Chapter XII: Part 12

The three plays cited furnish strong proofs, if any were needed, that the author of the plays could not have looked at his plots through a legalist imagination like that of Lord Bacon, the first lawyer in his day of the kingdom. They are the product of an imagination in which the descent of a throne to a brother, or to a successful chieftain in preference to a son, creates no sense of incongruity.

_The Bacon Humbug_

In the course of a newspaper discussion of the authorship of the poems and plays attributed to Shakespeare, the assertion that present day scholarship is almost unanimous in discrediting the editors of the First Folio (1623) brought out from Mr. William Winter, the accomplished dramatic critic, the following sharp reply:

“There is no disposition on the part of the defenders of Shakespeare to make use of ‘intemperate language.’ Indeed, considering their provocation, they have displayed uncommon patience. The most ‘intemperate language’ that has been used in the Shakespeare-Bacon controversy, has been used by Baconians, such as the late Mr. Donnelly and the present Mr. W. H. Edwards. A little acerbity, as remarked by Andrew Lang, is, perhaps, unavoidable in such a discussion. To those who believe—having every reason to believe, and no reason whatever to doubt—that the plays were written by Shakespeare, the attempt to ruin his renown seems nothing less than a criminal desecration.

“It has not been said and it is not thought, by any person acquainted with the subject, that the First Folio of Shakespeare was thoroughly edited, or that it is free from defects; but it is confidently maintained that Heminge and Condell, in their association with that book, were entirely disinterested and absolutely honest, and that without compensation and probably at a pecuniary loss, they rendered a service to literature such as entitles them to everlasting gratitude and esteem.

“Certain commentators, like Spalding, Wright, and Madden, have been pleased to impugn the integrity of Heminge and Condell, but, in so doing, they have gone much further than there was ever any warrant for them to go. Heminge and Condell did not ‘fail in their duty;’ the First Folio is not ‘dishonest;’ and to say, or to insinuate, that it has been discredited is to use the language of gross injustice and sheer extravagance.

“The primary defect in the First Folio—the defect to which all modern editors of Shakespeare have called attention, and the point upon which so much stress is now laid—is the discrepancy between a few words of the preface and the contents of the book. In their ‘Address’ or preface, Heminge and Condell say, ‘We have scarce received from him (Shakespeare) a blot in his papers.’ It has been found, however, that several of the plays were, in fact, reprinted from earlier quartos, and that, in some cases, earlier quartos that were not consulted contain a better text than the Folio. This is the sum of all the fault that can be imputed to Heminge and Condell, except, indeed, that the proofs of the Folio were not carefully read and scrupulously corrected; but Heminge and Condell were not men of letters.

“The late J. O. Halliwell-Phillipps was an implicit believer in William Shakespeare as the author of the plays; he never wavered in that belief; he is acknowledged as ‘the most competent Shakespeare worker who ever lived.’ The language of Halliwell-Phillipps accordingly, with reference to the First Folio and to Heminge and Condell, ought to carry some weight. These are his words,—

“‘These estimable men who are kindly remembered in the poet’s will are not likely to have encouraged the speculation from motives of gain.... When we find Heminge and Condell not only initiating and vigorously supporting the design, but expressing their regret that Shakespeare himself had not lived to direct the publication, who can doubt that they were acting as trustees for his memory, or that the noble volume was a record of their affection? Who can ungraciously question their sincerity?... What plausible reason can be given for not accepting the literal truth of their description of themselves as ‘a pair so careful to show their gratitude to the dead?’... Heminge and Condell speak of themselves as mere gatherers, and it is nearly certain that all that they did was to ransack their dramatic stores for the best copies of the plays that they could find, handing those copies over to the printers, in the full persuasion that, in taking this course, they were morally relieved of all further responsibility.... Out of the thirty-six dramas that they collected one-half had never been published in any shape.... There is nothing to show that fair copies were ever made in those days for the prompters.... So far from being astonished at the textual imperfections of the Folio, we ought to be profoundly thankful for what is, under the circumstances, its marvellous state of comparative excellence. Heminge and Condell did the best they could, to the best of their judgment. It never could have entered their imagination that the day would arrive for the comfort of intellectual life to be marred by the distorted texts of ‘Hamlet’ or ‘Lear.’ There cannot, indeed, be a doubt that, according to their lights, they expressed a sincere conviction when they delivered the immortal dramas to the public as being ‘absolute in their numbers, as he (Shakespeare) conceived them.’... There is nothing in the writings of Heminge and Condell to warrant a suspicion that there was a single wilful misrepresentation of facts.... Statement ... that the entire volume was printed from the author’s own manuscripts would have been a serious misrepresentation, but the language of Heminge and Condell does not necessarily, under any line of interpretation, express so much, and in all probability they are here speaking themselves in their managerial capacity, referring to the singularly few alterations that they had observed in the manuscripts which he delivered to them for the use of the theatre.... Nor, in our measure of gratitude for the First Folio—the greatest literary treasure the world possesses—should we neglect to include a tribute to Ben Jonson.’

“The First Shakespeare Folio distinctly and unequivocally declares that its contents (all the Shakespeare plays except ‘Pericles’), were written by William Shakespeare—then, 1623, deceased—and it is prefaced with a noble tribute to him, by his great contemporary Ben Jonson, and with a portrait of him, authenticated by Jonson’s verses. The authenticity of that book was not questioned by any person living at the time of its publication, nor was its validity assailed until many generations had passed away. It remains authentic; and no amount of pettifogging as to its defects—all of which are easily comprehensible and explicable—will ever destroy its force as conclusive evidence of the authorship of Shakespeare.

