I turn then from Mr. Dowse’s singularly injudicial tract to Mr. Burgoyne’s more sober comment. “As to the penman who actually wrote the manuscript,” says Mr. Burgoyne, “nothing certain is known. The writing on the contents page is chiefly in one hand, with occasional words in another, and a few words mostly scrawled across the page at an angle appear to be written by a third. The main body of the work is in two or more handwritings, and the difference is especially to be noted in ‘Leycester’s Commonwealth,’ which appears to have been written in a hurry, for the writing has been overspaced in some pages and overcrowded in others, as if different penmen had been employed. There are also noticeable breaks on folios 64 and 88, and the difference in penmanship on these pages is specially remarkable. This points to the collection having been written at a literary workshop or professional writer’s establishment. It is a fact worthy of notice, that Bacon and his brother Anthony were interested in a business of the kind about the time suggested for the date of the writing of this book. Mr. Spedding states:—[109] “Anthony Bacon appears to have served [Essex] in a capacity very like that of a modern under-secretary of State, receiving all letters which were mostly in cipher in the first instance; forwarding them (generally through his brother Francis’s hands) to the Earl, deciphered and accompanied with their joint suggestions; and finally, according to the instructions thereupon returned, framing and dispatching the answers. Several writers must have been employed to carry out with promptitude such work as here outlined, and we find in a letter from Francis Bacon to his brother,[110] dated January 25th, 1594, that the clerks were also employed upon other work.... ‘I have here an idle pen or two ... I pray send me somewhat else for them to write out besides your Irish collection.’” etc., etc.

In a well-known letter to Tobie Mathew, Bacon writes: “My labours are now most set to have those works, which I had formerly published ... well translated into Latin by the help of some good pens that forsake me not.” In this connection Mr. Burgoyne writes: “It is worthy of notice that in ‘The Great Assises holden in Parnassus by Apollo and his Assessours,’ printed in 1645, the ‘Chancellor’ is declared to be ‘Lord Verulam,’ and ‘Ben Johnson’ is described as the ‘Keeper of the Trophonian Denne.’”[111] “It seems not unlikely,” says Mr. Burgoyne, “that this literary workshop, was the source of the ‘Verulamian Workmanship’ which is referred to by Isaac Gruter in a letter to Dr. William Rawley (Bacon’s secretary and executor) written from Maestricht, and dated March 20, 1655. This letter was written in Latin, and both the original and the translation are printed in ‘Baconiana, or certain genuine Remains of Sir Francis Bacon,’ London, 1679.” Mr. Burgoyne gives the following extract:

“If my Fate would permit me to live according to my Wishes I would flie over into England, that I might behold whatsoever remaineth, in your cabinet of the Verulamian Workmanship, and at least make my eyes witnesses of it, if the possession of the Merchandize be yet denied to the Publick.... At present I will support the Wishes of my impatient desire, with hope of seeing, one Day, those [issues] which being committed to faithful Privacie, wait the time till they may safely see the Light, and not be stifled in their Birth.”

This letter, we note in passing, shows us that in the Verulamian literary Workshop certain “Merchandize” was produced which was “denied to the public”—that in fact (as we know by other evidence to have been the case) there were many writings of Bacon “committed to faithful Privacie”—to Rawley e.g.—which were to be kept unpublished till they could “safely see the light,” but which, most unfortunately, were lost or destroyed.

The suggestion, therefore, is that this paper volume, now known as the Northumberland MS., was a product of the famous Verulamian Workshop or Scriptorium, and Mr. Bompas adopting (with too great facility as I think) Mr. Dowse’s hypothesis that “the scribbler” was John Davies of Hereford, and referring to the known fact that the “Praises” were written for Essex’s Device in 1592, points out that at that date John Davies was only 27 and at the beginning of his career, and that it is “fifteen years later, in 1607, that an entry appears in the Northumberland accounts of a payment showing his employment by the Earl.” Mr. Bompas, therefore, suggests that in 1592 Davies might have been in Bacon’s employ; he seems, however to have overlooked the fact that, according to Mr. Dowse, the “Praises” were not written by Davies, since they are “in a totally different hand.”[112] The one fact which emerges is that we really do not know who wrote any part of the Manuscript, but that it was written for Bacon by one or more of his secretaries seems entirely probable, seeing that six of the nine pieces which now form its contents are transcripts of Bacon’s works, then unpublished. How Bacon, or his secretary, came into possession of two unpublished plays of Shakespeare, is a matter for speculation.

