club.

One day, a subject for debate being lacking, he proposed that it should be debated whether Bacon or Shakespeare had the better claim to the authorship of the Plays. The subject was considered, at first, too monstrous to be discussed; but John Stuart Mill, being one of the members, spoke strongly in favor of giving Mr. Smith a hearing. A paper was accordingly read, and produced such a sensation that Mr. Smith was requested to print it in the form of a letter to Lord Ellesmere, the then head of the Shakespearean Society. Of course it was virulently assailed by the Shakspereans, who tried by caricature and ridicule to annihilate Mr. Smith and his notions. He then wrote a fuller statement and published it in a little two-shilling-sixpence volume, and having done this he retired from the scene. He did not care, he said, to have literary mud cast at him; the truth would come out some day. Great domestic troubles overtook him, and for a while he lost interest in everything, even in the fate of his book, living a very recluse life, sometimes in London, but more often in a little country estate in Sussex. He is a highly entertaining old gentleman, always ready with his joke and his apt quotation, and with a laugh of infectious jollity. He had, he says, no desire to live, but now he certainly would like to abide the publication of Mr. Donnelly's book, and see how the learned Shakspereans are going to wriggle out of their very decided statements.

II. THE CHARGE OF PLAGIARISM.

Mr. W. H. Wyman, in his Bacon-Shakespeare Bibliography, has the following remarks:

A question of precedence as to the Baconian advocacy arose between Mr. Smith and Miss Bacon's friends. Hawthorne, in his preface to Miss Bacon's book, animadverted upon Mr. Smith for "taking to himself this lady's theory," resulting in the correspondence published in Smith's book. In his letter Mr. Smith claimed that he had never seen Miss Bacon's Putnam's Monthly article until after his pamphlet was published, and also that he had held these opinions for twenty years previously. But as Miss Bacon's article was published eight months previous to his pamphlet, and reviewed in the Athenæum in the meantime, his want of knowledge was certainly very singular, and the precedence must be awarded to her.

It seems to me that any one who reads this famous pamphlet of 1856 will come to the conclusion that these animadversions are not just. There is no resemblance in the mode of thought between Miss Bacon's argument and that of Mr. Smith. Miss Bacon dealt in the large, general, comprehensive propositions involved in the question; Mr. Smith's essay is sharp, keen and bristling with points. Both show wonderful penetration, but it is of a different kind. Miss Bacon's is the penetration of a philosopher; Mr. Smith's that of a lawyer,

Neither should it be a matter of surprise that two different minds should arrive at the same conclusions, at the same time, cn

this question: the only wonder is that the whole world did not reach the same views simultaneously with them.

III. MR. HAWTHORNE'S CHARGE.

Concerning this question of originality in the discussion of the question, Nathaniel Hawthorne, in his Preface to Miss Bacon's book, had this to say:

Another evil followed. An English writer, (in a "Letter to the Earl of Ellesmere," published within a few months past), has thought it not inconsistent with the fair play on which his country prides itself, to take to himself this lady's theory, and favor the public with it as his own original conception, without allusion to the author's prior claim. In reference to this pamphlet, she (Miss Bacon) generously says:

This has not been a selfish enterprise. It is not a personal concern. It is a discovery which belongs not to an individual, and not to a people. Its fields are wide enough and rich enough for us all; and he that has no work, and whoso will, let him come and labor in them. The field is the world's; and the world's work henceforth is in it. So that it be known in its real comprehension, in its true relations to the weal of the world, what matter is it? So that the truth, which is dearer than all the rest-which abides with us when all others leave us, dearest then so that the truth, which is neither yours nor mine, but yours and mine, be known, loved, honored, emancipated, mitered, crowned, adorned-"who loses anything, that does not find it?" And what matters it? says the philosophic wisdom, speaking in the abstract, what name it is proclaimed in, and what letters of the alphabet we know it by?-What matter is it, so that they spell the name that is good for all, and good for each ?-for that is the real name here?

Speaking on the author's behalf, however, I am not entitled to imitate her magnanimity; and, therefore, hope that the writer of the pamphlet will disclaim any purpose of assuming to himself, on the ground of a slight and superficial performance, the results which she has attained at the cost of many toils and sacrifices.

IV. MR. SMITH EXONERATED BY MR. HAWTHORNE.

In 1857 Mr. Smith published his book: Bacon and Shakespeare: An Inquiry touching Players, Play-houses and Play-writers in the days of Elizabeth. By William Henry Smith. London: John Russell Smith, 36 Soho Square; and he prefaced it with copies of a correspondence between Mr. Hawthorne and himself. In this correspondence Mr. Smith assured Mr. Hawthorne:

I had never heard the name of Miss Bacon until it was mentioned in the review of my pamphlet in the Literary Gazette, September, 1856. . . . If it were necessary I could show that for upwards of twenty years I have had the opinion that Bacon was the author of the Shakespeare Plays.

