hed his edition of the Sonnets, with the
evidence he had collected. He lent me a copy of the book, which I
never returned. But I reviewed it in the Pall Mall Gazette on the 7th
of January 1886, and thereby let loose the Fitton theory in a wider
circle of readers than the book could reach. Then Tyler died, sinking
unnoted like a stone in the sea. I observed that Mr Acheson, Mrs
Davenant's champion, calls him Reverend. It may very well be that he
got his knowledge of Hebrew in reading for the Church; and there was
always something of the clergyman or the schoolmaster in his dress and
air. Possibly he may actually have been ordained. But he never told
me that or anything else about his affairs; and his black pessimism
would have shot him violently out of any church at present established
in the West. We never talked about affairs: we talked about
Shakespear, and the Dark Lady, and Swift, and Koheleth, and the
cycles, and the mysterious moments when a feeling came over us that
this had happened to us before, and about the forgeries of the
Pentateuch which were offered for sale to the British Museum, and
about literature and things of the spirit generally. He always came
to my desk at the Museum and spoke to me about something or other, no
doubt finding that people who were keen on this sort of conversation
were rather scarce. He remains a vivid spot of memory in the void of
my forgetfulness, a quite considerable and dignified soul in a
grotesquely disfigured body.

Frank Harris

To the review in the Pall Mall Gazette I attribute, rightly or
wrongly, the introduction of Mary Fitton to Mr Frank Harris. My
reason for this is that Mr Harris wrote a play about Shakespear and
Mary Fitton; and when I, as a pious duty to Tyler's ghost, reminded
the world that it was to Tyler we owed the Fitton theory, Frank
Harris, who clearly had not a notion of what had first put Mary into
his head, believed, I think, that I had invented Tyler expressly for
his discomfiture; for the stress I laid on Tyler's claims must have
seemed unaccountable and perhaps malicious on the assumption that he
was to me a mere name among the thousands of names in the British
Museum catalogue. Therefore I make it clear that I had and have
personal reasons for remembering Tyler, and for regarding myself as in
some sort charged with the duty of reminding the world of his work. I
am sorry for his sake that Mary's portrait is fair, and that Mr W. H