hold the mirror up to nature, and to shew the very age and body of the time, his form and pressure.
The study of this one feature of the "age and body" of Shakespeare's time, with the view of clearly grasping the extreme accuracy of the "abstract and brief chronicle" to be found in his works, will surely go some way to give definiteness and force to our ideas of Shakespeare's magnificent grip of all other phases of thought and of action.
The argument recommends itself—"If he is trustworthy in this subject, he is trustworthy in all."
To a professional reader at all events, it argues very much indeed in a writer's favour, that the "layman" has managed to write the simplest sentence about a specialty, without some more or less serious blunder.
Finally, no Shakespeare student will deny that some general help is necessary, when Schmidt's admirable Lexicon commits itself to such a misleading statement as that a virginal is a kind of small pianoforte, and when a very distinguished Shakespeare scholar has allowed a definition of a viol as a six-stringed guitar to appear in print under his name.
Out of thirty-seven plays of Shakespeare, there
