forward is, "Bacon's mother was a lady; Shakspere's mother, of a peasant family." Though this contrast is quite irrelevant to the subject in hand, genius being of a different sphere from social distinction, one cannot accept it. The family of the Ardens was very far above the rank of peasants; a comfortable well-to-do, well-connected family, farming their own lands,1 and living in houses very much above the average of the times, having a memory of a higher past, and aspirations towards a higher future, that could not have entered a peasant's brain. It is very evident that Mary Arden was at once possessed of powers and charms. She was her father's favourite daughter, and his executor, and was most probably a methodical help-meet for her ambitious but unpractical husband. She lived long, had a handsome family; and if we judge by the traces of her in the female characters of the plays, must have been tender, pure, and noble. A happier and more healthyminded mother was she certainly, in any case, for a great man, than the learned, ambitious, narrow, masterful Lady Bacon, whose mind preyed on itself until it went crazy.

"It will tax ingenuity to invent any satisfactory explanation of the facts that some of Shakspere's plays appeared during his lifetime without his name, and some did not appear till after his death, supposing William Shakspere to have been the author." The very simple and satisfactory explanation is, that the habits of these days in regard to publication were perfectly different from ours; that it was perfectly common for writers to publish even their own writings without name or signature, and to do so in some editions and not in others; that Shakspere wrote for the stage, and therefore for the proprietors, and it was not to their interest to publish; and in his later plays, when his name had been famous some time, were more likely to be more jealously guarded than the earlier. But the pirates were always about, and either put on names or no names

1 See Appendix, Note 4.

on the title-page, to suit their own convenience. Printing and publishing was a difficult business in these days, as we can see in the Stationers' Records.1 "After his retirement," the Rev. John Ward, Vicar of Stratford-on-Avon, in 1663 writes that "Shakspere wrote two plays every year for the stage, for which he was so well paid, he could spend at the rate of a thousand a year;" and the Rev. J. Ward knew Shakspere's daughter Judith.

I believe it was a sense that, being removed from the sphere of pure poetry by the mercantile impulse towards them, they fell so far short of his ideas of what they should be, which prevented his caring to publish them. Yet his brain may have been full of plans of correction and publication when he died. Various other queries and difficulties are brought forward, all the important points of which have been answered. The parallelisms only show how well the industry of Shakspere kept him abreast of the literature of the time. But we could not go through each trifling dispute in detail without writing a mighty volume. Our ignorance of many facts is to be deplored; but research daily reduces our ignorance.

The revolt against authority and custom of our awakened and intelligent period, good to a certain degree, sometimes goes too far. It often deems the reasons it brings stronger than the reasons it finds, merely because of bringing them. It would destroy the carefully guarded, to replace it with new forms, whose only value lies in novelty. It should base itself on Bacon's laws regarding antiquity and novelty, and it would be at once more valuable and more practical.

Much has been said and proved, contested and disproved, regarding the authorship of the fourth Gospel. This attempt at disproving our fifth Gospel is another outcome of the same destructive creed, but I consider that the laws regarding the authenticity of testimony and credibility of witnesses can be fully satisfied in this case, and the attack 1 See Appendix, Note 18.

resisted. The Daily Telegraph committed a fallacy in using the question-begging epithet, "Dethroning Shakspere," in the correspondence on this subject, reproduced in bookform. Without doubt, it was an attempt to do so. Success requires greater strength than that. The "attempt and not the deed confounds it."

Yet some good comes out of all evil. The good for us in this discussion is, that it sends us back from second-hand traditions and repeated errors, forgeries, misstatements, and misconstructions, to read anew the real authors, and their real friends and foes, in the living reality of time and space contemporary with them. The more one reads of them, the less it seems necessary to answer the Baconian statements; the answers seem so simple and self-evident.

CHAPTER VII.

BACON'S CIPHER'S.

BACON Sometimes, as in Valerius Terminus, wrote his doctrines in a purposely abrupt and obscure style, such as would "choose its reader." He did not give his philosophy in a form which "whoso runs may read,” and was scornful of "the general reader." But there is not the slightest ground in his works for believing there was a cipher in them. Nay, rather, he apologised for introducing ciphers as a part of learning at all. His connection with Essex, with his brother Anthony, with so many treasonable and state affairs, must have taught him the value of thoroughly understanding the powers of concealment in writing;1 and we are not surprised he considers ciphers

1 In the examination of the Lopez treason, in his report Bacon writes: "It was not so safe to use the mediation of Manuel Louys, who had been made privy to the matter as some base carrier of letters; which letters should also be written in a cipher, not of alphabet, but of words, such as mought, if they were opened, import no vehement suspicion. . . . These letters were written obscurely (as was touched) in terms of merchandise; to which obscurity when Ferrera excepted, Lopez answered, they knew his meaning by that which had passed before. Gomez was apprehended at his landing, and about him were found the letters aforesaid, written in jargon or verbal cipher, but yet somewhat suspicious, in these words: 'This bearer will tell you the price in which your pearls are esteemed, and in what resolution we rest about a little musk and amber, which I am determined to buy,' which was confessed to be meant to be deciphered as 'the allowance of pearls,' that they accepted the offer of Lopez to poison the Queen,' and 'the amber and musk' meant the destruction of the Queen's ships, a longer message than the cipher!"

in his general survey of learning. But he gives them no prominence.

In the 6th Book of De Augmentis, Chapter i., Bacon treats of ciphers and the method of deciphering. "Communications may either be written by the common alphabet (which is used by everybody), or by a secret or private one agreed upon by particular persons, called ciphers. There are many kinds, simple and mixed, those in two different letters; wheel-ciphers, key-ciphers, word-ciphers, and the like. There may be a double alphabet of significants and non-significants. The three merits of a cipher are: 1st, easy to write; 2nd, safe, or impossible to be deciphered without the key; 3rd, such as not to raise suspicion." "Now for this elusion of inquiry there is a new and useful contrivance for it, which, as I have it by me, why should I set it down among the desiderata, instead of propounding the thing itself? It is this—let a man have two alphabets, one of true letters, the other of non-significants, and let him unfold in them two letters at once, the one carrying the secret, the other such a letter as the writer would have been likely to send. Then if any one be strictly examined as to the cipher, let him offer the alphabet of non-significants for the true letters, and the alphabet of true letters for the non-significants. Thus the examiner will fall upon the exterior letter, which, finding probable, he will not suspect anything of another letter written." He then alludes to his own contrivance in his early youth in Paris (which he gives in full), and is the same as that mentioned in Every Boy's Book. "But for avoiding suspicion altogether, I will add another contrivance. The way to do it is thus-first let all the letters of the alphabet be resolved into transpositions of two letters only. For the transposition of two letters through five places will yield 32 differences, much more than 24, which is the number of letters in our alphabet."