The hypothesis that the works of Shakespeare were written by Bacon has now been before the world for more than forty years. It has been supported in hundreds of books and pamphlets, but, as a rule, it has been totally neglected by scholars. Perhaps their indifference may seem wise, for such an opinion may appear to need no confutation. ‘There are foolisher fellows than the Baconians,’ says a sage —‘those who argue against them.’ On the other hand, ignorance has often cherished beliefs which science has been obliged reluctantly to admit. The existence of meteorites, and the phenomena of hypnotism, were familiar to the ancient world, and to modern peasants, while philosophy disdained to investigate them. In fact, it is never really prudent to overlook a widely spread opinion. If we gain nothing else by examining its grounds, at least we learn something about the psychology of its advocates. In this case we can estimate the learning, the logic, and the general intellect of people who form themselves into Baconian Societies, to prove that the poems and plays of Shakespeare were written by Bacon. Thus a light is thrown on the nature and origin of popular delusions.

270 (1) ‘Bacon and Shakespeare,’ by William Henry Smith (1857); (2) ‘The Authorship of Shakespeare,’ by Nathaniel Holmes (1875); (3) ‘The Great Cryptogram,’ by Ignatius Donnelly (1888); (4) ‘The Promus of Formularies and Elegancies of Francis Bacon,’ by Mrs. Henry Pott (1883); (5) ‘William Shakespeare,’ by Georg Brandes (1898); (6) ‘Shakespeare,’ by Sidney Lee (in the Dictionary of National Biography, 1897); (7) ‘Shakespeare Dethroned’ (in Pearson’s Magazine, December 1897); (8) ‘The Hidden Lives of Shakespeare and Bacon,’ by W. G. Thorpe, F.S.A. (1897). (9) ‘The Mystery of William Shakespeare,’ by Judge Webb (1902).

The Baconian creed, of course, is scouted equally by special students of Bacon, special students of Shakespeare, and by almost all persons who devote themselves to sound literature. It is equally rejected by Mr. Spedding, the chief authority on Bacon; by Mr. H. H. Furness, the learned and witty American editor of the ‘Variorum Shakespeare;’ by Dr. Brandes, the Danish biographer and critic; by Mr. Swinburne, with his rare knowledge of Elizabethan and, indeed, of all literature; and by Mr. Sidney Lee, Shakespeare’s latest biographer. Therefore, the first point which strikes us in the Baconian hypothesis is that its devotees are nobly careless of authority. We do not dream of converting them, but it may be amusing to examine the kind of logic and the sort of erudition which go to support an hypothesis not freely welcomed even in Germany.

The mother of the Baconian theory (though others had touched a guess at it) was undeniably Miss Delia Bacon, born at Tallmadge, Ohio, in 1811. Miss Bacon used to lecture on Roman history, illustrating her theme by recitations from Macaulay’s ‘Lays.’ ‘Her very heart was lacerated,’ says Mr. Donnelly, ‘and her womanly pride wounded, by a creature in the shape of a man — a Reverend (!) Alexander MacWhorter.’ This Celtic divine was twenty-five, Miss Bacon was thirty-five; there arose a misunderstanding; but Miss Bacon had developed her Baconian theory before she knew Mr. MacWhorter. ‘She became a monomaniac on the subject,’ writes Mr. Wyman, and ‘after the publication and non-success of her book she lost her reason WHOLLY AND ENTIRELY.’ But great wits jump, and, just as Mr. Darwin and Mr. Wallace simultaneously evolved the idea of Natural Selection, so, unconscious of Miss Delia, Mr. William Henry Smith developed the Baconian verity.

From the days of Mr. William Henry Smith, in 1856, the great Baconian argument has been that Shakespeare could not conceivably have had the vast learning, classical, scientific, legal, medical, and so forth, of the author of the plays. Bacon, on the other hand, and nobody else, had this learning, and had, though he concealed them, the poetic powers of the unknown author. Therefore, prima facie, Bacon wrote the works of Shakespeare. Mr. Smith, as we said, had been partly anticipated, here, by the unlucky Miss Delia Bacon, to whose vast and wandering book Mr. Hawthorne wrote a preface. Mr. Hawthorne accused Mr. Smith of plagiarism from Miss Delia Bacon; Mr. Smith replied that, when he wrote his first essay (1856), he had never even heard the lady’s name. Mr. Hawthorne expressed his regret, and withdrew his imputation. Mr. Smith is the second founder of Baconomania.

