Page:Mr. Sidney Lee and the Baconians.djvu/21

 funeral of his father or mother or of his son Hamnet or at the marriage of his daughter Susanna!

Mr. Lee says: "The poet's mother was buried in the parish church." Nobody knows where Shakspere's father or mother or son lies buried, as he forgot to mark their graves—wealthy man though he was. He made provision, however, for his own slab, for which he left the famous "curse," debarring (as he had "barred her dower") his wife from the grave in which he was buried only seventeen feet deep, although, as Mr. Lee says (p. 273), the widow "expressed a desire to be buried beside her husband." Shakspere's marriage must, after all, have been one of "love," as his admirer Rolfe maintains! [See Note, p. 9.]

How conveniently Mr. Lee twists out of his difficulties with regard to Shakespeare's universal knowledge of the life of a soldier, the life of a courtier, the life of a sailor,—the life of everybody! It was all accomplished by his "intuitive power of realising life under almost every aspect by force of his imagination." There is no proof that Shakspere climbed the tree of knowledge. According to Mr. Lee, there was no necessity for such a feat. He stood below the tree with his mouth open, and the fruit dropped into it intuitively. Lucky Shakspere! Yet Dr. Johnson declared—"Shakespeare, however favoured by nature, could impart only what he had learned." Mr. Lee knows differently, however.

Friends, we have seen, supplied Shakspere with his knowledge of law, so we are not surprised to learn from Mr. Lee that "he doubtless obtained all his knowledge of Northern Italy from the verbal reports of travelled friends or from books, the contents of which he had a rare power of assimilating and vitalising." The names of the books are not mentioned, but probably they were early editions of Baedeker or Murray, none of which are extant in any public or private library.