“It is not forgotten (strange if it were, considering how continuously and strenuously the fact is proclaimed!) that actors and dramatic authors, in the time of ‘Eliza and our James,’ were legally liable to severe penalties for satire of ‘the great.’ What of it? Penal legislation did not make actors less industrious in their vocation, or authors less prolific, or the theatre less popular. Shakespeare, Greene, Heywood, Marlowe, Lyly, Nash, Lodge, Ford, Beaumont and Fletcher, and all the rest, continued to write plays, and continued not to be ashamed of them or afraid of the law. Nature also has laws; and the product of the English poetic drama, between 1580 and 1640, surpasses, in wealth, variety, and splendor, every kindred product in the history of mankind.

“Direct, conclusive, final evidence that Henry Chettle referred to Shakespeare, in the apology that he made for having published Robert Greene’s attack on ‘Shakescene,’ does not exist: that is to say, the name of Shakespeare is not actually mentioned by Chettle; but, if ‘imputation and strong circumstance, which lead directly to the door of truth,’ are evidence, the rational conclusion is irresistible that the reference was to Shakespeare. Upon a careful reading of Greene’s ‘Groats-worth of Wit’ and Chettle’s ‘Kind Heart’s Dream,’ no other conclusion seems possible. Shakespeare scholars have invariably accepted it.

“Inquiry as to the authenticity of the Beaumont and Fletcher Folio of 1647 need not here be pursued. There might be a time to consider ‘analogy’ between the circumstances of that book and those of the First Folio of Shakespeare, if, primarily, it could be shown that Beaumont and Fletcher were actors, that they bequeathed money to two fellow-actors with which to buy memorial rings, and that those two fellow-actors, ‘careful to show their gratitude to the dead,’ collected and published their plays, as a duty of affectionate friendship and ‘to do an office for the dead.’ At present the two books stand before the world in a totally different light,—for the Beaumont and Fletcher Folio of 1647 (on its face authentic) was introduced by a stationer who had never known or seen those authors and knew nothing about them or their works, save what he had gleaned at second-hand.

“No case can be made for Bacon as the author of Shakespeare by aspersing the memory of Heminge and Condell, or by assailing the authenticity of their Folio. The Baconian delusion is not a product of scholarship, but of perverse incredulity and crazy and mischievous conjecture. Delia Bacon went mad over it years ago, and since her time there has been a procession of harmless lunatics steadily moving in the same way. Every little while some new crank starts up with a theory that something well known to have happened ‘never could have happened,’ and upon that gratuitous assumption a prodigious structure of phantasy is very soon reared. Lately, for example, it has impressed several persons as remarkable that a scantily educated youth, reared in a little rural village, and adventurously migrating to the capital to seek his fortune, should have acquired, so soon and so readily, the correct style that appears in the poems of ‘Venus and Adonis,’ ‘Tarquin and Lucrece,’ and the Sonnets. Instances of admirably correct versification made by novices, illiterate as well as scholastic, throughout the history of poetical literature, meantime, causes no surprise. The youthful achievements of Cowley and Pope and Chatterton are taken quite as a matter of course. James Hogg, the Ettrick Shepherd, who had no education at all, nevertheless could, and did, write verse as harmonious, as correct, and as finished as that of Sir Walter Scott, who possessed every advantage that education could bestow. ‘He lisped in numbers, for the numbers came.’

“That which has happened to others, however, must not—in the reasoning of these censors—happen to Shakespeare. He alone, of all men, must be thought to have developed by rule and line. The dominant fact, all the same, remains unchanged,—the decisive fact of Shakespeare’s colossal, transcendent poetic genius, the instantaneous insight and intuition whereby he grasped all knowledge of human nature, and the faculty of clear, fluent, illuminative expression, whereby he was able to utter all things in a language of imperishable beauty. Nothing indeed could be more preposterous than the wild theory on which the whole Baconian fabric of detraction reposes,—the theory that because, to prosaic perception, a certain thing seems unlikely to have happened, therefore it never did happen. Byron mentions a certain Abbé who wrote a treatise on the Swedish Constitution, proving it to be indissoluble and eternal, just as Gustavus III. had destroyed it: ‘Sir,’ said the Abbé, ‘the King of Sweden may overthrow the Constitution, but not my book.’ Shakespeare, of course, ought not to have been able to write the ‘Venus,’ or the ‘Lucrece,’ or the Sonnets, or the Plays, or anything else, and he would not have been had he possessed a properly respectful prescience of the doubts of Mr. Hallam, the mental perplexities of the portentous Owen, and the excruciating divinations of Mrs. Gallup—that oracular dame whose fiery-footed steeds are just now prancing over the mangled remains not merely of the philosopher Bacon, but of Queen Elizabeth and all her ‘spacious times.’ But, unhappily for these distressed beings, Shakespeare did write all those things, and the fact of his authorship of them remains as solid and permanent as any fact ever was, since the beginning of recorded time.

“All the ciphers that ever a perturbed ingenuity has read into Elizabethan literature cannot shape the uncontroverted and incontrovertible truth that is written in marble over that sacred tomb in Stratford Church: ‘Shakespeare, with whom quick Nature died; Nestor in wisdom, Socrates in genius, Virgil in art.’ And if anything were needed utterly to discredit and finally to explode the Bacon humbug, it would be supplied by the monstrous story that Mrs. Gallup’s reckless and mischievous fancy has evolved, and that Mr. Mallock later has had the astounding effrontery in some sort to countenance,—a story that covers Queen Elizabeth with shame, that makes Essex and Bacon her children (their father being Leicester), so that Bacon becomes practically the murderer and defamer of his own brother, and while darkening Bacon’s already tarnished reputation with unspeakable infamy, capsizes all authentic records of Elizabeth’s time, taxes even the credulity of ignorance, makes common sense ridiculous, and turns all knowledge to laughter and contempt.”

