'His name is Goodman Dingland, the gardener.' 'Oh,' said the man 'if he be thy goodfather, he is at the next alehouse, but I feare thou takest God's name in vaine. But Taylor might have worked it over from a contemporary as well as gotten it from Joe Miller himself.

Though Dr. Halliwell-Phillipps, after reading his own citations so industriously collected, decides against the Shakespearian paternity of Sir William D'Avenant, I cannot myself, on reading them, feel so positive. The fact that the innuendo was put upon paper so many times: By Aubrey (1680); Gildon (1699); Hearne (1709); Jacobs (1719); Pope (1733), again in (1744); Oldys (1750), again in his notes on Langbaine (1791); The Lives of the Poets (1753); A Description of England and Wales (1769); J. Taylor's Letters to Malone (1810); and so comparatively near the event, ought to go for something surely. On the other hand, of course, the will of John Davenant himself, made in 1622 (earlier than the earliest of the insinuations), speaks of William as his undoubted son. The facts are all preserved, and the contemporary references carefully reprinted, in Dr. Halliwell-Phillipps' “Outlines," and such is the constitution of the human mind-that of very little evidence can it be said that it impresses all minds alike. But at any rate, Shakespeare left no known son, legitimate or natural, if Sir William D'Avenant was not that son. But if he was not Shakespeare's son, he is conceded to have been his godson, which surely is glory enough for any man. H. P. HARMAN.

NOTE. By oversight, the view of John Davenant's hostelry at Oxford, "the Crown Inn," was inserted as frontispiece to the January (1892) SHAKESPEARIANA.

BOOKS RECEIVED.

[75] JAHRBUCH DER DUETSCHEN SHAKESPEARE-GESELLSCHAFT IM AUFTRAGE HERAUSGEGEBEN JAHRGAND. 8vo, pp. 360. Weimar: in kommission bei A. Huschke.

[76] THE MORTAL MOON; Or, Bacon and HIS MASKS. The Defoe Period Unmasked. By J. E. Roe. 12m0, pp. 604. New York: Burr Printing House.

[77] THE CAMBRIDGE SHAKESPEARE, Vols. IV.-V. Crown 8vo, pp. 436-458. New York: Macmillan & Co.

[78] LATEST LITERARY ESSAYS AND ADDRESSES OF JAMES RUSSELL LOWEll. 12m0, pp. 184. Boston: Houghton, Mifflin & Co.

[79] FRANCIS BACON AND HIS SECRET SOCIETY. An attempt to collect and unite the lost links of a long and strong chain. By Mrs. Henry Pott. 12mo, cloth, pp. 421. Chicago: Francis J. Schulte & Co.

BOOKS REVIEWED.

[76] "The Mortal Moon may be an ejaculation, as in the sonnet it is said: "The Mortal Moon hath her eclipse endured." But why this book is so called, or why it is printed, or what it is about (all that there is in it has been lately printed in other arrangement) passes man's understanding.

[78] There probably never was a more "all around" literary man than the late James Russell Lowell. Doing a very little—or at least not too much of any one thing, it is hard to find anything he did, prose, poetry, criticism, in which any improvement can be suggested. The volume before us contains (besides the essay on Richard III., to which we are expected to call especial attention below) papers on Gray, Landor, Walton, Milton's Areopagitica. The essay or

lecture on Richard III. was one which Lowell, for some reason, did not himself care to see in print, did not indicate to his publishers as among those of his pieces which might go into any collection of his writings: one with which, as Prof. Norton says in a brief note, Mr. Lowell "was not satisfied." thankful to Professor Norton for reprinting it. of it to which our attention has been attracted himself, to be dissatisfied with it, and Mr. E. A. preface to Vol. XV. of the Bankside Shakespeare, is calmly and judicially severe with it. But on a re-reading we are inclined to fall in with Dr. Lowell's reasoning, and, malgre Mr. Calkins, to express our ex

But we must still be
The general reviews
appear, like Lowell
Calkins, in his noble

treme sense of the luminousness of Dr. Lowell's perception of the bottom trouble with the Richard III.

Mr. Lowell's argument is in fact very much the argument by which Mr. Morgan, in his introductions to the Bankside Titus Andronicus and Pericles, felt compelled to decide that those plays were Shakespeare's—namely: that while Shakespeare might be turgid-preposterous, deal in blood and thunder, follow popular models, fall below himself over and over again-yet the one thing which was impossible to Shakespeare was that he should be for long dull, or that he could write an entire speech or scene without flashing himself out. "His incomparable force and delicacy of poetic expression which can never keep themselves hidden for long, but flash out from time to time like those pulses of pale flame with which the sky throbs at unpropheticable intervals, as if in involuntary betrayal of the coming Northern Lights: . . in all his plays we have evidence that he could not long keep his mind from that kind of overflow." If Mr. Morgan had been a word-painter instead of a Shakespearian, he would have expressed it in this inimitable way. But this is Mr. Morgan's argument from beginning to end.

