have done their duty and have received neither fame nor monument?
Their blood, too, cries out to me from the paving-stones of London.
Alas for men! that they should be so blind,
And laud as gods the scourges of their kind!
Call each man glorious who has led a host,
And him most glorious who has murdered most!
Alas! that men should lavish upon these
The most obsequious homage of their knees--
That those who labour in the arts of peace,
Making the nations prosper and increase,
Should fill a nameless and unhonoured grave,
Their worth forgotten by the crowd they save--
But that the Leaders who despoil the earth,
Fill it with tears, and quench its children's mirth,
Should with their statues block the public way,
And stand adored as demi-gods for aye.
But thanks to the efforts of Mr. G. F. Watts, R.A., and Mr. Walter
Crane, London is at last in a fair way to pay homage also to these
unsung and unhonoured heroes of lowly life.
During the Jubilee of 1887 Mr. Watts urged that cloisters or
galleries should be erected throughout the country and frescoes
painted therein, to record the shining deeds of the Democracy's
great men and great women. Such a Campo Santo is now being prepared
in the new Postmen's Park in Aldersgate Street, and one of the first
frescoes to be painted there by Mr. Crane will commemorate the
valiant act of one Alice Ayres, a young nurse-girl who rescued her
three young charges from a burning house, she herself perishing in
the flames.
When I go to Paris, my favourite pilgrimage is to the Mur des
Fédérés in the Père-la-Chaise Cemetery, where the last of the
Communists were mowed down by the mitrailleuse.
My sincerest worship of the dead in London will be tendered in the
Campo Santo of the Postmen's Park, and I hope one day to pay my
homage there to the memorial of Trooper Lockyer.
THE MERMAID TAVERN
There hath been great sale and utterance of wine,
Besides beere, and ale, and ipocras fine,
In every country, region, and nation,
But chiefly in Billingsgate, at the Salutation;
And the Bore's Head, near London Stone,
The Swan at Dowgate, a taverne well known;
The Mitre in Cheape; and then the Bull Head,
And many like places that make noses red;
Th' Bore's Head in Old Fish Street, Three Crowns in the Vintry,
And now, of late, St. Martin's in the Sentree;
The Windmill in Lothbury; The Ship at th' Exchange,
King's Head in New Fish Street, where oysters do range;
The Mermaid in Cornhill, Red Lion in the Strand,
Three Tuns, Newgate Market; Old Fish Street, at the Swan.
(_Newes From Bartholomew Fayre_; an undated, anonymous black-letter
poem.)
"Much time," says Andrews in his history of the sixteenth century,
"was spent by the citizens of London at their numerous taverns."
The tavern was the lounging-place, not only of the idle and
dissolute, but of the industrious also. It was the Club, the Forum,
sometimes too the Theatre.
The wives and daughters of tradesmen collected here to gossip, and,
strange as it now seems to us they came here, too, to picnic. An
old song of the period describes a feast of this sort, and tells
how each woman carried with her some goose, or pork, the wing of
a capon, or a pigeon pie. Arrived at the tavern, they ordered the
best wine. They praised the liquor, and, under its inspiriting
influence, discussed their husbands, with whom they were naturally
dissatisfied; and then went home by different streets, perfidiously
assuring their lawful masters that they had been to church.
This evidence is useful and seemly to be here set down, as
indicating the true origin of habits for which much undeserved
censure has been in these later days inflicted upon mere imitators.
The men, whose chiefest fault has ever been their too great
readiness to follow the women, fell insensibly into the habit, and
have been there ever since.
[Illustration: COURTYARD OF AN OLD TAVERN.]
And what a glorious time they have had of it! To recall only
Fuller's description of the "wit combates" between Shakespeare's
"quickness of wit and invention" against Ben Jonson's "far higher
learning," and "solid, but slow performances," at the historic
Mermaid; and Beaumont's rapturous praise in his epistle to Jonson
of the banquet of wit and admirable conversation which they had
enjoyed at the same place!
Oh to have been at the Mermaid on the night when Jonson had been
burnt out at the Bankside Globe! or on the night of Shakespeare's
first performance before Elizabeth--when he had first, perhaps, set
eyes on Mary Fitton!