_Stratford-on-Avon_

A London editor, in commenting upon the work of the Stratford iconoclasts, says it is deplorable to have doubts started as to whether the Shakespeare Museum contains a single genuine relic; whether Anne Hathaway’s cottage is not, after all, a simple fraud; and Mary Arden’s farm a disreputably unhistorical building. Anne Hathaway’s cottage is a place which every Shakespeare-loving visitor to his native town makes a point of inspecting. It has been good enough for all the myriad tourists of all nationalities that have flocked to see it; yet a dark rumor has been going about seriously affecting its _bona fides_ as a genuine article. Mr. Halliwell-Phillipps, the Shakespearian critic, we are told, is of opinion that the probabilities are decidedly against the so-called cottage ever having contained the woman who, at the age of twenty-seven, married William Shakespeare when the latter was only nineteen. Here is a pleasing illusion dissipated at once. Those who have visited the spot can no longer, as they recall that lowly cot nestling among its trees and ascend again in fancy the creaking wooden staircase, picture to themselves the May mornings when the Bard of All Time must have gone the same round on a courting expedition, and probably sat under the eaves with his arm round his future bride. The sighing tourist will whisper, What next? Well, the next surprise in store for him is the disestablishment and disendowment of the old farmhouse still shown as that in which the poet’s mother, Mary Arden, lived. Its history is now said to be altogether inconsistent with the theory that any of the ancestors of the Shakespeare stock ever resided there. In addition to the attack on the Bard’s wife, his mother too meets with this tragic fate. We are on the high road to having it proved that no such person as Mary Arden ever lived; that, in fact, Shakespeare was such a wonderful man that he never had a mother at all. This about the cottage and farmhouse is distinctly bad news for those who some time ago spent their money on the “Shakespeare Fund,” which went to purchasing for the good of the nation all the spots considered to be traditionally connected with the life of the master-poet. It is also bad news for the tourists and pilgrims. Will they care to go to the shrine of the great dramatist if a cloud of doubt surrounds some of its most cherished monuments?

The people of the little old market-town on the quiet Avon are resentful over this scepticism. The Stratfordians would be the last people in the world to admit the truth of the story about Anne Hathaway’s cottage or Mary Arden’s farm, even when backed up by such a competent critic in these matters as Mr. Halliwell-Phillipps. They have hitherto found the fame of the Prince of Poets exceedingly useful to their small borough. Shakespeare represents bread-and-butter to many of the excellent burghers and burgesses. They owe to him their winter’s stock of coals and their weekly supply of cabbages and candles and household matches. Should any ruthless hand remove from them this source of legitimate gain, then the contiguous workhouse would soon feel the result. This idea, therefore, about Anne Hathaway’s cottage must be regarded simply with disgust by every loyal citizen of the good Warwickshire town. In private they all probably wish to goodness that these pestilent critics were at the bottom of the sea, with their destructive doubts and depressing hypotheses. With one accord, no doubt, the Stratford folk would combine to duck the unfortunate author of the latest Shakespearian heresy in the reedy Avon if they could lay hands on him. Such theories, they think, ought to be put down with a strong hand. What is Parliament about that it allows honest people’s bread to be thus taken out of their mouths? They would boycott the theory-mongers if they could. It would, indeed, be an evil day were the last of the tourists to appear at Stratford. What, no more American enthusiasts? No more smoke-dried pedants and musty students of “First Folios?” No more excursions to the local shrine and personally-conducted mobs of open-mouthed worshippers all gone “away in the ewigkeit?” Such an idea is enough to cause an effusion of blood on the brain of those who have lived all their lives in the shadow of the church where the poet’s dust rests, and where the remarkable effigy is to be seen which is still considered to be one of the best portraits extant of the sublime genius.

When a theory like this is once started, no human being can tell how far the stone will roll, or what will be the ultimate result. What would be the effect on the Shakespeare-worshipping tourist if everything at Stratford were shown to him as being only doubtfully connected with the Bard? For example, instead of the guide-post pointing the way to Anne Hathaway’s cottage, it might be sadly truthful to say, “To the reputed cottage of Anne Hathaway,” and Mary Arden’s farm ought to be ticketed as an “uncertain” building. Shakespeare’s tomb in the church would have to be pointed out as the tomb “either of Shakespeare or somebody else;” and if Shakespeare never wrote his own plays, it really does not much matter whose sepulchre it may be. That famous curse on the person who moves his bones would pass unnoticed; for who would care for a curse launched by somebody who was not Shakespeare, but a local versifier who flourished three hundred years ago, or perhaps the tombstone man himself, who may have charged a little more if he carved a quatrain of his own invention on the stone? Then, supposing the Shakespeare Museum were to experience a breath of the same critical spirit, where would the ring be that the Bard wore, the chair, the books that he might have used, and so on? That ancient chair was described by Washington Irving years ago. He says it is the most favorite object of curiosity in the whole of the house. He draws a picture of how Shakespeare may have sat in it when a boy, watching the slowly-revolving spit with all the longing of an urchin; or of an evening “listening to the gossips and cronies of Stratford, dealing forth church-yard tales and legendary anecdotes of the troublesome times of England.” Yes, no doubt he may have done so; and it is because of that delightful possibility that everybody used to sit down in his chair, to its great detriment. Americans are particularly anxious, the custodian asserts, to take a seat where the Bard of Avon had once sat. No sooner did they get into the room than they raced for the chair. After a severe scuffle one proud man succeeded in being the first to sit down in it; but after this sort of thing had gone on for some time, the chair was found to be so rickety that henceforth nobody was allowed to touch it. Washington Irving rather cruelly remarks that the chair partook of the volatile nature of the Santa Casa of Loretto or the Flying Chair of the Arabian Enchanter, for “though sold some time ago to a Northern Princess, it has found its way back again to the old chimney-corner.” This is one of those critical calumnies which need to be indignantly refuted. To doubt Shakespeare’s chair means a depression in the relic and tourist trade at Stratford; and, after all, what does it matter if the chair is a modern one, supposing that everybody believes it to be that in which Shakespeare sat while he composed “Macbeth”? The ordinary tourist does not ask for doubts—he wants certainty. Dogmatism is what is required at literary shrines; not a halting, hesitating statement that “Mr. Halliwell-Phillipps thinks this,” and “Mr. Somebody Else thinks that,” but a downright positive assertion of fact. Anne Hathaway’s cottage will lose half its attractions if the miserable carping spirit of a regard for historic accuracy comes in. There is nothing like resolute, good-humored credulity in such matters.

