active 19th century E. W. Smithson

Baconians hold that Francis Bacon concealed his identity under an alias, and this perhaps is why they are sometimes accused of slandering him, as if the use of a pen-name were a crime and not the perfectly legitimate ruse it actually is. Calumniators of Bacon there exist no doubt, and some of them are disposed to give Macaulay as an instance. Such calumniation, however, is less likely to be found among Baconians than among our orthodox opponents, whose creed effectually bars the way to any true appreciation of the great man. As for Mr. William Shakspere of Stratford, his character was, or should be, above suspicion. The Burbages, exceptionally well-informed and credible witnesses, testify that he was a “deserving” man, and Baconians accept that valuation of the man all the more readily because there is no proof that he himself ever laid claim to anything published or known as Shakespeare’s.

The serious criticism that Baconians have to face may be considered under three heads: (i) The testimony of Ben Jonson; (ii) The popular notion that Bacon was essentially a man of science; (iii) The absence of conspicuous and unmistakable evidence of identity between Bacon and Shakespeare.

(i) In spite of the obvious inconsistency and perversity of Ben Jonson’s various utterances on the subject, and the difficulty of believing that his famous Ode of 1623 could refer except in part to a death which had occurred in 1616, Ben Jonson is commonly regarded as an absolutely conclusive witness against us. An article of mine entitled Ben Jonson’s Pious Fraud, which appeared in the Nineteenth Century and After of November 1913, was an attempt at justification, and the attempt shall not be repeated here. Some of my readers, however, may care to know that in the December (1913) number of the same review an angry opponent charged me with having libelled Ben Jonson, about the last thing of which I, a lifelong admirer of Ben Jonson’s, could really be guilty.

(ii) The second criticism we have to meet is founded on the assumption that Science—Natural Science—set her mark upon Bacon almost as soon as he entered his teens. The main business of this section will be to set forth arguments tending to show that the mark which Bacon actually bore from early youth to mature age, was the sign manual of Poetry. In the nineties of the 16th century, Bacon had serious thoughts of abandoning the legal profession into which he had been thrust, and devoting himself to literature in some form or other. Towards the close of his life, when reviewing his life’s work, he regretfully confesses to having wronged his “genius” in not devoting himself to letters for which he was “born.” In another letter of about the same date, he expresses the same conviction: that in deserting literature for civil affairs, he had done “scant justice” to his “genius.” These are not the words, nor this the attitude of a man who thought and felt that he was born for Natural Science. Possibly so, says an opponent, but if Bacon were really born for literature, how came it that his literary output, until he had passed the mature age of 40, was so small? If you, Baconians, were not blinded by prejudice, you would recognise in Bacon’s literary inactivity during youth and early manhood, something very like proof of a preoccupation with Science. In replying to this argument, I should begin by pointing out that the words “literary inactivity” beg the important question of concealment of identity. Waiving this point for the moment, the presumption of an early preoccupation with Science will be seen at a glance to be incompatible with what we know of Bacon’s attainments in that direction. A speech of his about 1592 in praise of “Knowledge”—a word which covered everything knowable—contains some of his finest and most characteristic thoughts. The praise of knowledge, he declares, is the praise of mind, since “knowledge is mind.... The minde itself is but an accident to knowledge, for knowledge is a double of that which is. The truth of being and the truth of knowing is all one.” Then comes a rhetorical question reminiscent of Lucretius’s suave mari, i.e.: “Is there any such happiness as for a man’s mind to be raised above ... the clowdes of error that turn into stormes of perturbations.... Where he may have a respect of the order of Nature”? “Knowledge,” the speaker continues, should enable us “to produce effects and endow the life of man with infinite commodities.” At this point he interrupts himself with the reflection that he “is putting the garland on the wrong head,” and then proceeds to inveigh against the “knowledge that is now in use: All the philosophie of nature now receaved is eyther the philosophie of the Gretians or of the Alchemist.” Aristotle’s admiration of the changelessness of the heavens is derided on the naÏve assumption that there is a “like invariableness in the boweles of the earth, much spiritt in the upper part of the earth which cannot be brought into masse, and much massie body in the lower part of the heavens which cannot be refined into spiritt.”[61] Ancient astronomers are next taken to task for failing to see “how evident it is that what they call a contrarie mocion is but an abatement of mocion. The fixed starres overgoe Saturne and Saturne leaveth behind him Jupiter, and so in them and the rest all is one mocion, and the nearer the earth the slower.” As for modern astronomers, Copernicus for instance, and Galileo, he dismisses them with contumely as “new men who drive the earth about.” Then he chides himself for having forgotten that “knowledge itself is more beautiful than any apparel of wordes that can be put upon it”—a romantic sentiment reminiscent of Biron’s “angel knowledge” in Love’s Labour’s Lost; and a subsequent passage is reminiscent of Montaigne. The conclusion of the Speech is too fine to be abridged and must be given in full:

