he honoured and loved.

The further discussion of this subject was reserved for the next meeting
of the Society, as was also the reading of Mr. H.'s paper on the
subsequent quarrel between the two joint authors of Hamlet, which led to
Jonson's caricature of Shakespeare (then retired from London society to a
country life of solitude) under the name of Morose, and to Shakespeare's
retort on Jonson, who was no less evidently attacked under the
designation of Ariel. The allusions to the subject of Shakespeare's
sonnets in the courtship and marriage of Epicoene by Morose were as
obvious as the allusions in the part of Ariel to the repeated
incarceration of Jonson, first on a criminal and secondly on a political
charge, and to his probable release in the former case (during the reign
of Elizabeth=Sycorax) at the intercession of Shakespeare, who was allowed
on all hands to have represented himself in the character of Prospero
("it was mine art that let thee out"). Mr. I. would afterwards read a
paper on the evidence for Shakespeare's whole or part authorship of a
dozen or so of the least known plays of his time, which, besides having
various words and phrases in common with his acknowledged works, were
obviously too bad to be attributed to any other known writer of the
period. Eminent among these was the tragedy of _Andromana, or the
Merchant's Wife_, long since rejected from the list of Shirley's works as
unworthy of that poet's hand. Unquestionably it was so; not less
unworthy than _A Larum for London_ of Marlowe's. The consequent
inference that it must needs be the work of the new Shakespeare's was
surely no less cogent in this than in the former case. The allusion
occurring in it to a play bearing date just twenty-six years after the
death of Shakespeare, and written by a poet then unborn, was a strong
point in favour of his theory. (This argument was received with general
marks of adhesion.) What, he would ask, could be more natural than that
Shirley when engaged on the revision and arrangement for the stage of
this posthumous work of the new Shakespeare's (a fact which could require
no further proof than he had already adduced), should have inserted this
reference in order to disguise the name of its real author, and protect
it from the disfavour of an audience with whom that name was notoriously
out of fashion? This reasoning, conclusive in itself, became even more
irresistible--or would become so, if that were