“I should like to state unmistakably that I hold there to be not the smallest jot of even prima facie justification ... in the text of the First Folio for the belief that a cipher is concealed in that volume. I write with a fine copy on my desk.... Italic and Roman type appear in the preliminary pages ... they are never intermingled in the manner which would be essential if the words embodied Bacon’s bi-literal cipher.”
His idea of the intermingling of the Roman and Italic type as an essential is entirely wrong. If he had read my book understandingly, he would have known the different founts used by Bacon were in the differing forms of Italic type, not the Roman, except in the very few instances noted above. The cipher letters are not produced by intermingling Roman and Italic type in the Plays. He will find on every page of the Plays more than one fount or form of these Italic letters, and that not proper names only, but much besides was printed in them. See especially pp. 42-43, Merry Wives of Windsor.
Quoting again from Mr. Lee:—“To assert that a bi-literal cipher can or does appear in a text printed as the First Folio is printed is a bold denial of plain facts.” I wish to repeat, with equal earnestness and entire certainty, that to assert that the cipher cannot and does not exist in the text is a denial of a fact which I have demonstrated.
He mistakenly says, “The proper names figuring in the text of the plays alone appear in a different type.” To these must be added the abbreviated names of the speakers, the running titles, etc., and all other words in Italic type, which together make up when deciphered over 50 pages of my book that are extracted from the folio.
What shall we say of this quotation from Mr. Lee?
“Ignorance, vanity, inability to test evidence, lack of scholarly habits of mind are in each of these instances found to be the main causes predisposing half-educated members of the public to the acceptance of the delusion (!). And when any of the deluded victims have been narrowly examined they have invariably exhibited a tendency to monomania.... May a second Hogarth deal as effectually with Mrs. Gallup and Mr. Mallock, and their feeble-witted followers.”
Mr. Mallock “addlepated!” and “half-educated!” Lord Palmerston “feeble-witted”—“with a tendency to monomania!” Is this temperate discussion of a new discovery? Is true criticism of this subject and its believers reduced to vituperation, and this the end of the argument?
The public will refuse to accept Mr. Lee’s dictum as having any weight at all over against the examination made, and being made, by Mr. Mallock, Mr. Sinnett, and many others. I must assume them to be the peers of Mr. Lee in intelligence and discrimination, for he is most surely wrong and refuses knowledge, while they are willing to study the subject with patience and candour.
LITERARY WORLD.
London.