“But indeede facilitie to beleeve, impatience to doubte, temeritie to assever, glorie to knowe, end to gaine, sloth to search, resting in a part of nature, these and the like have been the things which have forbidden the happy match between the minde of man and the nature of things, and in place thereof have married it to vaine nocions and blynde experiments. And what the posteritie of so honorable a match may be it is not hard to consider.[62] Therefore no doubte the sovereigntie of man lieth hid in knowledge, wherein many things are reserved which Kings with their treasures cannot buy, nor with their force command: their spies and intelligencies can give no news of them: their seamen and discoverers cannot saile where they grow. Now we governe nature in opinions but are thrall to her in necessities, but if we would be led by her in invention we should command her in action.”

These are not the views nor is this the accent of one who has been devoting himself to natural science. The utterance is that of a genius for letters whose preoccupation has been the apparelling of beautiful thoughts in beautiful words.

The above Speech, which is part of an entertainment called a Conference of Pleasure, expresses intuitions that come from the very soul of the poet-speaker. Ample confirmation of this is to be found in the Advancement of Learning—Learning here being the synonym of Knowledge in the Speech—published in 1605. That work aimed at promoting “natural science” with a view above all to scientific discovery and the increase of man’s power over nature. It teems with practical allusions to and quotations from the classical poets, particularly Ovid and Vergil. It was dedicated to James the First, a prince—to quote the words of its author—“invested with the learning and universality[63] of a philosopher.” In a passage dealing with the art of medicine the author deems it very much “to the purpose” to note that poets were wont “to conjoin music and medicine in Apollo, because the office of medicine is but to tune this curious harp of man’s body and reduce it to harmony.” Another passage asserts that the wild fancies of quacks or empirics were anticipated and discredited by the poets in the fable of Ixion. What we call endowment of research, he, student of belles lettres that he is, regards as provision for the making of experiments appertaining to Vulcan and DÆdalus. Students of Natural Science will search the book in vain for evidence of direct familiarity with any branch of the subject. In the opinion of its author, natural history—the natural history of 1605—left little to be desired so far as normal phenomena were concerned. He ruled that the “opinion of Copernicus touching the rotation of the earth” was repugnant to “natural philosophy.” The notion that air had or could have weight is dismissed as preposterous. Among his observations on history there is no suggestion of the circulation of the blood. He sums up Gilbert in terms of contempt, his own contribution to the subject of magnetism being: “There is formed in everything a double nature of good, the one as everything is a total or substantive in itself, the other as it is a part or member of a greater or more general form. Therefore we see the iron in particular sympathy moveth to the loadstone, but yet if it exceed a certain quantity, it forsaketh the affection to the loadstone and like a good patriot moveth to the earth which is the region or country of massy bodies.”

One of the most telling arguments against the presumption that Bacon had interested himself in natural science to the exclusion of almost everything else, is the staggering value he put upon “poesy” as compared with “philosophy” or science at large. Fascinated by the wonderful discoveries of explorers in the material globe, he pictures knowledge, all knowledge, as an intellectual globe, which he then divides into three great parts or continents, History, Poesy, and Philosophy. Only a poet could have made such a distribution as that. For the continent allotted to Philosophy, as he understands it, embraced not only all the natural sciences, but also ethics, politics, mathematics, metaphysics, and many another subject besides. It would be easy, out of the Advancement alone, to multiply refutations of the theory that Bacon’s early and middle life were devoted to natural science. The only difficulty is to select.