Like his followers, down to Mr. Ignatius Donnelly, and Mr. Bucke, and General Butler, and Mr. Atkinson, who writes in ‘The Spiritualist,’ and Mrs. Gallup, and Judge Webb, Mr. Smith rested, first, on Shakespeare’s lack of education, and on the wide learning of the author of the poems and plays. Now, Ben Jonson, who knew both Shakespeare and Bacon, averred that the former had ‘small Latin and less Greek,’ doubtless with truth. It was necessary, therefore, to prove that the author of the plays had plenty of Latin and Greek. Here Mr. John Churton Collins suggests that Ben meant no more than that Shakespeare was not, in the strict sense, a scholar. Yet he might read Latin, Mr. Collins thinks, with ease and pleasure, and might pick out the sense of Greek books by the aid of Latin translations. To this view we return later.

Meanwhile we shall compare the assertions of the laborious Mr. Holmes, the American author of ‘The Authorship of Shakespeare’ (third edition, 1875), and of the ingenious Mr. Donnelly, the American author of ‘The Great Cryptogram.’ Both, alas! derive in part from the ignorance of Pope. Pope had said: ‘Shakespeare follows the Greek authors, and particularly Dares Phrygius.’ Mr. Smith cites this nonsense; so do Mr. Donnelly and Mr. Holmes. Now the so-called Dares Phrygius is not a Greek author. No Greek version of his early mediaeval romance, ‘De Bello Trojano,’ exists. The matter of the book found its way into Chaucer, Boccaccio, Lydgate, Guido de Colonna, and other authors accessible to one who had no Greek at all, while no Greek version of Dares was accessible to anybody.271 Some recent authors, English and American, have gone on, with the credulity of ‘the less than half educated,’ taking a Greek Dares for granted, on the authority of Pope, whose Greek was ‘small.’ They have clearly never looked at a copy of Dares, never known that the story attributed to Dares was familiar, in English and French, to everybody. Mr. Holmes quotes Pope, Mr. Donnelly quotes Mr. Holmes, for this Greek Dares Phrygius. Probably Shakespeare had Latin enough to read the pseudo-Dares, but probably he did not take the trouble.

271 See Brandes, William Shakespeare, ii. 198–202.

This example alone proves that men who are not scholars venture to pronounce on Shakespeare’s scholarship, and that men who take absurd statements at second hand dare to constitute themselves judges of a question of evidence and of erudition.

The worthy Mr. Donnelly then quotes Mr. Holmes for Shakespeare’s knowledge of the Greek drama. Turning to Mr. Holmes (who takes his motto, if you please, from Parmenides), we find that the author of ‘Richard II.’ borrowed from a Greek play by Euripides, called ‘Hellene,’ as did the author of the sonnets. There is, we need not say, no Greek play of the name of ‘Hellene.’ As Mr. Holmes may conceivably mean the ‘Helena’ of Euripides, we compare Sonnet cxxi. with ‘Helena,’ line 270. The parallel, the imitation of Euripides, appears to be —

By their dark thoughts my deeds must not be shown,

with —

Prooton men ouk ons adikoz eimi duskleez,272

which means, ‘I have lost my reputation though I have done no harm.’ Shakespeare, then, could not complain of calumny without borrowing from ‘Hellene,’ a name which only exists in the fancy of Mr. Nathaniel Holmes. This critic assigns ‘Richard II.,’ act ii., scene 1, to ‘Hellene’ 512–514. We can find no resemblance whatever between the three Greek lines cited, from the ‘Helena,’ and the scene in Shakespeare. Mr. Holmes appears to have reposed on Malone, and Malone may have remarked on fugitive resemblances, such as inevitably occur by coincidence of thought. Thus the similarity of the situations of Hamlet and of Orestes in the ‘Eumenides’ is given by similarity of legend, Danish and Greek. Authors of genius, Greek or English, must come across analogous ideas in treating analogous topics. It does not follow that the poet of ‘Hamlet’ was able to read AEschylus, least of all that he could read him in Greek.

