CHAPTER XXII.

A WORD PERSONAL.

I

BEGAN this book with an apology; I end it with another.

No one can be more conscious of its defects than I am. So great a subject demanded the utmost care, deliberation and perfection; while my work has, on the other hand, been performed with the utmost haste and under many adverse circumstances.

It was my misfortune to have announced, in 1884, that I believed I had found a Cipher in the Plays. From the time I put forth that claim until the copy was placed in the hands of the publishers, I made no effort to advertise my book. But the assertion was so startling, and concerned writings of such universal interest, that it could not be suffered to fall unnoticed. I felt, at the same time, that I owed some duties to the nineteenth century, as well as to the sixteenth, and hence my work was greatly broken in upon by public affairs. After a time the reading world became clamorous for the proofs of my surprising assertion; and many were not slow to say that I was either an impostor or a lunatic. Goaded by these taunts, I made arrangements to publish before I was really ready to do so; and then set to work, under the greatest strain and the highest possible pressure, to try to keep my engagements with my publishers. But the reader can readily conceive how slowly such a Cipher work as this must have advanced, when every word was a sum in arithmetic, and had to be counted and verified again and again. In the meantime upon my poor devoted head was let loose a perfect flood-tide of denunciation, ridicule and misrepresentation from three-fourths of the newspapers of America and England. I could not pause in my work to defend myself, but had to sit, in the midst of an arctic winter, and patiently endure it all, while working

from ten to twelve hours every day, at a kind of mental toil the most exhausting the human mind is capable of.

These facts will, I trust, be my excuse for all the crudeness, roughness, repetitions and errors apparent in these pages.

In the Patent Office they require the inventor to state clearly what he claims. I will follow that precedent.

I admit, as I have said before, that my workmanship in the elaboration of the Cipher is not perfect. There are one or two essential points of the Cipher rule that I have not fully worked out. I think that I see the complete rule, but I need more leisure to elaborate and verify it abundantly, and reduce my workmanship to mathematical exactness.

But I claim that, beyond a doubt, there is a Cipher in the so-called Shakespeare Plays.

The proofs are cumulative. I have shown a thousand of them. No honest man can, I think, read this book through and say that there is nothing extraordinary, unusual and artificial in the construction of the text of 1st and 2d Henry IV. No honest man will, I think, deny the multitudinous evidences I present that the text words, brackets and hyphens have been adjusted arithmetically to the necessity of matching the ends of scenes and fragments of scenes with certain root-numbers of a Cipher. No man can pretend that such words and phrases as the following could come in this, or any other book, by accident, held together in every case by the same Cipher numbers:

THE NAMES OF PLAYS.

1. Measure for Measure, three times repeated.

2. Contention of York and Lancaster, three times repeated.

3. The Merry Wives of Windsor, twice repeated.

4. Richard the Second, twice repeated.

5. Richard the Third, given once.

6. King John, twice repeated.

THE NAMES OF PERSONS.

1. Shakspere, repeated about twenty times.

2. Marlowe, repeated several times.

3. Archer, used once.

4. Philip Henslow, used once in full, and twice without first name.

5. Field, several times repeated.

6. Cecil, many times repeated.

7. The Earl of Shrewsbury, two or three times repeated.

Now I submit to all fair-minded men whether this is not an astonishing array of words to find in about a dozen pages of the text of two plays; and whether there is any other writing on earth in which, in the same space, these words can be duplicated. I cannot believe there is. But remember that not only are these significant and most necessary words found in this brief compass, but they fit exactly into sentences every word of which grows out of the same determinate Cipher number. But, in addition to all this, remember the dense packing of some columns, and the sparse condition of the adjoining columns; remember how heart is spelled hart where it refers to Shakspere's sister; remember how and it is

spelled an't, and not and't, where allusion is had to Bacon's aunt; remember how dear is spelt deere when it refers to deer; remember how sperato is separated by a hair space into sper ato, so as to give the terminal syllable of Shake-sper; remember how the rare word rabbit is found in the text precisely cohering, arithmetically, with hunting. Then turn to the Cipher story on page 79 of the Folio, where not only scattered words come out, but where whole long series of words are so adjusted, with the aid of the brackets and hyphens, as to follow precisely the order of the words in the play! Then remember how every part of this Cipher story fits precisely into what we know historically to be true; and, although much of it is new, that part is, in itself, probable and reasonable.

The world will either have to admit that there is a Cipher in the Plays, or that in the construction of this narrative I have manifested an ingenuity as boundless as that which I have attributed to Bacon. But I make no such claim. No ingenuity could create the words necessary to tell this extraordinary story, unless they were in the

Take Bulwer's Richelieu, or Byron's Manfred, or Goldsmith's She Stoops to Conquer, or any other dramatic composition of the last hundred years, and you will seek in vain for even one-tenth of the significant words found herein; and as to making any of these modern plays tell a coherent, historical tale, by counting with the same number from the ends of scenes and fragments of scenes, it would be altogether and absolutely impossible.

I do not blame any man for having declared à priori against the possibility of there being a Cipher in the Plays. On the face of it such a claim is improbable, and, viewed from our nineteenth century standpoint, and in the light of our free age, almost absurd. I could not, in the first instance, have believed it myself. I advanced to the conception slowly and reluctantly. expected to find only a brief assertion of authorship, a word or two to a column. If any man had told me five years ago that these two plays were such an exquisite and intricate piece of microscopic mosaic-work as the facts show them to be, I should have turned from him with contempt. I could not have believed that any man would involve himself in such incalculable labor as is implied in the construction of such a Cipher. We may say the brain was abnormal that created it. But

how, after all, can we judge such an intellect by the ordinary standard of mankind? If he sought immortality he certainly has achieved it, for, once the human family grasps the entirety of this inconceivable work, it will be drowned in an ocean of wonder. The Plays may lose their charm; the English language may perish; but tens of thousands of years from now, if the world and civilization endure, mankind will be talking about this extraordinary welding together of fact and fiction; this tale within a tale; this sublime and supreme triumph of the human intellect. Beside it the Iliad will be but as the rude song of wandering barbarians, and Paradise Lost a~ temporary offshoot of Judaism.

I trust no honest man will feel constrained, for consistency's sake, because he has judged my book unheard, to condemn it heard. It will avail nothing to assail me. I am not at issue. And you cannot pound the life out of a fact with your fists. A truth has the indestructibility of matter. It is part of God: the threads of continu ity tie it to the throne of the Everlasting.

Edmund Burke said in a debate in Parliament about the population of the American colonies: "While we are disputing they grow to it." And so, even while the critics are writing their essays, to demonstrate that all I have revealed is a fortuitous combination of coincidence, keen and able minds will be taking up my imperfect clues and reducing the Cipher rule to such perfection that it will be as useless to deny the presence of the sun in the heavens as to deny the existence of the inner story in the Plays.

And what a volume of historical truths will roll out of the text of this great volume! The inner life of kings and queens, the highest, perhaps the basest, of their kind; the struggles of factions in the courts; the interior view of the birth of religions; the first coloniza-tion of the American continent, in which Bacon took an active part, and something of which is hidden in The Tempest; the death of Mary Queen of Scots; the Spanish Armada, told in Love's Labor Lost; the religious wars on the continent; the story of Henry of Navarre; the real biography of Essex; the real story of Bacon's career; his defense of his life, hidden in Henry VIII., his own downfall, in cipher, being told in the external story of the downfall of Wolsey. What historical facts may we not expect, of which that account of the introduction

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