Before changing the subject it may be well to give the substance of a foot-note to the present writer’s Shakespeare-Bacon, 1899 (Swan Sonnenschein): “When Bacon came to review his early estimate of the importance of poetry to science or knowledge, he was evidently dissatisfied. In the Advancement (1605) he had claimed that ‘for the expressing of affections, passions, corruptions, and customs, we are beholding to poets more than to philosophers.’ In the corresponding place of the revised edition (1623) he drops this claim. In the Advancement again Poesy is stated to be one of the three ‘goodly fields’[64] (history and experience being the other two), ‘where grow observations concerning the several characters and tempers of men’s natures and dispositions.’” In the corresponding place of the revised version this commendation is materially lowered, on the ground that poets are so apt to exceed the truth. The revised version, in short, goes so far towards cheapening Poesy and Imagination as to suggest that if the author had not been hampered by his earlier utterances, he would have deposed both from the high places they still were permitted to occupy in his system.

That Bacon’s relations with “Poesy” were extremely intimate and at the same time anxiously concealed from the public, his letters afford convincing evidence. Writing to the Earl of Essex in 1594-5, when his affairs were in evil plight, he assures that generous friend that “the waters of Parnassus” are the best of consolation. In a letter to Lord H. Howard he writes: “We both have tasted of the best waters to knit minds together”—the allusion being of course to the same Parnassian waters. In an open letter (1604) to the Earl of Devonshire, he confesses to having written a sonnet addressed to the Queen herself on a memorable occasion, and then, by way of proving his generosity when the welfare of Essex was at stake, directs special attention to the fact that this sonnet (affair) involved a publishing and declaring of himself—in other words a dropping of the mask that screened him as poet from the eyes of the public. That such was his meaning is explained by a confidential letter to a poetical friend in which he ranks himself among “concealed” poets. Moreover, this was evidently only one of several letters in which Bacon confessed himself a concealed poet, for John Aubrey tells us that Bacon “was a good poet, but concealed as appears by his letters.” Whether any of these other letters still exist is to be doubted, for the piety of Sir Tobie Mathew, Sir Thomas Meautys, and other devoted friends of the concealed poet, would naturally destroy all they could lay hands on.

The external evidence that Bacon was essentially a poet is a theme so large that only a portion of it can be given here. In 1626, the year of Bacon’s death, John Haviland printed for Sir William Rawley thirty-two monumenta insignia expressive of adoration and grief for the great man who had just passed away.[65] Rawley, the editor, would take care that no published offering to the Manes Verulamiani should impart his Master’s secret to persons who were not in it already; and this may help to explain why all the thirty-two offerings are in Latin, not in the vulgar tongue. In his preface to the collection, Rawley informs his readers that the monumenta were a selection merely from the numbers which had been entrusted to him—“very many, and those of the very best having been kept back by him” (plurimos, enim, eosque optimos versus apud me contineo). How tantalising! He does not even hint at his reason for such wholesale suppression of masterpieces. One of the thirty mourners declares that Bacon was a Muse more choice than any of the famous Nine. Another considers him “the hinge of the literary world.” Another bids the fountain of Hippocrene weep black mud, and warns the Muses that their bay-trees would go out of cultivation now that the laurel-crowned Verulam had left this planet. Others call upon Apollo and the Muses to weep for the loss of the great Bacon. Another laments the disaster that has befallen “us nurselings of the Muses,” and calls Bacon “the Apollo of our choir.” Another exclaims that “the morning-star of the Muses, the favourite of Apollo, has fallen,” and supposes that Melpomene in particular is inconsolable for the loss of him. Another declares that Bacon had placed all the Muses under obligations impossible to estimate. Another laments him as “the Tenth Muse ... ornament of the choir,” and imagines that Apollo can never have been so unhappy before. Another regards Bacon as the delicium of his country. Another calls him the choir leader of the Pierides. Another, No. 24, will have it that Ovid, had he lived, would have been better qualified than any other poet to lay an acceptable offering on the tomb of Bacon. Why Ovid should have been pitched upon is not obvious. Perhaps the opinion of Francis Meres, that “the sweet witty soul of Ovid lives in mellifluous and honytongued Shakespeare, witness his Venus and Adonis, his Lucrece, his Sugred Sonnets, among his private friends,” may have determined his choice. Here it should be mentioned that a previous contributor had hinted not obscurely at Bacon’s authorship of “some elegant love pieces or poems”—quicquid venerum politiorum.[66] Another contributor exclaims: “Couldst thou thyself, O Bacon, suffer death, thou who wert able to confer immortality on the Muses themselves?” The last of the thirty-two selected contributors is Thomas Randolph, a notable member of the group of wits known as the tribe of Ben. After having expatiated on the grief of himself and his fellow-poets for the irreparable loss they had just sustained, and borne his testimony to Bacon’s intimacy with the melodious goddesses (CamÆnÆ), Randolph in the manner affected by contemporary poets and men of letters, proceeds to eulogise Bacon as the inventor of new scientific methods, of keys to Nature’s labyrinth, etc., and finishes: “But we poets can add nothing to thy fame. Thou thyself art a singer, and therefore singest thine own praises.” (At nostrÆ tibi nulla ferent encomia musÆ, Ipse canis, laudes et canis inde tuas).

