VII. PROFESSOR THOMAS DAVIDSON.

937

I take pleasure in presenting to the public the features of one of the most accomplished scholars in America, who, while not an avowed Baconian, has been largely identified with the presentation of this book to the public, and therefore deserves to be mentioned in it. Professor Davidson was sent to my home by the New York World, in August, 1887, to examine the proof-sheets of this work. He came believing that William Shakspere was undoubtedly the writer of the Plays; he left convinced that this was almost impossible; and since then, in numerous newspaper articles, he has presented most powerful arguments in support of his views. Only a great man could thus overcome, in a few hours, the prejudices of a life-time; only an honest man would dare avow the change. Prof. Davidson is both.

He comes of the great race of Burns and Scott, and Hume and Mackintosh; a race whose part in the world has been altogether out of proportion to the dimensions of their stormy little land; a land which sits with the fair fields of England at her knees, and the everlasting clouds upon her mountain brows.

Professor Davidson was born October 25, 1840, at Deer, Aberdeenshire. He graduated as the first in his class at Aberdeen in 1860. He has traveled in Germany, France, Italy, Greece, Canada, the United States, etc. From 1875 to 1877 he was a member of the Harvard University Visiting Committee. He has written for all the leading magazines and reviews of England and America. His lingual acquirements and his universal learning are such that he has been aptly termed "the Admirable Crichton of recent times."

But intellect and learning are cheap in these latter ages; they are produced in superabundance. Professor Davidson has that, however, which is better than a thoroughly-stored brain, to-wit: a kind, broad heart, which feels for the miseries of his fellow-men. The acquisitions of the memory cannot be expected to be perpetuated beyond the disintegration of the brain which holds them; but the impulses for good come from the Divine Essence, and will live. when all the universities are but little heaps of dust.

VIII. JAMES T. COBB.

And here I would note the labors of an humble and unostentatious

gentleman, who, while he has himself, I believe, published nothing touching the Baconian controversy, has contributed not a little to the elucidation of many remarkable parallelisms of thought and expression between Bacon's acknowledged writings and the Shakespeare Plays. Some of these have been used by Judge Holmes and others by myself. Mr. James T. Cobb, of Salt Lake City, Utah, school-teacher, born in Boston, graduated in 1855 from Dartmouth College, resided in different Western States, and finally removed to the great Salt Lake Basin. Mr. Cobb's verbal knowledge of the Baconian and Shakespeare writings is equaled only by his penetration into the spirit of the great mind which produced both.

IX. W. H. WYMAN.

I cannot close this chapter without some reference to one who, while not a Baconian, has yet materially contributed to the discussion of the question. I refer to Mr. W. H. Wyman, of Cincinnati, Ohio, author of The Bibliography of the Bacon-Shakespeare Controversy, with Notes and Extracts, published in 1884 by Cox & Co., Cincinnati, Ohio-a reasonably fair and well arranged compilation.

It is singular, indeed, that one who believed the Baconian theory was a delusion and a snare should be at so much pains to collect every detail of the controversy, amounting in all, in 1884, to 255 titles of books, pamphlets, essays and newspaper articles. So far back as 1882 we find Mr Wyman publishing in a Wisconsin paper a partial bibliographical list (25 titles); this grew in the same year to a small book of 63 titles and eight pages; this in 1884 to the work referred to of 255 titles and 119 pages; and I am informed Mr. Wyman has now the material on hand for a large volume, which will, I trust, soon be published.

Mr. Wyman was born in Canton, New York, July 21st, 1831. In 1838 he removed with the rest of his family to Madison, Wisconsin, then almost a wilderness. His father was publisher of a newspaper there, and Mr. Wyman received most of his education in the printing-office. He has been in the service of the Etna Insurance Company for thirty-two years, and now holds the responsible place of Assistant General Agent for that corporation in the State of Ohio.

CHAPTER IV.

OTHER MASKS OF FRANCIS BACON.

No more yet of this,

For 'tis a chronicle of day by day,

Not a relation for a breakfast, nor

Befitting this first meeting.

