get his liver fit for pâté de Strasbourg with vexation) must be, not to say at once he 'll build anything.

Always affectionately yours,

J. RUSKIN.

This collection of letters would hardly be complete without a word to that remarkable man, Mr. Rawdon Brown, so great a student of Venetian archives, and historian of Venice, where indeed he lived for the best part of his life. Here it is:

DENMARK HILL, May 10, 1862.

DEAR MR. BROWN, I can't write letters just now. I am always tired, somehow, but I mean to take your advice, and hope to get round a little, yet. I have no house of my own, not even rooms; and living with two old people, however good, is not good for a man. I should have tried to get abroad again before this, but found they had let all the Turner drawings get mildewed at the National Gallery during its repairs. So I stayed to get the mildew off as well as I could, and henceforward I've done with the whole business; and have told them they must take it off themselves, next time, or leave it on if they like. I shall not enter the Exhibition; it is merely a donkey-race among the shopkeepers of the world. . . . I do not care the least about people's religious opinions. What I meant to say was, that for a man who has once at any time had any hope of life in another world, the arrival at conviction that he has nothing to look for but the worn-out candle end of life in this, is not at first cheerful. . . . This letter was begun, with a better pen, three weeks ago. Since then, my discomforts have come to a climax and, I think, to an end (one way or another, for I feel so languid that I'm not sure I'm not dying), but to an end of better comfort, if I live. For the only people whom I at all seriously care for, in this British group of islands and who, in any happy degree of reciprocity, seriously care for me (there are many who care for me without my caring — and vice versa) — wrote three days ago to offer me a little cottage dwelling house, and garden, and field, just beside their own river, and outside their park wall: and the river being clear and brown, and rocky; the windows within sight of blue hills; the park wall having no broken glass on the top; and the people, husband and wife, and two girls and one boy, being all in their various ways good and gracious; I've written to say I'll come, when I please; which will, I suppose, be when I want rest and quiet, and get the sense of some kindness near me. Mean

This is the family referred to in 'Præterita,' vol. iii. pp. 103, 113, 178, 179, etc.

time, I am coming, if it may be as far towards you as Milan, to see the spring in Italy once more. But I don't think I can come to Venice, even to see you. I should be too sad in thinking - not of ten - but of twenty no, sixteen years ago when I was working there from six in the morning till ten at night, in all the joy of youth.

Ever affectionately yours,

J. RUSKIN.

Eminently characteristic this but oh, the pity of it! Thirty years have passed since these words were written; yet happily the master is still with us, albeit the burden of life now is lying heavily upon him.

William G. Kingsland.

LONDON, ENGLAND.

(To be continued.)

GENTLE WILL, OUR FELLOW.

WRIT IN 1626 A. D. BY JOHN HEMINGE, SERVANT OF HIS GRACIOUS MAJESTY KING CHARLES I.; EDITED IN 1892 A. D. AS ALL, THOUGH FEIGNED, IS TRUE" BY F. G. FLEAY, SERVANT OF ALL SHAKESPEARIAN STUDENTS IN AMERICA, ENGLAND, GERMANY, OR

ELSEWHERE.

TO THE GENERAL READER,

HETHER I obtained this little book from the inspiration of a medium, or by Mahatma post, or from a manuscript found in an old deed-chest, or by painful induction of steadfast labor carried on continuously for many years, matters not to inquire in this place. The one question is, "Is it true?" to which I answer it is truer than most histories, and wellnigh as true as the most truthful of fictions; truer than Macaulay, and wellnigh as true as 'Robinson Crusoc;' though not nearly so true as Tom Jones,' Don Quixote,' or 'King Lear.' There is not a statement in it for which there is not evidence enough to

gain admission into the most accurate of biographies, were it written of any man other than Shakespeare, with regard to whom alone is it the fashion to require the same amount of logical evidence, if the date of a play is in question, as if some physical law in Nature had to be demonstrated. Nevertheless, I put it forth as a fiction in form, however true in substance, no other method being open to me to avoid thorny paths of controversy, which would lead me astray from my main object, which is to place in your hands the results of long and wearisome investigation, apart from the arguments which serve as their foundation, which may be found by whosoever cares to track them in the four volumes of my larger work. I need hardly say that no other such book already exists: had there been one, I should have been the last to add to the ever-growing cairn which hides, while it glorifies, the fame of our ever-living poet. Nor have I any pretence to the position of a creative maker of fiction; the motto of the book is, if not "all is true," at any rate "all would be true."

LONDON, May, 1892.

F. G. F.

TO THE MOST NOBLE

WILLIAM EARL OF PEMBROKE,

Lord Chamberlain to the King's most excellent Majesty.

