All that depends upon the
intelligence of the scrutineer. Doubtless your Philister would turn
over the skull or the bones, or make hay with the dust, just as
Peter Bell could see nothing in a primrose but a weed in flower.
What message a bone or a weed may have for the man or the race
depends wholly upon the recipient. Your Shakespeare or Goethe, your
Owen or Huxley, would find in it an intelligible language; while
your Capel Lofft would denounce what he found there as dirt and
indecency. How true is the proverb of Syr Oracle Mar-text: "To the
wise all things are wise." In the case of Schiller, the skull spoke
for itself, and claimed to be that of Schiller; the bones, like
those in the 37th chapter of Ezekiel, aggregated themselves around
their head, and submitted to an accurate articulation; and the teeth
gave their evidence, too, at least the place of one, which was not
in the jaw, bore its testimony to the fact that the jaw in question
was that which Schiller had submitted to dentistry. In the case of
Raphael, the discovery of the skull disproved the claims of the
spurious relic, and arrested a stupid superstition. {29} Beyond
question, the skull of Shakespeare, might we but discover it in
anything like its condition at the time of its interment, would be
of still greater interest and value. It would at least settle two
disputed points in the Stratford Bust; it would test the Droeshout
print, and every one of the half-dozen portraits-in-oils which pass
as presentments of Shakespeare's face at different periods of his
life.
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