_L. E. L. Assumes a Virtue_

William Howitt remarks, “I met Letitia E. Landon in company at a time when there was a report that she was actually though secretly married.[4] Mrs. Hofland, on entering the room, went up to her in her plain, straightforward way, and said, ‘Ah, my dear, what must I call you, Miss Landon, or whom?’ After well-feigned surprise at the question, Miss Landon began to talk in a tone of merry ridicule at this report, and ended by declaring that as to love or marriage, they were things she never thought of. ‘What then have you been doing with yourself this last month?’

Footnote 4:

In later years, when L. E. L. married Governor Machan, of Cape Coast
Castle, West Africa, she was thirty-six years of age, and died a few
months afterwards.

“‘Oh, I have been puzzling my brain to invent a new sleeve; how do you like it?’ showing her arm.

“‘You never think of such a thing as love!’ exclaimed a sentimental young man; ‘you, who have written so many volumes upon it?’

“‘Oh, that’s all professional, you know,’ exclaimed she, with an air of merry scorn.

“‘Professional!’ said a grave Quaker who stood near; ‘why dost thou make a difference between what is professional and what is real? Dost thou write one thing and think another? Does not that look very much like hypocrisy?’

“To this the astonished poetess made no reply, but by a look of genuine amazement. It was a mode of putting the matter to which she had evidently never been accustomed. And, in fact, there can be no question that much of her writing was professional. She had to win a golden harvest for the comfort of others dear to herself; and she felt, like all authors who have to cater to the public, that she must provide, not so much what she would of her free-will choice, but what they expected of her.”

_The Burning of Rome_, A.D. 54

None of the stereotyped falsities of history have been reiterated with more persistence than that which represents the Emperor Nero on the summit of the tower of Mæcenas fiendishly fiddling and singing his verses while Rome was burning. Aside from the anachronism as to fiddling—the violin only dates from the middle of the sixteenth century—and admitting that the classic lyre of antiquity was meant, we have the authoritative statement of Tacitus that at the time of the fire Nero was at his villa at Antium, fifty miles from Rome. There is little doubt that Nero was the most depraved representative of pagan sensuality, but on the occasion of a conflagration which was planned and prompted by him for a wise purpose, he exhibited qualities greatly to his credit. Lanciani says that Nero conceived the gigantic plan of renewing and rebuilding the city, and as it was “crowded at every corner with shrines and altars and small temples which religious superstition made absolutely inviolable, and as the work of improvement was fiercely opposed by private owners of property, and gave occasion to an endless amount of lawsuits, and appraisals, and fights among the experts, he rid himself of all these difficulties in the simplest and easiest way.” Of the fourteen regions or wards into which Rome had been divided by Augustus, three were completely destroyed, and seven for the greater part, without any loss of life. In the work of reconstruction, the architects, Severus and Celer, were ordered to draw their plans in accordance with the best principles of hygiene and comfort. In anticipation of the lengthy period that would be required for clearing and rebuilding, Nero caused an enormous number of tents and wooden booths to be secretly prepared for the houseless multitude, and ordered fleets of grain-laden Mediterranean vessels from Sardinia, Sicily, Numidia, and Egypt to be conveniently near to prevent famine. This comprehensive provision for material improvement was made by a broad-minded, public-spirited man, who was in advance of his age, and who transformed narrow lanes into broad avenues, filthy slums into shaded squares and fountains, and shabby houses into magnificent public and private buildings.

_Mummy Wheat_

In how many sermons has the indestructibility of truth been illustrated by the wheat wrapped up with an Egyptian mummy and germinating after thousands of years! Yet this pleasing story has met with well-founded refutation. Sir J. D. Hooker, of London, an eminent authority on growth in the natural world, being appealed to, says: “The story of Egyptian mummy wheat having germinated has never been confirmed, and is not credited by any one who is warranted by knowledge and experience in such matters to give an opinion. Innumerable attempts to stimulate mummy wheat into vitality have each and all failed.”

