his life and his era, and had selected his own short acting plays, in their first brief form, for the web into which he would weave his story (for we find The Merry Wives, Henry V., Romeo and Juliet, Hamlet and other plays still existing in that original form, without the significant cipher words), determined that some day he would publish his cipher-plays in folio volume; and the cipher was constructed altogether with that end in view. To insert the cipher he had to double the size of the original plays; and this is the reason we have them "enlarged to as much again," as is stated in the preface to some of the quarto editions.

Now then, Richard II. having ended on page 45 (and probably Richard II. and King John constitute jointly a cipher narrative, united, just as we will see hereafter that the 1st and 2d Henry IV. are united), he then made his calculation that the 1st Henry IV. would occupy twenty-eight pages and this would make the first page of 2d Henry IV. page 74. Upon this basis he worked; for it is my impression that those coincidences I have just shown, of Francis Bacon- Nicholas Bacon's son, are either parts of a cipher different from that which I have worked out, or that they have no relation to the cipher proper, but were put there to lead some subsequent investigator along to the conviction that there was a cipher in the Plays. And I should conclude that Bacon made a mistake in his estimate, and that the 1st Henry IV., when finished, contained but twenty-six pages. Hence he was driven to the expedient of dropping two pages, or one leaf, out of the count; and, hence, in the Folio, page 49 follows page 46.

But, having settled upon page 74, he begins his work. He writes his text on the basis of the equivalent in words of what he thinks each column of the Folio, when printed, will contain, using either large sheets or two sheets bearing the same number. For instance, the first column of page 74 contains 294 words. These could be readily written on one sheet of paper; and the same is true of the second column, which contains 270 words. When he comes to page 75, the first column of which contains 468 words and the second 541, if he had not single sheets large enough for these he used two or more, giving them the same paging, as, for instance, 75' or 752, etc. The number of words on a column was largely dependent on the necessities of the cipher; hence, we will

find three hundred and odd words on one column, and six hundred and odd on another. Let the reader turn to our fac-similes, and compare the second column of page 76 with the second column of page 80. Both are in prose, and each contains one break in the narrative, caused by the entrance of characters. Yet the first has 615 words, while the other contains 553 words. And, to get the 615 words into the second column of page 76, the type had to be crowded together very closely, and we have the words, "Doth_not the King lack subjects?" printed (as the reader will see, by looking near the bottom of the column) thus:

Doth not the K. lack subjects?

On the second column of page 64 of 1st Henry IV., all in prose, and containing also one break, there are but 472 words; while on the first column of page 62 of the same play, all in prose, with three interruptions, there are but 375 words. There could as well have been 500 words printed on that column as 375. But we will see, as we proceed, that the necessity the cryptologist was under to use the same significant words more than once (counting from the bottom of the column up, as well as from the top of the column down) determined the number of the words on the column; even though he had to print King as simply K., to get them all in, in the one case; or to put in such phrases as the following, heavily leaded, in the other case, as on page 64:

Enter the Prince marching, and Falstaffe meets

him playing on his Trunchion

like a Fife.

Compare this with the first column of page 79, where a similar stage direction has not even a separate line given it, but is crowded in at the end of a sentence, thus:

Page. Away you Scullion, you Rampallion, you Fustil-
lirian: Ile tucke your Catastrophe. Enter Ch. Justice.

Here the writer did not allow even room enough to print the word Chief in full.

Now, having the Plays written on sheets, and so paged as to correspond with a prospective Folio, Bacon was in this dilemma: If he did not print the Plays during Shakspere's life-time, with the cipher in them, and Shakspere's name on the title-page, men would

say in the future, as they have said recently, that the Plays were really Shakspere's, and that he (Bacon) had stolen them and interjected a cipher claiming them. And so he published some of them. in quarto. But as the paging of the quarto would begin with page I, while the cipher was founded on page 74, or page 69 (as in Henry V.), or page 79 (as in Troilus and Cressida), it was absolutely impossible to decipher the inner story. But, to make assurance doubly sure, Bacon cut out of the quarto whole sentences that were in the Folio sheets, and set into the text of the quarto sentences and whole scenes that were not in the Folio; so that the most astute decipherer could have made nothing out of it, however cunningly he might have worked. And this is the explanation of the fact that while the editors of the Folio of 1623 assure the public that it is printed from "the true originall copies," and that all previous quarto editions were "stolne and surreptitious copies, maimed and deformed by the frauds and stealthes of injurious impostors that expos'd them;" and that the Folio copies were "perfect of their limbs and absolute in their numbers, as he (Shakespeare) conceived them," nevertheless, the publisher of Shakespeare to-day has to go to these same very much denounced quartos for many of the finest passages which go by the name of the great poet.

