REV. JOHN WARD, 1662. "Shakespeare, Drayton and Jonson had a merrie meeting, and it seems drank too hard, for Shakespeare died of a fever there contracted."

Shakespeare in his frequent journeys between London and his native place, Stratford-upon Avon, used to lie at Davenant, at the Crown in Oxford. He was very well acquainted with Mrs. Davenant, and her son, afterwards Sir William, was supposed to be more nearly related to him, (Shakespeare,) than as a godson only.

Spence, on the authority of Pope, 1730, to the same effect; John Taylor, 1629; Aubrey, 1630; Gildon, 1699; Hearne, 1709; Jacobs, 1716: Chetwoode, 1749; Oldys, 1750; "British Theatre," 1750; "Lives of the Poets," 1753; "Description of England and Wales," 1769; Warton, 1780; Malone, 1780; Taylor, 1810.

On Tuesday, April 23rd, he died."

"The Crown Inn, which stood near Carfax in Oxford, was the centre of associations, real or imaginary, with Shakespeare's journey from the capital to his home in New Place. **** The spell of Oxford must have been upon him and volumes of biography might well be exchanged for an account of one evening in the Commons room of some college when the greatest and most companion. able of English men of gen!us was the guest of scholars who shared with him the liberatory spirit of the new age." (page 53.)

To proceed with this parallelization would be to print in perpendicular half-columns, Mr. Mabie's entire 500 pages: The above is quite enough to justify the question asked above, "Is the Hamilton W. Mabie a Moral Person?"

To do this sort of thing, is, Mr. Mabie tells us, to satisfy the "problem of modern art!" "The Problem of Modern Art" says Mr. Mabie, "is to harmonize freedom, beauty and joy with moral sanity, order and power." We tremble to think that "The problem of modern art" requires M. Mabie to present us with Caliban as a pream of manly beauty, or in writing Jewish History, to present us with Herod as President of the Palestine Society for the Prevention of Cruelty to Children; or, if he should elect himself to illuminate the lives of the Ceasars, to describe Messalina as a Vestal Virgin! So far as Shakespeare happens to be concerned, those whom this kind of solution of "the problem of modern art" would not irritate, might perhaps propose a problem of their own, viz: "If this is what Mr. Hamilton W. Mabie thinks of Shakespeare what would Shakespeare think of Mr. Hamilton W. Mabie?" But we hope that they will not push things that far! To say that the sentence about harmonizing "freedom, beauty and joy" etc., means about as much as the pulpit utterances of the Rev. Charles Honeyman, that is: exactly nothing at all, would be too

cruel? Perhaps Patience and Lady Jane would dispose of it better. To me, would say Patience "It all seems to be nonsense." "Nonsense? Yes!" would reply Lady Jane, "But O! what Precious Nonsense!" "Papa, potatoes, prunes and prism" said Mrs. General "are all very good words for the lips, especially prunes and prisms. You will find it serviceable in the formation of a demeanor if you sometimes say to yourself in company, on entering a room, for instance. "Papa, potatoes, poultry, prunes and prism, prunes and prism." To prunes and prism, we now learn was that interesting period the Youth of Shakespeare, devoted! With sunny morning face hopping like robin joyfully to school six days o' the week; on Saturdays with his small hand in that of his beloved preceptor Mr. Barlow, he took long walks on Avon's banks, quite another Sanford and Merton' with "Pray sir, why is," etc., etc. "Pray sir, do we not perceive in this," etc., etc. Eschewing such vulgar temptations as drinking bouts at Piping Pebworth, or poaching on Sir Lucy's deer, or the squire's rabbits, small wonder that we get a Blameless Prig such as specially attracts Mr. Mabie to lavish upon him the entire resources of the English language! Only a Blameless Prig could have written those marvelous plays! The mystery of Shakespeare is now eternally solved without the aid of the Baconian Theorists! And Shakespeare was a Blameless Prig!