272 Anglicised version of the author’s original Greek text.

The ‘Comedy of Errors’ is based on the ‘Menaechmi’ of Plautus. It does not follow that the author of the ‘Comedy of Errors’ could read the ‘Menaechmi’ or the ‘Amphitryon,’ though Shakespeare had probably Latin enough for the purpose. The ‘Comedy of Errors’ was acted in December 1594. A translation of the Latin play bears date 1595, but this may be an example of the common practice of post-dating a book by a month or two, and Shakespeare may have seen the English translation in the work itself, in proof, or in manuscript. In those days MSS. often circulated long before they were published, like Shakespeare’s own ‘sugared sonnets.’ However, it is highly probable that Shakespeare was equal to reading the Latin of Plautus.

In ‘Twelfth Night’ occurs —

Like the Egyptian thief, at point of death, kill what I love.

Mr. Donnelly writes: ‘This is an allusion to a story from Heliodorus’s “AEthiopica.” I do not know of any English translation of it in the time of Shakespeare.’ The allusion is, we conceive, to Herodotus, ii. 121, the story of Rhampsinitus, translated by ‘B. R.’ and published in 1584. In ‘Macbeth’ we find —

All our yesterdays have LIGHTED fools
The way to dusty death. Out, out, BRIEF CANDLE.

This is ‘traced,’ says Mr. Donnelly, ‘to Catullus.’ He quotes:—

Soles occidere et redire possunt;
Nobis, cum semel occidit brevis lux,
Nox est perpetuo una dormienda.

Where is the parallel? It is got by translating Catullus thus:—

The LIGHTS of heaven go out and return;
When once our BRIEF CANDLE goes out,
One night is to be perpetually slept.

But soles are not ‘lights,’ and brevis lux is not ‘brief candle.’ If they were, the passages have no resemblance. ‘To be, or not to be,’ is ‘taken almost verbatim from Plato.’ Mr. Donnelly says that Mr. Follett says that the Messrs. Langhorne say so. But, where is the passage in Plato?

Such are the proofs by which men ignorant of the classics prove that the author of the poems attributed to Shakespeare was a classical scholar. In fact, he probably had a ‘practicable’ knowledge of Latin, such as a person of his ability might pick up at school, and increase by casual study: points to which we return. For the rest, classical lore had filtered into contemporary literature and translations, such as North’s Plutarch.

As to modern languages, Mr. Donnelly decides that Shakespeare knew Danish, because he must have read Saxo Grammaticus ‘in the original tongue’— which, of course, is NOT Danish! Saxo was done out of the Latin into French. Thus Shakespeare is not exactly proved to have been a Danish scholar. There is no difficulty in supposing that ‘a clayver man,’ living among wits, could pick up French and Italian sufficient for his uses. But extremely stupid people are naturally amazed by even such commonplace acquirements. When the step is made from cleverness to genius, then the dull disbelieve, or cry out of a miracle. Now, as ‘miracles do not happen,’ a man of Shakespeare’s education could not have written the plays attributed to him by his critics, companions, friends, and acquaintances. Shakespeare, ex hypothesi, was a rude unlettered fellow. Such a man, the Baconians assume, would naturally be chosen by Bacon as his mask, and put forward as the author of Bacon’s pieces. Bacon would select a notorious ignoramus as a plausible author of pieces which, by the theory, are rich in knowledge of the classics, and nobody would be surprised. Nobody would say: ‘Shakespeare is as ignorant as a butcher’s boy, and cannot possibly be the person who translated Hamlet’s soliloquy out of Plato, “Hamlet” at large out of the Danish; who imitated the “Hellene” of Euripides, and borrowed “Troilus and Cressida” from the Greek of Dares Phrygius’— which happens not to exist. Ignorance can go no further than in these arguments. Such are the logic and learning of American amateurs, who sometimes do not even know the names of the books they talk about, or the languages in which they are written. Such learning and such logic are passed off by ‘the less than half educated’ on the absolutely untaught, who decline to listen to scholars.

