Of the "group" first mentioned, each on its first appearance has been received by different classes of too easily persuaded critics and students with all the blind faith and enthusiasm of the true believer; so that there has been a Chandos party, a Jansen party, a Felton party, a Hunt party, an Ely Palace party, and a Droeshout Original party, each of which has been prepared to maintain à outrance the superior authenticity of its own fancy, and deride the pretensions of the rest so far as they were at the moment known. Of the works which have at some time aroused the widest interest a selection has here been made by the Editor to supplement the authentic portraits-no doubt as wise a choice as could have been made. But I may say at once that a long and minute study of the portraits of Shakespeare in every medium and material has led me, otherwise hopeful as I was at the outset years ago, no distance at all towards the firm establishment of the reputation of any one of them as a true life-portrait, and that the healthy but not irreconcilable scepticism which should be the equipment of every honest inquirer, has unhappily in my case been subjected to no undue

strain.

THE DROESHOUT ENGRAVING.

The authority of the engraving by Martin Droeshout in the First Folio is not to be gainsaid. This leading portrait was published by Shakespeare's friends and partners in the Globe Theatre; it carries their guarantee; and as it was issued in the life-time of Mrs. Shakespeare, a few months before her death, in all probability it had her approval, too. If Ben Jonson's dedicatory lines, "To the Reader," are to be taken seriously-as sincerely laudatory -the portrait had his acceptance as well; but this emphatic testimonial has been subjected to analytical dissection in order to ascertain if the full significance apparent in his words really belongs to them.

This Figure, that thou here seest put,

It was for gentle Shakespeare cut.

Does this mean, it has been asked, that the engraving was cut to represent Shakespeare or that it was cut to his order, long before, and possibly rejected by him? And again:

Wherein the Graver had a strife

With Nature to outdo the life.

How much importance are we to attach to praise so generous and lavish, not to say fulsome? The truth is that the expression,

according to the phrase of to-day, was almost a cliché. Shakespeare had himself used it thirty years before in Venus and Adonis :

Look, when a painter would surpass the life,

His art's with Nature's workmanship at strife.

The phrase, rather for its felicity of expression than for its unvarnished truth, no doubt, remained a favourite form of dedication for many years, and Dryden did not hesitate to apply it to Sir Godfrey Kneller:

Such are thy pieces, imitating life

So near, they almost conquer in the strife.

As for the concluding lines, many parallels might be found:
O could he but have drawn his wit

As well in brass, as he hath hit
His face, the print would then surpass
All that was ever writ in brass.

But, since he cannot, Reader, look
Not on his Picture, but his Book.

More than thirty years before Malherbe had placed below de Leu's engraving of Montaigne a quatrain curiously suggestive of the same idea:

Voici du grand Montaigne une entière figure;

Le peintre a peint le corps, et lui son bel esprit ;
Le premier, par son art, égale la nature;
Mais l'autre la surpasse en tout ce qu'il écrit.

Examples of dedications similarly laudatory are so numerous that, taken along with them, Ben Jonson's lines convey in effect no particular impression save that of amiability—amiability as much towards the bold publishers as the young artist. Reasoning from this basis, many have believed that the force of Jonson's testimony is seriously diminished, and argue that too much reliance need not be put upon it. It is even suggested that Jonson may have written his lines without ever seeing the print, so that he found himself stultified by the engraving, just as Carlyle's ecstatic praise of Steiler's portrait of Goethe is rendered absurd by the accompanying engraving that caricatured it. It must be borne in mind. that poets of good standing were frequently retained to write eulogistic verses under engraved portraits, a practice that prevailed over a long period, both antecedent and subsequent to the date of this plate.

However this may be, we may be pretty sure that Ben Jonson

formed his opinion not at all upon the print as it appeared in the title-page of the First Folio, but upon that early proof which Halliwell-Phillipps first brought to light. The difference between the two "states" is very striking. The harsh lights which fall in so unreasoning and unintelligible a manner all over the face in the Folio print, and invest the forehead with what Mr. A. C. Benson aptly calls its "horrible hydrocephalous development," are not seen in the proof. The hard drawing of the eyebrows, the speckled moustache and pimply or unshaven chin, find no place in the entirely human and sympathetic face presented to us in the proof-a document which will be seen to be of the highest importance when we come to consider the "Droeshout (or Flower) Painting" in the Shakespeare Memorial Gallery. The ear is an unexplained deformity in both plates; but the untouched proof must remain the test of authoritative Shakespeare portraiture which, relatively to it, must to a considerable extent be denied to the print. All the additional work-the strengthening, the cross-hatching, the added shadows-doubtless fitted the plate to give the numerous impressions that would be required of it; but it robbed it of the finer and more sympathetic expression we see in the proof, and imparted an appearance of age to what was previously a youthful face.

