some study at least of the attorney's part
of law. After considering all that Mr. Wilkes urges, we find nothing in
his ingeniously extracted evidence to shake our faith in these
probabilities. But in any case all this is of small importance. Suppose
Shakespeare to have been a Romanist, and never to have entered an
attorney's office: of what moment are these conclusions to the reader
of his plays? The facts were important to Shakespeare himself, but are
of only the slightest interest to any one else.

Mr. Wilkes's American point of view is finally and chiefly that which
he takes of Shakespeare's social feeling, according to his--Mr.
Wilkes's--conception of it. He says of him that it seems strange that
"unlike all the great geniuses of the world who had come before or
[have] come after him, he should be the only one so deficient in that
beneficent tenderness toward his race, so vacant of those sympathies
which usually accompany intellectual power, as never to have been
betrayed into one generous aspiration in favor of popular liberty. Nay,
worse than this, worse than his servility to royalty and rank, we never
find him speaking of the poor with respect, or alluding to the working
classes without detestation or contempt." This view of the great
poet-dramatist is repeated over and over again, all through Mr.
Wilkes's book. The point is not a new one. It has been considered by
one or two of Mr. Wilkes's predecessors, and has been set aside as of
no significance by those who have brought it up for consideration. We
cannot congratulate Mr. Wilkes upon his success in establishing his
position. The subject is of some interest, and for example we take Mr.
Wilkes's remarks in his twenty-third chapter, which is entirely devoted
to the support he finds for it in the first part of "Henry VI." He
quotes passages in which La Pucelle (Joan of Arc) calls herself "a
shepherd's daughter," speaks of her "contemptible estate," and her
"base vocation"; in which Talbot expresses his insulted feeling at a
proposal that he, when a prisoner, should have been proposed in
exchange for a "baser man of arms," and in which he and other noblemen
speak with contempt of peasants. And then he exclaims, "Lords, lords,
lords; nothing but princes and lords, and The People never alluded to
except as _worthless peasants_, or to be scorned as _scabs_, and
_hedge-born_ swains." The reply to all this is much like the famous one
as to the stealing of the kettle; w