All the wits of that age of giants were wont to assemble, after
the theatre, at the Mermaid, the Devil, and the Boar. Exuberant
Fletcher and graver Beaumont would "wentle" in from their lodging
on Bankside, wearing each other's clothes, and wrangling perhaps
about their plots--a habit which on one occasion caused them to be
arrested, a fussy listener having heard them disputing in a tavern
as to whether they should or should not assassinate the king. Poor,
drunken, profligate Greene, and his debauched companions, Marlowe
and George Peele,--all of whom ended their riotous courses with
painful and shameful deaths,--are sure to have lurched in on many
a razzling night. Regular visitors, too, were "Crispinus" Dekker,
and his friend Wilson the actor, whom Beaumont mentions as a
boon-companion over the Mermaid wine:--
Filled with such moisture, in most grievous qualms
Did Robert Wilson write his singing psalms.
From Whitehall, with "their port so proud, their buskin, and their
plume," would swagger in Raleigh, Surrey, Spenser, and others of the
wits from Elizabeth's ruffling Court. Drummond of Hawthornden came
here at least once on a visit to Ben Jonson; but this must have been
after Shakespeare had deserted the festive board for the crested
pomp of a gentlemanly life at Stratford, "coming up every term to
take tobacco and see new motions."
Sombre John Webster would be here sometimes, sometimes Massinger,
Thomas Middleton, Lilly, Thomas Heywood, William Rowley, Day,
Wilkins, Ford, Camden, Ned Drayton, Fulke Greville, Harrington,
Edmund Waller, Martin, Morley, Selden, the future Bishop of
Winchester, _et cetera, et cetera, et cetera_!
What a galaxy! what a feast!
It is well for your peace of mind, my good wife, that the Mermaid
and its company have vanished into the dark immensity. How long
would I wait, and cheerfully, for so much as a peep through the
window at that glorious company!
* * * * *
Dryden claims that the Mermaid did not receive such pleasant and
such witty fellows in the reigns of Bess and James as did the Royal
Oak, the Mitre, and the Roebuck after the Restoration; but to me
the haunts of Wycherley, Otway, Villiers of Buckingham, Wilmot of
Rochester, and the periwigged bucks and bloods and maccaronies in
velvets and lace of Charles the Second's dissolute Court, are, as
compared with the Falstaffian Taverns of the Shakespeareans, but
dull and dry dens.
So, if you will, of your grace, excuse the pun and the hasty skip,
we will give these pretty gentlemen a miss, and jump at once into a
fresh chapter and an account of a curious experience that once upon
a time came in a tavern to me.
WAS SHAKESPEARE A SCOTSMAN?
O Caledonia! stern and wild,
Meet nurse for a poetic child.
SCOTT.
At last I was alone. The landlord, douce man, could stand no more;
his conversation had been large and ample up to midnight, and had
indeed left a fair remainder to spread a feast for solitude; but for
the last two hours he had done nothing but alternately yawn and doze.
Now, thank goodness, he had gone, and I could read in peace.
Angels and ministers of grace defend us--Bacon's _Essays_ and
Donnelly's _Cryptogram_!--in the parlour of a shabby old inn! Was
mine host, then, of a literary turn? Ay, I had noted his gushing
praise of Burns and Walter Scott; and, by the way, what was it he
said about Shakespeare's visit to Edinburgh? He had shown me a
letter in a book: I had been too intensely bored by his trowelled
praise of Scottish lochs, Scottish mountains, haggis, parritch,
usquebaugh, and Scottish poetry, to pay much heed--but yes, this
must be it. Drummond's _Sonnets_, and here evidently was the letter,
signed by Ben Jonson, indorsed "to my very good friend, the lairde
of Hawthornden":--
Master vill,
quhen we were drinking at my Lordis on Sonday, you promised
yat you would gett for me my Lordis coppie he lent you of my
Lord Sempill his interlude callit philotas, and qhuich vill
Shakespeare told me he actit in edinburt, quhen he wes yair wit
the players, to his gret contentment and delighte. My man waits
your answer:
So give him the play,
And lette him awaye
To your assured friend
and loving servand,
BEN JONSON.
From my lodging in the canongait,
Mrch the twelft, 1619.
So here also had Shakespeare anticipated me? Had he been to
Edinburgh too?
I might have known: but lo! I grow so used to our resemblances, I
almost cease to notice them.
Donnelly too! I had never seen his book before--though I have taken
keen interest in the subject ever since Delia Bacon arose in--well,
the land where they do raise Bacon--and found Shakespeare out.
Could it indeed be true that Shakespeare was an ignorant impostor,
whose business it was to hold respectable gentlemen's horses at the
stage-door of the theatre, instead of which he wickedly suborned the
Lord High Chancellor of England to write his plays for him, and the
same with intent to deceive?
To make sure, I read a few pages of Donnelly.
Even that failed to convince me: the more I read, the more I didn't
know.
I saw Shakespeare's _Works_ on the bookshelf, and reached the volume
down. It opened at the _Sonnets_.
