While dying groans mixt with the battaile cry
In awesome sound; and steedes were fetlock deepe
In blood, fast flowing as the armies met.”
Still another chapter in the romance of Bacon’s life is disclosed in the cipher. Because of a late and somewhat mercenary marriage, he has been considered as having a cold nature, a conclusion hightened by the loveless comments of his Essay on Love. But the cipher writing discloses an early disappointment as the cause. While in France, and 17, he was violently enamored of the beautiful but dissolute Marguerite, wife of Henry of Navarre, and his senior by something like eight years. A divorce from Henry and her union with Bacon, the rightful Prince of Wales, was actually planned. The fair Marguerite proved fickle also, but his writings are filled with references to his affection for her which her falseness could not, apparently, extinguish. He tells us himself that “Romeo and Juliet” was written to picture their love, saying: “The joy of life ebb’d from our hearts with our parting, and it never came againe into this bosom in full flood-tide.” Another interesting episode brought out is Bacon’s account of his brother’s treason and his self-justification and remorse at his own part in the punishment that was meted out to him.
The verity of the cipher Mrs. Gallup has so painstakingly and with such unwearied patience unfolded would seem to be sustained by the fact that it is Bacon’s own invention, fully—even elaborately—set forth in one of his later writings, when, Elizabeth being dead and he himself near his end, he had less fear of consequences should his secret be discovered—indeed, he came to fear it would not be discovered and that he would not be justified to posterity.
So much of reserve as is due to lack of personal demonstration is maintained by the writer, but here are 360 pages of deciphered matter, with sufficient means of proof to satisfy any investigator. There can be no middle ground; one must accept or deny it in toto. Either the decipherer has made a most remarkable discovery to which the key has been open for three centuries, or the book is equally remarkable from an entirely different point of view. If accepted, truly “th’ tardy epistle shall turn over an unknowne leaf of the historie of our land.”
FRANCIS BACON’S BI-LITERAL CIPHER.
Baconiana, London.
Before these lines are printed, Mrs. Gallup’s very important work on “The Biliteral Cipher of Francis Bacon”[1] will have been for two months in the hands of the public. Since it is probable that there may be due discussion of its wonderful contents, it seems desirable to say a few words, not by way of review or mere expression of personal opinion (in such a case valueless), but in order to draw attention to certain points which, if not at present capable of absolute verification or contradiction, yet surely demand and are worthy of the closest investigation. Questions of this kind must naturally arise, “Is this cipher such as any person of ordinary intelligence can follow? Is it provably correct? Has any one besides Mrs. Gallup succeeded in depihering by the same means, and with similar results?”
These questions may without hesitation be answered in the affirmative. With the explanation given by the great inventor himself, anyone can master the method described in the De Augmentis (Book VI.). Ordinary patience and contrivance enable us to arrange two different alphabets of Italic letters and to insert these in the printed type, forming cipher sentences one-fifth in length of the “exterior” sentence or passage. Thus to bury one story within another is easy enough. To unearth it is another matter, and more difficult.