At this point of his inductive reasoning, the Spirit paused for effect: he looked for all the world like a picture I had seen in the Strand Magazine.
"Ah!" I said, "I know you now; you are Sherlock Holmes, the detective."
At which he was so indignant that he angrily pirouetted himself right out of sight. But he re-appeared almost immediately, and went on as if nothing had happened:—
"Having proved to you that neither Bacon nor Shakespeare wrote his own works, I will now proceed to tell you who wrote them."
"What! The lot?"
"Certainly. The similarity of thought in Bacon's Essays and Shakespeare's Plays prove that they were written by the same man. That man, as you may see by the legal knowledge betrayed alike in the Plays and the Essays, must have studied the law. But if he wrote all the books which I attributed to him, he could not have had time to practise it. Moreover, in the atmosphere of the law courts a man could have preserved neither the exquisite sweetness nor the human grandeur of the so-called Shakespeare's Plays."
"There's something in that," said I.
"Very well," continued Roderick, curveting so swiftly that even as one foot touched the floor the other seemed to be kicking the ceiling, "we have now established these facts:—
"First, that the initials of the author of the so-called Shakespeare's Plays are 'W. H.'
"Secondly, that he had an intensely painful love affair in his youth, and married another woman in his later years.