_Anglo-Saxon as a Race Term_

The term Anglo-Saxon as descriptive of Englishmen or Americans, is as incorrect as the use of the word Gothic in differentiation of pointed architecture. Mr. S. D. O’Connell, of the Bureau of Statistics, Washington, in a letter on the misuse of the term, says that among ethnologists the phrase Anglo-Saxon is never used as descriptive of a race, or of English institutions. Hence, he remarks, “no well-educated person of the present generation can be excused for using it descriptively of the English-speaking peoples; because there never was an Anglo-Saxon race nor an Anglo-Saxon institution to impart dominating influences to our civilization. The dominating influences must be traced to some other source than that of barbarian Teutonic tribes, even if we should grant the development of our civilization to the dominating influences of the people of the British Isles, who, in the early settlements of this part of the continent, so largely colonized it. Our British ancestors, after the invasion of the Romans, adopted the civilizing influences of the more civilized peoples of Europe, and whatever dominating influence the English-speaking peoples have to-day is due, to some extent at least, to that civilization, and to the vigor of the people, which no distinct race can claim as its own.

“‘The truth is,’ as the _Chicago Tribune_ has said, ‘that to plume ourselves upon our Anglo-Saxon extraction is ridiculous. Compared with us, the Romans, who first comprised all the vagabonds of Italy, and finally incorporated into the empire all the semi-barbarians of Europe, were a homogeneous race.’ That paper humorously cites Defoe’s ‘True-Born Englishman’ of his day:

“‘A true-born Englishman’s a contradiction—
In speech an irony, in fact a fiction;
A metaphor invented to express
A man akin to all the universe.

* * * * *

Forgetting that themselves are all derived
From the most scoundrel race that ever lived,
A horrid crowd of rambling thieves and drones,
Who ransacked kingdoms and dispeopled towns.
The Pict, and painted Briton, treacherous Scot,
By hunger, theft, and rapine hither brought;
Norwegian pirates, buccaneering Danes,
Whose red-haired offspring everywhere remains;
Who, joined with Norman-French, compound the breed,
From whence your ‘Free-born Englishmen’ proceed.’

“Anything more motley and heterogeneous than the English people, even before the Norman invasion, made up as they were from the veins of ancient Britons, Romans, Picts, Scots, Danes, Angles, and Saxons, it would be hard to conceive. This mixture of races and bloods shows plainly that the idea of an Anglo-Saxon race is sheer nonsense. How much more nonsensical it is to use the term ‘Anglo-Saxon’ in race classification of the American people, when they have compounded and are daily more and more compounding the confusion of its British blood with infusions from the veins of all other nations.

“Of course we have an Anglo-Saxon strain in our blood, as we have the Norman, a mixture of the Teutonic and Celtic, the old British—that is, the Celtic—the Germanic, and the Latin, so called. But which strain is the predominant one it is difficult to say. The best ethnologists incline to the opinion that it is the Celtic.

“Out upon this cant about ‘races,’ and especially the gabble about ‘Anglo-Saxon institutions,’ which we hear so often from persons who know little or nothing of the forefathers and forerunners of the English-speaking people, and less of their own, or of the science which is concerned with the natural history of man.

“The fiction that credits to Anglo-Saxon blood all the enterprise, progress, and best institutions of the centuries past has been the cause of more persecution in the name of religion, and bloodshed in the name of God, than the most malevolent influences that have ever caused brethren to imbrue their hands in the blood of brothers since the first murder. It has created and still sustains the most bitter and unjust and unfounded prejudices against the people of Ireland and their descendants everywhere among English-speaking peoples. Leaders of thought and educators should teach the English-speaking people of this land of liberty and constitutional equality—as the great leaders of thought in Great Britain and Ireland are now doing—that there is no distinction of race or blood or origin among the English-speaking peoples of to-day, nor has there been for long centuries past; that the great landmarks of our civilization were erected upon and the foundations of our political institutions laid in the Christian religion; and that to its benign and dominating influence are to be attributed the greatness and progress of the English-speaking peoples among the nations of the earth.”

_Guillotin_

It is a remarkable instance of the vitality of a popular error that Thackeray, who was well acquainted with French history should, in his “Philip,” chapter XVI, have fallen into the mistake of supposing that Dr. Guillotin perished by the instrument which bears his name, but which he did not, as Thackeray says, invent. Thackeray does not actually assert that Guillotin died on the guillotine, but he puts it in the form of a question, the answer to which is, of course, intended to be yes: “Was not good Dr. Guillotin executed by his own neat invention?” Now nothing is more certain than that Guillotin survived the great revolution many years, and died a natural death in 1814.

LEGENDARY LORE

_Ilium Fuit_

There is a radical change of opinion with regard to the Iliad. Those who have regarded Homer as a mere myth-collector, and the story of the siege of Troy as a figment of a fertile fancy, have learned that not only do the later critics concede that Homer was a true poet, but that Dr. Schliemann has conclusively proved that he sang of a real Troy and an actual war. How comprehensive the work of critical research has been may be seen in a single incident. A Glasgow surgeon, named Wolfe, reinforced by Mr. Gladstone, has shown that Homer had an ocular defect, that form of amblyopia known as color-blindness, the evidence of which is gathered from the treatment of colors in the Iliad.

_A Marred Destiny_

At Pevensey is the beach on which the Norman Conqueror landed. The castle on the cliff of Hastings marks the spot where he first planted his standard. From that place it is easy to trace his line of march till he saw Harold with the English army facing him on the fatal hill of Senlac. The battle-field is as well-marked as that of Waterloo, and fancy can recall the charges of the Norman cavalry up the hillside against the solid formation and the shield wall of the Saxon precursors of the British infantry. The ruins of Battle Abbey, the religious trophy of the Conqueror, are still seen, and the site of the high altar exactly marks the spot where the fatal arrow entering Harold’s brain slew not only a king, but a kingdom, and marred the destiny of a race. We are on the scene of one of the great catastrophes of history. Had that arrow missed its mark, Anglo-Saxon institutions would have developed in their integrity, the Anglo-Saxon tongue would have perfected itself in its purity, Anglo-Norman aristocracy would never have been, or have left its evil traces on society, the fatal connection of England and France, and the numerous French wars of the Plantagenets would have been blotted out of the book of fate.