RIGHT HONORABLE,

Whilst I study to be thankful for the indulgence you have used to the late issue of the Remains of your servant Shakespeare, I have also studied how I might best fulfil your gracious command to set down such particulars concerning his life, and especially his plays, while with us here in London, as might enable the general reader to peruse the same in that order in which they were presented on our stage, and at the same time to distinguish what portions of the plays as issued by us were not wholly from his own hand. That we could not do this while printing the plays themselves was irksome to us, but unavoidable. For in the first place we had to put out the copy, being of such magnitude, unto divers printers, in order that the book might be completed within a reasonable time; and these men, having miscalculated their copy, made a sad confusion in their paging, as may be seen at the ends of the plays of Romeo and Juliet'

and of 2 Henry IV.' in the printed copies, moreover, some plays did not come to our hands in time for insertion in their proper places, they having been entered to other men, and we having to buy of them the right to insert them in our book. For some indeed, Pericles' and The Yorkshire Tragedy,' their possessor, Pavier, would not come to our terms by any means and we had to leave them out altogether. Then again the separation into Comedies, Histories, and Tragedies stood in the way of such an order of arrangement by way of time as Ben Jonson had given us in his Folio; and yet the division we used, making three exact volumes, was in many ways a convenient one. So it came to pass that two of these parts were put forth without any order, while in the third we placed the plays in the order of the events narrated. Now as to the matter of authorship we thought it good to include, as far as we could, every play in which our friend and fellow had had a hand at all; for we thought it pity that anything of his should be lost, and we thought it matter of public notoriety that he had been in his earlier time a coadjutor of other men and a cobbler of other men's plays for new performance. This indeed is more to his credit than otherwise: no man works in his trade so well as he that hath served his apprenticeship thereto; and we never dreamed that any could be so obtuse or dull as to suppose that such a play as the first part of Henry VI.,' in which the very groundlings know the difference between the opening scene by Marlowe and the Talbot death-scene by Shakespeare, could be by us intended to be set out as by Shakespeare alone. In one thing I own we were ill-advised: we ought to have informed the reader that some of the later plays were not in all parts as Shakespeare left them, but had been reformed by Beaumont, Middleton, and others. Yet we could not put them forth as in their original copies; for these had been burned in the unfortunate fire at the Globe, and we were driven perforce to use such copies as we had at the Blackfriars, which, being suited to a more worthy audience, had been somewhat abridged to make room for masks and dances and songs. Moreover, the songs in 'Macbeth,' being taken from such a well-known play as Middleton's 'Witch,' and the extreme likeness of the Tempest' mask to Beaumont's other mask, told the story for us to those that know in such matters: and what matter for the others? We looked for an audience fit but few. But all this will more fully appear in the slight work which I have now the honor to submit to your Lordship's kindly indulgence; and which, if it come to the press now, I beseech your honorable Lordship to allow to be dedicated to you: if it do not, I hope it may hereafter

meet with as favorable a patron to your late servant, but I know not where such is to be found.

Your Lordship's most bounden

At my house in ALDERMANBURY, Christmas.

John Heminge.

[It appears from the contents of the following book that this letter was written in 1626, when Jonson was paralyzed and not expected to recover: on his restoration to health the work was probably thrown aside and meant to be published at his death; but Heminge died first by some years. I must add that much of the language and all the punctuation and dates have been accommodated to our modern method by me. F. G. F.]

I. SHAKESPEARE IN THE SERVICE OF THE EARL OF LEICESTER AND OF LORD STRANGE.

NIGH twenty years since, in the autumn of 1587, I with my fellows, then servants to the noble Earl of Leicester, was playing at the town of Stratford upon Avon. We had in the year before this travelled through many parts of Europe, having followed the noble Earl to the Low Countries; after that been commended by him to the King of Denmark, Frederick the Second; and from that gracious King to Christian the first, the elector of Saxony. This was in 1586; we were at Dresden in October. We then returned to London, where we acted in January of the next year; but we could get no great number of spectators: the two great companies, Her gracious Majesty's and the Lord High Admiral's, with their new poets, Master Greene and Master Marlowe, were so run after that any other company had but poor picking after they were served. We had no poet who could raise his vein on the stilts of Tamberlaine,' or utter such brave words as the furious Orlando and so, as the weakest must needs go to the wall, we thought it better to travel than play at a loss in London; and in our travel we came, as I have said, to Stratford upon Avon: and then for the first time I saw William Shakespeare.

He was then some three and twenty years of age, having been, as I afterwards learned, baptized 26 April, 1564; but, although so young, had a wife and three children: his wife was some eight