As to the “scribble” itself Mr. Spedding writes: “At the present time, if the waste leaf on which a law stationer’s apprentice tries his pens were examined, I should expect to find on it the name of the poet, novelist, dramatic author, or actor of the day, mixed with snatches of the last new song, and scribblings of ‘My dear Sir,’ ‘Yours sincerely,’ and ‘This Indenture witnesseth.’ And this is exactly the sort of thing which we have here.” Mr. Dowse demurs to this, for, says he, “the cases are not parallel: there is nothing trivial or vulgar in our scribbler: he was a serious and even religious man: the subjects that interest him are lofty, and like his acquaintance noble.” I will not offer an opinion on this point, viz., as to whether the scribbler was merely an idle penman, or “a serious and religious” penman, but, however that may be, I do not think that Mr. Spedding’s analogy holds good. “A law stationer’s apprentice” might certainly exercise his pen on a “waste leaf” as Mr. Spedding suggests, but an outer sheet of a paper volume in which works of importance, or so considered, were transcribed, the whole volume being stitched together, can hardly be described as a waste leaf. In days when printing was far less common than it is now such a volume would be valuable. Moreover, on the outside leaf were written the contents of the volume. A law stationer’s apprentice would hardly dare to exercise his idle pen on the outside skin of a newly-engrossed deed. I am inclined, therefore, to agree with Mr. Dowse that the scribblings were to a certain extent “serious.” There is method in their madness. And they are such “acts of ownership,” that the scribbler must have had a complete dominium over the document.

I have been long, and I fear, tedious over this curious work, but the more one considers Mr. Dowse’s tract the more does one find it provocative of criticism. I will now leave the regions of imagination for those of fact. Whether or not John Davies of Hereford was “the Scribbler” seems to me of comparatively little importance.[113] What is of importance is this:—We have here an undoubtedly Elizabethan manuscript volume. Its contents, as they have come down to us, are nine articles, out of which seven are by Bacon. It seems, therefore very reasonable to believe that the volume was written for Bacon and was perhaps a product of the “Verulamian workshop.” Very possibly it was presented by him either to the Earl of Northumberland, or to Sir Henry Neville, his own nephew. It is quite reasonable to believe that among the contents of the volume, as it originally stood, were the two Shakespearean plays, Richard II and Richard III. In any case these were noted on the outer leaf either as having been transcribed, or for future transcription. Such note would not, in all probability, have been made after 1597, when these plays were first (anonymously) published, at the price of sixpence each. At that date “Shakespeare” was unknown to the public as a dramatic author, for not a play had as yet been published under that name. Here then we have the names and the works of Bacon and Shakespeare associated, in close juxtaposition, in a contemporaneous manuscript. Further, the transcriber of, at any rate, part of the work, writing not idly but with serious thought, exercises his pen by writing the names, or parts of the names of Shakespeare and Bacon, over and over again, on the outside sheet. “William Shakespeare,” the author of Richard II and Richard III, seems to be a name familiar to him, although those plays had not as yet been published, and indeed were not published under the name of “Shake-speare” till 1598. He writes the name of “Shakespeare” “as it was always printed,” and not as Shakspere of Stratford “in any known case ever wrote it.” And not content with associating thus closely the names of Shakespeare and Bacon, on a volume containing some works by both these writers, if two they really were, he must needs, on the same outer sheet, quote a line, slightly varied, from Lucrece, and a word from Love’s Labour’s Lost. No other name of poet, or actor, appears upon “the Scribble” as distinct from the table of contents. It is all either Shakespeare or Bacon.

If a dishonest Baconian could fabricate fictitious evidence in the same way as the forger Ireland did for Shakspere, it seems to me that he might well endeavour to concoct such a document as this. But the Northumberland MS. is an undoubtedly genuine document, and it is but natural that the “Baconians” should make the most of it.—G.G.

FINAL NOTE

There is one argument in support of the contention that Bacon was the author of Venus and Adonis which seems to me to deserve more attention than it has hitherto received.