_Robinson Crusoe_

Dr. Edward Everett Hale has observed a curious feature in “Robinson Crusoe.” He says: “Readers who are curious in English history must not fail to observe that Robinson Crusoe was shipwrecked on his island on September 30, 1659. It was in that month that the English Commonwealth ended and Richard Cromwell left the palace at Whitehall. Robinson lived in this island home for twenty-eight years. These twenty-eight years covered the exact period of the second Stuart reign in England. Robinson Crusoe returned to England in June, 1687; the Convention Parliament which established William III. met in London at the same time. All this could not be an accidental coincidence. Defoe must have meant that the ‘true-born Englishman’ could not live in England during the years while the Stuarts reigned. Robinson Crusoe was a ruler himself on his own island, and was never the subject of Charles II. or James II.”

_Macaulay in the Role of a Pickpocket_

In clever sketches of social life in Rome, Mr. T. Adolphus Trollope repeats a story that was told during “A Moonlight Visit to the Coliseum,” showing how Lord Macaulay had once robbed a man there of his watch. One night, while strolling under the dark arches, all of a sudden a man in a large cloak brushed past him rather rudely, as Macaulay thought, and passed on into the darkness. Macaulay’s first impulse was to clasp his hand to his watch-pocket; and sure enough he found that his watch was not there. He looked after the man, who he doubted not had stolen his watch as he brushed past him, and peering into the darkness could just distinguish the outline of a figure moving farther away. Macaulay without the loss of a second rushed after him, overtook him, and seizing him by the collar demanded his watch. Macaulay could at that time speak very little Italian, and understood none when spoken. So he was obliged to limit his attack on the thief to a violent shaking of him by the collar and an angry repetition of the demand, “Orologio! orologio!” The man thus attacked poured forth a torrent of rapidly-spoken words, of which Macaulay understood not one syllable. But he again administered a severe shaking to his captive, stamping his foot angrily on the ground, and again vociferating “Orologio! orologio!” Whereupon the detected thief drew forth a watch and handed it to his captor. Macaulay, satisfied with his prowess in having thus recaptured his property, and not caring for the trouble of pursuing the matter any further, turned on his heel as he pocketed the watch, and saw nothing more of the man. But when he returned to his apartment at night, his landlady met him at the door, holding out something in her hand, and saying, “Oh, sir, you left your watch on the table, so I thought it better to take care of it. Here it is.” “Good gracious! What is this, then? What is the meaning of it?” stammered Macaulay, drawing from his pocket the watch he had so gallantly recovered in the Coliseum. It was a watch he had never seen before. The truth was plain: he had been the thief! The poor man he had so violently attacked and apostrophized in the darkness and solitude of the Coliseum arches had been terrified into surrendering his own watch to the resolute ruffian who, as he conceived, had pursued him to rob him. The next morning Macaulay, not a little crestfallen, hastened to the office of the _questor_ with the watch and told his story. “Ah, I see,” said the _questor_; “you had better leave the watch with me. I will make your excuses to the owner of it; he has already been here to denounce you.”

_A Minister’s Messenger and What He Saw_

At the moment when his soldiers were entering Strasburg, the _Roi Soleil_ started out from Fontainebleau to take possession in person of his new conquest. The day before—that is to say, on the 29th of September, 1681—Louis XIV. had announced to his court in the presence of the German Ambassador that he had made up his mind to go to Strasburg, in order to receive the oath of fealty which the treaty of Nimègue gave him the right to exact from the city. It was a _coup de théatre_ and no mistake. But how happened it that the king was so well informed as to the actual condition of affairs at so distant a point? Well, the story runs as follows:

One evening the Minister Louvois sent for a young man who had been recommended to his good graces and said,—“Sir, you will get into a post-carriage which you will find at my door. My servants have exact instructions what to do. You will proceed to Bâle without stopping and you will reach there about two o’clock to-morrow. You will proceed immediately to the bridge which crosses the Rhine. You will remain there until four o’clock. You will carefully notice all that you may see there. You will then again get into the carriage, and without losing a minute will return and report to me what you may have seen.” The young man bowed and started at once. The day after the next day at two o’clock he reached Bâle, and at once hastened to take up his station on the bridge. Nothing extraordinary attracted his attention. It was market-day, and some peasants were passing and repassing, bringing vegetables and taking back their empty carts. A squad of militia passed. Townfolk crossed the bridge, talking of the news of the day, and a little man, wearing a yellow coat, leaned over the railing and amused himself by dropping stones into the water, as if to create circling eddies, which he watched with a satisfied look. Four o’clock struck, and the Minister’s messenger started on his return to Paris. Very late in the evening the young man, greatly disappointed at the result of his mission, arrived at the house of Louvois. The Minister was still awake and rushed to meet his protégé.

“What did you see?” he asked.

“I saw peasants going and coming; a squad of militia passed over the bridge; citizens who walked along discussing the day’s news, and a little man wearing a yellow coat, who was amusing himself by dropping stones into the water.”

The Minister had heard enough, and he hurried to the king. The little man in yellow was a secret agent, and the stones dropped into the water was a signal that all difficulties had been overcome, and that Strasburg belonged to France.

