say in the future, as they have said recently, that the Plays were really Shakspere's, and that he (Bacon) had stolen them and interjected a cipher claiming them. And so he published some of them in quarto. But as the paging of the quarto would begin with page I, while the cipher was founded on page 74, or page 69 (as in Henry V.), or page 79 (as in Troilus and Cressida), it was absolutely impossible to decipher the inner story. But, to make assurance doubly sure, Bacon cut out of the quarto whole sentences that were in the Folio sheets, and set into the text of the quarto sentences and whole scenes that were not in the Folio; so that the most astute decipherer could have made nothing out of it, however cunningly he might have worked. And this is the explanation of the fact that while the editors of the Folio of 1623 assure the public that it is printed from "the true originall copies," and that all previous quarto editions were "stolne and surreptitious copies, maimed and deformed by the frauds and stealthes of injurious impostors that expos'd them;" and that the Folio copies were "perfect of their limbs and absolute in their numbers, as he (Shakespeare) conceived them," nevertheless, the publisher of Shakespeare to-day has to go to these same very much denounced quartos for many of the finest passages which go by the name of the great poet.

And here is another curious fact: Bacon was not content to publish the Plays during the life of Elizabeth and his keen-eyed cousin, Cecil, with a different paging; but where the word Bacon occurred, in the quartos, it is printed with a small b, so as not to arouse suspicion, instead of with a capital B, as in the Folio! And most of those curious bracketings and hyphenations which so mar the text of the great Folio, like "smooth-comforts-false," etc., are not to be found in the quartos.

One can fancy Francis Bacon sitting at the play in the background with his hat over his eyes-watching Elizabeth and Cecil, seated, as was the custom, on the stage, enjoying and laughing over some merry comedy, little dreaming that the internal fabric of the play told, in immortal words, all the darkest passages of their own dark lives-embalmed in the midst of wit and rollicking laughter, for the entertainment of all future ages. And so the long-suffering and much abused genius enjoyed

his revenge, even under the very nose of power; so he rose superior to

The law's delay,

The insolence of office, and the spurns

Which patient merit of the unworthy takes.

And when the time came to "put the alphabet in a frame" all he had to do was to have Condell and Heminge contract with the printers to print the Folio in columns, precisely as ordered, Bacon himself secretly correcting the proofs. Or Bacon may have bought the type and had it printed at Gray's Inn, or St. Albans, or at the house of Condell or Heminge. If printers were told to follow copy precisely, and put exactly as many words on a column as there were on a sheet of the original manuscript, they would, of course, do so; and only in this way can the extraordinary features of the Folio of 1623 be accounted for. And if the printers needed a reason, to allay suspicion, it could be given in the pretended reverence of the actor-editors for the work of "their worthy friend and fellow, Shakespeare;" for it follows, of course, that Heminge and Condell, or one, at least, of them, was in the secret of the real authorship.

And this also explains why one-half the Plays were not published until 1623, and why for nearly twenty years so few were put forth. The author could never know how far suspicion might be aroused by the curiously garbled state of the text. But in 1623 the generation that had witnessed the production of the Plays was mostly dead; Burleigh and Cecil and the Queen were all gone; and Bacon himself was nearing the last mile-stone of his wonderful career. There was but little risk of discovery in the few years that remained to him between 1623 and the grave.

The great Folio was the culmination of Bacon's life-work as regarded one portion of his mighty intellect; even as the De Augmentis and the Novum Organum were the culmination of his life-work as to the other side-his philosophy. And side by side, at the same time, he erected these great pillars, the one as worthy, as enduring, as world-sustaining as the other.

CHAPTER V.

LOST IN THE WILDErness.

Polonius. What do you read, my lord?

Hamlet. Words, words, words.

Hamlet, ii, 2.

L

AVING satisfied myself, in this way, that, beyond question,

HA

there was a cipher narrative in the Shakespeare Plays, I commenced the task of deciphering it. It has been an incalculable labor, reaching through many weary years.

I had but one clue: that the cipher words were to some extent the multiples of the pages on which they occur. But the problem was, In what order do they follow each other? What is the sequence of arrangement?

My first conception of the cipher narrative was that of a brief statement of the fact that Francis Bacon was the real author of the Plays. The words constituting this sentence might, I thought, be widely scattered, and but two or three to a play. On page 84 I found the word William.

I dare say my cousin William is become a good Scholler.'

In the subdivision above this, in the same column, being the end of act iii, scene 2, there were three hyphenated words, and thirtyfive words in brackets. If you deduct 3 from 86 it leaves 83, and on page 83 we find:

If you deduct 35

page 52 we have:

Feele, Masters, how I shake. ?

from 87, the next column, it leaves 52, and on

The uncertain footing of a Speare.

Here, I thought, I have a clue:-William Shakespeare. But, unfortunately, the rule would carry me no farther.

Then I was perplexed as to the true mode of counting. Was I to analyze words into their meaning and count them accordingly? Was what's, as in "what's the matter," one word or two words,

"what is"? Was o'th'clock, one word, two words or three words? Was th'other to be counted as two words, as "the other," or as one word, "t'other"? Were the figures 100 to be counted as one word, or as "one hundred," two words?

As I was working in the dark, it was a long time before I arrived at Bacon's purpose, and then I found that he adopted the natural rule, that the typographical consideration governed, and a word was a group of letters, separated by spaces from the rest of the text, whether it meant one, or two, or a dozen objects. The only exception seems to be where the word is merely slurred to preserve the rhythm of the blank verse, as in:

Had three times slain th' appearance of the king.'

Here the th' is counted as a separate word. At different stages I was led, by coincidences, to adopt one theory and then the other, and I recounted and numbered the words from time to time, until the text was almost obliterated with the repeated markings. I give herewith one page, page 79, of 2d Henry IV., which will show the defaced condition of my fac-simile, and at the same time give some idea of the difficulty of the work.

Many times I struck upon clues which held out for two or three points and then failed me. I was often reminded of our Western story of the lost traveler, whose highway changed into a wagon-road, his wagon-road disappeared in a bridle-path, his bridle-path merged into a cow-path, and his cow-path at last degenerated into a squirrel track, which ran up a tree! So my hopes came to naught, many a time, against the hard face of inflexible arithmetic.

I invented hundreds of ciphers in trying to solve this one. Many times I was in despair. Once I gave up the whole task for two days. But I said to myself: There is certainly a cipher here; and what the ingenuity of man has made, the ingenuity of man ought to be able to unravel.

My own preconceptions often misled me. Believing that each cipher word belonged to the page on which it was found, I did not look beyond the page.

ume.

At last, in my experimentations, I came across the word vol

ta