* "The Medical Acquirement of Shakespeare." By C. W.
Stearns, M. D. New York, 1865. Shakespeare's Medical
Knowledge. By Dr. Bucknill. London. 1860.
** "Shakespeare and the Bible." By John Bees, etc., etc.
Philadelphia: Claxton, Remsen & Haffelfinger, 1876.
We commend to readers of this paper this latest authority,
and can not forbear noting a few of his "discoveries." Mr.
Rees has found out (p. 37) not only that William Shakespeare
wrote the lines—
"———-Not a hair perished,
On their sustaining garments not a blemish,
But fresher than before." ("The Tempest," i. 2)
But that he took them from Deuteronomy viii. 4.
And in Acts xxvii. 34:
There shall not a hair fall from the head of any of you.
In which the parallelism is in the word hair!!!
Or, again (p. 36) that the lines:
Though they are of monstrous shape,...
Their manners are more gentle, kind, than of Our human
generation you shall find Many, nay, almost any ("The
Tempest," iii. 3),
are taken from the following:
In the same quarters were possessions of the chief man of
the island, whose name was Publius; who received us, and
lodged us three days courteously,... who also honored us
with many honors; and when we departed, they laded us with
such things as were necessary.—(Acts xxviii. 7-10.
In which—unless it be in the fact that one of these
passages is in an act and the other in Acts—the reader must
find the parallelism for himself, without assistance from
Mr. Rees.
Shakespeare, Mr. Rees tells us, never neglected his Bible,
because (p. 28) "he was indebted to one whose love added a
bright charm to the holy passages she taught him to read and
study—to his mother was Shakespeare indebted for early
lessons of piety, and a reverence for a book from whose
passages in afterlife he wove himself a mantle of undying
fame!"

It is to be hoped, for charity's sweet sake, that his latest authority has truth for his color and testimony for his oil. The picture has at least the freshness and charm of utter novelty!

The work of Shakespeare-making goes on. The facts are of record. We may ran as we read them! But rather let us, out of reverence for the errors of our fathers, refuse to read at all, and accept the ideal of Malone, of Halliwell and De Quincy, of Grant White, and of ten thousand more, who prefer to write their biographies of William Shakespeare, not in the first person, like Baron Munchhausen, nor in the second person, like the memoirs of Sully, but in the probable and supposititious person of "it is possible he did this," and "it is likely he did that."

Let those who will, disparage the boy and man William Shakespeare, who married and made an honest woman of Anne Hathaway of Shottery; left home to earn his own living rather than be a drain on the slender household store; used his first wealth to make a gentleman of his father; and who, with what followed, purchased himself a home on his boyhood's banks, where—"procul negotiis"—in the evening of life he might enjoy the well-won fruits of early toil. But that he ever claimed, much less wrote, what we call the Shakespearean drama, let those bring proof who can.

PART II. THE APPEAL TO HISTORY.

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