go into operation, which is the furthest step in advance that has been made. In twenty-three States they are constitutionally secured against having special charters made for them by the legislature, with or without their consent. Whatever sort of organic law is imposed in one city in these States must be imposed in all. But in ten States the cities are still at the mercy of the legislature, which may govern them by special legislation, and make, amend, or annul charters at its discretion, without pity or

remorse.

In looking at the history and condition of municipalities in America, one consideration meets us at every stage; that is, that in no other civilized country is municipal government so completely within the control of public opinion. Every where else there are deeply rooted traditions, long-established customs, muchrespected vested rights and cherished prejudices, to be dealt with, before any satisfactory framework of city government can be set up. Here the whole problem is absolutely at the disposal of popular sentiment. Our cities, therefore, might most easily have been the model cities of the modern world. Birmingham and Glasgow and Berlin, in other words, ought to have been in America. It is we who ought to have shown the Old World

how to live comfortably in great masses in one place. We have no city walls to pull down, or ghettos to clear out, or guilds to buy up, or privileges to extinguish. We have simply to provide health, comfort, and education, in our own way, according to the latest experience in science, for large bodies of free men in one spot.

This is as much as saying that in talking of the municipal question we describe a state of the popular mind, and not a state of law. Charters are nowhere else in the world an expression of popular thought as much as in America. They are merely what people believe or permit at any given period. Very often they are well adapted to our needs, like the late New York charter, but fail to give satisfaction, because, having provided the charter, we take no pains to secure competent officials. Finding that it does not work well, we seek a remedy by making a change in its provisions rather than in the men who administer it. In this way our municipal woes are perpetuated, and we continue to write and talk of charters as if they were self-acting machines instead of certain ways of doing business. No municipal reform will last long or prove efficient without a strong and healthy public spirit behind it. With this almost any charter would prove efficient. E. L. Godkin.

William A. Dunn.

SOME time ago, while looking over a wheelbarrow-load of rubbish written to prove that such plays as King Lear and The Merry Wives of Windsor emanated from one of the least poetical and least humorous minds of modern times, I was reminded of a story which I heard when a boy. I forget whether it was some whimsical man of letters like Charles Lamb, or some such professional wag as Theodore Hook, who took it into his head one day to stand still on a London street, with face turned upward, gazing into the sky. Thereupon the next person who came that way forthwith stopped and did likewise, and then the next and the next, until the road was blocked by a dense crowd of men and women, all standing as if rooted in the ground, and with solemn skyward stare. The enchantment was at last broken when some one asked what they were looking at, and nobody could tell. It was simply an instance of a certain remnant of primitive gregariousness of action on the part of human beings, which exhibits itself from time to time in sundry queer fashions and fads.

So when Miss Delia Bacon, in the year which saw the beginning of The Atlantic Monthly, published a book purporting to unfold the "philosophy" of Shakespeare's dramas, it was not long before other persons began staring intently into the silliest mare's nest ever devised by human dullness; the fruits of so much staring appeared in divers eccentric volumes, of which more specific mention will presently be made. Neither in number nor in quality are they such as to indicate that the BaconShakespeare folly has yet become fashionable, and we shall presently observe in it marked suicidal tendencies which are likely to prevent its ever becoming so; but there are enough of the volumes to illustrate the point of my anecdote.

Another fad, once really fashionable, and in defense of which some plausible arguments could be urged, was the Wolfian theory of the Homeric poems, which dazzled so many of our grandparents. It is worth our while to mention it here, by way of prelude. The theory that the Iliad and Odyssey are mere aggregations of popular ballads, collected and arranged in the time of Pisistratus, was perhaps originally suggested by the philosopher Vico, but first attracted general attention in 1795, when set forth by Friedrich August Wolf, one of the most learned and brilliant of modern scholars. Thus eminently respectable in its parentage and quite reasonable on the surface, this ballad theory came to be widely fashionable; forty years ago it was accepted by many able scholars, though usually with large modifications.

