him an enormous fib: that he had learned the black art of a magician, and that by means of potent charms he could set his Rosalind before him, and he might marry her if he would. (The sly dog said nothing upon the important question whether the real princess would be willing to be married.) And then came up Silvius and Phebe; and Rosalind led the whole party into a game of cross-purposes about their loves and their marriage, taking part herself, and bringing the farce to an end by promising them all their satisfaction on the morrow.

Orlando was so well content with this promise that it might seem to some that he now suspected, or was even sure, of the identity of Ganymede and Rosalind. And one solemn teller of the tale, who treats its light surface play of wit and joy with characteristic effort at profundity,' says that Orlando's brother Oliver saw through her disguise at the fainting scene and told his discovery to Orlando, who thereafter knew with whom he had to do. But this is mere profound evolution of moral probabilities which have no place in the Forest of Arden, and shows strange ignorance of the facts of the true story. For the next morning, the Duke and Orlando meeting, the Duke asked Orlando if he believed that the boy could do all that he had promised; and the lover answered that he alternately doubted and believed, adding a comparison that has become a sententious expression of that condition of mind: "As those that fear they hope and know they fear." And again, when afterward the Duke remarked some likeness between Ganymede and his daughter, Orlando agreed to the likeness, adding, however, "But, my good lord, this boy is forest born." Their doubts,

1 Gervinus, in the book before mentioned.

however, were soon resolved; for while Touchstone, who had come in with a country wench whom his courtly wit had captivated, was explaining to Jaques the virtues of a lie seven times removed, the very God of Marriage, great Hymen himself (who lived with the lionesses and the snakes and the English hedge-priests in the Forest of Arden), entered, leading the very, very Rosalind, decked in woman's garments (for there were trees that bore those mysterious although necessary articles in the Forest of Arden); and there was a great scene of recognition; and the Duke gave his daughter to Orlando; and they all coupled just as you like it; and Rosalind, after teasing them with her wit and enjoying their bewilderment, said:—

Whiles a wedlock hymn we sing,
Feed yourselves with questioning;
That reason wonder may diminish

How thus we met, and these things finish.

Rosalind's woodland escapade was over; and although she had enjoyed it to the full, the merry girl was well content. For her sallies of wit were but the bright bubbles that floated from the rapids and shallows of her lighter moods over the deep-channelled flow of her really sober nature. She had been sadly in earnest from the time when her heart took the part of a better wrestler than she, and he overthrew more than his enemies.

But the wondrous tale of the wondrous Forest of Arden is not quite finished. To them all, as they stood there ready to worship Hymen, there entered Jaques de Bois, the second son of old Sir Roland, who told them that as Frederick, the usurping Duke, was on his way with a mighty power to take his brother and his followers and put them to the sword, he was met by an old religious man, who with few words converted

him both from his purpose and from the world - such power had hermits in that marvellous Forest of Arden -and that he himself had become a hermit, bequeathing his crown to his banished brother.

Amid all this joy, did the moralizing Jaques find any cause for his rejoicing? No; he was too set in the ways of his peculiar melancholy. The sight of so much real happiness was more than he could bear; and he too withdrew to hide his chagrin in a hermit's cell. The pleasure of others filled his breast with bile and envy; and, with a few civil words to the gentlefolks and a snarl at his fellow cynic Touchstone by way of wedding benison, he disappeared, leaving the honest hearts to their well won happiness.

THE BACON-SHAKESPEARE CRAZE.

WOULD to heaven there were unquestionable evidence that Bacon did write the plays contained in the famous folio volume published at London in 1623! Would that, as there is now a consensus of critical opinion that the lady of the last century who decided that it was Ben Jonson who "wrote Shikspur" was wrong (although even that, it would seem, is not sure beyond a doubt), it might be made as clear as the sun in the heavens that her rival female critics of our own day are right in proclaiming Francis Bacon the man! True, this decision, like the other, affects in no way the value or the interest of the plays. It neither lessens nor enlarges their significance as regards the material, the mental, or the moral condition of the English people at the time when they were produced. For the statesman-philosopher and the player-poet were strictly contemporaries, and lived at the same time in the same city. The question (if it were a question) is not at all akin to that, for example, which has been so long discussed, and which is not yet decided, as to the authorship of the "Iliad" and the "Odyssey." For that is not a mere effort of curiosity to find out whether those poems were produced by a blind ballad-singer who spelled his name Homer, or by an open-eyed epic poet of some other name, but a question as to the period of the production of the poems, as to their pur

pose, as to the condition of the society in which they were produced, as to the intellectual record embodied in their language, and as to the historical value of the incidents which they profess to record. It is a question which touches the origin, the character, and the development of the most remarkable people and the brightest, richest, and most influential civilization of antiquity. But whether "Hamlet," "King Lear," and “Othello" were written by Francis Bacon or by William Shakespeare, or by John Smith, so they were written by an Englishman, in London, between the years 1590 and 1610, affects in no way their literary importance or interest, their ethnological or their social significance, their value as objects of literary art, or their power as a civilizing, elevating influence upon the world. The question (if it were a question) is merely a large variety of that small sort of literary puzzles which interest pene-literary people, of the sort who are disturbed to the profoundest shallows of their minds by uncertainty as to who is the author of that foolish saying, "Consistency, thou art a jewel," and who search volumes of Familiar Quotations and vex other folk with letters there-anent, in hopes to allay the agitation of their souls.1

For one, I avow myself wholly indifferent upon this subject. What is Shakespeare to me, or what am I to Bacon? They are no more. Even what they were when they lived concerned only themselves and their personal friends. What they did is of the greatest moment to the world for all time; but it would be of

1 Or who spring to critical life in the discovery that Hamlet should say that he is to the manor born." I have certainly received fifty letters, indeed many more than fifty, suggesting this new reading. A man who could make it should no more be trusted with a copy of Shakespeare than a boy of nine years with a revolving razor.