Being, as I have said, a duly modest and an evidently
honest man, he admits "with candour" that there is no jot or tittle of
"external evidence" whatsoever to be alleged in support of this
gratuitous attribution: but he submits, with some fair show of reason,
that there is a certain "resemblance between the style of" Shakespeare's
"earlier performances and of the work in question"; and without the
slightest show of any reason whatever he appends to this humble and
plausible plea the unspeakably unhappy assertion that at the time of its
appearance "there was no known writer equal to such a play"; whereas at a
moderate computation there were, I should say, on the authority of
Henslowe's Diary, at least a dozen--and not improbably a score. In any
case there was one then newly dead, too long before his time, whose
memory stands even higher above the possible ascription of such a work
than that of the adolescent Shakespeare's very self.
Of one point we may be sure, even where so much is unsure as we find it
here: in the curt atheological phrase of the Persian Lucretius, "one
thing is certain, and the rest is lies.
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