Page:Mr. Sidney Lee and the Baconians.djvu/25

 or explanation." And of other Lee "facts" Mr. Greg maintains: "Here I am afraid Mr. Lee has been drawing upon his imagination; it is at best pretty fiction." And Mr. Greg proves his case, with regard to Mr. Lee's statements regarding the First Folio.

I find also that Mr. Lee has no better acquaintance with the Quartos. On page 299 he says:—"At the time of his death in 1616 there had been printed in quarto seven editions of his 'Venus and Adonis,' and five editions of his 'Lucrece.'" Mr. Lee ought to have known that only the first two editions of "Venus and Adonis," and only the first edition of "Lucrece" were "printed in quarto."

Mr. Lee has abused Baconians, but he has never argued with them. Mr. Edwin Reed challenged him to a public debate in America, but he would not take it up. I have not a tithe of the knowledge and ability of Mr. Reed, but I am willing to thrash out the subject with Mr. Lee when and where he pleases. I may not support the claim of Bacon, but I shall certainly take Mr. Lee's Life of Shakespeare in my hand, and ask him where he obtained the "facts" for his "personal history." Till he does this, Baconians may be excused for maintaining that Mr. Lee has unconsciously invented "a fictitious biography" to sustain a fictitious character, a biography "full of fanciful might-have-beens," without which, according to Mr. F. G. Fleay, a Life of Shakespeare cannot apparently be compiled.

It must have been the author of this "standard" Life of Shakespeare whom Mr. Asquith had in his eye when he said:—"Few things are more interesting to watch than the attempts of scholars and critics to reconstruct the life of a man at once so illustrious and so obscure as the greatest of our poets," and that the work of a Shakespeare biographer is "not so much an essay in biography as in the more or less scientific use