To sum up, the outstanding impression left on the mind by Randolph and his friends is that they regarded Bacon, not merely as a poet, but as the foremost poet of the age; and this impression is confirmed by the reflection that few if any of the contributors knew enough of science to be capable of appreciating the work of really scientific pioneers such as Harriot, Gilbert, Harvey, and others whose names are conspicuously absent from the roll of Bacon’s admirers.

(iii) The remaining difficulty—that of establishing a relation between Bacon and Shakespeare—has now to be dealt with. It may be well to begin by directing attention to the significant omission of the name of Jonson, head of the tribe of Ben, from the collection of eulogies we have just been considering. Adequate explanation of this conspicuous omission is almost impossible without the aid of the Bacon hypothesis. If any contribution of Jonson’s had appeared in the publication, the secret would have been out. Even as it was, his executors almost disclosed it when, in 1640-1, they sanctioned publication of those tell-tale notebooks in which Jonson records that Bacon “had performed that in our tongue which might be compared or preferred either to insolent Greece or haughty Rome,” an appreciation almost identical with that contained in his famous Ode to Shakespeare. It is well to remember in this connection that Jonson on Bacon’s sixtieth birthday had apostrophised him as an enchanter or “mystery” worker.

Among other arguments which tend to identify the names of Bacon and Shakespeare, the following seem worthy of mention: (a) Poesy, as we know, constituted one of the three continents into which Bacon in his Advancement of Learning, mapped out the whole “globe” of the knowable. To ignore dramatic poetry altogether would have given rise to inconvenient curiosity. Compelled, therefore, to give it a name, Bacon rejects the natural word “dramatic” and adopts instead the out-of-the-way word “representative.” What he says, moreover, about dramatic poetry—in the proper place for saying it—is apparently intended to carry on the suggestion that he was almost a stranger to dramatic performances, a suggestion contradicted by passages in other sections of the same work. For instance, on handling what he calls the “Georgics of the mind,” he describes dramatic poetry in terms so appropriate to the best dramatic poetry of the period, that one is almost forced to say to oneself: Here surely, Bacon must have been thinking of Shakespeare! The passage will bear quoting at length. “In poetry,” it runs, “no less than in history, we may find painted forth with great life how affections are kindled and excited; how they work, how they vary, how they gather and fortify, how they do fight and encounter one with another ... how to set affection against affection, and to master one by another, even as we use to hunt beast with beast.” His leave-taking, it may be added, of the whole theme or subject of poetry is effected by an ironical: “But it is not good to stay too long in the theatre,” which could only be fully appreciated I suppose, by his personal friends.

