more or
less identified himself with the productions of his pen. Take Walter
Scott, for instance; or Byron, or Addison, or Dryden; or, to go still
earlier, take Ben Jonson, or Kit Marlowe, or Geoffrey Chaucer, and
each and all of them have external marks by which we could assign the
authorship, even if the production had been published anonymously. Try
Shakspeare's plays by the same test, and suppose _Hamlet_, _Macbeth_,
&c., had been successively published after the fashion of Junius, and
what critic of any age would ever have ascribed them to William
Shakspeare?

This may appear uncandid and unfair. It may be said, that Shakspeare
lived in a time when letter-writing and letter-preserving were
comparatively infrequent, and that we have no right to deprive him of
his authorship, any more than we should have had to deprive Dr Johnson
of _Rasselas_, if he had not had the good-fortune of a Boswell to
record his sayings. So we humbly think it would, had Shakspeare, like
Homer, been wholly unknown, and every record of him lost; we should
then, as in the case of Homer, have judged exclusively from the
internal evidence of the works themselves, and formed a brilliant
ideal picture of what the astonishing author must have been in his
daily walk, correspondence, and conversation. But, unfortunately,
enthusiasm worked up to its pitch, sweeping the clouds for a
bird's-eye view of the high pinnacle of human greatness commensurate
with the 'local habitation and the name' of such a genius, is at once
'cabined, cribbed, confined,' by the authentic recorded whatabouts,
whenabouts, and whereabouts of William Shakspeare, actor, owner,
purchaser, and chattels and messuage devisor whilom of the Globe
Theatre, Surrey-side; item of the Blackfriars, Fleet Street; and
ultimately of Stratford-on-Avon, '_gent_,' husband of Anne Hathaway,
to whom he devises his second-best bed. On the one hand, research has
traced his life from the cradle to the grave, and by means of
tradition, legal documents, records, and inscriptions, formed a very
accurate skeleton biography; while, on the other hand, with the single
exception of Ben Jonson, to be noticed hereafter, records and even
tradition are silent upon his walk and conversation; and though his
signature has been several times disinterred, his whole
correspondence, if he ever wrote a letter, has sunk like lead beneath
the dark waters of oblivion; indeed, even the single signature as yet
discovered unc