age, the only specimens of his poetry that have come down to us, in his acknowledged works? No; it was something great, something overwhelming; something that is to be "compared or preferred either to insolent Greece or haughty Rome."

And what was it that "insolent Greece and haughty Rome" had accomplished to which these "numbers" of Bacon could be preferred? We turn to Jonson's verses in the Shakespeare Folio and we read:

And though thou hadst small Latine and less Greek,
From thence to honor thee I would not seeke

For names, but call forth thundering Æschilus,
Euripides and Sophocles to us,

Paccuvius, Accius, him of Cordova dead,

To life again, to hear thy buskin tread,

And shake a stage; or, when thy socks were on,

Leave thee alone, for the comparison

Of all that insolent Greece or haughty Rome

Sent forth, or since did from their ashes come.

The "numbers" of Bacon are to be compared or preferred either to insolent Greece or haughty Rome - that is to say, to the best poetical compositions of those nations. And when Ben Jonson uses this expression we learn, from the verses in the Folio, what kind of Greek and Roman literary work he had in his mind; it was not the writings of Homer or Virgil, but of Æschylus, Euripides, Sophocles, etc.—that is to say, the dramatic writers. Is it not extraordinary that Jonson should not only assert that Bacon had produced poetical compositions that would challenge comparison with the best works of Greece and Rome, but that he should use the same adjectives, and in the same order, that he had used in the Folio verses, viz.: insolent Greece and haughty Rome? It was not haughty Greece and insolent Rome, or powerful Rome and able Greece, or any other concatenation of words; but he employs precisely the same phrases in precisely the same order. How comes it that when his mind was dwelling on the great poetical and secret works of Bacon- for they must have been secret — he reverted to the very expressions he had used years before in reference to the Shakespeare Plays?

And it is upon Ben Jonson's testimony that the claims of William Shakspere, of Stratford, to the authorship of the Plays, principally rest.

99

If the Plays are not Shakspere's then the whole make-up of the Folio of 1623 is a fraud, and the dedication and the introduction are probably both from the pen of Bacon.

a

Mr. J. T. Cobb calls attention to a striking parallelism between

passage in the dedication of the Folio and an expression of Bacon: Country hands reach forthe milk, cream and fruits, or what they have.1

Bacon writes to Villiers:

And now, because I am in the country, I will send you some of my country fruits, which with me are good meditations, which when I am in the city are choked with business.

And in the "discourse touching the plantation in Ireland," he asks his majesty to accept "the like poor field-fruits."

We can even imagine that in the line,

And though thou hadst small Latine and less Greek,

Ben Jonson has his jest at the man who had employed him to write these verses. For Jonson, it will be remembered, was an accurate classical scholar, while Bacon was not. The latter was like Montaigne, who declared he could never thoroughly acquire any language but his own. Dr. Abbott, head master of the City of London school, in his introduction to Mrs. Pott's great work,' refers to "several errors which will make Latin and Greek scholars feel uneasy. For these in part Bacon himself, or Bacon's amanuensis, is responsible; and many of the apparent Latin solecisms or misspellings arise. . . from the manuscripts of the Promus." He adds in a foot-note:

I understand that it is the opinion of Mr. Maude Thompson, of the British Museum manuscript department, that all entries, except some of the French proverbs, are in Bacon's handwriting; so that no amanuensis can bear the blame of the numerous errors in the Latin quotations.

How "rare old Ben" must have enjoyed whacking Bacon over Shakespeare's shoulders, in verses written at the request of Bacon!

XI. A GREATER QUESTION.

When the crushing blow of shame and humiliation fell upon Francis Bacon in 1621, and he expected to die under it, he hurriedly drew a short will. It does not much exceed in length one page of Spedding's book, and yet in this brief document he found time to say:

Dedication, Folio 1623.

2 Montagu, iii, p. 20.

3 Promus, P. 13.

My compositions unpublished, or the fragments of them, I require my servant Harris to deliver to my brother Constable, to the end that if any of these be fit, in his judgment, to be published, he may accordingly dispose of them. And in particular I wish the Elogium I wrote, In felicem memoriam Reginæ Elizabethæ, may be published. And to my brother Constable I give all my books; and to my servant Harris for this his service and care fifty pieces in gold, pursed up.

He disposed of all his real property in five lines, for the payment of his debts.

And when Bacon came to draw his last will and testament,' he devoted a large part of it to the preservation of his writings. He says:

For my name and memory, I leave it to men's charitable speeches, and to foreign nations, and the next ages. But as to the durable part of my memory, which consisteth of my works and writings, I desire my executors, and especially Sir John Constable, and my very good friend Mr. Bosvile, to take care that of all my writings, both of English and of Latin, there may be books fair bound and placed in the King's library, and in the library of the University of Cambridge, and in the library of Trinity College, where myself was bred, and in the library of the University of Oxonford, and in the library of my lord of Canterbury, and in the library of Eaton.