_Tobacco in Diplomacy_

The “herb of peace” has played an important rôle in politics and diplomacy during the last two hundred years in the history of the world, and its influence upon the course of public events has been almost invariably of a beneficial character. Not only have its narcotic properties tended to soothe the angry passions of those intrusted with the conduct of international relations, but it has also afforded them the opportunity of thinking before they spoke, and allowed time for those second thoughts which in statecraft, at any rate, are always best. People are often disposed to make fun of the so-called “pipe of peace” and to regard it as a mere form of speech originating with the red Indians. But tobacco, whether taken in the form of a pipe, a cigar, a cigarette or snuff, has proved a powerful and effective aid to peace, and as such its use deserves to be fostered and propagated by all patriotic and law-abiding citizens, in lieu of being condemned as noxious. The value placed by people in the eighteenth century and in the early part of the nineteenth upon snuff as a preventive of violence is shown by the German historian Jacoby, who, writing of his times, declares: “Whenever any one displays signs of temper the snuff-box is handed to him, and we all have too much self-control, even under the most trying circumstances, ever to resist the power.”

Even women in those days who did not take snuff kept boxes for the purpose of averting quarrels among their admirers, and it was universally regarded as one of the most efficacious aids to the maintenance of friendly and agreeable intercourse. Nowadays snuff has gone out of fashion, and, as a rule, cigarettes have supplanted tobacco in its powdered form in what has been described as “diplomatic machinery.” The statesman or the ambassador who could formerly conceal his embarrassment and collect his thoughts for an appropriate answer during the slow and stately process of taking a “prise,” is now enabled to do so while breathing out nicely distanced rings of fragrant Turkish tobacco. Indeed, the cigarette proves perhaps a more effective ally in a moment of difficulty than the pinch of snuff. For whereas you cannot indefinitely prolong the process of inhaling the latter, it is always possible to gain time with a cigarette by letting it go out and then having to relight it. To-day there is scarcely any foreign minister or diplomat who is not provided with his cigarette-box, which he regards, not in the light of an object of personal luxury, but as part and parcel of the most indispensable paraphernalia of his office. It is worthy of note that the Russians, who devote more attention and importance to the study of diplomacy than any other Western nation, are always provided with finer cigarettes than any of their foreign colleagues, while one of the reasons why the late Khedive was subject to so much bullying and badgering by the various ministers and consuls accredited to his court was because his cigarettes were so execrable that it required the strongest dose of courtesy possible to make even a pretence of smoking them, the result being that he had to bear the full brunt of every disagreeable first thought that came into the mind of his foreign visitors, his cigarettes offering no inducement for them to reflect before speaking, and tending, moreover, to irritate rather than to soothe their tempers.

It is a peculiar fact that all women who have achieved fame in diplomacy, such as Princess Pauline Metternich, Princess Lise Troubetskoi, the late Princess Leopold Croy, Mme. de Novikoff, etc., have all been inveterate consumers of cigarettes, and each of those just mentioned has availed herself with signal advantage of the opportunity afforded by toying with a fragrant papilletto to reflect before speaking, which women, as a rule, alas! so seldom do. Apparently it is with the hope of encouraging women who are not, like Mme. de Novikoff and Princess Lise Troubetskoi, professed diplomats, to think before speaking, and thereby avert a goodly portion of the trouble which befalls man, that several of the governments of Continental Europe are encouraging the use of tobacco among the fair sex by providing smoking apartments for women on all the state railroads. And we even find that solemn and august functionary, the Speaker of the British House of Commons, the living embodiment of all that is most time-honored, old-fashioned, and ultra-respectable in the English Parliament, turning a deaf ear to the protest raised of late years in certain of the London newspapers against the now frequent spectacle offered on summer nights of women in full evening dress sitting out on the riverside terrace of the palace of Westminster puffing at their post-prandial cigarette. “The First Commoner of the Realm” is, like his predecessor, Lord Peel, apparently of the opinion that the weed, first dedicated to England’s “Virgin Queen,” is infinitely more effective and less injurious to high-strung feminine nerves than chloral, morphine or alcohol. The easiest-tempered and most tractable women of the universe are those of the Orient, who smoke all day long, and the same may be said of the women of Southern Europe. With the exception of the present Czarina of Russia, Queen Alexandra, and the Queen of the Netherlands, nearly all the women of the reigning houses of the Old World smoke.

_The Mystery of the Dauphin_

The story, according to which the Dauphin, son of King Louis XVI. and Queen Marie Antoinette, was done to death in the Temple prison by his brutal jailer Simon and the latter’s wife, has long since been exploded. It has been definitely established on the most incontrovertible evidence that the Dauphin did not die in the Temple at the hands of the Simons. The latter were not ignorant brutes, but well-to-do people, Simon being a member of the “Conseil Général” of the Seine, and, moreover, he resigned his guardianship of the Dauphin in January, 1794, eighteen months before the royal lad’s alleged death. There is abundant evidence to show that the Prince escaped, and that several members of the Royalist party were concerned in his flight.

The Dauphin eventually, after all sorts of adventures, when the star of Napoleon was on the wane, went to Berlin—he was about twenty-nine years old at the time—with a view of putting forward his claims for recognition as a member of the house of Bourbon. His uncles, the Comte de Provence (afterward King Louis XVIII.) and the Comte d’Artois (subsequently King Charles X.) were in receipt of handsome allowances from the Prussian, Russian, and English governments, and the Dauphin hoped that he, too, might be provided for in a similar way. The Prussian government, however, was committed to the Comte de Provence, and the chief of the Berlin police forced the Dauphin to surrender to him all the papers establishing his identity, and then furnished him with a passport describing him as a native of Weimar. These papers were never returned to him, in spite of all his efforts to recover them, and they remain at Berlin to this day. Eventually he made his way to Holland. The Dutch authorities, who are the most strict in the world in all matters relating to the assumption of unauthorized names and titles, not only permitted him to figure on the marriage and death registry at Delft as “Louis of Bourbon, son of King Louis XVI. and Queen Marie Antoinette,” but likewise allowed his sons and grandsons to serve under the royal name of Bourbon in the Dutch Army.

