n this habit of mind, and have not entirely outgrown it yet; have not so
far outgrown it but that literary discussions, problems, discoveries
engage me though they lie remote from literature's service to man
(who has but a short while to live, and labour and vanity if he outlast
it). I could join in a hunt after Bunyan's grandmothers, and have
actually spent working days in trying to discover the historical facts of
which _Robinson Crusoe_ may be an allegory. One half of my quarrel with
those who try to prove that Bacon wrote Shakespeare rests on resentment of
the time they force me to waste; and a new searcher for the secret of the
Sonnets has only to whistle and I come to him--though, to be sure, that
gentleman almost cured me who identified the Dark Lady with Ann Hathaway,
resting his case upon--

SONNET CCXVIII.

Whoever hath my wit, thou hast thy Will:
And where is Will alive but _hath a way?_
So in device thy wit is starved still
And as devised by Will. That is to say,
My second-best best bed, yea, and the gear withal
Thou hast; but all that capital messuage
Known as New Place goes to Susanna Hall.
Haply the disproportion may engage
The harmless ail-too-wise which otherwise
Might knot themselves disknitting of a clue
That Bacon wrote me. Lastly, I devise
My wit, to whom? To wit, to-whit, to-whoo!
And here revoke all previous testaments:
Witness, J. Shaw and Robert Whattcoat, Gents.

After this confession you will pardon any small complacency that may
happen to betray itself in the ensuing narrative.

Mr. Dobell followed up his discovery of Traherne by announcing another
_trouvaille_, and one which excited me not a little:--

"Looking recently over a parcel of pamphlets which I had purchased,
I came upon some loose leaves which were headed _A Prospect of
Society_. The title struck me as familiar, and I had only to
read a few lines to recognise them as belonging to [Goldsmith's]
_The Traveller_. But the opening lines of my fragment are not the
opening lines of the poem as it was published; in fact, the first two
lines of _A Prospect of Society_ are lines 353-4 in the first edition
of _The Traveller_. . . . A further examination of the fragment which
I had discovered showed that it is not what is usually understood as
a 'proof' of _The Traveller_, but rather t