Proceeding specifically with the Richard III., Dr. Lowell finds also that there is no humor in the Richard III., except the one touch where Richard rebukes Buckingham for saying "Zounds." But this, if humor, is rather grim, from the sovereign to the man who, from loading with honors, he is about to order beheaded. And he questions if Shakespeare, however intentionally dull and perfunctory, could for so long have repressed his all-enwrapping humor. Again, Dr. Lowell misses the eloquence which, any more than the humor, Shakespeare could not keep from issuing from the end of his pen. Could Shakespeare have done those twelve ghosts with their antiphonal monotony, or those two addresses of Richard and Richmond to their respective armies, in the former of which only is there the slightest gleam of that crystallizing power which Shakespeare had of unexpectedly and in a phrase uttering a whole lexicon of contempt? "Who never in their lives felt so much cold as over shoes in snow," is Lowell's example of this power. That stinging sentence in which Henry at Agincourt tells a Frenchman that his soldiers are so ragged, hungry and worn out that they are little better "than so many French," is another. We think, therefore, that a more careful reading of this essay, now it is in print, will dispel the public disfavor with which it was received a disfavor arising, undoubtedly, from its destructive criticism of even a single play of the world's idol, or from the popular impression, created by newspapers mostly, that it was on the line of the small men who say that this and that and the other is not "Shakespeare," who print parts of the plays in small type in their editions because of-well, because of fifteen or twenty pages of reasons, à la Fleay, Furnivall and (we extremely regret to add) à la Dr. Rolfe himself, who, beginning by doing good work, has at last, in his old age, succumbed to this Bottom-the-weaver "business."

If we are going to throw Shakespeare out of the window, as Landor threw his cook, every time we come upon one of these acreages, we might as well join hands with dear Mrs. Pott, for even she admits that Shakespeare might have been equal to the dull and heavy-witted filling-in between the splendid Bacon's magnificent period. But this is not what Dr. Lowell does. And we think that a

re-reading of this elegant paper will impress every one with the exact and steady, even if light and playful, hand of the critic at his best. And we should not be surprised either, if more than one of these rereaders should not rise convinced of the justice and cogency of Dr. Lowell's criticism.

[79] Mrs. Pott has always been and, we trust, always will be treated with the utmost respect and esteem in SHAKESPEARIANA. Her zeal and perseverance are certainly admirable, and when she adds this compactly printed volume of 421 pages to her other works, she may well feel that she has given reasons for the faith that is in her. These reasons do not touch us, or else we are not in touch with them. As we once said about Mr. Wigston's occult volumes: Supposing all this Rosicrucian stuff is true, what has it got to do with the Baconian authorship of Shakespeare? And is it not time to stop all this twaddle about the "secrets" the Rosicrucians imagined that they possessed? Why not turn the tables, and ask what the Rosicrucians would have said to the telephone, the electric light, the phonograph, the telegraph and the rest of our amenities or nineteeth-century secrets," if we are pleased to call them so? And (though to nobody else than to Mrs. Pott would we spare the necessary space) let us add that even a temptation to read Mrs. Pott's book would be sadly handicapped, if not blocked at the start, by reading on page 12 an allusion to "Mr. Donnelly's great discovery of cipher in the Shakespeare Folio of 1623." If Mrs. Pott still thinks that her friend Donnelly "discovered" anything, or that there is a cipher in the First Folio, as we said once before, let it be so. But others quite as competent as Mrs. Pottseveral millions of others-disagree with her as to her facts.

66

Mrs. Pott continues, we perceive, to find "parallelisms," such as were quoted by Mr Breeze from papers in the journal of the Bacon Society, and between such passages as these (the italics are Mrs. Pott's, p. 248): (1) "Winds the great waves of the air. . . . They may blow down trees. . ... They may likewise overturn edifices, but the more solid structures they cannot destroy, unless accompanied by earthquakes. Sometimes they hurl down avalanches from the mountains so as almost to bury the plains beneath them; sometimes they cause great inundations of water." BACON ("History of the Winds").

Though you untie the winds and let them fight
Against the churches; though the yesty waves
Confound and swallow navigation up;

Though bladed corn be lodged and trees blown down;

Though castles topple on their warders' heads;

Though palaces and pyramids do slope

Their heads to their foundations; though the treasure

Of nature's germens tumble altogether

Even til destruction sicken.

MACBETH.

If Mrs. Pott can read these two passages aloud, or listen to somebody else read them aloud, and still conceive that they were written by the same person, why, then, several millions of Mrs. Pott's equals in average intelligence disagree with her not only as to her facts. but as to her judgment. And doubtless it is and always will be mere

*Ante, Vol. VI., p. 115.