True, the Duke of Orleans, like his father before him, denounces the claims of these Dutch Bourbons, now established at Paris in the wine business, as ridiculous, and stigmatizes the alleged Dauphin as having been an impostor. Yet, in spite of all the efforts, and the large amount of money spent by Louis XVIII., Charles X., King Louis Philippe, and the Comte de Paris, no one has ever succeeded in finding out who the alleged Dauphin could possibly have been, if not the son of the ill-fated Queen Marie Antoinette.

It was natural that the brothers of Louis XVI. refused to recognize the alleged Dauphin as their nephew, since by their recognition he would have become an obstacle in the way of their accession to the throne of France on the restoration of the Bourbon dynasty. Moreover, they had always been among the most bitter enemies of Marie Antoinette, insisting that her children were the offspring of another man instead of their eldest brother. There is, however, evidence to the effect that they provided for the lad’s maintenance after his escape from the Temple, on the understanding that he should be kept in the background, being unwilling that any personage should be appealed to in the matter. But when he grew up, they denounced him as a fraud.

It may be remembered that the Vatican, when asked in 1826 for a permit of consecration of the Chapelle Expiatoire at Paris, erected over what was understood to be the remains of King Louis XVI., of his queen, and of their son, only granted it on the condition that the name of the Dauphin was removed, taking the ground, set forth in an official dispatch, which is on record, that it could not lend itself to the comedy of consecrating a memorial chapel to a living person.

That the Prussian government or the Prussian crown have among their archives papers proving the usurpation of the French throne by Louis XVIII., the escape from prison of the Dauphin, and his identity with that Louis Bourbon who died at Delft, and to whom the president of the Berlin police had given a passport as “Naundorff,” a citizen of Weimar, where, by the by, no such person had ever been born or lived, has long been known. The Russian imperial archives and those of the Vatican are likewise known to possess equally conclusive documentary evidence upon the subject, and the attitude of the papacy toward the Dutch Bourbons has always been particularly considerate.

_The Sistine Madonna and La Fornarina_

People who are not content to accept the old-fashioned traditions concerning pictures and artists will be pleased with some recent discoveries about Raphael made by the art critics. These ingenious persons have practically exhausted Leonardo da Vinci, who for many years was their favorite quarry, having proved to their own satisfaction that nearly every picture ascribed to him was painted by some one else. They have now turned upon Raphael, and in the merciless but scientific dissection of his works and his life not only the authenticity but the fame of his Sistine Madonna has been placed in question. The chain of circumstantial evidence, it is true, seems incomplete in parts, but the missing links will be supplied by that faith which science often demands no less than legend.

Raphael has the unusual distinction of having had an excellent reputation among his contemporaries. He was a hard worker, and his private life was so uneventful as to excite no comment. This was hardly artistic, so, fifty years after his death, Vasari supplied him with a nameless mistress, a baker’s daughter, “La Fornarina,” whom the painter saw and loved in her father’s garden, near the Church of Santa Cecilia, in the Trastevere quarter at Rome. In another fifty years this story had grown into the well known tale of the painter’s passionate love bringing about his early death, and the beautiful, sensuous face of “La Fornarina” in the Uffizi Gallery at Florence made it credible. Sentimental persons looked on her portrait and then on Raphael’s own, and had no doubts.

Then came the critics. They proved that it was not Raphael but Sebastian del Piombo who had painted the portrait, and that it represented not “La Fornarina” but an entirely different woman, a beauty of Bologna. Their scepticism, however, stopped short of rejecting the whole story. They cling to that in all its details, and one of them, Signor Valeri, of Rome, has just confirmed it by discovering “La Fornarina’s” name. His method is interesting.

First, he found in somebody’s manuscript life of Goethe that “La Fornarina’s” Christian name was Margarita; next, in a census of Rome made in 1518, two years before Raphael’s death, kept in the Vatican library, he discovered that a baker named Francesco, from Siena, kept a bakery near the Church of Santa Cecilia; finally, he searched in the registers of the nunnery of Santa Apollonia, and found there under the date August 18, 1520, four months after Raphael’s death, the name of “Margarita, daughter of the late Francesco Luti of Siena,” as having been received into the convent as a nun. Therefore this Margarita Luti or Luzzi must necessarily be “La Fornarina.”

This demonstration was hardly needed by the art critics, whose faith in the existence of the Fornarina was unshaken. Having discredited the Uffizi portrait, they looked around among Raphael’s other paintings for her features. For a time they inclined to the “Veiled Woman” in the Pitti Gallery, but finally settled on the Sistine Madonna as representing the painter’s beloved. The evidence for the identification is of the slightest, and surely the simple peasant girl, whose innocence and loveliness alone the painter has transmitted to us, might have been left unsmirched. Such as it is, however, the identification is shaken by another art critic. A lynx-eyed young German iconoclast has cast doubts on the authenticity of the Dresden Gallery’s treasure, and declares boldly that the picture is not the “Madonna di San Sisto,” and that in all likelihood Raphael never painted it. His attack is backed by such a display of erudition that the director of the gallery went to Italy to find out if there might not be some foundation of truth in it.