"Hamlet," she maintained, was the master-key that unlocked the whole magnificent system. They were not plays, but chapters in a great Treatise—links in a great chain of philosophy—a new philosophy of politics and of life; and, just as the Lord Hamlet caused certain strolling players, with the set speech he put into their mouths, to "catch the conscience of the king," so had the greatest mind of all the golden age put into the mouths of the vagabond Shakespeare and his crew the truth which should, in the fullness of time, catch the conscience of the whole world. But why should these great minds have chosen to put their philosophy into enigmas and ciphers? Miss Bacon's answer was convincing: "It was the time when the cipher, in which one could write 'omnia per omnia,' was in request; when even 'wheel ciphers' and 'doubles' were thought not unworthy of philosophic notice. It was a time, too, when the phonographic art was cultivated and put to other uses than at present, and when a nomme de plume was required for other purposes than to serve as the refuge of an author's modesty, or vanity, or caprice. It was a time when puns, and charades, and enigmas, and anagrams, and monograms, and ciphers, and puzzles were not mere sport and child's play; when they had need to be close and solvable only to those who should solve them. It was a time when all the latent capacities of the English language were put in requisition, and it was flashing and crackling through all its length and breadth, with puns and quips and conceits and jokes and satires, and inlined with philosophic secrets that opened down into the bottom of a tomb, that opened into the Tower, that opened on the scaffold and the block." * This was the "Delia Bacon theory." This was the "madness" forever associated with her plaintive story, and not the proposition that the author of the plays (whoever he might be—or they, if more than one) and William Shakespeare were persons—as distinctly two as were the noble Hamlet and the poor player who played "Gonzago" in the "Mousetrap" that day before the majesty of Denmark. But, madness or not, Miss Bacon never wavered in her conviction that the appointed time to read the oracles had come, and that she, Delia Bacon, a namesake, possibly, of the real Hamlet of the plays, had been raised in her appointed place to be the reader. Alas for her!

* "Philosophy of Shakespeare's Plays unfolded," p. x.
Like Cassandra, she announced her message only to be
scorned and flouted in return!

By what whim of fortune or fancy the great plays had grown to be known as "Shakespeare's works," any more than Burbage's works, or Jonson's works, she never troubled herself to inquire; but with the details of lier mission she was careful to possess herself. She held that "the material evidence of her dogma as to the authorship, together with the key of the new philosophy, would be found buried in Shakespeare's grave." * She claims to have discovered, by careful study of Lord Bacon's letters, not only the key and clew to the whole mystery, but to an entire Baconian cipher In these letters—there were over five hundred of them extant, and others have been discovered, we believe, since Miss Bacon's day—however, it still remains, for the secret of Miss Bacon's clew died with her. But she stoutly maintained that in these letters were "definite and minute directions how to find a will and other documents relating to the conclave of Elizabethan philosophers, which were concealed in a hollow space in the under surface of Shakespeare's gravestone.... The directions, she intimated, were completely and precisely to the point, obviating all difficulties in the way of coming to the treasure, and so contrived as to ward off any troublesome consequences likely to arise from the interference of the parish officers.... There was the precious secret protected by a curse, as pirates used to bury their gold in the guardianship of a fiend." **

* Hawthorne.
** Id. Delia Bacon was born in New Haven, in 1811, and
early devoted herself to literature, writing two works "The
Tales of the Puritans" and "The Bride of Fort Edward." She
soon, however, abandoned miscellaneous writing and adopted
the profession of a student and teacher of history, and
began her career as a lecturer on history in the city of
Boston. Her method was original with herself. She had
models, charts, maps, and pictures to illustrate her
subject; and we are told by Mrs. Farrar ("Recollections of
Seventy Years," Boston, Ticknor & Fields, 1866) that, being
of a commanding presence and elegant delivery, she was
successful and attracted large audiences. Mrs. Farrar says,
"She looked like one of Dante's sibyls, and spoke like.
** Id. Delia Bacon was born in New Haven, in 1811, and
early devoted herself to literature, writing two works "The
Tales of the Puritans" and "The Bride of Fort Edward." She
soon, however, abandoned miscellaneous writing and adopted
the profession of a student and teacher of history, and
began her career as a lecturer on history in the city of
Boston. Her method was original with herself. She had
models, charts, maps, and pictures to illustrate her
subject; and we are told by Mrs. Farrar ("Recollections of
Seventy Years," Boston, Ticknor & Fields, 1866) that, being
of a commanding presence and elegant delivery, she was
successful and attracted large audiences. Mrs. Farrar says,
"She looked like one of Dante's sibyls, and spoke like an
angel."

The original manuscripts of the plays she did not expect to find there. These she believed the ignorant Shakespeare to have scattered, after the blotless copies for the players had been taken; to have devoted to domestic purposes, or to have never concerned himself about farther. This was the gravamen of the charge she brought against "Lord Leicester's groom," the co-manager, late of Stratford, and this the vandalism for which she never could forgive him. "This fellow," she cried, "never cared a farthing for them, but only for his gains at their hands.... What is to hinder his boiling his kettle with the manuscripts... after he had done with them? He had those manuscripts—the original Hamlet, with its last finish;... the original Lear, with his own fine readings... he had them all—pointed, emphasized, corrected, as they came from the gods! And he has left us to wear out our youth and squander our life in poring over and setting right the old garbled copies of the play-house!... For is he not a private, economical, practical man, this Shakespeare of ours, with no stuff and nonsense about him; a plain, true-blooded Englishman, who minds his own business, and leaves others to take care of theirs?... What did he do with them? He gave them to his cook, or Dr. Hall put up potions in them, or Judith—poor Judith, who signified her relation to the author of Lear and the Tempest, and her right to the glory of the name he left her, by the very extraordinary kind of 'mark' which she affixed to legal instruments—poor Judith may have curled her hair with them to the day of her death.... What did you do with them? You have skulked this question long enough; you will have to account for them! The awakening ages will put you on the stand, and you will not leave it until you answer the question, what did you do with them?" * This chain of dramas, so blindly perpetuated by William Shakespeare, became, through Miss Bacon's unlocking process, a great system of political philosophy, dictated by the thoughtful Bacon and his compeers, and locked up for the nineteenth century, against the blindness of the centuries between.