We cannot of course furnish a complete summary of all that the Baconians have said in their myriad pages. All those pages, almost, really flow from the little volume of Mr. Smith. We are obliged to take the points which the Baconians regard as their strong cards. We have dealt with the point of classical scholarship, and shown that the American partisans of Bacon are not scholars, and have no locus standi. We shall take next in order the contention that Bacon was a poet; that his works contain parallel passages to Shakespeare, which can only be the result of common authorship; that Bacon’s notes, called ‘Promus,’ are notes for Shakespeare’s plays; that, in style, Bacon and Shakespeare are identical. Then we shall glance at Bacon’s motives for writing plays by stealth, and blushing to find it fame. We shall expose the frank folly of averring that he chose as his mask a man who (some assert) could not even write; and we shall conclude by citing, once more, the irrefragable personal testimony to the genius and character of Shakespeare.

To render the Baconian theory plausible it is necessary to show that Bacon had not only the learning needed for ‘the authorship of Shakespeare,’ but that he gives some proof of Shakespeare’s poetic qualities; that he had reasons for writing plays, and reasons for concealing his pen, and for omitting to make any claim to his own literary triumphs after Shakespeare was dead. Now, as to scholarship, the knowledge shown in the plays is not that of a scholar, does not exceed that of a man of genius equipped with what, to Ben Jonson, seemed ‘small Latin and less Greek,’ and with abundance of translations, and books like ‘Euphues,’ packed with classical lore, to help him. With the futile attempts to prove scholarship we have dealt. The legal and medical lore is in no way beyond the ‘general information’ which genius inevitably amasses from reading, conversation, reflection, and experience.

A writer of today, Mr. Kipling, is fond of showing how easily a man of his rare ability picks up the terminology of many recondite trades and professions. Again, evidence taken on oath proves that Jeanne d’Arc, a girl of seventeen, developed great military skill, especially in artillery and tactics, that she displayed political clairvoyance, and that she held her own, and more, among the subtlest and most hostile theologians. On the ordinary hypothesis, that Shakespeare was a man of genius, there is, then, nothing impossible in his knowledge, while his wildly daring anachronisms could have presented no temptation to a well-regulated scientific intellect like that of Bacon. The Baconian hypothesis rests on the incredulity with which dulness regards genius. We see the phenomenon every day when stupid people talk about people of ordinary cleverness, and ‘wonder with a foolish face of praise.’ As Dr. Brandes remarks, when the Archbishop of Canterbury praises Henry V. and his universal accomplishments, he says:

Which is a wonder, how his grace should glean it,
Since his addiction was to courses vain,
His companies unletter’d, rude, and shallow,
His hours fill’d up with riots, banquets, sports
AND NEVER NOTED IN HIM ANY STUDY,
Any retirement, any sequestration,
From open haunts and popularity.

Yet, as the Archbishop remarks (with doubtful orthodoxy), ‘miracles are ceased.’

Shakespeare in these lines describes, as only he could describe it, the world’s wonder which he himself was. Or, if Bacon wrote the lines, then Bacon, unlike his advocates, was prepared to recognise the possible existence of such a thing as genius. Incredulity on this head could only arise in an age and in peoples where mediocrity is almost universal. It is a democratic form of disbelief.

For the hypothesis, as we said, it is necessary to show that Bacon possessed poetic genius. The proof cannot possibly be found in his prose works. In the prose of Mr. Ruskin there are abundant examples of what many respectable minds regard as poetic qualities. But, if the question arose, ‘Was Mr. Ruskin the author of Tennyson’s poems?’ the answer could be settled, for once, by internal evidence. We have only to look at Mr. Ruskin’s published verses. These prove that a great writer of ‘poetical prose’ may be at the opposite pole from a poet. In the same way, we ask, what are Bacon’s acknowledged compositions in verse? Mr. Holmes is their admirer. In 1599 Bacon wrote in a letter, ‘Though I profess not to be a poet, I prepared a sonnet,’ to Queen Elizabeth. He PREPARED a sonnet! ‘Prepared’ is good. He also translated some of the Psalms into verse, a field in which success is not to be won. Mr. Holmes notes, in Psalm xc., a Shakespearean parallel. ‘We spend our years as a tale that is told.’ Bacon renders:

As a tale told, which sometimes men attend,
And sometimes not, our life steals to an end.

In ‘King John,’ iii. 4, we read:—

Life is as tedious as a twice-told tale
Vexing the dull ear of a drowsy man.

Now, if we must detect a connection, Bacon might have read ‘King John’ in the Folio, for he versified the Psalms in 1625. But it is unnecessary to suppose a reminiscence. Again, in Psalm civ. Bacon has —

The greater navies look like walking woods.