And here is another curious fact: Bacon was not content to publish the Plays during the life of Elizabeth and his keen-eyed. cousin, Cecil, with a different paging; but where the word Bacon occurred, in the quartos, it is printed with a small b, so as not to arouse suspicion, instead of with a capital B, as in the Folio! And most of those curious bracketings and hyphenations which so mar the text of the great Folio, like "smooth-comforts-false," etc., are not to be found in the quartos.

One can fancy Francis Bacon sitting at the play-in the background with his hat over his eyes-watching Elizabeth and Cecil, seated, as was the custom, on the stage, enjoying and laughing over some merry comedy, little dreaming that the internal fabric of the play told, in immortal words, all the darkest passages of their own dark lives-embalmed in the midst of wit and rollicking laughter, for the entertainment of all future ages. And so the long-suffering and much abused genius enjoyed

his revenge, even under the very nose of power; so he rose superior to

The law's delay,

The insolence of office, and the spurns

Which patient merit of the unworthy takes.

And when the time came to "put the alphabet in a frame" all he had to do was to have Condell and Heminge contract with the printers to print the Folio in columns, precisely as ordered, Bacon himself secretly correcting the proofs. Or Bacon may have bought the type and had it printed at Gray's Inn, or St. Albans, or at the house of Condell or Heminge. If printers were told to follow copy precisely, and put exactly as many words on a column as there were on a sheet of the original manuscript, they would, of course, do so; and only in this way can the extraordinary features of the Folio of 1623 be accounted for. And if the printers needed a reason, to allay suspicion, it could be given in the pretended reverence of the actor-editors for the work of "their worthy friend and fellow, Shakespeare;" for it follows, of course, that Heminge and Condell, or one, at least, of them, was in the secret of the real authorship.

And this also explains why one-half the Plays were not published until 1623, and why for nearly twenty years so few were put forth. The author could never know how far suspicion might be aroused by the curiously garbled state of the text. But in 1623 the generation that had witnessed the production of the Plays was mostly dead; Burleigh and Cecil and the Queen were all gone; and Bacon himself was nearing the last mile-stone of his wonderful career. There was but little risk of discovery in the few years that remained to him between 1623 and the grave.

The great Folio was the culmination of Bacon's life-work as regarded one portion of his mighty intellect; even as the De Augmen tis and the Novum Organum were the culmination of his life-work as to the other side-his philosophy. And side by side, at the same time, he erected these great pillars, the one as worthy, as enduring, as world-sustaining as the other.

CHAPTER V.

LOST IN THE WILDERNESS.

Polonius. What do you read, my lord?

Hamlet. Words, words, words.

Hamlet, ii, 2.

H

AVING satisfied myself, in this way, that, beyond question,

there was a cipher narrative in the Shakespeare Plays, I commenced the task of deciphering it. It has been an incalculable labor, reaching through many weary years.

I had but one clue: that the cipher words were to some extent the multiples of the pages on which they occur. But the problem was, In what order do they follow each other? What is the sequence of arrangement?

My first conception of the cipher narrative was that of a brief statement of the fact that Francis Bacon was the real author of the Plays. The words constituting this sentence might, I thought, be widely scattered, and but two or three to a play. On page 84 I t

found the word William.

I dare say my cousin William is become a good Scholler.'

In the subdivision above this, in the same column, being the end of act iii, scene 2, there were three hyphenated words, and thirtyfive words in brackets. If you deduct 3 from 86 it leaves 83, and on page 83 we find:

Feele, Masters, how I shake. 2

If you deduct 35 from 87, the next column, it leaves 52, and on page 52 we have:

The uncertain footing of a Speare.

Here, I thought, I have a clue:- William Shakespeare. But, unfortunately, the rule would carry me no farther.

Then I was perplexed as to the true mode of counting. Was I to analyze words into their meaning and count them accordingly? Was what's, as in "what's the matter," one word or two words,