Bacon himself appears to have been struck with the immensity of his production, and he cast about for some plausible explanation that would justify it in the eyes of his twentieth century admirers. Human endurance and fecundity would, he foresaw, be regarded as unequal to the strain—Divine assistance alone could make so colossal a task possible:

“Whosoever may question assertions that tend to shew y’ mankinde evidences of a Divine thought interfusing th’ human minde, hath but to prove it by experiment. He would not bee ready to cavil, or laugh to scorn this assertion, which I may repeate anon, that Divine aide was given me in my work. I have, at th’ least, accomplished a great work in fewe yeares, work of such a difficult nature that no one hand could accomplish, except other than myselfe upheld or directed it.” And “anon,” he repeats, “surely my hand and braine have but short rest. I firmly believe it were not in the power of humane beings to do anie more than I have done, yet I am but partlie satisfied.”

These excerpts, which have been given at some length, disclose not only the exact nature and extent of the alleged claims, but the style and manner in which they are couched. There is nothing of the literary polish and elegance in the cipher writing which we find in all of Bacon’s acknowledged works, but taking into consideration the difficulties of dropping the cipher into the books in which it is said to appear, and the even greater difficulties of interpreting it, it seems manifestly unfair to dismiss the entire thing as an imposture on that account. Mr. Mallock’s contention is that Mrs. Gallup’s theory is sufficiently plausible to merit it an unprejudiced investigation. If the cipher proves to be altogether false, the manner in which it has been elaborated will, Mr. Mallock submits, form a curious incident in literary history; while should it prove true, it will be more curious still. Apart from the cipher, Mr. Sinnett declares, there are floods of reasons for disbelieving that Shakespeare could have written the plays. Mr. Sinnett, and the other leaders of the Baconian cult, do not appear to see that if their theory is to outlast the present controversy, the cipher business must be thrown overboard forthwith.

As Mr. William Archer has said with reference to these ciphers, the point at issue is as plain as a pike-staff. We are not concerned, while we deal with this phase of the subject, in the verbal parallels between Shakespeare’s writings and those of Bacon, nor with the vehemently expressed conviction of students and scholars that Bacon did not write Shakespeare. All we desire to know is whether the ciphers which Mrs. Gallup and Dr. Owen contend are contained in certain books (the First Folio Shakespeare among others) really exist. Mr. Mallock says that until an examination by experts in typography has negatived this theory, he is inclined to believe it. His position is unassailable. Nothing further can be argued or asserted (with conviction) until a committee of experts have made their report. If they declare that the cipher has no foundation in fact, the students who have carefully perused Mrs. Gallup’s great work—great invention it will then be—and Dr. Owen’s many volumes of badly-constructed, ridiculous plays and poems, will give both Mrs. Gallup and Dr. Owen credit for a veritable triumph of misapplied energy and endurance—for having conceived a masterpiece of diabolical inventiveness, for having revealed a perfect genius for the perpetration of literary fraud.

Personally, I do not expect to learn that they will be convicted of the possession of such an exceptional gift of deception. Their labours smack of honesty; their conclusions betray an ingenuous credulity that calls for respect. It will, indeed, surprise most people who have made a study of their works, if it is proved that the cipher they claim to have discovered, and manipulated with such marvellous results, is a myth. But assuming that a properly-constituted committee did declare that the cipher was to be found in all the books indicated, and that the investigation corroborated the revelations made by Mrs. Gallup and Dr. Owen, there would still remain the question as to who concealed the statements in the different volumes, and whether there is any truth in them.

I think, nay I claim, that in the event of the cipher being verified, and the translations being confirmed, that (a) The cipher could have been introduced by no other man than Bacon; and that (b) The whole of the statements found therein are false from beginning to end. In a searching investigation into the cipher undertaken by a correspondent of the Times, a single page of the cipher was tested, but the test is not, as the Times claims for it, entirely convincing. The method of investigation employed is excellent. A greatly enlarged photograph is taken of a page from the Epistle Dedicatory to the Ruine of Time in the 1591 edition of Spenser’s Complaints, and the “A” and “B” letters which Mrs. Gallup herself assigns to the parts respectively are cut out and arranged in parallel columns. When these two sets of letters are seen side by side it would, indeed, be difficult for the untrained eye to distinguish any marks of dissimilarity between them. But as Mr. Mallock tells us, “although even the naked eye can be soon trained to perceive that in many cases the letters belong to different founts, yet these differences are of so minute a kind that in other cases they allude the eye without the aid of a magnifying glass; and even with the aid of a magnifying glass, the eye of the amateur, at all events, remains doubtful, and unable to assign the letters to this alphabet or to that.” The correspondent of the Times leads us to infer that he has been unable to verify the existence of the cipher in the page he has tested, and Mr. Lee has declared, without hesitation, that the cipher does not exist in the Shakespeare First Folio. On the other hand, Mr. Mallock had little difficulty in distinguishing the different founts in the facsimiles from the Novum Organum and Spenser’s Complaints. He experimented with a large number of passages, and comparing his interpretation with that of Mrs. Gallup, he found that it coincided with hers, sometimes in four cases out of seven, and not infrequently in five. “It appears to me,” Mr. Mallock writes, “to be almost inconceivable that multiplied coincidences such as these can be the work of chance, or that they can originate otherwise than in the fact that in these pages at all events—the preface to the Novum Organum, printed in 1620, and in the Dedication of Spenser’s Complaints, printed in 1591—a bi-literal cipher exists, in both cases the work of Bacon; and if such a cipher really exists here, the probabilities are overwhelming that Mrs. Gallup is right, and that we shall find it existing in the first folio of Shakespeare also.”