Ah! what exquisite music! But--what was this?
_Your_ name, from hence, immortal life shall have,
Though _I_, once gone, to all the world must die.
Again in Sonnet XXXVIII.--
If my slight muse do please these curious days,
The pain be _mine_, but _thine_ shall be the praise.
And in the next:--
What can mine own praise to mine own self bring?
And what is't but mine own when I praise _thee_?
Curious, surely. What could these lines mean?
And again:--
_My life hath in this line some interest._
What if the true cryptogram were concealed in this strangely
emphasised and deeply noted line? What if it were left to me to
solve the mystery?
By Jove! here _was_ a discovery! Writing "interest" "interrest," as
it would be written in the manuscript, the letters in the line spell
the words
"MISTRESS MARY FITTON";
and Mistress Mary Fitton, as everybody knows, is the Dark Lady
of the _Sonnets_, the lady who had "her Will, and Will to boot,
and Will in overplus"; to wit, Will Shakespeare; her young lover,
William Herbert, Earl of Pembroke; and the respectable elderly lover
whom she was plighted to marry at his wife's death--Sir William
Knollys, Comptroller of the Household to Queen Elizabeth!
Mary Fitton's identity with the lady of the Sonnets has been
established beyond question by Lady Newdegate's publication of
_Passages in the Lives of Anne and Mary Fitton_. The perfect
anagram which I had accidentally discovered in the most pointedly
accentuated line in the whole of the _Sonnets_, was therefore
something more than curious.
I next took the entire passage:--
But be contented: when that fell arrest
Without all bail shall carry me away,
_My life hath in this line some interest,
Which for memorial still with me shall stay._
After an hour's wrestling I had extracted from the letters forming
these four lines, these words:--
"Learn ye that have a little wit y^t FRANCIS BACON THESE
LINES TO MISTRESS MARY FITTON, ELIZABETH'S MAID OF HONOUR at
Whitehalle, hath writt."
But the anagram was imperfect. Several letters included in the words
of the sonnet, remained unused in my anagram.
It was maddening to arrive so near success, to touch it as it
were with one's, finger tips, yet fail for a few foolish trifling
alphabetic signs.
Desperately, frantically, I struggled to complete and perfect
the anagram; but the more I juggled with the letters, the more
bewildered, mazed, and helpless I became. My blood was a-fire, my
head a horrible ache, my brain a whirling tornado of dancing vowels
and consonants.
The excitement, if still fed and unsatisfied, must lead, I felt, to
brain fever or madness.
I tore myself from the intoxicating pursuit, and fell, restless,
sleepless, yet painfully weary, upon the couch beneath the window.
It was a wild winter's night, and the view outside was full of
"fowle horror and eke hellish dreriment." The cordon of turrets
girding the city bulged eerily through the heavy gloom like limbs
of a skeleton starkly protruding through a lampblack shroud. A beam
of lurid moonlight uncannily lit up a distant stretch of bluff,
stern crags, and nearer spectral foreground of towers, gables, and
bartisans.
Deep down in the hollow, dismal and desolate, under a sky of raven's
feathers, glowered murder-stained Holyrood, congenial to the night.
The solitary glimmer on the thunder and battle-scarred Castle Rock,
looked like a match held up to show the darkness.
The melancholy patter of the rain, and the discordant creaking and
rattling of an iron shutter and rusty hinge, made music harmonious
to the scene.
The air of the musty room added to the contagious heaviness. In vain
I stretched the astral sceptre of the soul upon the incorporeal
pavement of conjecture. Nothing came of it, except that I slipped
off the couch. I was too restless to think. Even the dog, on the rug
at my feet, uneasily twitched and growled in his sleep.
Suddenly, I became conscious of a creepy chill; my head, by some
impulse foreign to my volition, was raised from its meditative
pose; and in the spluttering, dying beam of the lamp's light, I
beheld an Apparition.
A grim and grisly goblin, of unwholesome oatcake hue, fluttered
(no other word describes the wild and fitful unreliability of his
movements) before my startled gaze; his eyes, like glassy beads,
shone horridly.
My dog raised his head, and looked over his shoulder. When his gaze
fell on the Apparition he bounded to his feet, his limbs shaking
like jelly, his eyes projecting like shining stars, and his hair
standing up round his neck like a frill.
He tried to growl, but the sound, shaken and softened by terror,
issued to the night in lamb-like bleats. Yet more appalled by his
vocal failure, he shrank, still feebly bleating, backwards under the
sofa.
