cond Rosetta Stone, or
as if it had to be read, like the lines in a Hebrew book, backward. They
study him in the spirit of the fool, who, being given a book upside
down, stood on his head to read it--a position naturally confusing to
the intellect.

Nor is it only in their methods of investigation that many of our
Shakespearian critics are at fault. Their fondness for rearing vast
temples of possibilities upon small corner-stones of fact is proverbial.
We know that Shakespeare went to London, where he both wrote and acted
plays, and upon this slender basis you may find, in almost any of his
commentators, such added items of biography as this sentence from
Heraud's book upon Shakespeare's _Inner Life:_ "That he had a house in
Southwark, that his brother Edmund lived with him, and that his wife was
his frequent companion in London, are all exceedingly probable
suppositions." So they may be to Mr. Heraud's mind, but the next
biographer shall form a totally different set of "exceedingly probable
suppositions" equally satisfactory to himself. The same critic says that
when Shakespeare, in his Sonnets, spoke of "a black beauty" (a phrase
universally used to express a brunette as late even as the age of Queen
Anne), the poet had his Bible open at Solomon's Song, and meant the
Bride "who is black but comely;" in other words, the Reformed Church.
Mr. Page, the artist, finds in the Chandos portrait, after it has been
cleaned and scraped, and upon the photographs of the German mask, a
certain mark which he thinks the indication of a scar. Two gentlemen,
one an artist, who have seen the mask itself, assure him that they find
his scar to be merely a slight abrasion or discoloration of the plaster;
but Mr. Page, secure in his position, quotes Sonnet 112,

Your love and pity doth the impression fill
Which vulgar scandal stamped upon my brow,

and triumphantly asks, "If that doesn't refer to the scar, what does it
refer to?"

The Sonnets of Shakespeare have been quite too much neglected by the
lovers of his plays, and Stevens said that the strongest act of
Parliament that could be framed would fail to compel readers into their
service. Two classes of minds, however, have always pondered over
them--the poets, who could not fail to appreciate their wonderful power
and beauty, and the psychologists, who have found in them an ample field
for speculation. The variety and extent of the theories of these latter
gentlemen can only