When Martin Droeshout engraved the plate in 1622 he was twenty-one years old. The volume, it must be remembered, was issued early in 1623, seven years after Shakespeare's death. It is the earliest of the engraver's known plates, and his hall-mark is to be recognized in the hatchet-like treatment of the corners of the eyes-just as we see it in his "Buckingham," his "Munjoy Blunt," and other plates. The dress, which has given rise to so much discussion, discloses monstrous faults of perspective such as we could expect only, yet not less resent, in a young man's work: perhaps it was reproduced from that preliminary limning which Sir George Scharf suggested, I believe with truth, might be the original of the portrait. Likely enough, the young engraver felt it incumbent upon him to copy his original and import no corrections of his own, and so the extraordinarily bad drawing of the body became perpetuated. Commentators have supposed, on what grounds does not appear, that it is a stage dress; but it is clearly enough the recognised, well-established dress of wealthy men, persons of high estate, such as we see in Van Somer's portrait of Henry, Prince of Wales, in that of the Earl of Essex wrought in 1597 (now in the National Portrait Gallery), and in Cecil's portrait of Sir John Kedermister [sic] in the British Museum.

The root-fact of this portrait, it must be remembered, is the

perpendicular rise of the forehead, clearly denoting the shape of the skull-a definitive test of all other portraits of Shakespeare, confirming the Stratford bust in Holy Trinity Church and involving all other likenesses in serious discredit. In conclusion, Sir George Scharf's belief in sharp divergence though it is with the contention of many other critics-seems to be justified by the character inherent in the engraving before us: the plate was executed from a drawing and was not taken from an oil painting.

THE CHANDOS PORTRAIT.

The claim of the Chandos portrait, now in the National Portrait Gallery, to be a true likeness from the life rests mainly on a pedigree or pedigrees which make a serious draft on our credulity. It is hard to believe that this dark face, of distinctly Italian type, represents one of the pure English Shakespeare stock of the Midlands. Comparing it with the alleged portrait of Shakespeare at the Shakespeare Memorial, called the "Venice portrait," admittedly of Italian origin, we find an affinity of type (though with less of accent, I admit, in the Chandos) that is very suggestive. The Chandos pedigree is tainted at the outset. It is obviously more easy to concoct a pedigree than a portrait, and when that pedigree is founded not on documentary evidence but on a vague tradition, the truth becomes more elusive than ever. That the Chandos picture is an early seventeenth century painting is not denied, but more specific statements of its origin unfortunately carry little conviction. One tradition declares it to be the work of Shakespeare's fellow actor, Burbage, an amateur painter whose self-portrait in the Dulwich Gallery is, I believe, of uncontested authorship. If Burbage painted the Dulwich portrait the other is not by him. To mention but one detail, the ignorant drawing of the eyes in his own picture precludes the possibility of his having executed the well-drawn, skilfully-rendered eyes in the other. For, despite all criticism to the contrary, the Chandos portrait, although not a work of the highest class, is a very able rendering of a head, excellent alike in character, expression, and illumination. Oldys recorded a story that the picture was painted by Cornelis Jansen, thus sweeping away the other attribution-even assuming that he knew anything about its history, for there is a difficulty in the tallying of dates. Moreover, Jansen probably arrived in England only two years after Shakespeare's death, so that the claim of a life-portrait is annihilated by the assertion. The weight of such evidence as there is seems to be in favour of another authorship, that of John or Joseph

Taylor, who-notwithstanding that he is known to have died intestate-is alleged to have bequeathed it by will to Sir William D'Avenant. From that time forward, however, the history of the painting is clear enough, and it is attested by the copy of it which Sir Godfrey Kneller made for Dryden between 1683 and 1692at the instance, it has actually been said, of D'Avenant himself, who had been dead for some twenty years! This copy, a fine work, is not a very accurate transcript, but it is invaluable in showing that, contrary to the repeated assertions of former writers, unacquainted with this version, the Chandos portrait has not been radically or even materially altered by successive restorers or retouchers. The picture, indeed, is in fairly pure condition: the legend of excessive restoration having its origin in the defective photograph taken of it at the National Portrait Exhibition in 1864 and since then widely circulated.

In this portrait (less, perhaps, in the Kneller copy) we have a receding forehead and pointed chin which are in direct contradiction to the Droeshout portrait. But the baldness is much the same, and the edge of the hair where it falls away is similarly so sharply defined as to suggest a shaving of the head. Whether this really is so, whether it was a stage custom, or adopted in accordance with a quaint fashion of the day, is a matter into which it is impossible to enter here; but it must be remembered that Hentzner, a contemporary writer quoted by Granger, has recorded that "the English in the reign of Elizabeth cut the hair close on the middle of the head, but suffered it to grow on either side." It might be argued that this, and the abandonment of the fashion in the reign of James II, would account in some measure for the clashing of testimony in portraits of Shakespeare as to the bare or covered scalp. The presence of the gold ear-ring-a feature to be found in no other serious portrait of the poet except the Lumley portrait, for the "Dunford portrait," in which it is also found, is an admitted "make-up"-must not in itself be held to tell against the character of the picture. We have here a well-recognised fashion of the day. Although worn usually with a jewel-drop by the wealthy, as in the portraits of Charles I, Henry II of France, William Herbert, Earl of Pembroke, Sir Walter Raleigh, Henry, Earl of Oxford, and many more, it is to be found as a simple gold ring in the pictures of the Earl of Southampton, the first Marquess of Worcester, Sir John Hawkins, the Duke of Buckingham, and a dozen other portraits that might be named. The fashion extended over two centuries, and if it be conceivable that the actor aped the manners of the exquisites of his day, there is no reason to rule out the picture, as some have sought to do, by reason of the adornment.