For my part, I believe I may say I was not afraid, but intensely
excited. I felt that something was about to be revealed to me; this
was the reason why my hand trembled so as to knock Shakespeare,
Bacon, and Donnelly in one commingled heap of fallen glory to the
floor.
I was curious, fascinated, and highly wrought.
The wild and fitful little shape bewilderingly wriggled and
flickered in the light, and his ghast and fixed eye was painful to
endure. Yet I felt that we two had not met without reason. Instinct
told me we should do business.
He was the jerkiest and perkiest little figure I had ever clapped
eyes on. He bore his head with confident, nay impudent, erectness;
his arms waved like a windmill's; and his shapeless little legs
straddled all over the place in a succession of purposeless leaps
and flings and prancings.
So quick and fidgety were his movements that it was not easy to
catch the details of his dress; but I saw that his tartan was
a spider's web, to whose check the slimy snail had imparted a
variety of hue unknown to Macgregor or Macpherson; his bonnet
was a flowering thistle; his philabeg was made of the beards of
oat-florets; his buckle was a salmon's scale; and a blade of finest
rye dangled proudly by his side.
"Ye'll know me the noo if ye'll speir lang enoo," he squealed
ironically when I had stared for some moments. "Gape and glower till
your lugs crack, but ye canna' alter the fact that a' great men are
Scots. Burrrns was Scottish, and Allan Ramsay, and Blair, and Thomson,
Smollett, and Hume, and Boswell, and Adam Smith, and Stewart, and
Hogg, and Campbell; and ay, Sir Walter Scott, Tam Carlyle, and Lord
Brougham; and Chalmers, and Brewster, and Lyell, and Livingstone,
and Macbeth, and McGinnis; Macchiaveli, the Maccabees; and
Macaronis, the Macintoshes and Macrobes; and what reason hae ye to
suppose that the author of Shakespeare's _Plays_ was an exception?"
"Oh, I don't know," I said, "but--er--have I had the pleasure of
meeting you before?"
"Bah!" said he, hastily dancing a strathspey, "ma fute is on ma
native dew, ma name is Roderick; I am," he continued, drawing
himself up to the full height of his figure, which was about six
inches, "I am the Speerit o' Scottish Literature."
"Oh, I know you now," I said, "you're the spirit men call the Small
Scotch."
"Where will ye find the Small Scotch that's fu' sax inches in
height?" answered Roderick, with asperity.
"Oh, I beg your pardon," I said. "But I didn't ring for you, did I?"
"I'm no slave o' the ring," proudly answered Roderick, as he broke
into the opening steps of a complicated sword-dance. "I came of my
ain sweet will, just to improve your mind."
"That's very kind," said I; "will you take a chair, or a tumbler?"
The Spirit hissed angrily, as if a small soda had been poured over
him, and I prudently abstained from further interruptions.
As some of my readers are perhaps less fluently acquainted with the
Scotch than myself, I take the liberty of translating into English
the conversation which ensued.
The Spirit began by asking whether I regarded Shakespeare as the
greatest poet that ever lived, or as the meanest sweater that ever
exploited the gifts of the helpless poor--meaning in this case
Francis Bacon.
I responded that I did _not_ think Bacon a man of that sort.
"Well," continued the Spirit, "do you think that a man who could
scarcely write his own name could write _Hamlet_?"
"It is a nice point," I said.
"Very well," said the Spirit, dancing a series of fantastic Highland
flings in the unsubstantial air, and turning a double somersault at
the finish; "if, as everybody admits, Bacon was one of the blackest
scoundrels that ever lived, his mind could not have conceived the
noble philosophy to which his name is attached. And if Shakespeare,
as the signature to his will shows, could scarcely write his own
name, he could not have written his own _Plays_."
"Same again," said I.
"Besides which," continued the Spirit, "neither Shakespeare nor
Bacon was a Scotsman."
"That settles 'em," quoth I.
"Now, look at here," continued the Spirit, aggressively shaking his
forefinger under my nose; "whoever wrote Shakespeare's _Plays_ must
have written Shakespeare's _Sonnets_."
"Undoubtedly," said I.
"And the _Sonnets_ were dedicated by the publisher to 'W. H.,' who
is styled 'the onlie begetter of these ensuing _Sonnets_.'"
"Well?"
"The publisher must have known who the author was."
"Very likely."
"And in referring to the '_onlie_ begetter,' he clearly implies that
the authorship was claimed by many, and in furnishing no more than
the initials of 'the onlie begetter,' he indicates that the real
author had reasons for concealing the authorship."
"That may be so."
