libertine of fiction, had come forward to placard
by way of self-advertisement on his own stage, and before the very eyes
of a Maiden Queen, the scandalous confidence in his own powers of
fascination and seduction so cynically expressed in the too easily
intelligible vaunt--A Woman will have her Will [Shakespeare]. In the
penultimate line of the hundred and forty-third sonnet the very phrase
might be said to occur:

So will I pray that thou mayst have thy Will.

Having thus established his case in the first instance to the
satisfaction, as he trusted, not only of the present Society, but of any
asylum for incurables in any part of the country, the learned member now
passed on to the consideration of the allusions at once to Shakespeare
and to a celebrated fellow-countryman, fellow-poet, and personal friend
of his--Michael Drayton--contained in a play which had been doubtfully
attributed to Shakespeare himself by such absurd idiots as looked rather
to the poetical and dramatic quality of a poem or a play than to such
tests as those to which alone any member of that Society would ever dream
of appealing. What these were he need not specify; it was enough to say
in recommendation of them that they had rather less to do with any
question of dramatic or other poetry than with the differential calculus
or the squaring of the circle. It followed that only the most perversely
ignorant and aesthetically presumptuous of readers could imagine the
possibility of Shakespeare's concern or partnership in a play which had
no more Shakespearean quality about it than mere poetry, mere passion,
mere pathos, mere beauty and vigour of thought and language, mere command
of dramatic effect, mere depth and subtlety of power to read, interpret,
and reproduce the secrets of the heart and spirit. Could any further
evidence be required of the unfitness and unworthiness to hold or to
utter any opinion on the matter in hand which had consistently been
displayed by the poor creatures to whom he had just referred, it would be
found, as he felt sure the Founder and all worthy members of their
Society would be the first to admit, in the despicable diffidence, the
pitiful modesty, the contemptible deficiency in common assurance, with
which the suggestion of Shakespeare's partnership in this play had
generally been put forward and backed up. The tragedy of _Arden of
Feversham_ was indeed connected with Shakespeare--and that, as he should
proceed