Shakespeare says:

To let imagination jade me.1

Speaking of a young man overthrown and dying, Bacon says: The flower of virtue cropped with sudden chance.'

Shakespeare speaks of

A fresh, uncropped flower.3

Comparing her son to the violets that "strew the green lap of the spring," the Duchess says to him:

Well, bear you well in this new spring of time,
Lest you be cropped before you come to prime.

Speaking of the history of an event, Bacon says:
The King hath so muffled it."

Shakespeare says:

Muffle your false love."

Love whose view is muffled still.'

Bacon says:

The King resolved to make this business of Naples as a wrench and means of peace. 8

Shakespeare says:

A noble nature

May catch a wrench.

Wrenching the true cause the false way.10

Bacon says:

The corruption and ambition of the times did prick him forward."

Our fear of Spain, which hath been the spur to this rigor.19

Honor pricks me on. Yea, but how if honor prick me off when I come on.'

Falstaff complains on the battle-field that his bowels are as hot as molten lead." Bacon, speaking of the horror of Essex when he found that the city would not sustain his attempted insurrection, graphically says:

So, as being extremely appalled, as divers that happened to see him then might visibly perceive in his face and countenance, and almost molten with sweat, though without any cause of bodily labor, but only by the perplexity and horror of his mind.'

What a dramatical command of language does this sentence exhibit!

While my book is being printed, Mr. J. G. Bronson, of Chicago, calls my attention to the following parallelism.

In a letter of "Sir Francis Walsingham, Secretary, to Monsieur Critoy, Secretary of France," said by Mr. Spedding to have been written by Bacon, we find:

But contrariwise her Majesty, not liking to make windows into men's hearts and secret thoughts, except the abundance of them did overflow into overt and express acts or affirmations, etc.

While in the Shakespeare sonnets we have this precisely parallel thought:

For through the painter must you see his skill,
To find where your true image pictur'd lies,
Which in my bosom's shop is hanging still,

That hath his windows glazed with thine eyes.
Now, see what good turns eyes for eyes have done:
Mine eyes have drawn thy shape, and thine for me
Are windows to my breast, wherethrough the sun
Delights to peep, to gaze therein on thee:

Yet eyes this cunning want to grace their art;

They draw but what they see, know not the heart.'

Here we have not only the same thought, but the same conclusion: that the heart can only be read by its acts.

Bacon says:

And there used to shuffle up a summary proceeding, by examination."
Whatsoever singularity, chance and the shuffle of things has produced.*
Shakespeare says:

I am fain to shuffle, to hedge and to lurch.

Your life, good master,

Must shuffle for itself.'

When we have shuffled off this mortal coil.'

Shuffle her away.3

And here, as illustrating the scholarly acquirements of the writer of the Plays, and his tendency to enrich the English language by the creation of new words, I would refer to two instances, which, although I have observed no parallels for them in Bacon's

writings, are curious enough to be noted here:

Dost thou infamonize me among potentates.

As he had been incorpsed and demi-natured.

And here we have a very unusual word used by both - used only once, I think, by either of them.

I could give many more instances of this use in the two bodies of writings of the same quaint and unusual words, did I not fear to offend the patience of the reader and extend this book beyond all reasonable proportions.

I regret that I am not where I could have access to authorities which would show how many of these strange words appeared for the first time, in the history of our language, in the Bacon and Shakespeare writings. But this will constitute a work for scholars hereafter.

1 Cymbeline, V, 5. *Hamlet, iii, 1.

'Merry Wives of Windsor, ii, z.

Love's Labor Lost, v, 2.

•Hamlet, iv, 7.

*Gesta Grayorum — Life and Works, vol. i,

p. 336.

ad Henry VI., v, 3.

Letter to the King, 1612.

•Othello, 1, 3.

CHAPTER VIII.

IDENTITIES OF CHARACTER.

I saw Othello's visage in his mind.

Othello, i, 3.

CHARACTER, after all, constitutes the man.

I do not mean

thereby reputation,- for that concerns the opinions of others, and they may or may not be deserved; but those infinite shades of disposition which separate one man from all other men. And as there were never in the world two men who possessed heads of precisely the same shape, so there cannot be two men having precisely the same character. The Creator has a thousand elements which go to make man, and he never puts all of them in any one man; nor does he ever mix a part of them, in his alembic, in the same proportions, for any two men. "In the catalogue we all go for men." Anything, with the human osseous system and flesh on it, is, perforce, a man; but the difference between one man and another may be as wide as that between the primordial cell and the regenerated soul.

The writer of the Plays had thought this thought, as he seems to have thought all other thoughts, and he exclaims:

Oh, the difference of man and man!!

When we seek, however, to institute a comparison between Francis Bacon and the writer of the Plays, we are met by this difficulty: We know, accurately enough, what was the character of Francis Bacon-his life reveals it;—but if we turn to the author of certain dramatic compositions, we are at a loss to know when the man himself speaks and when the character he has created speaks. We are more apt to see the inner nature of the writer in the general frame, moral and purpose of the piece, and in those utterances which burst from him unawares, and which have no necessary connection with the plot or the characters of the play, than in the acts performed in the course of the drama, or in the

1 Lear, iv, 2.

sentiments put into the mouths of the men who perform them, and which are parts of the acts and parcel of the plots.

But, notwithstanding these difficulties, we can perceive clearly enough that the writer of the Plays possessed essentially the same traits of character which we know to have belonged to Francis Bacon.

The reader has seen already that both personages, if we may call them such, possessed the philosophical and poetical cast of mind; that they were persons of unequaled genius, command of language, elevation of mind and loftiness of moral purpose. Let us go a step farther.

I. INDUSTRY.

I have shown on page 92, ante, that the writer of the Plays was a man of vast industry, and that he elaborated his work with the utmost skill and pains. Knight says:

The whole of this scene,' in the Folio, exhibits the greatest care in remodeling the text of the quarto.

But let us turn to another play.

A comparison of that part of the text of The Merry Wives of Windsor which embraces the scene at Hernes' oak, in the edition of 1602, with the text of the Folio of 1623, will show how elaborately the writer revised and improved his text. I place the new parts of the Folio in italics, and where it repeats the words of the edition of 1602 they are given in quotation marks. In this way the changes are made more conspicuous.

In the edition of 1602 we have:

Quickly. You fairies that do haunt these shady groves,
Look round about the woods if you espy

A mortal that doth haunt our sacred round:

If such a one you can espy, give him his due,
And leave not till you pinch him black and blue.
Give them their charge, Puck, ere they part away.

In the Folio of 1623 we have this thus amplified:

Quickly. "Fairies," black, gray, green and white,

You moonshine revelers and shades of night,

You orphan heirs of fixed destiny,

Attend your office and your quality.