The recent discovery of an entry in a domestic expenses account book of the Mannours or Manners family has attracted some notice. According to Mr. Sidney Lee[37] the terms of the entry, under the head “Payments for household stuff, plate, armour,” etc., are: “1613. Item 31 Martii to Mr. Shakspeare in gold about my Lorde’s impreso [the terminal o should be a] xliiij^s., to Richard Burbadge for paynting and making yt in gold xliiij^s.. [Total] iiij^liviij^s.” An impresa Camden describes as “a device in picture with his motto or word borne by noble and learned personages to notifie some particular conceit of their own,” its nearest modern analogue being the book-plate.[38] Burbage seems to have made, as well as painted, the thing. What there was for Mr. Shakespeare to do is by no means clear. The motto, if motto there were, would to a certainty be designated by the “noble and learned personage” himself. Moreover, some three years later (1616) Burbage appears to have executed a similar commission for the same Earl of Rutland, entirely without assistance. That the clerk who made the entry denied to Burbage the “prefix of gentility” which he bestowed upon “Mr. Shakespeare” is a fact of trivial import. If—to take an imaginary case—Nick Bottom had been living “on his means” at South Place, Stratford-at-the-Bow, this clerk would have dubbed him Mr. Bottom as a matter of course in the same circumstances. Mr. Lee is of opinion that “the recovered document discloses a capricious sign of homage on the part of a wealthy and cultured nobleman to Shakespeare.” If he had suggested that the two-guinea payment to “Mr. Shakespeare” may have been preceded by a hearty meal in the buttery, without exciting any feeling of resentment on the part of either recipient that the meal was not served in the dining-hall, I should have been more disposed to agree with him.

The situation is a curious one. But any serious discussion of it would be premature until we are actually in possession of the “rich harvest of new disclosures” which Mr. Lee teaches us to expect.[39] Meanwhile the Bacon theory regarded as a development of the hypothesis that Shakespeare was a pen-name of Bacon’s is certainly not crushed, if it be not actually encouraged, by this Belvoir disclosure, since no one in his senses would think of denying the existence of “Mr. Shakespeare” or his acquaintance with Richard Burbage.

In Gilbert Wats’ English version (1640) of Bacon’s Instauratio Magna, Francis Bacon, Baron of Verulam, Vicont St. Alban, who is designated as “Tertius a Platone PhilosophiÆ Princeps,” is represented pen in hand, tall hat on head, a voluminous lace ruff round his neck, in the act of inditing: Mundus Mens Connubio Jungam Stabili.[40] On the opposite page two worlds, a Mundus Visibilis and a Mundus Intellectualis are shown clasping hands across space, in order, no doubt, to give emphasis to the idea of a world and mind connubium. The picture typifies the conception of Bacon which has prevailed ever since. A skater on his way to the Engadine declared he was at a loss to understand why anyone ever went to Switzerland in summer for pleasure. Some of us would have been tempted to smile at the remark. But the prevailing conception of Bacon is probably quite as inadequate as this skater’s conception of Switzerland. The age of Queen Elizabeth probably had no presage—not a hint—that Francis Bacon would ever develop into a “prince of philosophy.” In my opinion the Bacon known to it was not a natural philosopher1 even in aspiration, but an artist—an artist in words, who, if circumstances, more especially family circumstances, had been favourable any time between 1580 and 1590 would have openly confessed that poetry was his ideal, and declared himself a poet. As it was, he took the line of least friction, and sooner or later acquired the title of “concealed poet.” How far the concealment extended in the early days it is impossible to discover. To Sir Philip Sidney,2 Sir J. Harrington, and other accomplished young men of their class, the true state of the case was doubtless an open secret.

Professor Nichol (Francis Bacon, Part I), though he thinks that Bacon “did not write Shakespeare’s plays,” considers that “there is something startling in the like magnificence of speech in which they 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 country in our age. They are similar in this respect for rank,” etc. Shelley discerned that Bacon “was a poet,” and Macaulay perceived that the “poetical faculty” was “powerful” in Bacon. Taine held that Bacon “thought as artists and poets habitually think,” that he was one of the finest of a “poetic line,” that “his mental procÉdÉ was that of the creator, not reasoning but intuition.” Bacon, then, was essentially a poet, belonged to the same race as Sidney for example. Sidney died young, and his poetic activity ceased some time before he died. Yet Sidney’s poetical achievement has come down to our day. What has become of Bacon’s poetical achievement? Was it also concealed?