But, of so startling a proposition, Miss Bacon confesses that the world would require something more than her own conviction. So she deliberately set out to prove, from the very crypt and silence of the grave itself, its truth. To St. Albans, whence the mysterious letters were dated, to the lonesome tomb at old Verulam and the vault in Stratford chancel, she proposed a pilgrimage—thence to probe the secret, and lay it open to a doubting world. Her friends regarded her theory as a delusion, and Miss Bacon as a monomaniac....

* "Putnam's Magazine," January, 1856. "to her
conversations on the subject, and peremptorily refused
contributions to assist in her expedition. But, by her
lectures, and the friend she enlisted in her project in New
York City, she gathered together enough money to get to
London."
It was while in London, in abject poverty and
friendlessness, that Thomas Carlyle, "upon whom she had
called and whom she had impressed with respect for herself
if not for her theory," says Hawthorne, advised Miss Bacon
to put her thoughts upon paper first, before proceeding to
the overt act of proof she contemplated—namely, the opening
of William Shakespeare's grave. It was upon his advice that
this most remarkable woman—sitting in bed in a garret to
keep warm without a fire, without sufficient or wholesome
food, "looking back," to use her own words, "on the joys and
sorrows of a world in which I have no longer any place, like
a departed spirit," and yet, doing "the world's work," and
knowing "that I had a right to demand aid for it"—undertook
to unfold out of the Shakespearean plays their hidden system
of philosophy." Meanwhile, under a contract obtained for her
by Mr. P. W. Emerson (though, it is presumed, more for
temporary supply of funds than as rider to her great work),
she furnished to "Putnam's Magazine" eighty pages of
manuscript, which became the famous paper "William
Shakespeare and his Plays," first announcing to the world
the first anti-Shakespearean theory of which it had ever
heard. **
* Mrs. Farrar.
** This was contracted to be the first of a series of
papers, but the arrangement for some reason, probably
because Miss Bacon found it necessary to devote herself to
the work to which she was to give her life, fell through,
and no successive papers appeared in the magazine.

They put their Shakespeares out of sight when she approached, declined to listenUnder such circumstances, and with such surroundings, this heroic woman accomplished the first half of the work she had marked out for herself—the reading of the sealed book, the unfolding of the philosophy of the Shakespearean plays. Her book was written, printed, published, and—damned! *

* "The Philosophy of Shakespeare's Plays unfolded. By Delia
Bacon." London: Sampson, Low & Co.; and Boston: Ticknor &
Fields, 1857. The book lies before us, and certainly is the
most difficult reading we ever attempted. Even so competent
and partial a critic as Hawthorne says of it: "Without
prejudice to her literary ability, it must be allowed that
Miss Bacon was wholly unfit to prepare her own work for
publication, because, among other reasons, she was too
thoroughly in earnest to know what to leave out. Every leaf
and line was sacred, for all had been written under so deep
a conviction of truth, as to assume, in her eyes, the aspect
of inspiration. A practiced book-maker, with entire control
of her material, would have shaped out a duodecimo volume,
full of eloquent and ingenious dissertation—criticisms
which quite take the color and pungency out of other
people's critical remarks on Shakespeare.... There was a
great amount of rubbish, which any competent editor would
have shoveled out of the way. But Miss Bacon thrust the
whole bulk of inspiration and nonsense into the press in a
lump, and there tumbled out a ponderous octavo volume, which
fell with a dead thump at the feet of the public, and has
never been picked up. A few persons turned over one or two
of the leaves, as it lay there, and essayed to kick the
volume deeper into the mud.... I believe that it has been
the faith of this remarkable book never to have had more
than a single reader. I myself am acquainted with it only in
isolated chapters and scattered pages and paragraphs. But
since my return to America, a young man of genius and
enthusiasm has assured me that he has positively read the
book from beginning to end, and is completely a convert to
its doctrines. It belongs to him, therefore, and not to me,
whom, in almost the last letter that I received from her,
she declared unworthy to meddle with her work—it belongs
surely to this one individual, who has done her so much
justice as to know what she wrote, to place Miss Bacon in
her due position before the public." ("Our Old Home.") The
volume is obtained to-day, only by chance, in old bookshops
and at such prices as the bookseller may choose to demand.

It failed so utterly and miserably that nobody opened it, though that fact deterred nobody, of course, from laughing at it and its author to the utmost of their endeavor in ridicule and abuse. "Our American journalists," says Hawthorne, "at once republished some of the most brutal vituperations of the English press, thus pelting their poor countrywoman with stolen mud, without even waiting to know whether the ignominy was deserved, and they never have known it to this day, and never will." But none the less did Delia Bacon persevere to the end. The philosophy was unfolded. If the world declined to receive the truth—"the truth," as she claimed, "that is neither yours nor mine, but yours and mine"—it was not on her head, at least, that the consequences would fall. The second half of her work remained. She proceeded to Stratford to crown her labors, by opening the vault in the chancel of the parish church, and exposing the secret she had already guessed, to the doubting Thomasses who clamored for the tactual evidence so long entombed there.