Then he bequeaths his register books of orations and letters to the Bishop of Lincoln; and he further directs his executors to "take into their hands all my papers whatsoever, which are either in cabinets, boxes or presses, and them to seal up until they may at their leisure peruse them."

We are asked to believe that William Shakspere was, necessarily, as the author of the Plays, a man of vast learning, the owner of many books, and that he left behind him, unpublished at the time of his death, such marvelous and mighty works as The Tempest, Macbeth, Julius Cæsar, Timon of Athens, Coriolanus, Henry VIII. and many more; and that, while he carefully bequeathed his old clothes and disposed of his second-best bed, he made no provision for the publication of his works, "the durable part of his memory."

Is it reasonable? Is it probable? Is it not grossly improbable? What man capable of writing Macbeth and Julius Cæsar, and knowing their value to mankind-knowing that they lay in his house, in some "cabinet, box or press," probably in but one manuscript copy each, and that they might perish in the hands of his illiterate family and "bookless" neighbors would, while carefully remembering

so much of the litter and refuse of the world, have died and made no provision for their publication?

But it may be said he did not own them; he may have sold them. It seems not, for Heminge and Condell, in their introduction to the first Folio, say that they received the original copies which they published from Shakespeare himself:

And what he thought he uttered with that easiness that we have scarce received from him a blot in his papers.

And again:

It has been a thing, we confess, worthy to have been wished, that the author himself had lived to have set forth and overseen his own writings.

What right would he have had to set them forth if they belonged to some one else?

But since it hath been ordained otherwise, and he by death departed from that right, we pray you do not envy his friends the office of their care.

If this introduction means anything, it means that Shakspere owned these Plays; that he would have had the right to publish them if death had not interfered; that his friends and fellow-actors, Heminge and Condell, had, "to keep the memory of so worthy a friend and fellow alive as was our Shakespeare," assumed the task of publishing them; that they had received the original manuscripts from him that is, from his family. - free from blot, and that they published from them, as all the quarto copies were "stolne and surreptitious, maimed and deformed by the frauds and stealthes of injurious impostors."

And yet these Plays, which belonged to Shakspere's wealthy family, as the heirs of the author, which were printed by his "fellows" to sell to make money-for they say in their introduction: The fate of all books depends upon your capacities: and not of your heads alone but of your purses. Read and censure. Do so, but buy first. -these Plays were not published or paid for by Shakspere's family, but, as the Folio itself tells us, were

Printed at the charges of W. Jaggard, Ed. Blount, I. Smithweeke, and W. Aspley, 1623.

Several works have been written in England and America to demonstrate this. I quote a few extracts:

Franklin Fiske Heard says:

The Comedy of Errors shows that Shakespeare was very familiar with some of the most refined of the principles of the science of special pleading, a science which contains the quintessence of the law. . . . In the second part of Henry IV., act v, scene 5, Pistol uses the term absque hoc, which is technical in the last degree. This was a species of traverse, used by special pleaders when the record was in Latin, known by the denomination of a special traverse. The subtlety of its texture, and the total dearth of explanation in all the reports and treatises extant in the time of Shakespeare with respect to its principle, seem to justify the conclusion that he must have attained a knowledge of it from actual practice.1

Senator Davis says:

We seem to have here something more than a sciolist's temerity of indulgence in the terms of an unfamiliar art. No legal solecisms will be found. The abstrusest elements of the common law are impressed into a disciplined service with every evidence of the right and knowledge of commanding. Over and over again, where such knowledge is unexampled in writers unlearned in the law, Shakespeare appears in perfect possession of it. In the law of real property, its rules of tenure and descents, its entails, its fines and recoveries, and their vouchers and double vouchers; in the procedure of the courts, the method of bringing suits and of arrests; the nature of actions, the rules of pleading, the law of escapes and of contempt of court; in the principles of evidence, both technical and philosophical; in the distinction between the temporal and spiritual tribunals; in the law of attainder and forfeiture; in the requisites of a valid marriage; in the presumption of legitimacy; in the learning of the law of prerogative; in the inalienable character of the crown, this mastership appears with surprising authority.?

And again the same writer says:

I know of no writer who has so impressed into his service the terms of any science or art. They come from the mouth of every personage: from the Queen; from the child; from the merry wives of Windsor; from the Egyptian fervor of Cleopatra; from the lovesick Paphian goddess; from violated Lucrece; from Lear;

1

1 Shakespeare as a Lawyer, pp. 43, 48.

2 The Law in Shakespeare, p. 4.