Hallam, in the Introduction to the Literature of Europe, confessed he was unable to identify “the young man who came up from Stratford, was afterwards an indifferent player in a London theatre, and retired to his native place in middle life, with the author of Macbeth and Lear.” Emerson (Representative Men) declared: “The Egyptian verdict of Shakespearean societies comes to mind, that Shakespeare3 was a jovial actor and manager. I cannot marry this fact to his verse. Other admirable men have led lives in some sort of keeping with their thought; but this man in wide contrast.” It would be easy to adduce other evidence pointing in the same direction. But Hallam and Emerson, unexceptionable witnesses, will serve the turn. On one side, then, we are brought into contact with a poet or maker whose poems elude us. On another side we are confronted with poems whose poet or maker eludes us—some of us. What if Shakespeare were to Bacon what Callisthenes, Aristophanes’ actor-friend, was to Aristophanes? Suppose by way of working hypothesis that such was the case, that Shakespeare was a pen-name of Bacon’s. In that case his ultimate intention as to dropping or retaining the mask of pseudonymity would be affected by various considerations extending far beyond the family circle. (a) To be “rewarded of” the stage-manager was probably nothing less than degrading to a man of good birth. (b) The conditions under which the hypothetical Shakespeare must have written, were unfavourable to careful work. A man who is half ashamed of what he is doing is hardly likely to do his best, especially when more or less concealed. Certainly many of the plays suffer from faulty construction, inconsistency, obscurity, bombast and so forth, and what is more important, Shakespeare himself4 was probably quite as conscious of these blemishes as were any of his critics. (c) With us the daily paper exerts a certain influence on public opinion. In Bacon’s day the theatre was one of the most effective means of appeal to any considerable audience, and in that way the name Shakespeare probably got entangled in controversies with which Bacon felt no desire to meddle autonymously.5 (d) The moral tendency of Shakespearean work published before 1609, Venus and Adonis for example, was not such as to forward any of the hypothetical author’s schemes for place. (e) Early in the seventeenth century Bacon seems to have convinced himself that for purposes of moment Latin was destined to supplant English. He was haunted moreover by fear of impending civil commotions, and augured ill for that “fair weather learning which needs the nursing of luxurious leisure.” (f) Had there been no other considerations than these, Bacon, even after he became Solicitor-General, might have been induced himself to give to the world some at least of his hypothetical offspring really “perfect of their limbes as he conceived them.” It is not to be supposed that he would ever have claimed all or nearly all that passed for Shakespeare’s. Much would have been disavowed altogether, and many of the more inconvenient things would, quite fairly, have been ascribed to collaboration, misprints, inexperience, haste, carelessness, etc. But the action of the ill-conditioned group which in 1609 engineered the publication of the Sonnets of Shakespeare, must have greatly reduced the chance that Bacon would ever consent to edit anything of Shakespeare’s. So far as intimate friends were concerned, the piratical publication, however irritating,6 would be comparatively innocuous, and as for charitable strangers, they might be trusted to discover extenuating circumstances in the youth of the author and the fashion of the time. But the great indiscriminating public, unaccustomed to make allowances, and led by an enemy like Sir Edward Coke, would chortle over the self-revelations suggested by the book, and put the worst construction on everything. Rather than face such a prospect, Bacon would be willing to pay almost any price, and the price he may be supposed to have paid was to seem to know nothing and care nothing about “Shakespeare” or anything that was his. Adherence to this policy would not necessarily involve any visible change of attitude or conduct. On the contrary, the hypothetical Shakespeare would be urged to hold on his usual course by the fear that any sudden stoppage, of the supply of plays for instance, might arouse suspicions which otherwise would have slept. Parenthetically it may be observed that Bacon had already known what it was to give to the world things—the Essays of 1597—which he would rather have kept back, but was compelled to publish because “to labour the state of them had been troublesome and subject to interpretation.”

