And says Spedding:

Thus I conceive that six out of the ten passages under consideration must be set aside as not bearing at all upon the question at issue. Of the four that remain, two must be set aside in like manner, because, though they directly allude to the practice of transmitting knowledge as a secret from hand to hand, they contain no evidence that Bacon approved of it.

And it is most remarkable that in the next chapter after that in which we find the lengthy discourse about ciphers, already quoted, Bacon proceeds to discuss "the Handing on of the Lamp, or Method of Delivery to Posterity," and repeats himself again. He says there are two ways to transmit knowledge:

For both methods agree in aiming to separate the vulgar among the auditors from the select; but then they are opposed in this, that the former makes use of a way of delivery more open than the common; the latter (of which I am now going to speak), of one more secret. Let the one, then, be distinguished as the Exoteric method, the other as the Acroamatic; a distinction observed by the ancients principally in the publication of books, but which I transfer to the method of delivery. Indeed this acroamatic or enigmatical method was itself used among the ancients, and employed with judgment and discretion. But in later times it has been disgraced by many, who have made it a false and deceitful light to put forward their counterfeit merchandise. The intention of it, however, seems to be by obscurity of delivery to exclude the vulgar (that is the profane vulgar) from the secrets of knowledge, and to admit those only who have either received the interpretation of the enigmas through the hands of the teachers, or have wits of such sharpness and discernment as can pierce the veil.1

Is it not significant that immediately after the discussion of ciphers, in which he said that there were two kinds of writing, "either by the common alphabet or by a private and secret one," he should proceed to tell us that there are two ways of handing on the lamp to posterity, both of which exclude the vulgar, but one of them is more secret than the other, used formerly among the ancients [he has just given us an example in the Spartan Scytale]— an acroamatic or enigmatical method, the "veil" of whose "obscure delivery" can only be penetrated by those who have been let into the secret, or who have wits sharp enough to pierce it. Delia Bacon says of the Elizabethan period:

It was a time when the cipher, in which one could write "omnia per omnia," was in request; when even "wheel ciphers" and doubles were thought not unworthy of philosophic notice . . . with philosophic secrets that opened down into the bottom of a tomb, that opened into the Tower, that opened on the scaffold and the block.2

1 De Augmentis, book vi.

2 Philosophy of Shak. Plays Unfolded, p. 10.

Ben Jonson, in his Epigrams, says, speaking of the young statesmen of London:

They all get Porta for the sundry ways

To write in cipher, and the several keys
To ope the character.1

Porta was the famous Neapolitan, Johannes Baptista Porta. He

died in 1615.

Says W. F. C. Wigston:

It is difficult for us in this free age to understand all this. . . . For the necessity that arose for secrecy, and the intimacy of religion, politics and poetry cannot be fully grasped in an age where they have neither necessity nor interest to be in any way inter-related or inter-dependent.?

And that Bacon expected that in the future he would have an increase of fame or a justification of his life, seems to be intimated in the first draft of his will:

I leave my memory to the next ages and foreign nations, and to my own countrymen after some time be passed.

And in the last copy of his will he changes this phraseology, and

says:

For my name and memory I leave it to men's charitable speeches, and to foreign nations, and to the next ages.

Did he omit the words in italics because they might be too significant?

He always looked over the heads of the generation in which he lived, and fastened his eyes upon posterity. He anticipated the great religious and political revolution which soon after his death swept over England. He believed that the world was on the eve of great civil convulsions, growing out of religious fanaticism, in which it was possible civilization might perish, despite the art of printing. He says:

Nor is my resolution diminished by foreseeing the state of these times, a sort of declination and ruin of the learning which is now in use; for although I dread not the incursions of barbarians (unless, perhaps, the empire of Spain should strengthen itself, and oppress and debilitate others by arms, itself by the burden), yet from civil wars (which, on account of certain manners, not long ago introduced, seem to me about to visit many countries), and the malignity of sects, and from these com pendiary artifices and cautions which have crept into the place of learning, no less a tempest seems to impend over letters and science. Nor can the shop of the typographer avail for these evils.3

1 Epigram xci, The New City.

21 New Story of Shak., p. 193.

On the Interpretation of Nature.

What more natural than that he, the cipher-maker, being the author of the Plays, should place in the Plays a cipher story, to be read when the tempest that was about to assail civilization had passed away, the Plays surviving, for they were, he tells us, to live when "marble and the gilded monuments. of princes" had perished - even to the general judgment. If he was right; if the Plays were indeed as imperishable as the verses of Homer, they must necessarily be the subject of close study by generations of critics and commentators; and sooner or later some one would "pierce the veil" and read the acroamatic and enigmatical story infolded in them. Then would he be justified to the world by that internal narrative, reflecting on kings, princes, prelates and peers, and not to be published in his own day; not to be uttered without serious penalties to his kinsfolk, his family, his very body in the grave. Then, when his corpse was dust, his blood extinct, or diluted to nothingness in the course of generations; then, when all vanities of rank and state and profession and family were obliterated; when his memory and name were as a sublimated spirit; then, "in the next ages, ," "when some time had been passed," he would, through the cipher narrative, rise anew from the grave.

