which country he sets sail; he lands in Portugal; joins a Portuguese expedition to Barbary, and is there slain-a wild, romantic, rash and unreasoning career.

The play is evidently written by a lawyer; for he drags in law studies and law books, neck and heels, and to do so makes Stuckley a law-student, when the fact was Stuckley never studied law. Old Stuckley. I had as lief you'd seen him in the Temple walk, Conferring with some learned counselor,

Or at the moot upon a point of law.1

When he sees the array of swords, daggers and bucklers in his son's room the old man exclaims:

Be these your master's books?

For Littleton, Stanford and Brooke

Here's long sword, short sword and buckler,

But all's for the bar; yet I meant to have my son

A Barrister, not a Barrator.2

And Tom is made to express the disgust of a young law student:

Nay, hark you, father, I pray you be content:

I have done my goodwill, but it will not do.

John a Nokes and John a Style and I cannot cotton.

Oh, this law-French is worse than buttered-mackerell,

Full o' bones, full o' bones. It sticks here, it will not down.

And this reminds us of the young man who said, “The bar will be my bier."

Mr. Simpson sees evidence that this play was an early production of Shakspere; but what had the boy of Stratford to do with law-books? And how did he acquire the intimate knowledge of Stuckley's biography manifested in this play, and which astonishes the antiquarians?

And why should Shakspere drag into this play an allusion to Bacon's home, at St. Albans, just as we have seen the same village forced twenty odd times into the text of the Shakespeare Plays? It appears thus in the play of Tom Stuckley:

Vernon. Some conference with these gentlemen my friends
Made me neglect mine hour; but when you please

I now am ready to attend on you.

Harbart. It is well done, we will away forthwith.
St. Albans, though the day were further spent,
We may well reach to bed to-night.3

1 Act 1, scene 1.

2 Ibid.

Act 1.

Now, St. Albans had nothing to do with the action of the piece; we hear no more of it; Harbart does not go there, that we know of. Why did the Stratford boy, if this play is, as Simpson thinks, one of his early productions, without any necessity thus introduce the place of Bacon's residence into his play? What thread of connection, geographical, political, poetical or biographical, was there between Stratford and St. Albans ?

I have only space to give two or three extracts to show the resemblance between Tom Stuckley and the Shakespeare writings. In Stuckley we have:

Mix not my forward summer with sharp breath;

Nor intercept my purpose, being good.

Compare this with Shakespeare's:

Here stands the spring whom you have stained with mud;
This goodly summer with your winter mixed.1

In Stuckley we have:

He soonest loseth that despairs to win.

This is the embryo of the thought:

Our doubts are traitors,

And make us lose the good we oft might gain,

By fearing to attempt.

In Stuckley we find:

Nay, if you look but on his mind,

Much more occasion shall ye find to love him.

Compare this with Shakespeare's 69th sonnet:

They look into the beauty of the mind.

In Shakespeare we have:

That in the captain's but a choleric word,

Which in the soldier is flat blasphemy.'

And we catch a glimpse of the date of this composition by the following allusion:

Will you so much annoy your vital powers

As to oppress them with the prison stink?

Mr. Simpson calls attention to the following extract from Bacon's Natural History:

The most pernicious infection, next the plague, is the smell of the jail, when prisoners have been long and close and nastily kept; whereof we have had in our time experience twice or thrice; when both the judges that sat upon the jail, and numbers of those that attended the business, or were present, sickened upon it or died.2

This allusion in the play to "the prison stink" probably refers to "the black assizes" at Oxford, in 1577, or at Exeter, in 1586; and the probability is that the play of Stuckley was written by Francis Bacon, soon after the death of Stuckley, and subsequent to his return to England; and that reference was therein had to "the black assizes" at Oxford, in 1577.

I would close by calling attention to the Shakespearean ring in these lines from Stuckley's address to King Philip of Spain:

Right high and mighty, if to kings, installed

And sacredly anointed, it belong

To minister true justice, and relieve

The poor oppressèd stranger, then from thee,
Renowned Philip, that by birth of place
Upholds the scepter of a royal king.
Stuckley, a soldier and a gentleman,-
But neither like a soldier nor a man

Of some of thy unworthy subjects handled,-
Doth challenge justice at thy sacred hands.

IV. CHRISTOPHER MARLOWE.

We see it intimated in the Cipher that the plays of Christopher Marlowe were written by Francis Bacon; that he was Bacon's first mask or cover. Is this statement improbable or unreasonable?

In the first place, let us inquire who Marlowe was. Christopher Marlowe, or Marlin, as the name was often spelled, was born in

1 Measure for Measure, ii,2.

2 Natural History, cent. x, No. 914.