pid
word or two on _Arden of Feversham_.

It is with equally inexpressible surprise that I find Mr. Collier
accepting as Shakespeare's any part of _A Warning for Fair Women_, and
rejecting without compromise or hesitation the belief or theory which
would assign to the youth of Shakespeare the incomparably nobler tragic
poem in question. {129} His first ascription to Shakespeare of _A
Warning for Fair Women_ is couched in terms far more dubious and
diffident than such as he afterwards adopts. It "might," he says, "be
given to Shakespeare on grounds far more plausible" (on what, except
possibly those of date, I cannot imagine) "than those applicable to
_Arden of Feversham_." He then proceeds to cite some detached lines and
passages of undeniable beauty and vigour, containing equally undeniable
coincidences of language, illustration, and expression with "passages in
Shakespeare's undisputed plays." From these he passes on to indicate a
"resemblance" which "is not merely verbal," and to extract whole speeches
which "are Shakespearean in a much better sense"; adding in a surely too
trenchant fashion, "Here we say, _aut Shakespeare aut diabolus_." I must
confess, with all esteem for the critic and all admiration for the brief
scene cited, that I cannot say, Shakespeare.

There are spirits of another sort from whom we naturally expect such
assumptions and inferences as start from the vantage ground of a few
separate or separable passages, and clear at a flying leap the empty
space intervening which divides them from the goal of evidence as to
authorship. Such a spirit was that of the late Mr. Simpson, to whose
wealth of misused learning and fertility of misapplied conjecture I have
already paid all due tribute; but who must have had beyond all other sane
men--most assuredly, beyond all other fairly competent critics--the gift
bestowed on him by a malignant fairy of mistaking assumption for argument
and possibility for proof. He was the very Columbus of mare's nests; to
the discovery of them, though they lay far beyond the pillars of
Hercules, he would apply all shifts and all resources possible to an
ultra-Baconian process of unphilosophical induction. On the devoted head
of Shakespeare--who is also called Shakspere and Chaxpur--he would have
piled a load of rubbish, among which the crude and vigorous old tragedy
under discussion shines out like a veritable diamond of the desert. His
"School of Shakspere," though not