The Wolfians urged that we know absolutely nothing about the man Homer, not even when or where he lived. His existence is merely matter of tradition, or of inference from the existence of the poems. But as the poems know nothing of Dorians in Peloponnesus, their date can hardly be later than 1000 B. C. What happened, then, when "an edition of Homer was made at Athens, about 530 B. C., by Pisistratus or under his orders? Did the editor simply edit two great poems already five centuries old, or did he make up two poems by piecing together a miscellaneous lot of ancient ballads? Wolf maintained the latter alternative, chiefly because of the alleged impossibility of composing and preserving such long poems in the alleged absence of the art of writing. Having thus made a plausible start, the Wolfians proceeded to pick the poems to pieces, and to prove by “internal evidence" that there was nothing like "unity of design" in them, etc.; and

so it went on till poor old Homer was relegated to the world of myth. As a schoolboy I used to hear the belief in the existence of such a poet derided as "uncritical" and "unscholarly."

In spite of these terrifying epithets, the ballad theory never made any impression upon me; for it seemed to ignore the most conspicuous and vital fact about the poems, namely, the style, the noble, rapid, simple, vivid, supremely poetical style, a style as individual a style as individual and unapproachable as that of Dante or Keats. For an excellent characterization of it, read Matthew Arnold's charming essays On Translating Homer. The style is the man, and to suppose that this Homeric style ever came from a democratic multitude of minds, or from anything save one of those supremely endowed individual natures such as get born once or twice in a millennium, is simply to suppose a psychological impossibility. I remember once talking about this with George Eliot, who had lately been reading Frederick Paley's ingenious restatement of the ballad theory, and was captivated by its ingenuity. I told her I did not wonder that old dryasdust philologists should hold such views, but I was indeed surprised to find such a literary artist as herself ignoring the impassable gulf between Homer's language and that which any ballad theory necessarily implies. She had no answer for this except to say that she should have supposed an evolutionist like me would prefer to regard the Homeric poems as gradually evolved rather than suddenly created! A retort so clever and amiable most surely entitled her to the woman's privilege of the last word.

The Wolfian theory may now be regarded as a thing of the past; it has had its day and been flung aside. If Wolf himself were living, he would be the first to laugh at it. Its original prop has been knocked away, since it has become pretty clear that the art of writing was practiced about the shores

of the Egean Sea long before 1000 B. C. Probably even Wolf would now admit that it might have been a real letter that Bellerophon carried to the father of Anteia. All attempts to show a lack of unity in the design of the Iliad and the Odyssey have failed irretrievably, and the discussion has served only to make more and more unmistakable the work of the mighty master. The ballad theory is dead and buried, and he who would read its obituary may find keen pleasure, as well as many a wholesome lesson in sound criticism, in the sensible and brilliant book by Andrew Lang, on Homer and the Epic.

The Bacon - Shakespeare folly has never been set forth by scholars of commanding authority, like Wolf and Lachmann, or even Niese and Wilamowitz Moellendorff. Among Delia Bacon's followers not one can by any permissible laxity of speech be termed a scholar, and their theory has found acceptance with very few persons. Nevertheless, it illustrates as well as the Wolfian theory the way in which such notions grow. It starts from a false premise, hazily conceived, and it subsists upon arguments in which trivial facts are assigned higher value than facts of vital importance. Mr. Lang's remark upon certain learned Homeric commentators, that "they pore over the hyssop on the wall, but are blind to the cedar of Lebanon," applies with tenfold force to the Bacon-Shakespeare sciolists. In them we always miss the just sense of proportion which is one of the abiding marks of sanity. The unfortunate lady who first brought their theory into public notoriety in 1857 was then sinking under the cerebral disease of which she died two years later, and her imitators have been chiefly weak minds of the sort that thrive upon paradox, closely akin to the circle-squarers and inventors of perpetual motion. Underlying all the absurdities, however, there is something that deserves attention. Like many other 1 Iliad, vi. 168.

It starts with a syllogism, of which the major premise is that the dramas ascribed to Shakespeare during his lifetime, and ever since believed to be his, abound in evidences of extraordinary book-learning. The minor premise is that William Shakespeare of Stratfordon-Avon could not have acquired or possessed so much book-learning. The conclusion is that he could not have written those plays.

The question then arises, Which of Shakespeare's contemporaries had enough book-lore to have written them? No doubt Francis Bacon had enough. The conclusion does not follow, however, that he wrote the plays; for there were other contemporaries with learning enough and to spare, as for example George Chapman and Ben Jonson. These two men, to judge from their acknowledged works, were great poets, whereas in Bacon's fifteen volumes there is not a paragraph which betrays poetical genius. Why not, then, ascribe the Shakespeare dramas to Chapman or Jonson? The Baconizers endeavor to support their assumption by calling attention to similarities in thought and phrase between Francis Bacon and the writer of the dramas. Up to this point their argument consists of deductions from assumed premises; here they adduce inductive evidence, such as it is. We shall see specimens of it by and by. At present we are concerned with the initial syllogism.

