The principal reason was because the history of his life was largely given in those plays, not alone in the biliteral, but in the word-cipher, and the revelation of that in the lifetime of Queen Elizabeth would have cost his own life. He hoped against hope to the very day of the queen’s death, that she would relent and proclaim him heir to the throne. But he states that the witnesses were then dead, and the papers that would authenticate his claims destroyed. What could he do? Simply what he did.

In the peroration we find: “I fear that the desire to drag down Shakespeare from his pedestal, and to treat the testimony of his personal friends as that of lying rogues is due to that antipathy to the actor’s calling which has its eccentric manifestations even to this day.”

This cannot in any way refer to my book, for the very nature of this work eliminates personal thoughts and wishes or preconceived ideas. It is as mechanical as the reading of hieroglyphics, as naming perfectly well-known objects, as discriminating the clicks of the telegraph. And as far as Bacon was concerned he desired only his right.

It is by its great men in every age of the world that the actor’s calling is dignified, but the genius of the man of the stage is not necessarily the genius of the man who wrote the greatest plays that time through all the centuries has produced.

Elizabeth Wells Gallup.

THE BI-LITERAL CIPHER IN HENRY VII.

Baconiana, London, July 1905.

It has been suggested to me that I should give some of the results of my examination of Mrs. Wells Gallup’s work on Bacon’s Henry VII. I was not in England when Mrs. Gallup’s MSS. arrived from America, in the early part of 1904. On my return to London in June of that year, I heard that two or three members of our Society had been trying to work the cipher, but on comparing notes found that the various copies of the 1622 edition did not agree in some of the forms of the Italic letters. Only one member seemed inclined to devote the time and patience to investigate the matter at all thoroughly. That member, I understand, with much patience devoted one whole week to the study of the italic letters. His very able report against the cipher made me wish to look into the matter still more thoroughly myself. This may appear presumptuous as I was not one of the committee appointed to enquire into the subject. But I had had the advantage of many conversations with Mrs. Gallup, when she first presented her work to the public five years ago, and saw her and her sister, Miss Wells, at work on a book they found in my house not before deciphered by them. I was busy with other literary work during the summer of 1904, but in the autumn made up my mind to send my own copy of the 1622 edition of Henry VII. to the Howard Publishing Company, in America, for examination. I was anxious to know if it was a safe copy on which I might commence my work. It was returned to me by Mr. Moore in January, 1905, with one or two pencilled corrections written by Mrs. Gallup in the margin. Mrs. Gallup, in her letter to me, said, “Your copy and ours are the same, except in a very few places.” In that letter, and in others since, she answered several of my questions, and they have materially helped me. I worked diligently for three months, often eight and ten hours a day.

My studies have been confined to the first fifty pages only of the medium Italic type. I find in these fifty pages 10,058 Italic letters. Of these, 1,319 are capitals. For the present I shall confine my remarks to the capitals only. In these fifty pages only twenty-two letters of the alphabet are used. I have completed my studies on thirteen of these letters. They represent 704 letters used for the two founts; and with very few exceptions I find them correctly so used in Mrs. Gallup’s MSS. sent to us for examination. I have not yet completed my studies on the remaining nine letters of the alphabet, representing 615 letters. I am, however, finding the majority of these correctly used also. I am a slow worker, but each day’s work is bringing out better results on these nine more difficult letters. I give below a table of all the letters in the order in which I found them easiest to read, with the columns of figures divided into “a’s” and “b’s.”

Totals. “a” “b”
A. 61 25 36
E. 78 58 20
I. J. 51 49 2
M. 49 41 8
N 42 32 10
U. V. 11 9 2
Q. 13 2 11
P. 163 119 44
R. 41 8 33
S. 93 62 31
W. 19 11 8
T. 70 39 31
Y. 13 7 6
K. 71 37 34
L. 68 46 22
F. 78 47 31
B. 99 65 34
D. 74 47 27
H. 24 12 12
O. 24 17 7
G. 25 18 7
C. 152 100 52
—— —— ——
1,319 851 468