So the life that died with shame

Would live in death with glorious fame.'

"His eye," says Montagu, "pierced into future contingents." That can not be called improbable which has happened. If I had not fallen upon the cipher, some one else would. It was a mere question of time, with all time in which to answer it.

And this material and practical view sets aside that other and profounder conception, in which the operations of the minds of men are but the shadowings of an eternal purpose, and all history and all nature but the cunningly adjusted parts of a great external spiritual design.

1 Much Ado About Nothing, ii, 3.

CHAPTER II.

HOW I BECAME CERTAIN THERE WAS A CIPHER.

A book where men may read strange matters..

Macbeth, i, 5.

N the winter of 1878-9 I said to myself: I will re-read the Shake

IN

speare Plays, not, as heretofore, for the delight which they would give me, but with my eyes directed singly to discover whether there is or is not in them any indication of a cipher.

And I reasoned thus: If there is a cipher in the Plays, it will probably be in the form of a brief statement, that "I, Francis Bacon, of St. Albans, son of Nicholas Bacon, Lord Keeper of the Great Seal of England, wrote these Plays, which go by the name of William Shakespeare.”

The things then to be on the look-out for, in my reading, were the words Francis, Bacon, Nicholas, Bacon, and such combinations of Shake and speare, or Shakes and peer, as would make the word Shakespeare.

I possessed no Concordance at the time, or I might have saved myself much unnecessary trouble.

The first thing that struck me was the occurrence in The Merry Wives of Windsor of the word Bacon. The whole scene is an intrusion into the play. The play turns upon Sir John Falstaff's making love to two dames of Windsor at the same time, and the shames and humiliations he suffered therefrom. And this scene has nothing whatever to do with the plot of the play. Mistress Page, one of the Merry Wives, accompanied by her boy William, meets with Sir Hugh Evans, the Welsh parson and schoolmaster,— old Dame Quickly being by;-and Mistress Page tells the schoolmaster that her husband says the boy William "profits nothing at his book;" and she requests him to ask him some questions in his accidence." In the first place, it is something of a surprise to find the wife of a yeoman, or man of the middle class, who is able to

1 Act iv, scene 1.

tell whether or not the boy correctly answers the Latin questions put to him. But what, in the name of all that is reasonable, has the boy's proficiency in Latin to do with Sir John Falstaff's lovemaking? And why take up a whole scene to introduce it? The boy William nowhere appears in the play, except in that scene. He is called up from the depths of the author's consciousness, to recite a school lesson; and he is dismissed at the end of it into nothingness, never to appear again in this world. Is not this extraordinary?

We have also the older form of the play, which is only half the size of the present, and there is no William in it, and no such scene. That first form was written to play, and it has everything in it of action and plot necessary to make it a successful stage play, and tradition tells us that it was successful. But what was this enlarged form of the play written for, if the old form answered all the purposes of a play? And why insert in it this useless scene? Richard Grant White calls it "that very superfluous scene in The Merry Wives of Windsor." He acknowledges that "it has

nothing whatever to do with the plot."'

Speaking of the contemporaries of Shakspere, Swinburne says:

There is not one of them whom we can reasonably imagine capable of the patience and self-respect which induced Shakespeare to re-write the triumphantly popular parts of Romeo, of Falstaff and of Hamlet, with an eye to the literary perfection and performance of work, which, in its first outline, had won the crowning suffrage of immediate and spectacular applause.*

But while these reasons might possibly account for the re-writing of the parts of Romeo, Falstaff and Hamlet, there is no literary perfection about The Merry Wives of Windsor to explain the doubling of it in size; there is very little blank verse in the comedy, and still less of anything that can aspire to be called poetry. Why, then, was it re-written? And why, when re-written, was this superfluous scene injected into it? That the reader may be the better able to judge of it, I quote the scene entire, just as it appears on pages 53 and 54 of the Folio of 1623:

ACTUS QUARTUS. SCENA PRIMA.

Enter Mistris Page, Quickly, William, Evans.

Mist. Pag. Is he at M. Fords already think'st thou?

Qui. Sure he is by this; or will be presently; but truely he is very couragious mad, about his throwing into the water. Mistris Ford desires you to come sodainely.

Genius of Shak., p. 283. 2 Thomas Middleton, Shakespeariana, vol. iii, No. 26, p. 61.