To which Mr. Hawthorne replies, June 5, 1887, as follows:

I beg leave to say that I entirely accept your statement as to the originality and early date of your own convictions regarding the authorship of the Shakespeare

Plays, and likewise as to your ignorance of Miss Bacon's prior publication on the subject. Of course my imputation of unfairness or discourtesy on your part falls at once to the ground, and I regret that it was ever made.

My mistake was perhaps a natural one, although, unquestionably, the treatment of the subject in your “Letter to the Earl of Ellesmere” differs widely from that adopted by Miss Bacon. I now see that my remarks did you great injustice, and I trust that you will receive this acknowledgment as the only reparation in my power.

V. THE CONVERSION OF LORD PALMerston.

One of the first and greatest converts to the Baconian theory was made by Mr. Smith's book, namely, the famous Premier of England, Lord Palmerston. Mr. Wyman quotes the following from an article in Fraser's Magazine for November, 1865:

Literature was the fashion of Lord Palmerston's early days, when, (as Sydney Smith remarked), a false quantity in a man was pretty nearly the same as a faux pas in a woman. He was tolerably well up in the chief Latin and English classics; but he entertained one of the most extraordinary paradoxes, touching the greatest of them, that was ever broached by a man of his intellectual caliber. He maintained that the Plays of Shakespeare were really written by Bacon, who passed them off under the name of an actor, for fear of compromising his professional prospects and philosophic gravity. Only last year, when this subject was discussed at Broadlands, Lord Palmerston suddenly left the room, and speedily returned with small volume of dramatic criticisms, in which the same theory (originally started by an American lady) was supported by supposed analogies of thought and expression. "There," he said, "read that, and you will come to my opinion." When the positive testimony of Ben Jonson, in the verses prefixed to the edition of 1623, was adduced, he remarked, “Oh, these fellows always stand up for one another, or he may have been deceived like the rest." The argument had struck Lord Palmerston by its originality, and he wanted leisure for a searching exposure of its groundlessness.

The volume alluded to was Smith's Bacon and Shakespeare.

The truth was that the comprehensive mind of the great statesman, who had ruled the British Empire for so many years, needed but a statement of the outlines of the argument to leap at once to the conclusion that there was no coherence between the life of the man of Stratford and the mighty works which go by his name.

In America we have a gentleman who, for breadth of mind, knowledge of affairs, keenness of observation and depth of penetration, deserves to be named in the same breath with Lord Palmerston. I refer to the celebrated BENJAMIN F. BUTLER, whose genius has adorned alike the walks of peace and the fields of war. General

1Bacon-Shakespeare Bibliog., p. 26.

Butler, like Lord Palmerston, needed but the presentation of the argument to reach the conclusion that Francis Bacon wrote the Plays; and that opinion he has maintained inflexibly during a period of thirty years.

When such large and trained intelligences accept the theory of the Baconian authorship, as not only reasonable, but conclusive, it is amusing to see small creatures, who have never been known outside of their own bailiwicks, protesting, with their noses high in the air, that the theory is utterly absurd and ridiculous; and that it is an insult to their brain-pans to be even asked to consider it.

VI. A WONDERFUL FACT BROUGHT OUT.

Mr. Smith's book, already referred to, is a very able and original performance. It contained, for the first time, many of the arguments that have since been used by all the writers on the subject. It is evident that his observation is very keen. I find, for instance, this paragraph, which has a curious bearing on the Cipher in the Plays:

We may here mention a fact which we have remarked, and have not seen noted by any commentator- - that every page in each of the three first folio editions contains exactly the same amount of matter: · - the same word which begins or ends the page in the 1623 edition, begins and ends the page in the 1632 and 1664 editions; proving that they were printed from one another, if not from the same types. The 1685 edition is altogether different.

This is a very remarkable fact. The curious paging of the 1623 edition must have been precisely followed in the edition printed nine years later, and again in the edition printed forty-one years later. Now, there were no stereotype or electrotype plates in those days; and the type could not have been kept standing for forty-one years. There are but two explanations: The first is, that some person of means, we will say the author of the Plays, solicitous to secure the perpetuation of the Folio from the waste and ravages of "devouring time," had had printed in 1623 other editions, dated, on the title-pages, 1632 and 1664, and left them to be brought out by friends at those dates. The second explanation is that some man or men had been left behind,- some friends of Bacon,— or some secret society, if you please, like the Rosicrucians, who, knowing that there was a cipher in the Plays, and that it depended