Barnett lecture - In My Library

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it. Unable at that time to locate its authorship - the legend runs - that - the government hung, drew and quartered, R "Doleman" the publisher, burnt such copies of the work as they could put their hands upon, and made it high treason to possess a copy of the book hence its comparative rarity today. & its high price when it comes into the market.

We now know that it was the joint production of Sir Francis Inglefield, Cardinal Allen, and that brilliant and most capable of Jesuit priests - Robert Parson - "the lightening change variety artist" of the church stage of that troublesome time. He was not only an active conspirator, but a most zealous priest, and is credited with much preaching,

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and many celebrations of the Mass, in the secret rooms and private chapels, of the old baronial halls. He had an exceptional faculty for disguise, so that for a marked and wanted man, he moved about England with rapidity and comparative freedom. I am told he figures as a character in one of "Kingsley's" novels - probably "Westward Ho".

It adds attraction to "Dolemans Succession" - (as it is for brevity called -) to show with it a thin vellum bound quarto, containing a brilliant series of portraits, engraved by Henrici Hondius the elder, at (the) Hague in 1608, because, it contains the likeness? of Isabella and of K James, although here they are 15 years older than when Robert Parsons tried

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to use them as pawns, in the high-staked and risky game, he was playing for his church.

The largest collection of work on one special subject is the Shakesperiana, (books and pamphlets together more than 2,000 items). Ideal lives of our Poet, evolved from the writers inner consciousness, or from the imigary of the Sonnets -- a surprising fecundity of suggestion in amending the text of the early quarto & the first folio editions of the plays - much criticism, varying from cantankerous carping to fulsome eulogy -- analysis, running the gamut from transcendental idealism to the most prosaic realism -- many vols of pictorial illustration, with much literary

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33 quarreling, the warmth of whose crackling fires has long since smouldered out, to give place (in these latter days) to active discussion of verse and rhyme tests, as showing the time order of the writing of the dramas, with discussion on the Baconian and other alleged authorships of both plays and sonnets - make the bulk if not the worth of this mass of - - I was going to say - literature - but will say mass of paper and printing.

It seems - to me - to throw more light on human nature - more light on literary, poetic and dramatic psychology, than it does on Shakespears' life or work, so that, any would be student, with one good edition of the plays & sonnets, a life - say by Halliwell Phillips or Fleay, and a modern Concordance or Lexicon, by either Clark, Schmidt or

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Bartlett, is well equipped for ordinary study and for full enjoyment of "the Divine William" - and even if he discard the "Life" & the "Lexicon" he need not stumble any more at the second through reading, than he will actually stumble walking an ordinary Canadian country road.

Dull as may be some of the books about our Bard, the books that he used, the books that helped his genius, will always have a charm for some of us; - and such an attraction belongs to "Il Pecorone" of Giovanni Fiorentino, written as early as 1378 and printed in Venice 1565, the suggested probable source of the plot of "The Merchant of Venice". The Stratford (Canada) copy has in it the ex-libri of Charles Nodier - of Viollet-le-Duc and of the enthusiastic

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