believe in "Genius." Shakespeare and Moliere did not live in
"Society," though both rubbed shoulders with it, or looked at it over
the invisible barrier between the actor and the great people in whose
houses or palaces he takes the part of Entertainer. The rest they
divined, by genius.

Bacon did not, perhaps, study the society of carters, drawers, Mrs.
Quickly, and Doll Tearsheet; of copper captains and their boys; not
at Court, not in the study, did he meet them. How then did he create
his multitude of very low-lived persons? Rustics and rural
constables he MAY have lovingly studied at Gorhambury, but for his
collection of other very loose fish Bacon must have kept queer
company. So you have to admit "Genius,"--the miracle of "Genius" in
your Bacon,--to an even greater extent than I need it in the case of
my Will; or, like Lord Penzance, you may suggest that Will
collaborated with Bacon.

Try to imagine that Will was a born poet, like Burns, but with a very
different genius, education, and environment. Burns could easily get
at the Press, and be published: that was impossible for Shakespeare
at Stratford, if he had written any lyrics. Suppose him to be a
poet, an observer, a wit, a humorist. Tradition at Stratford says
something about the humorist, and tradition, IN SIMILAR
CIRCUMSTANCES, would have remembered no more of Burns, after the
lapse of seventy years.

Imagine Will, then, to have the nature of a poet (that much I am
obliged to assume), and for nine or ten years, after leaving school
at thirteen, to hang about Stratford, observing nature and man,
flowers and foibles, with thoughts incommunicable to Sturley and