(b) Nowhere, I believe, in any extant writing of Bacon’s, whether letter, essay, or notebook, is there any mention of Shakespeare, and a like reticence is observed in the Rawley collection just cited. Assume for the moment that Shakespeare was the proper name of the man of Stratford, not the pseudonym of Bacon, or, to put it in another way, that Shakespeare and Bacon were two separate persons, and what is the result? We should have to concede that of two poets, both interested in things dramatic, both supreme judges and keen observers of human nature, its affections, passions, corruptions, and customs—that of two such poets, one, and that one Bacon, must have forbidden the very mention of the other, and this, too, for no discoverable reason.

(c) Bacon (in 1605) held that the chief function of poetry was “to give some shadow of satisfaction to the mind of man in those points wherein the nature of things doth deny it.” He ranked poets among the very best of ethical teachers in virtue of their insight into human character as modifiable “by the sex, by the age, by the region, by health and sickness, by beauty and deformity” and the like; and again ... “by sovereignty, nobility, obscure birth, riches, want, magistracy, privateness, prosperity, adversity, constant fortune, variable fortune, rising per saltum, per gradus and the like.” Here again many an open-minded reader must have felt moved to reflect that he was on the track, if not in the presence, of Shakespeare.

(d) It is clear that Bacon as he grew older, came to think less and less highly of imaginative work. The mere fact that Shakespeare ultimately abandoned his poetical offspring to chance, points, it surely would seem, to a similar change of view.

(e) Though many of the coincidences between Bacon and Shakespeare may be explained as manifestations of the Time Spirit, some of them strongly suggest direct contact even when taken singly. Take for example, the misquotation of Aristotle by Shakespeare in Troilus and Cressida, and by Bacon in the Advancement of Learning.[67] Take, again, the curious resemblance between the Winter’s Tale and the Essay of Gardens. Spedding’s comment on this passage in the Essay runs: “The scene in Winter’s Tale where Perdita presents the guests with flowers ... has some expressions which, if the Essay had been printed somewhat earlier, would have made me suspect that Shakespeare had been reading it.”[68]

(f) Again, certain views to which Bacon gave expression in the Essay of Deformity, seem implicit in Shakespeare’s Richard the Third. Richard has his “revenge of nature” for the ill turn she did him in making him deformed. He is also “extreme bold,” ever on the watch to “observe the weakness” of others. His deformity, moreover, must, it would seem, be supposed to have “quenched jealousy” in those personages who, if he had been comely, would have foreseen and thwarted his ambitious designs.

(g) In the course of some interesting observations on the writing of history considered as an art, Bacon confesses to a liking for ready-made outlines or plots, so that the artist might be free to concentrate his powers on the more congenial work of enrichment “with counsels, speeches, and notable particularities.” The faulty plots of many of Shakespeare’s plays imply that he also grudged the labour of construction and delighted in decoration and enrichment.

(h) Several editions of Bacon’s Essays seem to have been published without their author’s consent. Shakespeare also seems to have been preyed upon by piratical publishers. Wherever concealment of authorship is a desideratum, prosecution by law must needs be difficult if not impossible.

(i) Whenever Shakespeare, as we know him in quartos and folios, stands in need of an interpreter, no contemporary author is so often consulted by orthodox critics as Francis Bacon.

(k) Compare the Merchant of Venice, which the editor of the First Folio rather enigmatically calls comedy, with Bacon’s Essay of Usury. The primary intention of the play was to amuse or delight; that of the Essay being of course to instruct. But the play appears to me to have combined utile with dulce, instruction with pleasure; and the lesson as I understand it was this:—usury instead of being forbidden by the State, should be recognised and regulated, on the ground that unconditional forfeiture of pawns or pledges—the usual alternative to usury—is apt to bear more harshly on the borrower. The crisis of the play arrives near the end of Act IV, Sc. 1, where the Doge pronounces judgment. The instant and immediate effect upon Shylock is positively crushing; he would rather die than submit. But the accent of despair is quickly succeeded by the words: “I am content,” although one of the conditions just introduced by Antonio is that the wretched man Shylock should “presently become a Christian.” The change of mood is so amazing that we can hardly believe our senses. What can be the explanation? we ask ourselves. Between the judgment pronounced by the Doge and Shylock’s accent of despair, Antonio has thrown in these words: “So please my lord the Duke and all the Court to quit the fine for one half of his goods, I am content; so he [Shylock] will let me have the other half in use, to render it upon his death unto the gentleman that lately stole his daughter.” To us the words may seem insignificant. But Shylock was a sort of personification of usury, and to him they meant nothing less than victory—victory over his arch-enemy Antonio, the head and front of the anti-usury party in Venice.

