private recesses of his library, are not among those who connect him with Shakespeare. This is because the claim is not made upon evidence, but is simply a belief in Bacon founded upon a disbelief in Shakespeare. Bacon's biographers do not share this belief or disbelief. Mr. Devey, for instance, says, "In casting the horoscope of the future, or tracing, with certain hand, the progress of civilization, who shall account for the appearance of such men as Dante and Shakespeare, who have created a new language; of Cromwell and Luther, who have revolutionized empires; of Newton and Archimedes, who have introduced a new element into science?"

It is no obstacle to the belief of Bacon's friends, that the plays are the work of an average lifetime, that they were put upon the stage by Shakespeare, and that Bacon's biographers (and his brother to whom his manuscripts were bequeathed) found no scrap or hint of an incident to indicate or betray the accomplishment of such an immense work, and involving the agency of at least one other person.

When Bacon wrote the psalms, the plays of Shakespeare had been in existence many

years, some at least thirty, none less than twelve; the sonnets thirty years, Lucrece nearly as long. To believe Bacon the author of the plays is therefore to suppose, not that he was an unskilled versifier when he wrote the psalms, but that the author of these awkward rhymes, was the ripe and unequalled poet who had already given Shakespeare's works to the world.

I have said, the plays had been in existence many years, but they existed in such an uncared-for shape that the attention of some one capable of appreciating their worth, and putting them in their original form, would doubtless have given them to us more complete and beautiful in many parts than we have them. As Bacon did nothing towards their preservation or publication (in such strong contrast with his solicitude for his writings), his indifference about them, or ignorance of them, cannot be reconciled with any claim to their authorship, and it seems as though his friends were willing to commit him to any absurdity, particularly those who picture him concocting a scheme to insure himself the fame in the future of having written the plays, while quite

unconcerned what becomes of them in the present; especially as he had so little faith in the survival of the language in which the plays were written, that he had taken the precaution to put his works into a dead tongue to insure their perpetuity.

It should be very disheartening to any one looking for similarities between Shakespeare and Bacon, to compare the 104th Psalm with Bacon's rhyming version of it, as an instance :

104TH PSALM.

"14. He causeth the grass to grow for the cattle, and the herb for the service of man : that he may bring forth food out of the earth; 15. And wine that maketh glad the heart of man, and oil to make his face to shine, and bread which strengtheneth man's heart."

Bacon's rendition reads:

"Causing the earth put forth the grass for beasts,
And garden herbs, served at the greatest feasts,
And bread that is all viands firmament,
And gives a firm and solid nourishment,
And wine, man's spirits for to recreate,
And oil, his face for to exhilarate."

This would pass for a travesty. The material

sense even, is not well preserved, whilst every

particle of sublimity, spirituality, and poetic beauty of diction in the original, is eradicated and destroyed. The thing of first importance to the Baconite theory is to prove that Bacon never wrote these lines. While they exist as his production, they must be accepted as the gauge of his ability, and that is fatal to the claim that is made for him. They are witnesses that must be silenced. They could not be inserted in any Shakespeare piece and escape detection by a school boy. They compare unfavorably with anything in print of that age. They who think that Shakespeare needed Bacon's learning to enable him to write the plays, may judge from this versification how much Bacon's learning contributed to his poetry.

The use of the words "do" and "for to" may be intended as very stately and formal, and at that time perhaps may not have been considered so inelegant as now; but the repetition, line after line, of such unvaried terms exposes a dearth of fancy, imagination and taste, and is most tiresome and unpleasing. In the selections from a hundred different poets and ballad writers which I have seen

collected in one volume, from 1400 to 1626, the year of Bacon's death, there is not anything that is not infinitely superior to Bacon's verses, which I think have never received the compliment of being printed in any collection of poems, and, so far as I know, have never appeared outside of his own works, or in any book or article on this subject, and I doubt if many people know they exist. His verses prove not only that he was not a poet, but that he had not a conception of poetic grace and sentiment, sufficient to teach him how weak and trashy his attempt was. Instead of hiding or burning this production he published it; an act upon which Spedding comments in this wise: "Considering how little he had cared to publish during the first sixty years of his life, and how many things of weightier character and more careful workmanship he had then by him in his cabinet, it was somewhat remarkable."

Every reader will endorse Mr. Spedding's opinion, but this singular act is one of the strongest evidences against Bacon's authorship of the plays; quite as convincing as the wretchedness of his poetry; for it shows his ardent ambition to pose before the world in