penny seats; but they could not see it without money.

If it rained, and it often rains in London, the people in the pit - butchers, mercers, bakers, sailors, apprentices-received the streaming rain upon their heads. I suppose they did not trouble themselves about it; it was not so long since they began to pave the streets of London, and when men, like these, have had experience of sewers and puddles, they are not afraid of catching cold.

While waiting for the piece, they amuse themselves after their fashion, drink beer, crack nuts, eat fruits, howl, and now and then resort to their fists; they have been known to fall upon the actors, and turn the theater upside down. At other times, when they were dissatisfied, they went to the tavern, to give the poet a hiding, or toss him in a blanket. . . . When the beer took effect, there was a great upturned barrel in the pit, a peculiar receptacle for general use. The smell rises, and then comes the cry, "Burn the juniper!" They burn some in a plate on the stage, and the heavy smoke fills the air. Certainly the folk there assembled could scarcely get disgusted at anything, and cannot have had sensitive noses. In the time of Rabelais there was not much cleanliness to speak of. Remember that they were hardly out of the Middle Ages, and that in the Middle Ages man lived on a dung-hill.

Above them, on the stage, were the spectators able to pay a shilling, the elegant people, the gentlefolk. These were sheltered from the rain, and, if they chose to pay an extra shilling, could have a stool. To this were reduced the prerogatives of rank and the devices of comfort; it often happened that there were not stools enough; then they lie down on the ground; this was not a time to be dainty. They play cards, smoke, insult the pit, who give it them back without stinting, and throw apples at them into the bargain.

The reader can readily conceive that the man must indeed have been exceedingly ambitious of fame who would have insisted on asserting his title to the authorship of plays acted in such theaters before such audiences. Imagine that aristocratic young gentleman, Francis Bacon, born in the royal palace of York Place; an exattaché of the English legation at the French court; the son of a Lord Chancellor; the nephew of a Lord Treasurer; the offspring of the virtuous, pious and learned Lady Anne Bacon; with his head full of great plans for the reformation of philosophy, law and government; and with his eye fixed on the chair his father had occupied for twenty years: -imagine him, I say, insisting that his name should appear on the play-bills as the poet who wrote Mucedorus, Tamburlane, The Jew of Malta, Titus Andronicus, Fair Em, Sir John Oldcastle, or The Merry Devil of Edmonton! Imagine the drunken, howling mob of Calibans hunting through Gray's Inn to find the son of the Lord Chancellor, in the midst of his noble friends, to whip him, or toss him in a blanket, because, forsooth, his last play had not pleased their royal fancies!

VI. SHARING IN THE PROFITS OF THE PLAY-HOUSE.

But suppose behind all this there was another and a more terrible consideration.

Suppose this young nobleman had eked out his miserable income by writing plays to sell to the theaters. Suppose it was known that he had his "second" and "third nights;" that he put into his pocket the sweaty pennies of that stinking mob of hoodlums, sailors, 'prentices, thieves, rowdies and prostitutes; and that he had used the funds so obtained to enable him to keep up his standing with my Lord of Southampton, and my Earl of Essex, and their associates, as a gentleman among gentlemen. Think of it!

And this in England, three hundred years ago, when the line of caste was almost as deep and black between the gentlemen and "the mutable, rank-scented many," as it is to-day in India between the Brahmin and the Pariah. Why, to this hour, I am told, there is an almost impassable gulf between the nobleman and the tradesman of great Britain. Then, as Burton says in The Anatomy of Melancholy, "idleness was the mark of nobility." To earn money in any kind of trade was despicable. To have earned it by sharing in the pennies and shillings taken in at the door, or on the stage of the play-house, would have been utterly damnable in any gentleman. It would have involved a loss of social position worse than death. One will have to read Thackeray's story of Miss Shum's Husband to find a parallel for it.

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But we have seen that the hiring of actors of Shakspere's company to perform the play of Richard II., by the followers of the Earl of Essex, the day before the attempt to rase the city" and seize the person of the Queen (even as Monmouth seized the person of Richard II.), and compel a deposition by like means, was one of the counts in the indictment against Essex, which cost him his head. In other words, the intent of the play was treasonable, and was so understood at the time. "Know you not," said Queen Elizabeth, "that I am Richard II.?" And I have shown good reason to believe that all the historical Plays, to say nothing of Julius Cæsar, were written with intent to popularize rebellion against tyrants.

"The poor player," Will Shakspere, might have written such plays solely for the pence and shillings there were in them, for he had nothing to do with politics: - he was a legal vagabond, a "vassal actor," a social outcast; but if Francis Bacon, the able and ambitious Francis Bacon, the rival of Cecil, the friend of Southampton and Essex; the lawyer, politician, member of Parliament, courtier, belonging to the party that desired to bring in the Scotch King and drive the aged Queen from the throne - if he had acknowledged the authorship of the Plays, the inference would have been irresistible in the mind of the court, that these horrible burlesques and travesties of royalty were written with malice and settled intent to bring monarchy into contempt and justify the aristocracy in revolution.