And first, as to the major premise,

it must be met with a flat denial. The Shakespeare plays do not abound with evidences of scholarship or learning of the sort that is gathered from profound and accurate study of books. It is precisely in this respect that they are conspicuously different from many of the plays contemporary with them, and from other masterpieces of English literature. Such plays as Jonson's Sejanus and Catiline are the work of a scholar deeply indoctrinated with the views and mental habits of classic antiquity; he has soaked himself in the style of Lucan and Seneca, until their mental peculiarities have become like a second nature to him, and are unconsciously betrayed alike in the general handling of his story and in little turns of expression. Or take Milton's Lycidas: no one but a man saturated in every fibre with Theocritus and Virgil could have written such a poem. extremely foreign and artificial literary form has been so completely mastered and assimilated by Milton that he uses it with as much ease as Theocritus himself, and has produced a work that even the master of idyls had scarcely equaled. After the terrific invective against the clergy and the beautiful invocation to the flowers, followed by the triumphant hallelujah of Christian faith, observe the sudden reversion to pagan sentiment where Lycidas is addressed as the genius of the shore. Only profound scholarship could have written this wonderful poem, could have brought forth the Christian thought as if spontaneously through the medium. of the pagan form.

An

terials and weaves them into a story without much regard to classical models; defying rules of order and unity, and not always heeding probability, but never forgetful of his abiding purpose, to create live men and women. These people may have Greek and Latin names, and their scene of action may be Rome or Mitylene, decorated with scraps of classical knowledge such as a bright man might pick up in miscellaneous reading; but all this is the superficial setting, the mere frame to the picture. The living canvas is human nature as Shakespeare saw it in London and depicted with supreme poetic faculty. Among the new books within his reach was Chapman's magnificent translation of the Iliad, which at a later day inspired Keats to such a noble outburst of encomium; and in Troilus and Cressida we have the Greek and Trojan heroes set before us with an incisive reality not surpassed by Homer himself. This play shows how keenly Shakespeare appreciated Homer, how delicately and exquisitely he could supplement the picture; but there is nothing in its five acts that shows him clothed in the garment of ancient thought as Milton wore it. Shakespeare's freedom from such lore is a great advantage to him; in Troilus and Cressida there is a freedom of treatment hardly possible to a professional scholar. It is because of this freedom that Shakespeare reaches a far wider public of readers and listeners than Milton or Dante, whose vast learning makes them in many places viare to the general." Book-lore is a great source of power, but one may easily be hampered by it. What we forever love in Homer is the freshness that comes with lack of it, and in this sort of freshness Shakespeare agrees with Homer far more than with the learned poets.

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It is not for a moment to be denied that Shakespeare's plays exhibit a remarkable wealth of varied knowledge. The writer was one of the keenest ob

are

some of the marks of what we call genius, something that we are far from comprehending, but which experience has shown that books and universities cannot impart. All the colleges on earth could not by combined effort make the kind of man we call a genius, but such a man may at any moment be born into the world, and it is as likely to be in a peasant's cottage as anywhere.

There is nothing in which men differ more widely than in the capacity for imbibing and assimilating knowledge. The capacity is often exercised unconsciously. When my eldest son, at the age of six, was taught to read in the course of a few weeks of daily instruction, it was suddenly discovered that his four-year-old brother also could read. Nobody could tell how it happened. Of course the younger boy must have taken keen notice of what the elder one was doing, but the process went on without attracting attention until the result appeared.

This capacity for unconscious learning is not at all uncommon. It is possessed to some extent by everybody; but a very high degree of it is one of the marks of genius. I remember one evening, many years ago, hearing Herbert Spencer in a friendly discussion regarding certain functions of the cerebellum. Abstruse points of comparative anatomy and questions of pathology were involved. Spencer's three antagonists were not violently opposed to him, but were in various degrees unready to adopt his views. The three were Huxley, one of the greatest of comparative anatomists; Hughlings Jackson, a very eminent authority on the pathology of the nervous system; and George Henry