in Cymbeline and King Lear! Concerning "the anomalous status of a
King of Scotland under one of its primitive Kings" the author of
Macbeth knew no more than what he read in Holinshed; of the actual
truth concerning Duncan (that old prince was, in fact, a young man
slain in a blacksmith's bothy), and of the whole affair, the author
knew nothing but a tissue of sophisticated legends. The author of
the plays had no knowledge (as Mr. Morgan inexplicably declares that
he had) of "matters of curious and occult research for antiquaries or
dilettanti to dig out of old romances or treaties or statutes rather
than for historians to treat of or schools to teach!"

Mon Dieu! do historians NOT treat of "matters of curious research"
and of statutes and of treaties? As for "old romances," they were
current and popular. The "occult" sources of King Lear are a popular
tale attached to legendary "history" and a story in Sidney's Arcadia.
Will, whom Mr. Morgan describes as "a letterless peasant lad," or the
Author, whoever he was, is not "invested with all the love" (sic,
v.1. "lore"), "which the ages behind him had shut up in clasped books
and buried and forgotten."

"Our friend's style has flowery components," Mr. Greenwood adds to
this deliciously eloquent passage from his American author, "and yet
Shakespeare who did all this," et caetera. But Shakespeare did NOT
do "all this"! We know the sources of the plays well enough: novels
in one of which "Delphos" is the insular seat of an oracle of Apollo;
Holinshed, with his contaminated legends; North's Plutarch, done out
of the French; older plays, and the rest of it. Shakespeare does not
go to Tighernach and the Hennskringla for Macbeth; or for Hamlet to
the saga which is the source of Saxo; or for his English chronicle-
plays to the State Papers. Shakespeare did not, like William of