"Well, why should a man desire to conceal his authorship of such
exquisite sonnets--sonnets of whose surpassing excellence he himself
is so convinced that he writes--
So long as men can breathe, or eyes can see,
So long lives this,
--unless the _Sonnets_ contained matter likely to bring him into
trouble? For instance, if a man had, in the fervour of his youth,
poured out such warm expression of his love as the _Sonnets_
contain, and very earnestly desired, later on in life, to marry
another lady, he might be anxious then that the authorship of the
_Sonnets_ should be temporarily forgotten. But Bacon never did
marry. And Shakespeare married young, and deserted his wife; and she
survived his death. Therefore, no such motive for secrecy could
have affected Bacon or Shakespeare."
At this point of his inductive reasoning, the Spirit paused for
effect: he looked for all the world like a picture I had seen in the
_Strand Magazine_.
"Ah!" I said, "I know you now; you are Sherlock Holmes, the
detective."
At which he was so indignant that he angrily pirouetted himself
right out of sight. But he re-appeared almost immediately, and went
on as if nothing had happened:--
"Having proved to you that neither Bacon nor Shakespeare wrote his
own works, I will now proceed to tell you who wrote them."
"What! The lot?"
"Certainly. The similarity of thought in Bacon's _Essays_ and
Shakespeare's _Plays_ prove that they were written by the same man.
That man, as you may see by the legal knowledge betrayed alike in
the _Plays_ and the _Essays_, must have studied the law. But if he
wrote all the books which I attributed to him, he could not have had
time to practise it. Moreover, in the atmosphere of the law courts
a man could have preserved neither the exquisite sweetness nor the
human grandeur of the so-called Shakespeare's _Plays_."
"There's something in that," said I.
"Very well," continued Roderick, curveting so swiftly that even
as one foot touched the floor the other seemed to be kicking the
ceiling, "we have now established these facts:--
"First, that the initials of the author of the so-called
Shakespeare's _Plays_ are 'W. H.'
"Secondly, that he had an intensely painful love affair in his
youth, and married another woman in his later years.
"Thirdly, that he was a lawyer by education but not by practice.
"Now, who was he? We have yet more evidence to aid us in identifying
him. There's Spenser's plaint that 'our pleasant Willy,' 'the man
whom Nature's self had made to mock herself and truth to imitate,'
had been 'dead of late,' and 'with him all joy and merriment.' We
have also the lines in the _Sonnets_:--
Make but my name thy love and love that still;
And then thou lov'st me, for my name is Will.
The first name of 'W. H.,' therefore, is Will. And this Will had
great trouble at one period of his life, which silenced all his joy
and merriment. Again I ask you, Who was the man?"
And the Spirit, bubbling and shaking with eagerness, peered
anxiously into my face.
"What great Scotsman of that great period," he continued, screaming
rather than speaking, "was brought up to the law and abandoned it
for the pursuit of literature and poetry? was driven nearly to
distraction by the loss of a mistress whom he loved more dearly
than life? went abroad to seek solace, and, returning after many
years, married another lady? wrote and left extant in his own name,
sonnets which are acknowledged to be perfect models of sweetness and
delicacy, sonnets which have never been eclipsed since his death?
who was the Scottish poet, friend of the London actors; friend of
Ben Jonson; the man who has left on record in British literature the
report of his conversations with Jonson; the man who, as you have
to-night seen by your landlord's letter, knew Shakespeare and lent
him plays which are not known now by the names they then bore--come,
come, man, who is this W. H.? Cannot you guess it even now?"
"William of Hawthornden?"
"Of course, of course," the Spirit cried. "Look you, now, how
plain it is. William Drummond of Hawthornden was tinged with the
conceits and romances of the Italian school, as was the author of
_Romeo and Juliet_. He wrote histories, as did the author of _The
History of Henry VII._, attributed to Bacon; as did the author of
the historical plays, attributed to Shakespeare. He wrote many
reflections on Death, as did the author of the _Sonnets_ and the
_Plays_. And who but a Scotsman, I would like you to tell me, could
have furnished the local colour and the Scottish character to the
tragedy of _Macbeth_?"
"Why, man, it's as plain as a pikestaff. The greatest Englishman
that ever lived was naturally a Scotsman. The greatest genius of any
clime or time was William Drummond of Hawthornden."
And, in the frenzy of his exultation, Roderick leaped high again
into the air, turned seventeen somersaults in succession, and,
alighting upon my nose, danced a wild Highland fling of triumph and
defiance.
It was certainly very plausible--as plausible, at least, as any
argument that I had heard in support of the theory that Bacon wrote
Shakespeare's _Plays_. I was almost persuaded: then a difficulty
occurred to me.