The parting between Prospero and Ariel has been thought to adumbrate the farewell of Shakespeare, whoever he was, to Poetry—a view that is plausible enough. It would explain the position assigned to The Tempest in the First Folio, and suggest an interesting answer to the question why Prospero, who “prized his books above his dukedom” threatened—only threatened—to drown a particular “book.” But no one knows within several years when The Tempest was written. Nor is it at all certain that the poem was wholly Shakespeare’s.[41] For anything we know to the contrary, the editor of the First Folio may have interpolated the striking invocation—to mention one passage only—which begins: “Ye elves of hills.”7 The Tempest then, does not enable us to fix the date of Shakespeare’s practical renunciation of poetry. I say, practical renunciation, because certain passages in Henry the Eighth which feelingly represent the insecurity of greatness might ex hypothesi have been contributed by Bacon just after his fall, though his practical renunciation could hardly have taken place later than 1612.[42] But whether the date were 1612 or somewhat earlier, the hypothetical Shakespeare was amply provided with other interests and pursuits. (a) Rhetoric had long held a high place in his affections. “Rhetoric and Logic,” says he, “these two, rightly taken, are the gravest of the sciences, being the arts of arts,”8 and what excellence he attained in the former of these arts we know from Ben Jonson. (b) Though poesy, the recreation of his leisure—Bacon would never have allowed that it was anything but a recreation—were denied him, prose, splendid inimitable prose was his to command. (c) The delightful days and months and years which he had spent with poets both ancient and modern, particularly Ovid,9 might be turned to philosophical account. (d) Historical projects allured him. In the Advancement of Learning, a history—a prose history no doubt—of England from the “Wars of the Roses” downwards is noted as a desideratum, and seems to have been begun. The History of the Reign of King Henry VII (1622), however, is the only portion of the desiderated history which reached completeness. (e) Legislative projects also attracted him, less strongly no doubt than historical. (f) But at this time the Great Instauration had possessed itself of the chief place in his affection: “Of this I can assure you that though many things of great hope decay with youth,10 yet the proceeding in that work doth gain upon me, upon affection and desire,” he writes, about 1609, to his bosom friend Matthew. The instauration, say rather transfiguration, of human knowledge—that was the vision which now fascinated him. When the spell began to work it is difficult to determine. Early in the seventeenth century his conception of human “learning” or “knowledge” or “science”—three words to which he attached practically the same meaning—included Poetry, not as an appendix, but as one of three fundamental constituents. Perhaps the word “culture,” with “barbarism” for antithesis, would now come nearest to what he then meant by learning. The Advancement of Learning is the work not of a scholar in the technical sense, but of an omnivorous apprehensive imaginative reader. It is the expression by an artist in words of the serried thoughts of a mind steeped in poetry, deep versed in human nature, but certainly not versed in natural philosophy as understood by his contemporaries—Galileo for example, Gilbert and others. A passage in the first of its two books runs: “No man that wadeth in learning or contemplation thoroughly but will find printed in his heart nil novi super terram.” It is incredible that Bacon can at this time have caught so much as a glimpse of the “New Logic,” “New Art,” or—to give its latest name—Novum Organum, which he afterwards declared was “quite new, totally new in every kind.”11 But though the Advancement was in fact a plea for culture, in Bacon’s intention it was a serious attempt to grapple with philosophy, an attempt so serious that he afterwards declared the Novum Organum itself to be the “same argument sunk deeper.” Moreover, in my opinion, it was his first serious attempt in that direction, hence its importance to any right apprehension of his genius.12

About the year 1609, the philosophical enthusiasm reached a climax. Cogitata et Visa de Interpretatione NaturÆ, Redargutio Philosophiarum, Sapientia Veterum, and other pieces, some of which Boswell, one of his executors, seems to have called impetus philosophici, were thrown off in rapid succession. As early as 1610, however, he solicits the King to employ him in writing a history of his Majesty’s “Time,” a hint surely that the philosophical impetus had begun to abate. The change, whether it began that year, or a year or two later, is intelligible enough. Science had not claimed him her deliverer. Harvey is reported to have sneered at his philosophy. Gilbert and Napier may have started the sneer; for Bacon obviously undervalued mathematics, and spoke almost contemptuously of Gilbert (whom Galileo fully appreciated). About this time, too, he probably began to suspect that somewhere in the New Art, there lurked a defect which would have to be cured before the apparatus would work. The truth is that in the philosophical work published or privately circulated by Bacon before 1610, though there was much to appeal to the Æsthetic side of the human mind, much to stimulate the cultivated layman’s admiration for knowledge, for the devoted student of science there was very little help of a constructive kind, the only kind of help he really needed.13

The Sapientia Veterum, 1609, is based on a number of myths selected from the poets and fabulists of antiquity in virtue of a certain congruity with Bacon’s intuitions and predilections. The Sylva Sylvarum or Natural History, his latest work, is based on an assemblage of what by way of distinction might be called facts. The dissonance between the two works is amazing. The Sapientia, which was intended to bespeak a favourable hearing for the New Art, busies itself with venerable fictions. From the Natural History on the other hand, poetry and fable were to have been rigorously excluded. Bacon’s biographer, Rawley, wrote for the first edition of the work (1627), an address “To the Reader,” which winds up: “I will conclude with an usual speech of his lordship’s; that this work of his Natural History is the world as God made it, and not as man made it; for it hath nothing of imagination.”

