To The Editor.
Sir:—There is a sense of relief after the worst has been said, in the assurance that nothing more dreadful can be expected. Since the “critic” of the Literary World has consigned me to that Avernus whose horrors all good people hope to escape, I should be beyond attack, as none would willingly follow me into the infernal regions.
After reading the article entitled Galluping in Avernum, my eyes fell upon a clipping in which George Brandes is named as the “famous Danish critic, and the greatest of living Shakespearean commentators.” It says: “He dismisses the whole 'Baconian Craze’ with the remark that it is on the one hand a piece of weak and inartistic feminine criticism, and on the other an Americanism and therefore lacking in spiritual delicacy.”
The criticism in the Literary World of Bacon’s Bi-literal Cypher and of the Tragedy of Anne Boleyn is not, I think, feminine nor American, but somehow the quality of spiritual delicacy seems lacking, and it can hardly be called artistic.
It is only recently that I have noticed—this rule has not reached America—that some writers apparently think it is good form to pun, or play, upon another’s surname. If the name is not pleasing to the ear, the mortal who bears it has perhaps a lifelong affliction, yet it is certainly a misfortune rather than a fault. Nor did I suppose, until I saw the articles of a large number of reviewers, that any—except writers more intent on filling space than careful of the value of the matter—rushed into print before the subject discussed, or book reviewed was half read. And yet it is this critic’s own confession, regarding the Bi-literal Cypher, that he has read but “half the book, and a few scattered sentences of the rest.” From this admittedly superficial reading he concludes a “Phantom personating Bacon claims to have written all the plays” etc.—the literature throughout which the ciphers have with infinite pains been traced, and the principles upon which they are based, the keys and directions for their decipherment, ascertained and set out in the work he attempts to criticise.
After quoting the statement that Elizabeth and Dudley were honorably married, and that Bacon and Essex were the issue of this union, our critic asks, “when were Elizabeth and Leicester again married?” This is answered in the Bi-literal Cypher (p. 154).
A little farther on critic says: “If there had been a marriage, which there wasn’t, sometime in the four months between Lady Dudley’s (Amy Robsart’s) death and (the supposed) Bacon’s birth, it would have legitimated Bacon; but then he would not have been a Tudor but a Dudley.”
Bacon evidently considered himself legitimated by “this second nuptial rite,” and when he wrote, probably knew quite as much of the law, and of the time the marriage took place, as our critic. It was not descent from Dudley that made him prince. Long-established custom was the law that gave “to the first borne of the sovereign the title of Prince of Wales.”
Our critic makes a point of the use and spelling of Brittain and of the expression 'in the throne,’ quoting: “Ended now is my great desire to sit in the British throne.”
In the Advancement of Learning (1605) he may read: “Queene Elizabeth, your immediate Predecessor in this part of Brittaine” (B. 1, p. 36); while in Shakespeare he will find: