeare ?

Well, then, if the Genius of the British Isle turns us out such men as those from her universities ; but when she would make her Shakespeare retreat

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into a green-room, and send him forth from that, furnished as we find him, pull down, we say, pull down those gray old towers, for the wisdom of the Great Alfred has been laughed to scorn ; undo his illustrious monument to its last Anglo-Saxon stone, and, " by our lady, build — theatres ! " If not Ju- liet only, but her author, and Hamlet's author, too, and Lear's, and Macbeth's can be made with- out " philosophy," we are for Romeo's verdict, " Hang up philosophy." If such works as these, and Julius CaBsar, and Coriolanus, and Antony, and Henry V, and Henry VIII, — if the " Mid- summer Night's Dream," and the '' Merchant of Venice," and the "Twelfth Night," — if Beatrice, and Benedict, and Rosalind, and Jaques, and lago, and Othello, and all their immortal company, — if these works, and all that we find in them, can be got out of " Plutarch's Lives," and " Holin- shed," and a few old ballads and novels, — in the name of all that is honest, give us these, and let us go about our business; and henceforth let him that can be convicted '' of traitorously cor- rupting the youth of this realm, by erecting a grammar-school," be consigned to his victims for mercy. " Long live Lord Mortimer ! " " Down with the paper-mills ! " " Throw learning to the dogs ! we '11 none of it ! "

But we are not, as yet, in a position to estimate the graver bearings of this question. For the reverence which the common theory has hitherto

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claimed from us, as a well authenticated historical fact, depending apparently, indeed, on the most un- impeachable external evidence for its support, has operated, as it was intended to operate in the first instance, to prevent all that kind of reading and study of the plays which would have made its gross absurdity apparent. In accordance with this original intention, to this hour it has constituted a barrier to the understanding of their true mean- ing, which no industry or perseverance could sur- mount ; to this hour it has served to prevent, ap- parently, so much as a suspicion of their true source, and ultimate intention.

But let this theory, and the pre-judgment it involves, be set aside, even by an hypothesis, only long enough to permit us once to see, for ourselves, what these works do in fact contain, and no amount of historical evidence which can be produced, no art, no argument, will suffice to restore it to its present position. But it is not as an hypothesis, it is not as a theory, that the truth here indicated will be developed hereafter. It will come on other grounds. It will ask no favors.

Condemned to refer the orio-in of these works to the vulgar, illiterate man who kept the theatre where they were first exhibited, a person of the most ordinary character and aims, compelled to regard them as the result merely of an extraordi- nary talent for pecuniary speculation in this man, how could we, how could any one, dare to see what

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is really in them ? With this theory overhanging them, though we threw our most artistic lights upon it, and kept it out of sight when we could, what painful contradictory mental states, what un- acknowledged internal misgivings were yet in- volved in our best judgments of them? How many passages were we compelled to read " tripphigly," with the " mind's eye," as the players were first taught to pronounce them on the tongue ; and if, in spite of all our slurring, the inner depths would open to us, if anything which this theory could not account for, would notwithstanding obtrude itself upon us, we endeavored to believe that it must be the reflection of our own better learning, and so, half lying to ourselves, making a wretched compromise with our own mental integrity, we still hurried on.

Condemned to look for the author of Hamlet himself — the subtle Hamlet of the university, the courtly Hamlet, " the glass of fashion and the mould of form " — in that dirty, doggish group of players, who come into the scene summoned like a pack of hounds to his service, the very tone of his courtesy to them, with its princely condescension, with its arduous familiarity, only serving to make the great, impassable social gulf between them the more evident, — compelled to look in that igno- minious group, with its faithful portraiture of the players of that time (taken from the life by one who had had dealings with them), for the princely

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scholar himself in his author, how could we under- stand him — the enigmatical Hamlet, with the thought of ages in his foregone conclusions ?

With such an origin, how could we see the sub- tlest skill of the university, not in Hamlet and Ho- ratio only, but in the work itself, incorporated in its essence, pervading its execution ? With such an origin as this, how was it possible to note, not in this play only, but in all the Shakespeare drama, what otherwise we could not have failed to ob- serve, the tone of the highest Elizabethan breed- ing, the very loftiest tone of that peculiar courtly culture, which was then, and but just then, attain- ing its height, in the competitions among men of the highest social rank, and among the most bril- liant wits and men of genius of the age, for the favor of the learned, accomplished, sagacious, wit- loving maiden queen ; — a culture which required not the best acquisitions of the university merely, but acquaintance with life, practical knowledge of affairs, foreign travel and accomplishments, and, above all, the last refinements of the highest Pa- risian breeding. For " your courtier " must be, in fact, " your picked man of countries." He must, indeed, " get his behavior everywhere." He must be, in fact and literally, the man of " the world."

But for this prepossession, in that daring treat- ment of court-life which this single play of Ham- let involves, in the entire freedom with which its conventionalities are handled, how could we have

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failed to recognize the touch of one habitually practiced in its refinements ? How could we have failed to recognize, not in this play only, but in all these plays, the poet whose habits and perceptions have been moulded in the atmosphere of these subtle social influences ? He cannot shake off this influence when he- will. He carries the court per- fume with him, unconsciously, wherever he goes, among mobs of artisans that will not " keep their teeth clean" ; into the ranks of " greasy citizens" and " rude mechanicals " ; into country feasts and merry-makings ; among " pretty low-born lasses," ''^ the queens of curds and cheese," and into the heart of that forest, " where there is no clock." He looks into Arden and into Eastcheap from the court standpoint, not from these into the court, and he is as much a prince with Poins and Bar- dolph as he is when he enters and throws open to us, without awe, without consciousness, the most delicate mysteries of the royal presence.

Compelled to refer the origin of these works to the sordid play-house, who could teach us to dis- tinguish between the ranting, unnatural stuff and bombast which its genuine competitions elicited, in their mercenary appeals to the passions of their audience, ministering to the most vicious tastes, depraving the public conscience, and lowering the common standard of decency, getting up " scenes to tear a cat in," — " out-Herod ing Herod," and going regularly into professional fits about Hecuba

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and Priam and other Trojans, — who could teach us to distinguish between the tone of this origi- nal, genuine, play-house fustian, and that of the "dozen or sixteen lines" which Hamlet will at first, for some earnest purpose of his own, with the consent and privity of one of the players, cause to be inserted in it ? Nay, thus blinded, we shall not, perhaps, be able to distinguish from this foundation that magnificent whole with which, from such beginnings, this author will, perhaps, ultimately replace his worthless originals alto- gether ; that whole in which we shall see, one day, not the burning Ilium, not the old Danish court of the tenth century, but the yet living, illustrious Elizabethan age, with all its momentous interests still at stake, with its yet palpitating hopes and fears, with its newborn energies, bound but uncon- querable, already heaving, and muttering through all their undertone ; that magnificent Avhole, where we shall see, one day, " the very abstract and brief chronicle of the time," the " very body of the age, its form and pressure," under any costume of time and country, or under the drapery of any fiction, however absurd or monstrous, which this author shall find already popularized to his hands, and available for his purposes. Hard, indeed, was the time, ill bestead was the spirit of the immemorial English freedom, when the genius of works such as these was compelled to stoop to such a scene to find its instruments.

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How could we understand from such a source, while that wretched player was still crying it for