Several years before the Sylva was written, Galileo had censured as paper philosophers certain contemporaries of his, who set about the investigation of nature as if she were a “book like the Æneid or the Odyssey.” One at least of Bacon’s intimate friends, Sir Tobie Mathew, was no stranger to Padua and Florence, and it is quite possible that he may have informed Bacon of these strictures of Galileo’s not long after they were uttered. But, be this as it may, a momentous change must have taken place after 1609, not in Bacon’s aspiration to be the greatest of human benefactors to man, but in his conception of the means by which his vast expectations were to be realised. Had the change been less than “fundamental,” “a good and well ordered Natural History” would not have been described in the Phenomena Universi (1622), as holding the “keys both of sciences and of operations.” After 1612 Bacon became for some eight or nine years so immersed in affairs, as Attorney-General, Privy Councillor—no sinecure then—Lord Chancellor, etc., that it must have been impossible for him to give to his New Logic a tithe of the attention it required. “At this period,” says Dr. Abbott: “there is a great gap in the series of Bacon’s philosophical works. In 1613 he was appointed Attorney-General, and from that time till 1620 no literary work of any kind published or unpublished is known to have issued from his pen. All that he did was apparently to rewrite repeatedly and revise the Novum Organum.14 The Organum made its appearance in 1620 with a dedication to the King by no means confident of either the worth or the use of his offering. But as he says in the proemium that “all other ambition whatsoever was in his opinion lower than the work in hand,” one would infer that his zeal for philosophy had begun to revive even before the tragedy of 1621. The remaining five years of the great man’s life—“a long cleansing week of five years’ expiation and more,” he calls it—were more or less distracted with anxieties in no way connected with philosophy. He hoped, nevertheless, to present the old King with a “good history of England, and a better digest” of the laws, and the young King with a history of the “time and reign of King Henry the Eighth.”15 But after the most distressful sequelÆ of his fall had been relieved, his grandiose, imposing scheme for the renovation or transfiguration of philosophy must have regained the position it had held some ten or a dozen years earlier. Without it, life for him would have been a mean and melancholy failure. “God hath framed the mind of man as a mirror or glass capable of the image of the universal world, and joyful to receive the impression thereof ... and not delighted in beholding the variety of things and vicissitude of times, but raised also to find out the ordinances which throughout all those changes are infallibly observed.”16 This capacity, this wonder-working exaltation of the mind had been neglected, and all but lost, by reason of the interference of Aristotle and other insolent dictators, and Bacon imagined himself destined to rehabilitate it, to usher in a new era, to endow the human race, not with knowledge alone, but with legions of beneficent arts,17 and for reward to go down to the ages as pre-eminently the Friend of man.18 Compared with a vision so magnificent, his youthful dream of a poet’s immortality would seem paltry, stale, and unprofitable. No wonder the old love, poetry, was forsaken. The wonder would have been if for the sake of the old love he had done or permitted or countenanced anything which he thought might possibly prejudice posterity against the new love, his “darling philosophy.”19

The more vulnerable points of this tentative theory20 of Bacon’s relation to poetry seem to be three. First, Bacon’s final perseverence in ignoring his hypothetical offspring. Second, his Translation of certain Psalms into English Verse which, according to Dr. Abbott, “so clearly betrays the cramping influence of rhyme and verse, that it could hardly have been the work of a true poet even of a low order.” Third, the detailed treatment of poetry in the Advancement of Learning is essentially and flagrantly defective. Objection number one—Bacon’s persistent neglect of the plays—is easily answered.21 The reasons for continuing to ignore them may in the aggregate have been even more cogent at the close, than at the opening of his career. For a Lord Chancellor, one who had been a “principal councillor and instrument of monarchy,” to publish not verses merely, but common plays, would have been a disgrace to the peerage, and ingratitude, if not disloyalty, to the sovereign to whom he owed his many promotions. Amongst the reasons for concealment, which did not exist at the opening of life, two more may be mentioned: one, the publication of the Sonnets, has been sufficiently discussed; the other, solicitude for the Great Instauration, has not. In casting about for an explanation of his frigid reception by contemporary science, Bacon must have hit upon a suspicion, shared maybe by King James,22 that his true greatness after all lay rather in the domain of poetry than in that of philosophy.23 Disappointed in his contemporaries, he would turn to the ages unborn, resolved that they at any rate should not start with a bias against his message. Any suggestion therefore, that he should allow his true name to be put to a volume of poetry, so distinguished from versified theology, would be unconditionally rejected.

To the objection founded on the Translation of certain Psalms into English Verse several answers suggest themselves. No artist is always at his best, least of all in illness and old age, and the Translation belongs to 1624 when Bacon was recovering from an attack of a painful disease. In the delightful preface to his select edition of Wordsworth’s Poems, Matthew Arnold writes: “Work altogether inferior, work quite uninspired, flat and dull, is produced by him (Wordsworth) with evident unconsciousness of its defects and he presents it to us with the same faith and seriousness as his best work.” Yet no competent judge of poetry would think of denying that Wordsworth was a “true poet” of a “high order.”[43] Again, conventional feeling may have been partly responsible for the dullness of this Translation. Dr. Abbott surely underrates the consequence of his admission that “theological verse like theological sculpture might seem to require something of the archaic, and a close adherence to the simplicity of the original prose.” Grant that Bacon was under the influence of some such feeling, and the objection we are considering is virtually answered, such was “Bacon’s versatility in adapting language to the slightest shade of circumstance and purpose.” Once more, the evidence that Bacon was a “concealed poet” is strong enough to hold its own against every argument that can fairly be urged against it, and to concealment dissimulation is apt to prove indispensable. It was so considered by Bacon, and Bacon’s experience of the device was extensive, if not unique. In a famous Essay he carefully distinguishes between Simulation and Dissimulation, and lets it be seen that he regarded the former as positively culpable, the latter as not only permissible but necessary.24 A man dissimulates when he “lets fall signs or arguments that he is not that he is.... He that will be secret must be a dissembler in some degree. For men are too cunning to suffer a man to keep an indifferent carriage.... They will so beset a man with questions and draw him on and pick it out of him, that without an absurd silence he must show inclination one way.... So that no man can be secret except he give himself a little scope of dissimulation; which is as it were but the skirts or train of secrecy.” The application is obvious. Bacon’s Translation of Certain Psalms is uninspired, lacks “choiceness of phrase ... the sweet falling of the clauses,” etc! Why? Possibly because the author “is letting fall signs or arguments that he is not that he is!” The fact that a thing so trivial as this Translation should have been published, instead of being reserved for private circulation only—published too on the heels of the Shakespeare First Folio—lends additional probability to this explanation.25

Objection number three. On the hypothesis that Shakespeare was a pen-name of Bacon’s this objection, like the last, would fall to the ground, for the essential inadequacy of the Advancement of Learning in relation to poetry would explain itself as part of the “train of secrecy.” But it may also be answered without resorting to the hypothesis. In the Advancement, dramatic poesy, though recognised, is deprived of its customary name, “dramatic,” and dubbed “representative,” whilst lyric, elegiac, and several other kinds of poetry are conspicuously ignored. The Latin version of the Advancement, however, the De Augmentis Scientiarum, published some eighteen years after the Advancement, not only restores to “representative poesy” its proper name “dramatic,” but also mentions elegias, odes, lyricos, etc. The objection, as I understand it, is founded on the assumption that, at the date of the Advancement, Bacon had still to learn what poetry essentially was, a defect which at the date of the De Augmentis he had contrived to supply by getting up the subject (poetry) much as a lawyer will cram an unfamiliar subject in order to speak to his brief. But is there warrant for so questionable an assumption? Not a scrap. To see its absurdity, one has only to compare the Advancement of Learning with the Apologie for Poetry by the “learned” Sir Philip Sidney (so the author is described on the title page), a treatise which somehow or other made its first appearance in 1595, and its second under a different title and with slight additions in 1596.26 One of the many resemblances involved in the comparison is, not that Sidney and Bacon appear to have read the same books, but that their literary preference should have coincided so closely. Among classical authors, Plutarch was manifestly the prime favourite of both. Next after Plutarch seem to have come Virgil, Cicero, Seneca, and Ovid. The Bible, it is true, plays a far more important part in the Advancement than in the Apologie, inevitably, considering the scope of the Advancement, and that it was specially addressed to a theological king. In those days, however, libraries were so scantily furnished that lovers of literature necessarily became acquainted with what seems to be an unusually large proportion of the same authors.27 It may, therefore, be urged that similarity of literary preference did not imply direct intercommunication. I will not argue the point, not because it is incontestable, but because there are other resemblances the cumulative force of which is more than enough for my purpose. The production of a sample half dozen of these will I hope be forgiven. (a) According to the Apologie for Poetrie geometry and arithmetic would seem to be the only constituents of the science of mathematics. The Advancement of Learning appears to take the same view. (b) According to the Apologie “knowledge of a man’s self” is the highest or “mistress” knowledge, and her highest end is “well doing and not well knowing only.” The Advancement holds “the end and term of natural philosophy” is “knowledge of ourselves” with a view to “active life” rather than to contemplative. (c) According to the Apologie “metaphysic” concerns itself with “abstract notions,” builds upon “the depths of Nature” as distinct from Matter. The Advancement defines “metaphysic”—which includes mathematics—as the science of “that which is abstracted and fixed,” “physic” being the science of “that which is inherent in matter and therefore transitory.” (d) The Apologie censures philosophers for reducing “true points of knowledge” into “method” and “school art.” In the Advancement, Bacon condemns “the over early and peremptory reduction of knowledge into acts and methods.” It is a theme on which he is ever ready to descant. Indeed, the Novum Organum, a congeries of aphorisms, was probably designed for a monumental warning against premature systematisation. (e) The Apologie contrasts the necessary limitations of other artists28 with the perfect freedom of the poet: “only the poet ... goeth hand in hand with nature, not inclosed within the narrow warrant of her gifts ... where with the force of a divine breath he bringeth things forth for surpassing her doings, with no small argument to the incredulous of the first accursed fall of Adam; sith our erected wit maketh us know what perfection is.” The Advancement, in a charming passage, instructs us that one of the chief uses of poetry “hath been to give some shadow of satisfaction to the mind of man in those points wherein the nature of things doth deny it, the world being in proportion inferior to the soul.... Therefore poesy was ever thought to have some participation of divineness, because it doth raise and erect the mind, by submitting the shows of things to the desires of the mind; whereas reason doth buckle and bow the mind into the nature of things.” (f) The Apologie holds “that there are many mysteries contained in poetry which of purpose were written darkly, lest by profane wits it should be abused.” The Advancement affirms that one of the uses of poesy is to “retire and obscure ... that which is delivered,” “that is when the secrets and mysteries of religion, policy, and philosophy are involved in fables and parables.” (g) The author of the Apologie venerated learning—“the noble name of learning,” he calls it—as if it were a sort of talisman. Bacon’s attitude towards learning, the theme of the Advancement, probably differed but little, if it differed at all from that of the Apologist. (h) The aims of the two authors were to a large extent identical, for the first book of the Advancement was a vindication of the dignity and importance of Poetry as one of the chief constituents of “learning.” Other resemblances, more or less significant, will doubtless be picked up by any alert reader. So numerous are they in the earlier portion of the Advancement that reading it one seems to be continually in touch with Sidney—assuming him to have been author of the Apologie. The effect in my own case has been such as to generate a conviction not indeed that Sidney and Bacon were personally intimate—though that is quite possible—but that Bacon when writing the Advancement was thoroughly familiar with the Apologie.

It appears then that the poetical defects or eccentricities of the Advancement, to whatever cause they may have been due—and honest dissimulation is the most likely cause—were not due to ignorance of poetry. Consequently the last of the three objections fails of effect.

“But,” says one, “suppose for a moment that your precious theory is not incoherent, what then? A dream is not less a dream because it happens to hang together. So with your theory. Its value is of the smallest unless it serve to harmonise or explain phenomena otherwise intractable. The omission to apply this test is fatal to your pretensions.” I have no fault to find with the criticism, except that it is founded on misapprehension. It takes for granted that I have undertaken to establish something, a Bacon theory to wit. That feat may be possible to an able advocate, after a “harvest of new disclosures.” For my part, so diffident am I of my power to do anything of the kind, that the thought of attempting it here had not even occurred to me.

For the rest, on good cause shown my precious theory will be abandoned without reserve and without a pang, though I shall hardly be able to rise to that fullness of joy which according to M. PoincarÉ (Le Science et l’HypothÈse) ought to be felt by the physicist who has just renounced a favourite hypothesis because it has failed to satisfy a crucial test.