fashion as did the old sea-dogs of Nelson's day regard the hero of
Trafalgar. 'Do not criticise him too harshly,' said Lord St. Vincent;
'there can only be one Nelson.'

These are not the real difficulties, though they seem to have pressed
somewhat heavily on Lord Penzance.

The circumstances attendant upon the publication of the Folio of 1623
are undoubtedly puzzling. Shakespeare died in 1616, leaving behind
him more than forty plays circulating in London and more or less
associated with his name. His will, a most elaborate document, does
not contain a single reference to his literary life or labours. Seven
years after his death the Folio appears, which contains twenty-six
plays out of the odd forty just referred to, and ten extra plays which
had never before been in print, and about six of which there is a very
scanty Shakespearean tradition. Of the twenty-six old plays, seventeen
had been printed in small Quartos, possibly surreptitiously, in
Shakespeare's lifetime, but the Folio does not reprint from these
Quartos, but from enlarged, amended, and enormously improved copies.
Messrs. Heminge and Condell, the editor of this priceless treasure,
the First Folio, wrote a long-winded dedication to Lords Pembroke and
Montgomery, which contains but one pertinent passage, in which they
ask their readers to believe that it had been the office of the
editors to collect and publish the author's 'mere writings,' he being
dead, and to offer them, not 'maimed and deformed,' in surreptitious
and stolen copies, but 'cured and perfect of their limbs and all the
rest, absolute in their numbers as he conceived them, who as he was a
happie imitator of Nature was a most gentle expresser of it. His mind
and hand went together, and what he thought, he uttered with that
easiness, that we have scarce received from him a blot in his papers.'