Students of Bacon will remember that his Essay of Usury is a plea for State recognition and regulation of interest or “use,” on utilitarian grounds similar to those suggested in the comedy.

But may not this harmony between the Merchant of Venice and the Essay have been accidental, especially as there was an interval of some twenty-five years between the appearance of the Essay in its present form and our Merchant of Venice? My answer is that the Essay was based, as we know from one of Bacon’s own letters, on “some short papers of mine touching usury, how to grind the teeth of it,” etc., and these short papers may well have been written as early as 1598, when Bacon himself was in the clutches of the money-lender.[69]{141}

(l) The relation between the play of Hamlet and the Essay of Revenge is quite as close as that between the Essay of Usury and the Merchant of Venice. A reader who should consider the tragedy of Hamlet with a single eye to conduct, will hardly escape the reflection that its lesson or moral is summed up to perfection in one of Bacon’s Essays, viz., the one which treats of revenge: “They doe but trifle with themselves that labour in past matters. There is no man doth a wrong for the wrong’s sake; but thereby to purchase himselfe Profit, or Pleasure, or Honour, or the like. Therefore why should I be angry with a Man, for loving himselfe better than mee?... Vindicative persons live the Life of Witches: who, as they are Mischievous, so end they Infortunate.” Such in the end was the noble Hamlet’s fate. Once possessed by the devil of revenge, he becomes a sort of upas or plague-centre, and perishes in a sorry and most unlucky broil.

(m) The existence of striking harmonies between Shakespeare and Bacon was detected by foreign students fifty years ago and more. Professor Kuno Fischer, for example, wrote: “To the parallels between them [i.e. Bacon and Shakespeare] belong the similar relation of both to Antiquity, their affinity to the Roman mind, and their divergence from the Greek.... Bacon would have man studied in his individual capacity as a product of nature and history, in every respect determined by ... external and internal conditions. And exactly in the same spirit has Shakespeare understood man and his destiny.” Gervinus in his Commentaries observes: “In Bacon’s works we find a number of moral sayings and maxims of experience from which the most striking mottoes might be drawn for every Shakespearean play, aye, for all his principal characters, testifying to a remarkable harmony in their comprehension of human nature.” One more quotation, of like import and from an author with no partiality for Baconian views, may not be superfluous. Professor J. Nichol, after having ruled out the Baconian heresy by recording his opinion that Bacon did not write Shakespeare, proceeds: “But there is something startling in the like magnificence of speech in which they [Bacon and Shakespeare] find voice for sentiments often as nearly identical when they anticipate as when they contravene the manners of thought and standards of action that prevail in our age.” (Francis Bacon, Vol. I, 1888).

(n) Only a lawyer by education would have hit upon the technicality which is the nucleus of the 87th Sonnet of Shakespeare. The technicality is not one which an amateur interested in common law proceedings would be likely to pick up, for it belongs to the art of conveyancing. Part of my time, fifty years ago, was spent in the chambers of a conveyancer. But for that early training I might still have been able to see intellectual beauty in the well-known bust of Shakespeare at Stratford; for my suspicion of the popular legend originated in the conviction that the Shakespeare who matters must have been bred up a lawyer.[70]{143}

(o) In the year 1867, Mr. John Bruce discovered in Northumberland House, which then stood in the Strand, a bundle of Elizabethan manuscripts, the outermost sheet of which contains a miscellaneous list of Elizabethan writings, the majority of which are unquestionably identified with work previously known to have been due to Bacon. The minority consists of five pieces, three of which may, for anything we know to the contrary, have been enriched if not entirely written by him. The two remaining pieces figure in the list as “Rychard the Second” and “Rychard the Third.” The significance of this association with work of which there can be no doubt that Bacon was the author, is greatly increased by the fact that the cover or sheet which bears the list of contents is bescribbled at random with the names “ffrancis Bacon” and “William Shakespeare.”[71]

