BOOK II.

•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 conclusion 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:

The earth can yield me but a common grave,
When you entombéd in men's eyes shall lie.
Your monument shall be my gentle verse,
Which eyes not yet created shall o'er-read;
And tongues to be your being shall rehearse,
When all the breathers of this world are dead;
You still shall live (such virtue hath my pen),
Where breath most breathes, even in the mouths of men.

And in sonnet lv he says:

Not marble, not the gilded monuments

Of princes, shall outlive this powerful rhyme;
But you shall shine more bright in these contents
Than unswept stone besmeared with sluttish time.

Gainst death and all-oblivious enmity,

Shall you pace forth; your praise shall still find room

Even in the eyes of all posterity,

That wear this world out to the ending doom.

So, till the judgment that yourself arise,

You live in this, and dwell in lovers' eyes.

There was, as it seems to me, no doubt: 1. That Bacon wrote the Plays; 2. That he loved them as the children of his brain; 3. That he estimated them at their full great value.

The question then arose, How was it possible that he would disown them with no hope or purpose of ever reclaiming them? How could he consent that the immortal honors which belonged to himself should be heaped upon an unworthy impostor? How could he divest BACON of this great world-outliving glory to give it to SHAKSPERE?

me.

This thought recurred to me constantly, and greatly perplexed

One day I chanced to open a book, belonging to one of my children, called Every Boy's Book, published in London, by George Routledge & Sons, 1868; a very complete and interesting work of its kind, containing over eight hundred pages. On page 674 I found a chapter devoted to "Cryptography," or cipher-writing, and in it I chanced upon this sentence:

The most famous and complex cipher perhaps ever written was by Lord Bacon. It was arranged in the following manner:

Now suppose you want to inform some one that All is well." First place down the letters separately according to the above alphabet:

aaaaa ababa ababa abaaa baaab babaa aabaa ababa ababa
Then take a sentence five times the length in letters of "All is well"-
is, "We were sorry to have heard that you have been so unwell."
Then fit this sentence to the cipher above, like this:

aaaaaababaababaabaaabaaabbabaaaabaaababaababa
wewere sorryt ohav cheard that youhav ebeensounwell

say it

Marking with a dash every letter that comes under a b. Then put the sentence down on your paper, printing all marked letters in italics and the others in the ordinary way, thus:

We were sorry to have heard that you have been so unwell.

The person who receives the cipher puts it down and writes an a under every letter except those in italics; these he puts a b under; he then divides the cipher obtained into periods of five letters, looks at his alphabet, and finds the meaning to be: "All is well."

And on page 681 of the same chapter I found another allusion to Bacon:

Most of the examples given will only enable one to decipher the most simple kind, such as are generally found in magazines, etc.; for if that intricate cipher of Lord Bacon's were put in a book for boys it would be a waste of paper, as we will venture to say that not one in a thousand would be able to find it out.

Here was indeed a pregnant association of ideas:

1. Lord Bacon wrote the Plays.

2. Lord Bacon loved them; and could not desire to dissociate himself from them.

3. Lord Bacon knew their inestimable greatness; and

4. Lord Bacon dealt in ciphers; he invented ciphers, and ciphers of exquisite subtlety and cunning.

Then followed, like a flash, this thought:

5. Could Lord Bacon have put a cipher in the Plays?

The first thing to do was to see what Lord Bacon had said on the subject of ciphers. I remembered that Basil Montagu in his Life of Bacon had said, speaking of his youth and before he came

of age:

After the appointment of Sir Amias Paulett's successor, Bacon traveled into the French provinces and spent some time at Poictiers. He prepared a work upon. ciphers, which he afterward published.'

Works of Lord Bacon, vol. i.