which even Scriven's print, good as it is, scarcely does justice.
To compare Humphreys' drawing, which hangs in the Birthplace, and is
its most valuable portrait, with Samuel Cousin's fine mezzotint of
the Chandos, engraved forty years ago, is to be convinced that the
existing picture no longer represents the man--whosoever he may have
been--from whom it was painted. How many questions, affecting the
Bust, the Death-Mask, and these portraits, would be set at rest by
the production of Shakespeare's skull!

The late Mr. William Page, the American sculptor, whose interest in
testing the identity of the Kesselstadt Death-Mask, by comparing it
with Shakespeare's skull, was in 1874-5 incomparably greater than
that of any other interested person, comes VERY NEAR the expression
of a wish for the exhumation of the skull. {39} But he had not the
courage to express that wish, and after the passage which I am about
to quote, abruptly changes the subject. He says, "The man who wrote
the four lines [of epitaph] which have thus far secured his bones
that rest which his epitaph demands, omitted nothing likely to carry
the whole plan into effect. The authorship of the epitaph cannot be
doubted, unless another man in England had the wit and wisdom to
divine the loyal heart's core of its people, and touch it in the
single appeal 'for Jesus sake.' Nothing else has kept him out of
Westminster [Abbey]. The style of the command and curse are
Shakespearian, and triumphant as any art of forethought in his
plays." Then follows on--without even the break of a paragraph--not
what naturally should have followed, and MUST have been in Mr.
Page's mind, but a citation of Chantrey and John Bell, as to the
model from which the Bust was made. Possibly it is due to the
omission of a sentence, which once intervened between the remarks on
the remains and those which concern the Bust of Shakespeare, that we