Mr. Spedding evidently missed what seems to me the true significance of this double association—the combination of titles in the list of contents, and the mixture of the names Bacon with Shakespeare in the scribbles. But one or two of his observations on the subject of this singular find are interesting enough. He notes, for example, that the name “Shakespeare” in the scribbles is “spelt in every case as it was always printed in those days, and not as he himself in any known case wrote it.” Another of Spedding’s observations is that the contained manuscripts, list or lists of contents, and scribbles, all belong to a period “not later then the reign of Elizabeth.”

(p) Attentive readers of almost any biography of Francis Bacon will be surprised to learn that the record of his achievements begins so late. Singularly precocious, he has already reached the ripe age—so these biographies tell us—of 36, before anything worthy of mention can be placed to his credit except a small tract or booklet of confessedly unripe Essays, Religious Meditations, and Coulers of Good and Evil. That there must be something very wrong with the record is proved by the fact that already in 1597, the date of the booklet, everything that came, or was suspected of coming, from the pen of Bacon, was in such request that he was compelled, as he tells his brother, to publish these crudities lest they should be stolen or mutilated by piratical printers. His first really notable work, according to the conventional record, is the Advancement of Learning, which was not published until two-thirds of his life was behind him. By far the greater part of the remaining third was so absorbed by public affairs, and, after his fall, so harassed by ill-health and private worries, that no literary fruit could have been looked for. Yet its closing years were marked by an unparalleled outburst of literary activity—an outburst which, like the fear of piratical printers expressed in his letter of 1597, means, I take it, that his youth and early manhood had been devoted to the art and practice of literature. Shelley’s emphatic assertion that Bacon was a poet leaves the puzzle still unsolved. So, perhaps, does the discovery of harmony after harmony between Bacon and Shakespeare.

But the tension will begin to relax so soon as we shall have taken time to grasp the significance on these two facts: first, that the dramas attributed to Shakespeare (spelt as it was always printed in those days[72]) cannot be fitted into the life of the man Shakspere who ended his life, and was evidently content to end it, in what was then a small and rather squalid country town: and second, that the evidence—Ben Jonson’s—which is commonly supposed to establish the Stratford case, turns out to be in itself an enigma rather than a solution.

The riddle is almost read when we shall have satisfied ourselves that Bacon was not only a poet but a “concealed” poet, and that by his own confession. And by the time we have been shown Sir T. Mathew’s remark, in his letter to Viscount St. Alban: “The most prodigious ... wit I know ... is of your Lordship’s name though he be known by another,” the true and only solution stands revealed.

This letter was written, I imagine, just at the time when the First Folio (of Shakespeare) was the talk of literary London. It was excluded from Sir Tobie Mathew’s own Collection of Letters (published 1660), but seems to have lived on, in seclusion no doubt, till 1762, by which time all thought about the “concealed poet’s” potent art had long been buried with his bones. Basil Montagu gives a copy of it, but Spedding, if I mistake not, ignores it.

This is by no means all the evidence that a better advocate than I could bring to bear on the question in dispute. But no stronger guarantee for the truth of the Bacon hypothesis can be demanded than that it should harmonise a large number of otherwise inexplicable data; and this demand I hope I may have done something to meet.

For the rival hypothesis, of course, there is much to be said. Never was Golden Bough the child or offspring of an ilex oak. Yet Vergil’s beautiful tale for ever adorns the lovely Avernian lake. Stratford-on-Avon was even more to the Shakespeare legend, and thereby may likewise be immortalised. “Doth any man doubt that if there were taken out of men’s minds vain opinions, flattering hopes, false valuations, imaginations as one would, and the like, but it would leave the minds of a number of men poor shrunken things, full of melancholy and indisposition and unpleasing to themselves?”