In our notice of the last number of the China Review we referred to a pestilent tial sort of people, as noisy as they are mistaken, who hold that the plays of Shakespeare were not written by Shakespeare at all, bat by Francis Bacon, the greatest, wisest, meanest of mankind" The chief and to our minds unanswerable reply to this state. ment is that it is impossible to believe that the egutemporaries and rivals of Shakespeare could have been cheated into accepting him as the author of the plays, if he did not write them. Ben Jenson was not always on the best of terms with his greater contemporary and he was in familiar intercourse with him at times. He must have known whether Shakespeare was a genius or an impostor, a peacock or a daw in borrowed plumes: and if he had not been convinced that Shakespeare was the author of the plays printed in the First Folio, he would never have cou. tributed to it the verses that face the portrait This Figure that thou here sees put, It was for gentle Shakespeare cut Wherein the graver had a strife With Nature, to outdoor the life O, Could he but have drawn his wit As well in brasse, as he hath hit His face; the Print would then aurpasse All, that was ever writ in brasse, But, since he cannot, Reader, locke Not on his Picture, but his Boke, Nor would be have written and signed with his full name the long poetical dedication, in whioh the Bard is compared to Chaucer, Spenser and Boaumont, is told that he outshines Marlowe, and that Aschylus, Euripides and Sophocles should be called forth to hear him. These things, however, move not the Baoonians, and they have lately found a mighty champion in a well-known, and much-laughed-at writer, Mr. Iguatiue Donnelly, of Hastings, Minnesota, ox-Member of Congress, author of Atlantis and Ragnarok, wild and whirling worke that uve already attained the honour of being in their twelfth and sixth editions respectively. It was well pointed out by M. Charles de Remu in his book on " Bacon, his Life, his Times, Lis Philosophy, and his Influence up to our own days," Uiat it is difficult to believe that the author of the Novum Organon would have left the world in ignorance of the fact that the same hand had written Othello and Hamlet, and that the discoverer of new scientific methods was the poet of Romeo and Juliet." This difficulty has now been swept away by Mr. Donnelly. Those who are acquaint. ed with facsimiles of the First Folio, the edition princeps of Ube poet, published as such by his faithful colleagues, Hemiuge and Coudell, know well that as a specimen of typography this volume, magnificent as it is considering its date, 1623, leaves much to be desired. Not only is the pagivation most being @ point on role are specially carefal—but in the words of a noted Shakespearean scholar, Mr. Grant White: "Besides minor errors, the correction of which is obvious, words are in some cases 80 transformed as to be past recognition, even with the aid of the context; lines are transposed sentences are sometimes broken by a fall point followed by capital letter, and at other times have their members displaced and mingled in iuoompre. heusible confusion; verse is printed fs prose, and prose ax verso; specs
Text read from the printed page and cleaned; old type leaves the occasional error.