original author of Macbeth.' The suggestion, however, only rests on the fact that he wrote a play called 'The Witch.' But a belief in witches was general in those days; so that any author might have made use of them.

CHAPTER XVIII.

AUTHORSHIP OF THE PLAYS, CONTINUED.
Francis Bacon, author of 'Hamlet.'

We have left our greatest author till last; but his claim is not heard of for the first time today. This idea, as far as we know, was originally started by Horace Walpole, he, and those who followed him, maintaining that Bacon wrote all Shakespeare's plays. He concluded-and the conclusion was not unworthy of his natural sagacity that works of such pre-eminent merit, could only be ascribed to the known genius of "the wisest and brightest of mankind," and not to a person of whose genius there was no independent evidence. It was, in his case, a primâ facie conclusion, for, in his time, historical research had not been brought to bear on the subject. But in 1856 such research began, a work being then published under the title of, Was Lord Bacon the author of Shakespeare's Plays?' in a

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letter to Lord Ellesmere, by W. H. Smith, London, 1856, 8vo. Miss Delia Bacon followed the next year with 'The Philosophy of Shakespeare's Plays unfolded,' London, 1857. Seven years after that came The Authorship of Shakespeare,' by N. Holmes, a judge of the Supreme Court of Missouri, New York, 1866, in 8vo; and finally 'The Great Cryptogram,' London, 1888. All of these, with the exception of the last, are, we think, entitled to respectful consideration. But we are not now proposing to deal with that large question, but with the smaller issue raised by Nash's preface to 'Menaphon, viz., the authorship of 'Hamlet.'

His testimony in that is that the author of 'Hamlet' was not only a lawyer himself, but the son of a lawyer-one born in the trade of Noverint. And we take Lord Campbell's opinion as conclusive that he was a lawyer of no common type, that he was one who had greater legal knowledge than "many a practising barrister." Now Nash, it must be born in mind, was a contemporary both of Bacon and Shakespeare, and evidently knew what he was talking about. We attach no importance to the sneering suggestion of the author's want of latinity. It is

obviously a piece of gratuitous impertinence, due only to envy. And we can easily believe that Nash was envious, because the appearance of 'Hamlet' must have thrown into the shade all the dramas with which he and his friends had previously supplied the stage. In other respects his testimony bears truth on its face, when we apply it to Bacon. He was a lawyer who had "run through every art and thriven by none." He had not only projected a new philosophy, he had been a diplomatist in France, and a courtier, barrister, and member of Parliament at home; and he certainly had not yet thriven by any of those employments. We, therefore, conclude that Nash and everybody in the literary and theatrical world knew that the young barrister and member for Taunton was the author of the tragedy which was so unlike those that had preceded it.

And nothing in Bacon's character, or genius contradicts that conclusion. Even his personal appearance in youth suggested the dramatist. Thus Hepworth Dixon, says:

How he appears in outward grace and aspect, the miniature of Hilyard helps us to conceive. Slight in build, rosy and round in flesh, the head well-set and erect,

a bloom of study and travel in the fat, girlish face, which looks even younger than his years; the hat and feather tossed aside from the broad, white brow, over which crisps and curls a mane of dark, soft hair; an English nose, firm, open, straight, a mouth delicate and small-a lady or a jester's mouth, a thousand pranks and humours, quibbles, whims and laughters lurking in its twinkling, tremulous lines. Such is Francis Bacon at the age of twenty-four (1585). (Personal Hist. of Lord Bacon, p. 22.)

And a graver biographer goes farther towards giving us a character fit for the author of that famous tragedy:

Those talents, Mallet remarks, that commonly appear single in others, shone forth in him united. All his contemporaries, even those who hated the courtier, stand up and bear witness to the superior abilities of the writer and pleader, of the philosopher and companion. In conversation he could assume the most different characters and speak the language proper to each, with a facility that was perfectly natural, or the dexterity of the habit concealed every appearance of art.

(Mallet's Works, III. 223.)

Then Ben Jonson's description of his speaking suggests one, who could have written speeches which would have been quite as effective, when put into the mouth of an actor.

him

Thus he calls