JV

In the very heat

And pride of their contention.1

And dialls the signs of leaping-houses.*

As oft as Lancaster doth speak.3

His uncle York.4

The name reappears, abbreviated, in the beginning of 1st Henry

The times are wild, Contention like a horse."

Between the royal field of Shrewsbury."

The gentle archbishop of York is up.'

Under the conduct of young Lancaster,

And the entire name, as it appears upon the title-page of the original quarto, is given in 3d Henry VI., "The Contention of the two Famous Houses of York and Lancaster." Thus:

No quarrel, but a slight contention."

Would buy two hours' life. 10
Were he as famous and as bold."
The colors of our striving houses,No

Strengthening mis-proud York, 13

O Lancaster, I fear thy overthrow.1

The word contention is an unusual one and appears in but four other plays, viz.: Henry V., Troilus and Cressida, Cymbeline and Othello, and in each case I think it has reference, in cipher, to the play of The Contention of York and Lancaster, one of the earliest of the author's writings. It is not found at all in thirty of the plays. And how strained and unnatural is the use of this word contention? It is plainly dragged into the text. As thus:

Contention (like a horse

Full of high feeding) madly hath broke loose.15

And let the world no longer be a stage

To feed contention in a lingering act.

The genius of the author drags a thread of sense through these sentences, but it is exceedingly attenuated and gossamery.

The name of Bacon's early philosophical work, The Masculine Birth of Time, appears in three of the plays. The word masculine

is an unusual word in poetry; it occurs but three times in the entire Folio, and each time the words birth and time accompany it, either in the same scene or close at hand. For instance, in Twelfth Night, in act v, in the same scene (scene 1), we have all three of the words, masculine, birth, time. In 1st Henry VI., masculine is in act ii, scene 1, while birth and time occur in act ii, scene iv. In Troilus and Cressida they appear in act v, scene 1, and act iv, scene 4.

The Advancement of Learning, the name of one of Bacon's great works, is found in The Tempest, 2d Henry IV. and Hamlet. The words Scaling Ladders of the Intelligence are all found in Coriolanus.

With these and many other similar observations, I became satisfied that there was a cipher narrative interwoven into the body and texture of the Plays. Any one of the instances I have given would by itself have proved nothing, but the multitude of such curious coincidences was cumulative and convincing.

Granted there was a cipher, how was I to find it?

CHAPTER III.

A VAIN SEARCH IN THE COMMON EDITIONS

He apprehends a world of figures here,

But not the form of what he should attend.

1st Henry IV., i, 3.

F there was a cipher in the Plays, written by Francis Bacon, why

IF

should it not be Bacon's cipher, to-wit: a cipher of words infolded in other words, "the writing infolding holding a quintuple proportion to the writing infolded"?

And if I was to find it out, why not begin on those words, Francis, Bacon, Nicholas, Bacon's, son, in the 1st Henry IV., act ii? I did so, using an ordinary edition of the Plays. For days and weeks and months I toiled over those pages. I tried in every possible way to establish some arithmetical relation between these significant words. It was all in vain. I tried all the words on page 53, on page 54, on page 55. I took every fifth word, every tenth word, every twentieth word, every fiftieth word, every hundredth word. But still the result was incoherent nonsense. counted from the top of the pages down, from the bottom up, from the beginning of acts and scenes and from the ends of acts and scenes, across the pages, and hop, skip and jump in every direction; still, it produced nothing but dire nonsense.

I

Since it was announced in the daily press of the United States that I claimed to have discovered a cipher in the Shakespeare Plays, there have been some who have declared that it was easy enough to make any kind of a sentence out of any work. I grant that if no respect is paid to arithmetical rules this can easily be done. If the decipherer is allowed to select the words he needs at random, wherever he finds them, he can make, as Bacon says, "anything out of anything;" he could prove in this way that the Apostle Paul wrote Cicero's orations. But I insist that, wherever any arithmetical proportion is preserved between the words. selected, it is impossible to find five words that will cohere in

sense, grammar or rhetoric; in fact, it is very rarely that three can be found to agree together in proper order.

To prove this, let me take this very page 53 of 1st Henry IV., on which Nicholas Bacon is found, and try the tenth, twentieth, fiftieth and hundredth words:

The tenth words are:

To,-it,-bids,-a,-can,-and-found-how,-looks-on,-1,

ripe,―loe,― once,—beare,—we,— thrive,— short,— Heigh, etc.

The twentieth words are:

It,—a, — and,—how, — on, — ripe, once,—we,— short,―hanged,— Tom,- of,—give,—since,— in,—in,—a,— away, etc.

The fiftieth words are:

Can,-on-beare,— hanged,

-as, — in,—your, – never,— 1,—go,

picking,-of-it-me-mad-pray, etc.

The hundredth words are:

On, hanged,-in,- never,-He,-wild,-if-then, etc.

The liveliest imagination and the vastest ingenuity can make nothing of such sentences as these, twist them how you will. The presence of order, and the coherence of things in the visible universe, prove the Creator. The existence of a regular, rhetorical, grammatical, reasonable sentence, occurring at stated and unvarying intervals in the texture of a work, proves conclusively that some mind so prearranged it. The man who would believe otherwise has just cause of complaint against the God who so miserably equipped him for the duties of life. He would be ready to believe, as Bacon himself has said, and as I have quoted elsewhere, that you could write the separate letters of the alphabet on a vast number of slips of paper, and then, by mixing and jumbling them together, they would accidentally assume the shape of Homer's Iliad!

A consecutive thought demonstrates a brain behind it.

If this prove false,

The pillared firmament is rottenness,

And earth's base built on stubble.

After many weary months of this self-imposed toil, trying every kind and combination of numbers that I could think of, I gave it up in despair. I did not for one instant doubt that there was a cipher in the Plays. I simply could not find it.

I wrote my books Atlantis and Ragnarök. After these were off my hands, my mind kept recurring to the problem of the cipher. At length this thought came to me:

The common editions of the Plays have been doctored, altered, corrected by the commentators. What evidence have I that the words on these pages are in anything like their original order? The change of a word, of a hyphen, would throw out the whole

count.

I must get a copy of the play as it was originally published. I knew there were fac-simile copies of the great Folio of 1623. I must procure one. At first I bought a copy, octavo form, reduced, published by Chatto & Windus. But I found the type was too small for the kind of work I proposed. I at length, July 1, 1882, procured a fac-simile copy, folio size, made by photo-lithographic process, and, therefore, an exact reproduction of type, pages, punctuation and everything else. It is one of those "executed under the superintendence of H. Staunton," and published in 1866 by Day & Son, London.