In Hamlet we have the name of Bacon's dear friend Bettenham, pronounced Battenham, to whom he erected a monument at Gray's

Inn:

To batten on this moor.'

Together with most weak hams.

I observed also the name Rawley (the name of his chaplain) in Henry V.:

Their children rawly left3.

while the combination Sir Walter Raleigh thus appears in Richard III.:

Sir Walter Herbert.4

The air is Raw and cold.'

A book of prayers on their pillow lay."

And again in Troilus and Cressida, thus:

Cold palsies, raw eyes.'

Drink up the lees and dregs."

While the combination raw and lay is found in The Merry Wives of Windsor, Love's Labor Lost and five other plays. The name of Bacon's uncle, Burleigh, is found in

The burly-boned clown."

Now the hurly-burly's done.

The news of hurly-burly innovation."

I observed another curious fact, that the name of the play Measure for Measure seemed to be very often referred to in the dramas; and in many cases the words ran in couples. Thus the word measure appears in the Merry Wives of Windsor only twice:

To measure our weapons."

To guide our measure round about.13

In Twelfth Night it likewise appears only twice:

In Measure for Measure itself the play seems to be referred to, in the cipher narrative, thus:

In A Winter's Tale the word also occurs twice, and only twice:

Measure me.'

The measure of the court."

In The Comedy of Errors it also appears twice only:

Not measure her from hip to hip.3

Took measure of my body.4

In Macbeth we find the same dualism:

Anon we'll drink a measure.

We will perform in measure.

In Troilus and Cressida we have the same word twice:

By measure of their observant toil."

Fair denies in all fair measure.

In King Lear also it appears in this double form:

If you will measure your lubber's length."

And every measure fail me. 10

In Othello we have it again twice, the last time in the possessive case, as if he was speaking of Measure for Measure's success, thus: Would fain have a measure to the health."

Nor for measures of lawn. 12

If the reader will examine the subject he will find that the word measure runs in couples all through the other plays. It is either matched with itself in the same play, as in As You Like It, where it occurs in three couples; in Love's Labor Lost, where there are also three couples; in Richard II., where there are two couples; in 3d Henry VI., where there are also two couples, and in Antony and Cleopatra, where there are also two couples; or it is found in the end of one play, matching with the same word in the beginning of the next play in the Folio, for the cipher narrative is oftentimes continuous from play to play.

The name of the plays now generally attributed to Shakespeare, the first and second parts of The Contention of the Houses of York and Lancaster, is found in the 1st and 2d Henry IV.,

thus:

9 Act i, scene 4.
10 Act iv, scene 7.

11 Act ii, scene 3.
12 Act iv, scene 3.

IV.:

In the very heat

And pride of their contention,

And dialls the signs of leaping-houses."

As oft as Lancaster doth speak.3

His uncle York.

The name reappears, abbreviated, in the beginning of 1st Henry

The times are wild, Contention like a horse."

Between the royal field of Shrewsbury.

The gentle archbishop of York is up.'

Under the conduct of young Lancaster®

And the entire name, as it appears upon the title-page of the original quarto, is given in 3d Henry VI., "The Contention of the two Famous Houses of York and Lancaster."

Thus:

No quarrel, but a slight contention.?

Would buy two hours' life. 10

Were he as famous and as bold."
The colors of our striving houses.19

Strengthening mis-proud York. 13

O Lancaster, I fear thy overthrow.'

The word contention is an unusual one and appears in but four other plays, viz.: Henry V., Troilus and Cressida, Cymbeline and Othello, and in each case I think it has reference, in cipher, to the play of The Contention of York and Lancaster, one of the earliest of the author's writings. It is not found at all in thirty of the plays. And how strained and unnatural is the use of this word contention? It is plainly dragged into the text. As thus:

Contention (like a horse

Full of high feeding) madly hath broke loose. 15

And let the world no longer be a stage

To feed contention in a lingering act.

The genius of the author drags a thread of sense through these sentences, but it is exceedingly attenuated and gossamery.

The name of Bacon's early philosophical work, The Masculine Birth of Time, appears in three of the plays. The word masculine

is an unusual word in poetry; it occurs but three times in the entire Folio, and each time the words birth and time accompany it, either in the same scene or close at hand. For instance, in Twelfth Night, in act v, in the same scene (scene 1), we have all three of the words, masculine, birth, time. In 1st Henry VI., masculine is in act ii, scene 1, while birth and time occur in act ii, scene iv. Troilus and Cressida they appear in act v, scene 1, and act iv, scene 4.

In

The Advancement of Learning, the name of one of Bacon's great works, is found in The Tempest, 2d Henry IV. and Hamlet. The words Scaling Ladders of the Intelligence are all found in Coriolanus.

With these and many other similar observations, I became satisfied that there was a cipher narrative interwoven into the body and texture of the Plays. Any one of the instances I have given would by itself have proved nothing, but the multitude of such curious coincidences was cumulative and convincing.

Granted there was a cipher, how was I to find it?

CHAPTER III.

A VAIN SEARCH IN THE COMMON EDITIONS

He apprehends a world of figures here,

But not the form of what he should attend.

1st Henry IV., i, 3.

I

F there was a cipher in the Plays, written by Francis Bacon, why should it not be Bacon's cipher, to-wit: a cipher of words) infolded in other words, "the writing infolding holding a quintuple proportion to the writing infolded"?

And if I was to find it out, why not begin on those words, Francis, Bacon, Nicholas, Bacon's, son, in the 1st Henry IV., act ii?

I did so, using an ordinary edition of the Plays. For days and weeks and months I toiled over those pages. I tried in every possible way to establish some arithmetical relation between these significant words. It was all in vain. I tried all the words on page 53, on page 54, on page 55. I took every fifth word, every tenth word, every twentieth word, every fiftieth word, every hundredth word. But still the result was incoherent nonsense. counted from the top of the pages down, from the bottom up, from the beginning of acts and scenes and from the ends of acts and scenes, across the pages, and hop, skip and jump in every direction; still, it produced nothing but dire nonsense.

I

Since it was announced in the daily press of the United States that I claimed to have discovered a cipher in the Shakespeare Plays, there have been some who have declared that it was easy enough to make any kind of a sentence out of any work. I grant that if no respect is paid to arithmetical rules this can easily be done. If the decipherer is allowed to select the words he needs at random, wherever he finds them, he can make, as Bacon says, "anything out of anything;" he could prove in this way that the Apostle Paul wrote Cicero's orations. But I insist that, wherever any arithmetical proportion is preserved between the words selected, it is impossible to find five words that will cohere in