Sent forth, or since did from their ashes come."

And yet he never, while going from one to the other, mentions Shakespeare to Bacon or Bacon to Shakespeare; never "introduces" them or brings them together; never gives his soul's idol Bacon any "order" to his soul's idol Shakespeare's theater, that this absolutely inimitable Bacon (who has surpassed insolent Greece and haughty Rome) may witness the masterpieces of this absolutely inimitable Shakespeare(who has likewise surpassed insolent Greece and haughty Rome); this Boswell of a Jonson, go-between of two men of repute and public character, travels from one to the other, sings the praises of each to the world outside (using the same figures of speech for each), and, in the presence of each, preserves so impenetrable a silence as to the other, that of the two public characters themselves each is absolutely ignorant of the other's existence! And yet they ought to have been close friends, for they borrowed each other's verses, and loaned each other paragraphs to any extent. Persons there have been who asserted, as we shall see, on merely the internal evidence of their writings, that Bacon and "Shakespeare" were one and the same man, and that what appeared to be "parallelisms" and coincidences in Bacon and "Shakespeare" were thus to be accounted for. But, admitting their separate identity, it is certain either that the natural philosopher borrowed his exact facts from the comedies of the playwright, or that the playwright borrowed the speeches for his comedies from the natural philosopher; either of which looks very much like, at least, a speaking acquaintance. For, as we shall see further on, * some of these "parallelisms" are not coincidences, but something very like identities.

* Post, part V, The Baconian Theory.

It will not lighten this new difficulty to rule out the prose and leave in the poetry, for we can not annihilate Francis Bacon nor yet William Shakespeare from their places in history. If, however, the Jonsonian poetry were wiped out, the Jonsonian prose would receive, at least, a negative corroboration, as follows: At the same time that Bacon and Shakespeare are living, unknown to each other respectively, in London, there also dwell there three other gentlemen—Sir Walter Raleigh, Edmund Spenser, and Sir Tobie Matthew. We, therefore, actually have four well-known gentlemen of the day in London, gentlemen of elegant tastes—poets, men about town, critics—who, if the town were being convulsed by the production at a theater of by far the most brilliant miracles of genius that the world had ever seen, ought not, in the nature of things, to have been utterly uninformed as to the circumstance. We do not add to this list Southampton, Essex, Rutland, Montgomery, and the rest, because these latter have left no memorandum or chronicle of what they saw and heard on manuscript behind them. But the first four have left just precisely such memoranda of their times as are of assistance to us here. Bacon, in his "Apothegms," Spenser in his poems, * and Raleigh and Matthew in their remains—especially Matthew—who, like Bacon, kept a diary, who wrote letters and postscripts, and was as fond of playing at Boswell to his favorites as Jonson himself—appear to have stumbled on no trace of such a character as "Shakespeare" in all their sauntering about London.

* Spenser's well-known lines in "Colin Clout's come Home
again," written in 1591, are:
And there, though last not least, is Ætion,
A gentler shepherd may nowhere be found,
Whose muse, full of high thought's invention,
Doth—life himself—heroically sound."
"Æton" is generally assumed by commentators to stand in the
verse for "Shakespeare." But it is difficult to imagine how
this can possibly be more than mere speculation, since
Spenser certainly left no annotation explanatory of the
passage, and it does not identify itself as a reference to
Shakespeare. In "The Tears of the Muses," line 205, there is
an allusion which on a first glance appears so pat, that the
Bard of Avon has long been called "our pleasant Willy" on
the strength of it. It runs:
"And ho, the man whom Nature's self had made, To mock
herself and truth to imitate
With kindly counter under mimick shade,
Our pleasant Willy, ah, is dead of late:
With whom all joy and jolly merriment Is also deaded, and in
dolour dreut."
But, since Spenser died some seventeen years before
Shakespeare, and if—as must be supposed from their
flippancy—these lines point to the enforced or voluntary
retirement or silence of some writer, rather than to his
death—they appear more nearly to refer to Sidney than to
Shakespeare. And this now appears to be conceded. (See
Morley's "English Men of Letters: Spenser," by Dean Church.
American edition, Harpers, New York, 1879, p. 106.) Besides,
"The Tears of the Muses" was written in 1580, when
Shakespeare was a lad of sixteen, holding horses at the
theater door. "Will," or "WiB," appears to have been the
ordinary nickname of a poet in those days.—R. Gr. White's
"Shakespeare," vol. i., p. 57, note.

Especially on one occasion does Sir Tobie devote himself to a subject-matter wherein, if there had been any "Shakespeare" within his ken, he could very properly—and would, we think, very naturally—have mentioned him. In the "Address to the Reader," prefixed to one of his works, * he says, speaking of his own date, "We have also rare compositions made among us which look so many fair ways at once that I doubt it will go near to pose any other nations of Europe to muster out in any age four men who, in so many respects, should be able to excel four such us we are able to show—Cardinal Wolsey, Sir Thomas More, Sir Philip Sidney, and Sir Francis Bacon. For they were all a kind of monsters in their various ways," etc.

* "A Collection of Letters made by Sir Tobie Matthew, with
a Character of the Most Excellent Lady Lucy, Countess of
Carlisle. To which are added Many Letters of his Several
Persons of Honour, who were contemporary with him." Loudon,
1660.

Besides, these four—or, dismissing Spenser, who was a poet exclusively—then three, Bacon, Raleigh, and Tobie Matthew—however else dissimilar, were any thing but blockheads or anchorites. They were men of the court and of the world. They mingled among their fellow-men, and (by a coincidence which is very useful to us here) none of them were silent as to what they met and saw during their careers. They both live and move in the very town and in the very days when this rare poetry which Emerson says "the greatest minds value most" was appearing. But, if William Shakespeare was the author of it all, how is it possible to escape the conviction that not one of them all—not Bacon, a man of letters himself, a student of antique not only, but of living and contemporary literature, and overfond of writing down his impressions for the benefit of posterity (even if wanting in the dramatic or poetic perception, the scholarship of the plays could not have escaped him; and had these plays been the delight and town talk of all London, as Mr. Grant White says they were, some morsel of them must have reached his ear or eye)—not Raleigh, courtier, gallant, man-about-town, "curled darling," and every thing of that sort (who probably was not afraid to go to a theater for fear of injuring his morals)—not Tobie Matthew, who was all this latter with less of responsibility and mental balance—ever so much as heard his (Shakespeare's) name mentioned? That not one of these ever heard of a name that was in everybody's mouth—of a living man so famous that, as we shall presently consider, booksellers were using his name to make their wares sell, that his plays were fill-ins: the most fashionable theater in London from cockpit to the dome; whose popularity was so exalted that the great Queen Elizabeth herself stepped down from the throne and walked across his stage to do him honor, to whom in after days, her successor King was to write an autograph letter (for these must all be considered in the argument, though, as we have seen, the King James story is only one of the "yarns," * cooked for occasion by commentators, or the growth of rumor—in orthodox procession from "might have been" to "was"—and so, doubtless, is the other) is a trifle incredible to a mind not already adjusted to swallow any and every fable in this connection rather than accept the truth of history! To be sure, it is not absolutely impossible that these three men should have been cognizant of William Shakespeare's existence without mentioning him in their favors to posterity.

* The story of Elizabeth's order for "Falstaff in Love,"
resulting in the production of "The Merry Wives of Windsor"
(which would prove that, whatever else she was, Elizabeth
was no Anthony Comstock), is, to our mind, another sample of
the same procession. Hazlitt (Lit. of Europe, Part iii.,
chap. 6, sec. iii., note,) is especially incredulous as to
the King James letter. The truth is that Shakespeare, far
from being flattered by James, was actually in disgrace, and
not so much as to be mentioned in that monarch's hearing,
from having permitted a representation of the sacred person
of royalty on his stage, as is authenticated by the well-
known lines of Davies:
"Hadst thou not played some Kingly parts in sport, etc., etc."

But, under all the circumstances, it is vastly improbable. At any rate, we fancy it would not be easy to conceive of three Englishmen in London to-day, in 1881—let us say Mr. Gladstone, Mr. Browning, and Mr. Swinburne—without collusion, writing down a list of their most illustrious contemporaries, and not one of them mentioning Mr. Tennyson! Or, assuming that Tennyson is the admitted first of poets of the Victorian age (as Mr. Ben Jonson and all the commentators at his heels, down to our own Mr. Grant White, tell us that "William Shakespeare" was the admitted first of poets of his contemporary Elizabethan age), it would not be the easiest thing in the world to conceive three chroniclers—Mr. Gladstone, Mr. Browning, and Mr. Swinburne-sitting themselves down to an enumeration, not of their illustrious contemporaries in general, but of their contemporaneous men of letters only, and, by a coincidence, omitting any mention of the great first of poets of their day! Either, then, it seems to us we are to infer that three such men as Raleigh, Bacon, (who, Emerson says, "took the inventory of the human understanding, for his time,") and his satellite Matthew, had never so much as heard that there was any Shakespeare, in an age which we moderns worship as the age of Shakespeare, or that there was no "Shakespeare" for them to hear about; that "William Shakespeare" was the name of an actor and manager in the Globe and Blackfriars play-houses, of a man not entitled, any more than any of his co-actors and co-managers in those establishments, to enumeration among the illustrious ornaments of an illustrious age, the stars of the golden age of English!