in the record that the expression ̓Αδώνιδος κῆποι became proverbial, and was applied to whatever perished previous to the period of maturity" as witnessed by the ADAGIA VETERUM, p. 410. The couplet in the play does but make a loose use of the familiar phrase; and Mr. White's strained cavil has only helped the Baconisers to darken counsel. As to their independent performances, it may suffice to cite one of Mr. Donnelly's, in illustration of the procedure of the school. Quoting the familiar lines of Catullus :

"Soles occidere et redire possunt :

Nobis, cum semel occidit brevis lux,

Nox est perpetua una dormienda,”

Mr. Donnelly appends somebody's halting translation, with italics :

"The lights of heaven go out and return.

When once our brief candle goes out,

One night is to be perpetually slept,"

and points for parallel to the "all our yesterdays have lighted fools," and the "out, out, brief candle," of MACBETH. Burlesque could no further go. There is no "candle" in Catullus; and even the "lights" of the first line is a variant made by the translator. If Mr. Donnelly had but heard a little more about Catullus, he might have made out a comparatively respectable case for the claim that

"The undiscover'd country, from whose bourn
No traveller returns,"

was drawn from the lines on the dead sparrow:

"Qui nunc it per iter tenebricosum

Illuc, unde negant redire quemquam."

Even in that case he would be wrong, for Shakespeare did not get the suggestion from Catullus; but the proposition would at least not be ridiculous.

It is doubtless vain to invite the general run of the Baconians to reconsider their position; but one may in the present connection submit, to such as will reconsider anything, a few critical suggestions by way of challenge. Bacon, a habitual reader of Latin, crowds his pages with Latin phrases and quotations; whereas even in the pseudo-Shakespearean plays there are but a few Latin tags. Bacon quotes Virgil in his works some fifty times; Ovid only some ten times; whereas the classicists among them find but two or three semblances of Virgilian reading in the plays,' and rest their case mainly upon Ovid. To

1 Stress is still at times laid upon the "Most sure, the goddess,” of Ferdinand in the Tempest, as copying Virgil's "O dea certe," and upon the further parallels in the contexts. Yet Farmer had pointed out that Stanyhurst (1583) translated the phrase "No doubt, a goddess." The point, however, is really too trivial for discussion : "small Latin" indeed would have made Shakespeare acquainted with such a tag; and he may well have read the passage at school.

Aristotle Bacon refers more than a hundred times, with critical knowledge: in the plays, Aristotle is named only twice-once in a colourless allusion in the TAMING Of the Shrew, once in what we have seen to be a current misquotation, or adaptation, made by Bacon also. Of Bacon's endless criticism of Aristotle the plays show not a trace. Of Plato, Bacon speaks some fifty times: in the plays he is not once named. Bacon, always playing with metaphors, constantly turns myths into moral lessons: for Shakespeare they are simply tales and tags. Prometheus is for Bacon an allegorical figure, standing for Providence; in the plays we have only the tags of "Prometheus tied to Caucasus" (TITUS) and "Promethean fire," which Shakespeare could get from Peele, the main author of TITUS. Apart from the article on Atalanta in the SAPIENTIA VETERUM, Bacon six times over makes use of the tale of how she was stayed in her course by the golden balls: it is always for him a figure of the deflection of science from its proper course by the allurements of profit. In the plays we have only "Atalanta's heels" and "Atalanta's better part" for Shakespeare she is merely the swift runner of fable. In their relation to classical lore, as in their whole psychic cast, the two minds are widely different in their content. In the face of

all this, to found a theorem of identity on the one or two points of intellectual contact in the plays and Bacon's works is to turn critical reason out of doors. Of the multitude of scientific problems which occupied Bacon, the only traces in the plays are those we have noted concerning the motion of the earth, the substance of the stars, and the relation of art to nature. In Shakespeare (apart from two allusions to the power of adamant) the magnet is not once mentioned, while Bacon frequently refers to Gilbert. And Bacon uses thousands of words that never occur in the plays. Bacon and Shakespeare had a literary friend in common; and Bacon might now and then see a Shakespearean play: that said, all is said. And for one point of contact with the ideas of Bacon, the plays have a dozen with the diction of dramatic contemporaries.

VI

ON one other issue, unfortunately, the Baconisers have gratuitous support from the Shakespeareans. Many of these, including Professors Fiske, Baynes, and Collins, decide that the VENUS AND ADONIS must have been written about six years before its publication, "probably before

Shakespeare left Stratford for London."1

This

view is taken on the ground that Shakespeare calls the VENUS AND ADONIS "the first heir of my invention," and that before its publication in 1593 he had had a hand in several of the chronicle plays, and had presumably written LOVE'S LABOUR'S LOST, the Two GENTLEMEN OF VERONA, and the COMEDY OF ERRORS. Now, this antedating of the poem makes a much worse difficulty than is set up by the natural hypothesis that it was written shortly before its publication. The Baconisers may well ask how Shakespeare could have produced such a comparatively polished piece of diction in the illiterate circle of Stratford.

It would not avail to press Professor Baynes's proposition that the poet's mother was "of gentle birth," for she too was illiterate, and her rank as a well-to-do yeoman's daughter is no guarantee for her having spoken literate English. But we

might still more pertinently ask how it can reasonably be supposed that Shakespeare would have kept such a taking poem by him in manuscript for six or seven years of his London life, when it was his business and his ambition to make

1 Baynes, Shakespeare Studies, p. 207. This sentence is clearly inconsistent with the previous statement that "within six or seven years" Shakespeare produced not only the Venus and Adonis and Lucrece but "at least fifteen of his dramas" (p. 105).