They looked like nothing of the sort; but Bacon may have remembered Birnam Wood, either from Boece or Holinshed, or from the play itself. One thing is certain: Shakespeare did not write Bacon’s Psalms or compare navies to ‘walking woods’! Mr. Holmes adds: ‘Many of the sonnets [of Shakespeare] show the strongest internal evidence that they were addressed [by Bacon] to the Queen, as no doubt they were.’ That is, Bacon wrote sonnets to Queen Elizabeth, and permitted them to pass from hand to hand, among Shakespeare’s ‘private friends,’ as Shakespeare’s (1598). That was an odd way of paying court to Queen Elizabeth. Chalmers had already conjectured that Shakespeare (not Bacon) in the sonnets was addressing the Virgin Queen, whom he recommended to marry and leave offspring — rather late in life. Shakespeare’s apparent allusions to his profession —

I have gone here and there,
And made myself a motley to the view,

and

The public means which public manners breeds,

refer, no doubt, to Bacon’s versatile POLITICAL behaviour. It has hitherto been supposed that sonnet lvii. was addressed to Shakespeare’s friend, a man, not to any woman. But Mr. Holmes shows that the Queen is intended. Is it not obvious?

I, MY SOVEREIGN, watch the clock for you.

Bacon clearly had an assignation with Her Majesty — so here is ‘scandal about Queen Elizabeth.’ Mr. Holmes pleasingly remarks that Twickenham is ‘within sight of Her Majesty’s Palace of White Hall.’ She gave Bacon the reversion of Twickenham Park, doubtless that, from the windows of White Hall, she might watch her swain. And Bacon wrote a masque for the Queen; he skilfully varied his style in this piece from that which he used under the name of Shakespeare. With a number of other gentlemen, some named, some unnamed, Bacon once, at an uncertain date, interested himself in a masque at Gray’s Inn, while he and his friends ‘partly devised dumb shows and additional speeches,’ in 1588.

Nothing follows as to Bacon’s power of composing Shakespeare’s plays. A fragmentary masque, which may or may not be by Bacon, is put forward as the germ of what Bacon wrote about Elizabeth in the ‘Midsummer Night’s Dream.’ An Indian WANDERER from the West Indies, near the fountain of the AMAZON, is brought to Elizabeth to be cured of blindness. Now the fairy, in the ‘Midsummer Night’s Dream,’ says, capitalised by Mr. Holmes:

I DO WANDER EVERYWHERE.

Here then are two wanderers — and there is a river in Monmouth and a river in Macedon. Puck, also, is ‘that merry WANDERER of the night.’ Then ‘A BOUNCING AMAZON’ is mentioned in the ‘Midsummer Night’s Dream,’ and ‘the fountain of the great river of the Amazons’ is alluded to in the fragment of the masque. Cupid too occurs in the play, and in the masque the wanderer is BLIND; now Cupid is blind, sometimes, but hardly when ‘a certain aim he took.’ The Indian, in the masque, presents Elizabeth with ‘his gift AND PROPERTY TO BE EVER YOUNG,’ and the herb, in the play, has a ‘VIRTUOUS PROPERTY.’

For such exquisite reasons as these the masque and the ‘Midsummer Night’s Dream’ are by one hand, and the masque is by Bacon. For some unknown cause the play is full of poetry, which is entirely absent from the masque. Mr. Holmes was a Judge; sat on the bench of American Themis — and these are his notions of proof and evidence. The parallel passages which he selects are on a level with the other parallels between Bacon and Shakespeare. One thing is certain: the writer of the masque shows no signs of being a poet, and a poet Bacon explicitly ‘did not profess to be.’ One piece of verse attributed to Bacon, a loose paraphrase of a Greek epigram, has won its way into ‘The Golden Treasury.’ Apart from that solitary composition, the verses which Bacon ‘prepared’ were within the powers of almost any educated Elizabethan. They are on a level with the rhymes of Mr. Ruskin. It was only when he wrote as Shakespeare that Bacon wrote as a poet.