Still, we suppose for those that like this kind of a Shakespeare, this is the kind of a Shakespeare they like. But those who prefer exact statement, even if not particular as to the facts, Mr. Mabie's habit of loose thinking will perhaps Irritate. When, for example, we read that "Shakespeare's part in Henry VI brought him immediate recognition," and in proof of this, is quoted again as if it was a discovery of Mr. Mabie's, Green's familiar diatribe against the Johannes-Factotum, and the Chetle commentary thereon, an occasional reader might remember that some very recent students, like Mr. Fleay, have found reason for suspicion that the individual aimed at was Marlowe instead of Shakespeare at all! If Mr. Mabie had said that the work of Falstaff and "the Irregular Humorists" in Henry IV. made the plays so popular that they were pirated by the printer and printed in broadsides (the quartos) and so came to be preserved to us to-day, he would have stated the exact truth. No one has ever suspected two hands in the composition of the Henry Fourth. But Mr. Mabie's rapid pen, by long space-writing exigency of the newspaper habit, has not leisure for the mass of modern explorations. What Mr. Mabie wants to be sure of, is, whether the gown hangs in absolutely correct folds, regardless of the lines of the figure he is draping, and aided by a mouthful of pins he will gather in here and let out there, smoothing out wrinkles and adding diapharous frills and Frou-frou, in the height of his ambition to be a complete lady's maid among the Biographers of Shakespeare! Possibly it may all work for good, possibly we have our compensation in that he has turned out a Life of Shakespeare which can be safely put into the hands of the Young Person without bringing a blush to its cheek by suggestion that Herder's 'immense figure of a man', was not always and altogether his grandsire incut alabaster! If so, why then so good. But we doubt it!

It does not in the least bother Mr. Mabie that the study of Shakespeare is full of pitfalls other than moral ones; that there are textual man-holes everywhere; that a little learning is rarely anywhere so dangerous as in these paths. He foots it just as featly here and there. If, for example, Mr. Mabie, does not know, surely it is not necessary that the ordinary reader should realize as he reads his Shakespeare, that he is perusing a selected and a complex text; that this passage is not in a first quarto or a third quarto, or is otherwise in one of the folios, or that another is not in any folio or quarto, or dates from the eighteenth or nineteenth century, and so on and so on. What mat. ters it? This is all "Shakespeare," and Mr. Mabie is no less a valuable sign-post to lead young ladies of both sexes to reading Shakespeare because he does not suspect these things and therefore does not mention them to others. But is perhaps a little disappoint ing, possibly a trifle irritating, to a student to run against these miry blunderings. Had Mr. Mabie consulted any tolerable edition of the Plays and learned, for example, that it was "poor piddling Theobold" and not Dame Quickly who said that Falstaff on his death-bed "babbled o' green fields!" But consider the consequences had he happened to have discovered this! He would have been debarred the pleasure of telling us what his friend "Mr. Locke Richardson" thought about the aforesaid green fields. To reflect that if Mr. Mabie had only had leisure, how, instead of such new names as "Locke Richardson,' ," "Prof. C. H. Herford," and "Mr. George C. Wyndham," (doubtless all good friends of Mr. Mabie's and so mentionable on the Furnivallian plan, but new names among the prophets to us, at any rate) we might have had hundreds of pages of Mr. Mabie's choicest insight! But then, alas, that old lady who died so long ago as 1862, (cited as authority by Mr. Mabie) might never have been heard from among the hundreds and thousands of Shakespearean students whose lifetime have been loaned to the very drudgery which Mr. Mabie has so happily escaped.

Perhaps it is that, in this Age of Ink, the man who does not write a book is a Public Benefactor! If there remaineth any sanity in the dictum that no one shall write at all except in matters wherein he is Authority, and that tours de force are sins to be answered for at the Day of Judgment, then Mr. Hamilton W. Mabie is a sinner before all that have gone before him. For he is not, and has not become in this book, Authority on matters Shakesperean. And he has not even had the excuse of a tour de force! He has no case to make, no theory to advocate, no plea to urge. A mere figment, of course of no consequence in comparison with the gain to Adolescence of a real Blameless Prig, not to mention Mr. Hamilton W. Mabie himself as harmonizer of Freedom, Beauty and joy with moral sanity, Order and Power, and Grappler-in-general with the Problem of Modern Art! But grappling with the Problems of Modern Art is not exactly a "Life of Shakespearǝ." It will hardly suffice to allege as an excuse for Mr. Mabie's twitter of soulful sunsets and throbbing sympathies to conceal slipshod unfamiliarty with what he is talking about, that Shakespeare has been written to death, and that there is really nothing to be done but to embrace with idolatrous fancy what is already in print. Some things yet remain which

(not to interrupt the flow of soul into his typewriter too long of course,) it might be profitable to look up. Where, for example, did Shakespeare get his information as to the effect of tears upon white-hot metal; the Talmudic drop of poison in the corner of the moon; the tides in the Bosphorus which "ne'er know returning ebb;" the business methods of Mytelene brothels two or three thousand years before his birth; of a wolf having been hung for eating a live man, and so on? We really can afford to leave all these puzzles to the Baconians. Have we not a Life of Shakespeare by Mr. Hamilton W. Mabie?