VIII. ANOTHER REASON.

But it must be further remembered that while Bacon lived the Shakespeare Plays were not esteemed as they are now. Then they were simply successful dramas; they drew great audiences; they filled the pockets of manager and actors. Leonard Digges, in the verses prefixed to the edition of 1640, says that when Jonson's "Fox and Subtle Alchymist'

Have scarce defrayed the sea-coal fire

And door-keepers: when, let but Falstaff come,
Hal, Poins, the rest- - you scarce shall have room,

All is so pestered: let but Beatrice

And Benedick be seen, lo! in a trice

The cock-pit, galleries, boxes, all are full,

To hear Malvolio, that cross-gartered gull.

There was no man in that age, except the author of them, who rated the Shakespeare Plays at their true value. They were admired for "the facetious grace of the writing," but the world had not yet advanced far enough in culture and civilization to recognize them as the great store-houses of the world's thought. Hence there was not then the same incentive to acknowledge them that there would be to-day.

IX. STILL ANOTHER REASON.

If Francis Bacon had died full of years and honors, I can conceive how, from the height of preeminent success, he might have fronted the prejudices of the age, and acknowledged these children of his brain.

But the last years of his life were years of dishonor. He had been cast down from the place of Lord Chancellor for bribery, for selling justice for money. He had been sentenced to prison; he held his liberty by the King's grace. He was denied access to the He was a ruined man, "a very subject of pity," as he says

court. himself.

For a man thus living under a cloud to have said, "In my youth I wrote plays for the stage; I wrote them for money; I used Shakspere as a mask; I divided with him the money taken in at the gate of the play-houses from the scum and refuse of London," would only have invited upon his head greater ignominy and disgrace. He had a wife; he had relatives, a proud and aristocratic breed. He sought to be the Aristotle of a new philosophy. Such an avowal would have smirched the Novum Organum and the Advancement of Learning; it would have blotted and blurred the bright and dancing light of that torch which he had kindled for posterity. He would have had to explain his, no doubt countless, denials made years before, that he had had anything to do with the Plays.

And why should he acknowledge them? He left his fame and good name to his "own countrymen after some time be past;" he believed the cipher, which he had so laboriously inserted in the Plays, would be found out. He would obtain all the glory for his

name in that distant future when he would not hear the reproaches of caste; when, as pure spirit, he might look down from space, and see the winged-goodness which he had created, passing, on pinions of persistent purpose, through all the world, from generation to generation. In that age, when his body was dust; when cousins and kin were ashes; when Shakspere had moldered into nothingness, beneath the protection of his own barbarous curse; when not a trace could be found of the bones of Elizabeth or James, or even of the stones of the Curtain or the Blackfriars: then, in a new world, a brighter world, a greater world, a better world, to which his own age would be but as a faint and perturbed remembrance,- he would be married anew to his immortal works. He would live again, triumphant, over Burleigh and Cecil, over Coke and Buckingham; over parasites and courtiers, over tricksters and panderers:- the magnificent victory of genius over power; of mind over time. And so living, he would live forever.

WE

CHAPTER VIII.

CORROBORATING CIRCUMSTANCES.

Lapped in proof,

Confronted him with self-comparisons.

Macbeth, i, 2.

E sometimes call, in law, an instrument between two parties an indenture. Why? Because it was once the custom to write a deed or contract in duplicate, on a long sheet of paper or parchment, and then cut them apart upon an irregular or indented line. If, thereafter, any dispute arose as to whether one was the equivalent of the other, the edges, where they were divided, were put together to see if they precisely matched. If they did not, it followed that some fraud had somewhere been practiced.

Truth, in like manner, is serrated, and its indentations fit into all other truth. If two alleged truths do not thus dovetail into each other, along the line where they approximate, then one of them is not the truth, but an error or a fraud.

Let us see, therefore, if, upon a multitude of minor points, the allegation that Francis Bacon wrote the Shakespeare Plays fits its indentations-its teeth-precisely into what we know of Bacon and Shakspere.

In treating these questions, I shall necessarily have to be as brief as possible.

I. THE QUESTION OF TIME.

Does the biography of Bacon accord with the chronology of the Plays?

Bacon was born in York House, or Palace, on the Strand, January 22, 1561. William Shakspere was born at Stratford-on-Avon, April 23, 1564. Bacon died in the spring of 1626. Shakspere in the spring of 1616. The lives of the two men were therefore parallel; but Bacon was three years the elder, and survived Shakspere ten years. Bacon's mental activity began at an early age. He was studying the nature of echoes at a time when other children are playing.