We have spoken somewhat harshly of Mr. Holmes as a classical scholar, and as a judge of what, in literary matters, makes evidence. We hasten to add that he could be convinced of error. He had regarded a sentence of Bacon’s as a veiled confession that Bacon wrote ‘Richard II.,’ ‘which, though it grew from me, went after about in others’ names.’ Mr. Spedding averred that Mr. Holmes’s opinion rested on a grammatical misinterpretation, and Mr. Holmes accepted the correction. But ‘nothing less than a miracle’ could shake Mr. Holmes’s belief in the common authorship of the masque (possibly Bacon’s) and the ‘Midsummer Night’s Dream’— so he told Mr. Spedding. To ourselves nothing short of a miracle, or the visitation of God in the shape of idiocy, could bring the conviction that the person who wrote the masque could have written the play. The reader may compare the whole passage in Mr. Holmes’s work (pp. 228–238). We have already set forth some of those bases of his belief which only a miracle could shake. The weak wind that scarcely bids the aspen shiver might blow them all away.

Vast space is allotted by Baconians to ‘parallel passages’ in Bacon and Shakespeare. We have given a few in the case of the masque and the ‘Midsummer Night’s Dream.’ The others are of equal weight. They are on a level with ‘Punch’s’ proofs that Alexander Smith was a plagiarist. Thus Smith:

No CHARACTER that servant WOMAN asked;

Pope writes:

Most WOMEN have no CHARACTER at all.

It is tedious to copy out the puerilities of such parallelisms. Thus Bacon:

If we simply looked to the fabric of the world;

Shakespeare:

And, like the baseless fabric of a vision.

Bacon:

The intellectual light in the top and consummation of thy
workmanship;

Shakespeare:

Like eyasses that cry out on the top of the question.

Myriads of pages of such matter would carry no proof. Probably the hugest collection of such ‘parallels’ is that preserved by Mrs. Pott in Bacon’s ‘Promus,’ a book of 628 pages. Mrs. Pott’s ‘sole object’ in publishing ‘was to confirm the growing belief in Bacon’s authorship of the plays.’ Having acquired the opinion, she laboured to strengthen herself and others in the faith. The so-called ‘Promus’ is a manuscript set of notes, quotations, formulae, and proverbs. As Mr. Spedding says, there are ‘forms of compliment, application, excuse, repartee, etc.’ ‘The collection is from books which were then in every scholar’s hands.’ ‘The proverbs may all, or nearly all, be found in the common collections.’ Mrs. Pott remarks that in ‘Promus’ are ‘several hundreds of notes of which no trace has been discovered in the acknowledged writings of Bacon, or of any other contemporary writer but Shakespeare.’ She adds that the theory of ‘close intercourse’ between the two men is ‘contrary to all evidence.’ She then infers that ‘Bacon alone wrote all the plays and sonnets which are attributed to Shakespeare.’ So Bacon entrusted his plays, and the dread secret of his authorship, to a boorish cabotin with whom he had no ‘close intercourse’! This is lady’s logic, a contradiction in terms. The theory that Bacon wrote the plays and sonnets inevitably implies the closest intercourse between him and Shakespeare. They must have been in constant connection. But, as Mrs. Pott truly says, this is ‘contrary to all evidence.’

Perhaps the best way to deal with Mrs. Pott is to cite the author of her preface, Dr. Abbott. He is not convinced, but he is much struck by a very exquisite argument of the lady’s. Bacon in ‘Promus’ is writing down ‘Formularies and Elegancies,’ modes of salutation. He begins with ‘Good morrow!’ This original remark, Mrs. Pott reckons, ‘occurs in the plays nearly a hundred times. In the list of upwards of six thousand words in Appendix E, “Good morrow” has been noted thirty-one times. . . . “Good morrow” may have become familiar merely by means of “Romeo and Juliet.”’ Dr. Abbott is so struck by this valuable statement that he writes: ‘There remains the question, Why did Bacon think it worth while to write down in a notebook the phrase “Good morrow” if it was at that time in common use?’