If it occurred to Mr. Mabie that if he must write about Shakespeare, it would have been judicious to himself to read up about him first, possible he might have earned a niche for himself, not in the school of Messrs Pecksniff, Podsnap and Waldengarver. (A little Shakespearean information is not a dangerous thing but in the entirely proper school of Miss Blanche Amory and those ladies' Tea-and-Shakespeare Societies, of which (at least if we count in with them the Ice Cream-and-Shakespeare Clubs,) there are some ten thousand or more in these great United States! As it is, we doubt if even to the Teaand-Shakespeare people Mr. Mabie's soulful typewriter will not come, in time, to be a

Bore.

The utmost that can be said of this book, is, we fear, that some things in it are not worse than some others! If Mr. Mabie had called his work "Chats about Shakespeare," or "Evenings with Shakespeare," or "Ice Cream and Shakespeare for the Ice Cream and Shakespeare Clubs," or even, borrowing a title from Goldsmith, "Shakespearee and the Musical Glasses," this review need not have been written. But Mr. Mabie must not sulk by being weighed by his own titular estimate of his own unctious, not to say saponaceous, book! Thoroughly bad as the book is; supremely lacking as it is in either competence, manliness, timeness or raison d'etre; insufferable as is its utter lack of manly fibre and its substitution of pale and green-sickly sentimentalism for research, and lazy and slushy wordiness for facts and records, - these are not the worst of Mr. Mabie's sinnings! He had all the authorities at his elbow. He had a weekly newspaper to print his material in as fast as he gathered it, so that he should not be dismayed at the bulkiness of his own transcribings. His worst sin is that he has thrown at the public another superfluous volume, and cumbered just to that extent our over-crowded bookseller's columns with five hundred more pages of silly and buttery padding.

The publishers have done their best to atone for the superfluousness of the book by beautiful letter-press and binding and by illustrations, (not always new, but still pictorial.) But neither they nor Mr. Mabie's friends and clacquers can give his volume even the average life-time of an unneeded "alms for oblivion."

TWO VOLUMES OF MENTAL AND EMOTIONAL ENRICHMENT AND EXCEPTIONAL POETICAL INSIGHT.

How to study Shakespeare, by William H. Fleming,&c., with an introduction by W. J. Rolfe, Litt. D. 2 vols. cloth, 16 mo pp. 444-334. New York, Doubleday & McClure Co. $1 00 per vol. Net.

"389. What examples of balance and proportion are there in this play?"

"Ans. Duke Senior vs. Duke Frederick. Orlando vs. Oliver. Jacques vs, Touchstone. Hate, Eg. of Duke Frederick, of Oliver vs. Love. Eg. of the four pairs of lovers." Vol. 2, p. 135.”

"[Could marry the wench for this device.] By this remark Shakespeare foreshadows the marriage of Sir Toby and Maria.” Vol. 1, p. 89.

"167. In what other plays does Shakespeare make Dramatic use of Ghosts?"

"Ans. Cf. p. 134."

"178. What is, at this time, Macbeth's emotional and moral condition?"

"I am in blood. Seq." Vol. 1, p. 247.

"What description of the outcome of the trick on Malvolio which is equally descriptive of the outcome of the drama, does the clown give?"

"Ans. The whirligig of time brings in its revenge." Vol. 1, p. 94.

The duty of reviewing 778 pages of this sort of thing has been spared us by the thoughtfui publishers, who affix to each of these volumes the following final opinions of Mr. Fleming's Masterpiece, viz:

"An addition to Shakespearean Literature which is of real and permanent value" (Frederic G. Smedley, President N. Y. Shakespere Club)-in which nothing is more evident than the certainty and brevity of your (Mr. W. H. Fleming's.) touch throughout"-(Prof. Barrett Wendell, Assistant Professor of English, Harvard University.) "Which shows not only thorough study and knowledge of the subject in hand but exceptional poetic insight (Geo. Lansing Raymond, Professor of Esthetics, Princeton University.) And the Asst. Editor of the Standard Dictionary, (which Mr. Fleming, on p. IV of his Volume II, says that he considers "facile princeps among dictionaries") writes that" indeed he does not see why the ordinary reader or student needs any notes other than those Mr. Fleming has supplied for the eight plays selected."

But even such glowing words as these fail to adequately describe the entire opulence of this intellectual feast here lavished upon the purchaser of these volumes for the small sum of One Dollar per volume. For no less a personage than Dr. William J. Rolfe, of