When I first put out the cipher, I thought any one who would take the time could decipher all that I have done, but when I found people who could not distinguish between this w and w to say nothing of obscure o's and e's, I despaired of their becoming decipherers. There are, of course, many who have a correct eye for form, who will be able in time to overcome the difficulties this study presents, but I wish to ask Mr. Candler if he does not think the small a's, c's, etc., of the Latin illustration in De Augmentis Scientiarum, which he says a child could manage, quite as bewildering as any of the Italic letters elsewhere?
At the close of Mr. Candler’s article he desires that I “get together a few men who know something about books, and add to them a printer or two, familiar with types, new and old; between them if they extract a consecutive narrative ... there is nothing more to be said.” I have extended this invitation many times, only to have it politely declined. The Editor of the Times refused, more than a year ago, to consider this request. Now, having practically lost the use of my eyes for such close work as this entails, I shall be obliged to forego, for a time at least, until a greater degree of strength has returned, the satisfaction it would be to point out in detail to a committee the various differences, though it seems to me they should be readily observable without my aid. In the meantime I rest in confidence that it will be correctly done by some one, somewhere and sometime.
REPLY TO MR. MARSTON.
It seems rather infantile to call attention to the spelling, but as Mr. Marston deems it of sufficient importance to draw from it the following inference, he must think it serious. I quote from the Times of January 3: “The whole thing is so transparently a concoction that a school boy who was reading this deciphered Tragedy asks: 'Was Bacon a Yankee? He spells words like “labour” and “honour” without the “u”.’”
I would reply that he was the same person that wrote the Shakespeare plays. The folio shows both ways of spelling. But all the word-cipher productions were printed according to modern American usage, as in this Tragedy of Anne Boleyn.
Mr. Marston emphasizes the matter by a second allusion to this peculiarity as discrediting my work, in the following words: “And Mrs. Gallup asks the world to believe Bacon wrote this 'new drama’ in order to vindicate the 'honor’ of his grandmother.”
A few minutes’ examination shows, in the first four plays of Shakespeare, forty-four instances of the spelling of honor, without the u, against twenty-five occurrences of the word with the u. For the spelling of labor, I will take time and space to quote only a single line from the first folio:
“There be some Sports are painfull and their labor—” Tem. 3-1-1.
These words occur in the cipher story, as in the plays, spelled both ways.[9]
This suggests one thing of value to present day readers of the plays who do not know, or do not stop to consider, that modern editions differ greatly, and in important particulars, from the original editions, both spelling and grammar having been modified, while in some parts, whole paragraphs of the text are omitted to meet the ideas of what the particular editor thought the author should have said.