Tempest, v, I.

ΤΗ

HE Cipher establishes that Francis Bacon wrote the Shakespeare Plays; but it proves much more than this to the reasoning mind.

The first of the Plays, we are told by Halliwell-Phillipps, (the highest authority on the subject), appeared March 3, 1592. But Bacon was born January 22, 1561; so that he was thirty-one years of age when the first Shakespeare play was placed on the stage.

Can any one believe that the vastly active intellect of Francis Bacon lay fallow from youth until he was thirty-one years of age?

The Rev. Mr. Newman, in his funeral oration over the son of Senator Stanford, of California, collated many instances, going to show how early the greatness of the mind manifests itself in men of exceptional ability. He says:

In all this early intellectual superiority he reminds us that the history of heroes is the history of youth. At eleven, Bacon was speculating on the Laws of the Imagination; at twelve, a student at Cambridge; at sixteen, expressing his dislike for the philosophy of Aristotle; at twenty, the author of a paper on the defects of universities; at twenty-one, admitted to the bar; at twenty-eight, appointed Queen's Counsel Extraordinary. He reminds us of the tender and eloquent Pascal, who, at the age of sixteen, published a Treatise on Conic Sections; at seventeen, suggested the hydraulic press; at twenty, anticipated by his inventions the works of Galileo and Descartes, and at twenty-four was an authority in higher mathematics. He reminds us of Grotius, who entered the University of Leyden at twelve; at fourteen, published an edition of Martianus Capella, which disclosed his acquaintance with Cicero, Aristotle, Pliny, Euclid, Strabo, and other great writers; at fifteen, was an attaché of a Dutch embassy to Henry IV.; at sixteen, was admitted to practice; at twenty-four, was Advocate-General of the Treassury of Holland, and at twenty-five was an authority on international law. He

recalls to us Gibbon, who was in his Latin at seven; a student at Oxford at fifteen; a lover of Locke and Grotius and Pascal at seventeen, and at twenty-five had acquired the scholarship, gathered the materials, and formed the plan of that great history which has given immortality to his name. He brings to mind our own Hamilton, who entered college at fifteen; was an orator at seventeen; a political writer at eighteen; at twenty, was on Washington's staff; at twenty-four, was a legislator, and at thirty-two was Secretary of the Treasury of the United States. Nay, more; his mental promise was like that of Washington, of Pitt, of Whitfield, of Raphael, of Agassiz, in their early manhood.

And yet, up to 1592, when Bacon was thirty-one years of age, he had published nothing but a pamphlet on a religious topic, and a brief letter on governmental questions. What was he doing before he assumed the mask of Shakespeare?

I. EARLY PLAYS.

He had, before "William Shagsper of thone part " appeared on the scene, created a whole literature. That mighty renaissance of English genius and reconstruction of the drama, which marks the years between 1580 and 1611, had begun while the beadles were still amusing themselves and exercising their muscles over the raw back of Shagsper; and when Shake-speare appeared in 1592, as an author, he simply inherited a style of workmanship and a form of expression already created. Swinburne says:

In his early plays the style of Shakespeare was not for the most part distinctively his own. It was that of a crew, a knot of young writers, among whom he found at once both leaders and followers, to be guided and to guide.'

The young lawyer, Francis Bacon, being possessed of the creative, poetical instinct, and having discovered that there was in the theaters a veritable mine of money, and that "a philosopher may be rich, if he will," and still be a philosopher, poured forth, between the year 1581, when he was twenty years of age, and 1592, when he assumed the Shake-speare mask, a whole body of plays. They were not perfected or elaborated; they were youthful and immature experiments; many of them, most of them, have perished; they were dashed off to meet some temporary money necessity; just as we are told the original play of The Merry Wives of Windsor was written in fourteen days; and Bacon's chaplain, Rawley, notes the rapidity with which he composed his writings. The very names of many of these plays are lost; some we have in glimpses; three

1 Swinburne, A Study of Shak., p. 243.