dissyllables heaven, wearest, many, even, goeth; and to glittering and chariot but the value of two, precisely as Shakespeare would.

But he tries to show that Bacon could not have written the Plays because it was his custom to run his sentences, as I have shown, into triplets. He says:

Bacon, in this feature of the rhythmical adjustment of clauses, attaches to those sentences of his which are composed of triple clauses of equal dimensions, and which possess such regularity which he never seeks to disturb, etc.

And he gives in addition to the instances I have quoted from Bacon the following, among others:

A man cannot speak (1) to his son but as a father, (2) to his wife but as a husband, and (3) to his enemy but upon terms.

Judges ought to be (1) more learned than witty, (2) more reverent than plausible, and (3) more advised than confident.

And he argues that Shakespeare

Does not object to four or more clauses, but he does to three.

And therefore Bacon did not write the Plays. Such arguments are fully answered by the pages of examples I have just given from the Shakespeare Plays, showing that the poet is even more prone to fall into the triple form of expression than Bacon-more prone, because there is more tendency to harmonious and balanced expressions in poetry than in prose.

But the Professor admits that there "is a kind of melody of speech that belongs to Bacon," and that his ear is exact, “and counts its seconds like the pendulum of a clock."

In truth, if any man would take the pains to print the prose disquisitions and monologues of Shakespeare, intermixed with extracts from as nearly similar productions of Bacon as may be, the ordinary reader would scarcely be able to tell which was which,

If such a reader was handed this passage, and asked to name the author, I think the probabilities are great that he would say it was from the pen of Francis Bacon:

Novelty is only in request; and it is dangerous to be aged in any kind of course, as it is virtuous to be constant in any undertaking. There is scarce truth enough alive to make societies secure, but security enough to make fellowship accursed: much upon this riddle runs the wisdom of the world.

We have here the same condensed, pithy sentences which mark the great philosopher, together with the same antithetical way of balancing thought against thought.

Yet this is from Shakespeare. It will be found in Measure for Measure.

And we can conceive that the following passage might have been written by Shakespeare- the very extravagance of hyperbole sounds like him:

Contrary is it with hypocrites and impostors, for they, in the church and before the people, set themselves on fire, and are carried, as it were, out of themselves, and, becoming as men inspired with holy furies, they set heaven and earth together.

There is not a great stride from this to the poet's eye in a fine phrensy rolling from earth to heaven, from heaven to earth; and the madman seeing more devils than vast hell could hold.

In short, the resemblance between the two bodies of compositions is as close as could be reasonably expected, where one is almost exclusively prose, and the greatness of the other consists in the elevated flights of poetry. In the one case it is the lammergeyer sitting among the stones; in the other it is the great bird balanced on majestic pinions in the blue vault of heaven, far above the mountain-top and the emulous shafts of man.

1 Act, iii, scene 2.

Meditationes Sacræ-Of Impostors.

BOOK II. W •THE DEMONSTRATION·

"Come hither, Spirit,

Set Caliban and his Companions free:
Untie the Spell."

Tempest,V,I.

PART I.

THE CIPHER IN THE PLAYS.

CHAPTER I.

HOW I CAME TO LOOK FOR A CIPHER.

I will a round, unvarnished tale deliver.

Othello, i, 3.

I

HAVE given, in the foregoing pages, something of the reasoning - and yet but a little part of it—which led me up to the con clusion that Francis Bacon was the author of the so-called Shakespeare Plays.

But one consideration greatly troubled me, to-wit: Would the writer of such immortal works sever them from himself and cast them off forever?

All the world knows that the parental instinct attaches as strongly to the productions of the mind as to the productions of the body. An author glories in his books, even as much as he does in his children. The writer of the Plays realized this fact, for he speaks in one of the sonnets of "these children of the brain." They were the offspring of the better part of him.

But, it may be urged, he did not know the value of them.

This is not the fact. He understood their merits better than all the men of his age; for, while they were complimenting him on "his facetious grace in writing," he foresaw that these compositions would endure while civilized humanity occupied the globe. The sonnets show this. In sonnet cvii he says:

My love looks fresh, and Death to me subscribes,
Since spite of him I'll live in this poor rhyme,
While he insults o'er dull and speechless tribes:
And thou in this shalt find thy monument,
When tyrants' crests and tombs of brass are spent.

And in sonnet lxxxi he says: