e stage employment or the moral character of the one artist and
the other. In either case they were as closely as possible connected
with a murder. There was a painter in the _Spanish Tragedy_, and there
was also a painter in _Arden of Feversham_. He need not--he would not
add another word in confirmation of the now established fact, that Ben
Jonson had in this play held up to perpetual infamy--whether deserved or
undeserved he would not pretend to say--the names of two poets who
afterwards became his friends, but whom he had previously gibbeted or at
least pilloried in public as Black Will Shakespeare and Murderous Michael
Drayton.

Mr. E. then brought forward a subject of singular interest and
importance--"The lameness of Shakespeare--was it moral or physical?" He
would not insult their intelligence by dwelling on the absurd and
exploded hypothesis that this expression was allegorical, but would at
once assume that the infirmity in question was physical. Then arose the
question--In which leg? He was prepared, on the evidence of an early
play, to prove to demonstration that the injured and interesting limb was
the left. "This shoe is my father," says Launce in the _Two Gentlemen of
Verona_; "no, this left shoe is my father; no, no, this left shoe is my
mother; nay, that cannot be so neither; yes, it is so, it is so; _it hath
the worser sole_." This passage was not necessary either to the progress
of the play or to the development of the character; he believed he was
justified in asserting that it was not borrowed from the original novel
on which the play was founded; the inference was obvious, that without
some personal allusion it must have been as unintelligib1e to the
audience as it had hitherto been to the commentators. His conjecture was
confirmed, and the whole subject illustrated with a new light, by the
well-known line in one of the Sonnets, in which the poet describes
himself as "made lame by Fortune's dearest spite": a line of which the
inner meaning and personal application had also by a remarkable chance
been reserved for him (Mr. E.) to discover. There could be no doubt that
we had here a clue to the origin of the physical infirmity referred to;
an accident which must have befallen Shakespeare in early life while
acting at the Fortune theatre, and consequently before his connection
with a rival company; a fact of grave importance till now unverified. The
epithet "dearest," like so much else in th