Bacon wrote down ‘Good morrow’ just because it WAS in common use. All the formulae were in common use; probably ‘Golden sleepe’ was a regular wish, like ‘Good rest.’ Bacon is making a list of commonplaces about beginning the day, about getting out of bed, about sleep. Some are in English, some in various other languages. He is not, as in Mrs. Pott’s ingenious theory, making notes of novelties to be introduced through his plays. He is cataloguing the commonplace. It is Mrs. Pott’s astonishing contention, as we have seen, that Bacon probably introduced the phrase ‘Good morrow!’ Mr. Bucke, following her in a magazine article, says: ‘These forms of salutation were not in use in England before Bacon’s time, and it was his entry of them in the “Promus” and use of them in the plays that makes them current coin day by day with us in the nineteenth century.’ This is ignorant nonsense. ‘Good morrow’ and ‘Good night’ were as familiar before Bacon or Shakespeare wrote as ‘Good morning’ and ‘Good night’ are today. This we can demonstrate. The very first Elizabethan handbook of phrases which we consult shows that ‘Good morrow’ was the stock phrase in regular use in 1583. The book is ‘The French Littelton, A most Easie, Perfect, and Absolute way to learne the Frenche Tongue. Set forth by Claudius Holyband. Imprinted at London by Thomas Vautrollier, dwelling in the blacke-Friers. 1583.’ (There is an edition of 1566.)

On page 10 we read:—

‘Of Scholars and Schoole.

‘God give you good morrow, Sir! Good morrow gossip: good morrow my she gossip: God give you a good morrow and a good year.’

Thus the familiar salutation was not introduced by Bacon; it was, on the other hand, the very first formula which a writer of an English–French phrase-book translated into French ten years before Bacon made his notes. Presently he comes to ‘Good evening, good night, good rest,’ and so on.

This fact annihilates Mrs. Pott’s contention that Bacon introduced ‘Good morrow’ through the plays falsely attributed to Shakespeare. There follows, in ‘Promus,’ a string of proverbs, salutations, and quotations, about sleep and waking. Among these occur ‘Golden Sleepe’ (No. 1207) and (No. 1215) ‘Uprouse. You are up.’ Now Friar Laurence says to Romeo:—

But where unbruised youth with unstuffed brain
Doth couch his limbs, there GOLDEN SLEEP doth reign:
Therefore thy earliness doth me assure,
Thou art UP-ROUSED by some distemperature.

Dr. Abbott writes: ‘Mrs. Pott’s belief is that the play is indebted for these expressions to the “Promus;” mine is that the “Promus” is borrowed from the play.’ And why should either owe anything to the other? The phrase ‘Uprouse’ or ‘Uprose’ is familiar in Chaucer, from one of his best-known lines. ‘Golden’ is a natural poetic adjective of excellence, from Homer to Tennyson. Yet in Dr. Abbott’s opinion ‘TWO of these entries constitute a coincidence amounting almost to a demonstration’ that either Shakespeare or Bacon borrowed from the other. And this because each writer, one in making notes of commonplaces on sleep, the other in a speech about sleep, uses the regular expression ‘Uprouse,’ and the poetical commonplace ‘Golden sleep’ for ‘Good rest.’ There was no originality in the matter.

We have chosen Dr. Abbott’s selected examples of Mrs. Pott’s triumphs. Here is another of her parallels. Bacon gives the formula, ‘I pray God your early rising does you no hurt.’ Shakespeare writes:—

Go, you cot-quean, go,
Get you to bed; faith, you’ll be sick tomorrow
For this night’s watching.

Here Bacon notes a morning salutation, ‘I hope you are none the worse for early rising,’ while Shakespeare tells somebody not to sit up late. Therefore, and for similar reasons, Bacon is Shakespeare.

We are not surprised to find Mr. Bucke adopting Mrs. Pott’s theory of the novelty of ‘Good morrow.’ He writes in the Christmas number of an illustrated sixpenny magazine, and his article, a really masterly compendium of the whole Baconian delirium, addresses its natural public. But we are amazed to find Dr. Abbott looking not too unkindly on such imbecilities, and marching at least in the direction of Coventry with such a regiment. He is ‘on one point a convert’ to Mrs. Pott, and that point is the business of ‘Good morrow,’ ‘Uprouse,’ and ‘Golden sleepe.’ It need hardly be added that the intrepid Mr. Donnelly is also a firm adherent of Mrs. Pott.

‘Some idea,’ he says, ‘may be formed of the marvellous industry of this remarkable lady when I state that to prove that we are indebted to Bacon for having enriched the English language, through the plays, with these beautiful courtesies of speech, ‘Good morrow,’ ‘Good day,’ etc., she carefully examined SIX THOUSAND WORKS ANTERIOR TO OR CONTEMPORARY WITH BACON.’

Dr. Abbott thought it judicious to ‘hed............