"So shall he not lift up his head
In the assembly of the just.
For why? The Lord hath special eye
To be the godly's stay at call;
And hath given over righteously
The wicked man to take his fall."
Half a score of lines may be found of a better quality than those above exhibit; but the bad ones have been purposely selected as yielding the only sensible and conclusive test. The writer of the plays could not have been guilty of them. Some things we know to be impossible,—that Sidney should display the white feather; that a gentleman should ever once practise a scurvy trick; that a woman all compact of grace, animate with the instinct of fitness, should ever make a vulgar gesture; that the genius which interfused the plays should ever have gone to rot on the Lethean wharf of those prosaic lines. Nay, the question whether Bacon composed the plays grows pale before a greater one,—If he did compose them, what debility suggested to him this undertaking of the Psalms? There they already stood, in their tender, majestic English, simple as Hamlet's soliloquy and Macbeth's regrets,—a mother-tongue that resents the adulterate touch. We have a right to call upon those who espouse the Baconian theory of the plays to account for the existence of the paraphrase.
Lord Bacon wrote some lines commending the natural defence of an upright conscience. So did Shakspeare. Let us compare them:—
"The man of life upright, whose guileless heart is free
From all dishonest deeds and thoughts of vanity;
The man whose silent days in harmless joys are spent,
Whom hopes cannot delude nor fortune discontent,—
That man needs neither towers nor armor for defence,
Nor secret vaults to fly from thunder's violence."
In the second part of "Henry VI." are found the lines which are memorable to all English-speaking people:—
"What stronger breastplate than a heart untainted?
Thrice is he arm'd that hath his quarrel just;
And he but naked, though lock'd up in steel,
Whose conscience with injustice is corrupted."
We have plainly another case of paraphrase to be accounted for; and we can understand why Bacon, who used to send sonnets to Elizabeth to soften her heart towards Essex, should lament, "But I could never prevail with her."
The badness of Bacon's efforts at poetry has suggested to me the possibility that some of the didactic passages in the plays which Shakspeare altered and amended for the theatre, were left as they came from his pen; just as other passages from the playwrights of that day may be found streaking the rich Shakspearean lode, recognized by their inferiority or difference of style, but no longer imputable to the culprits by name. Pages of this un-Shakspearean matter may have drifted from Bacon's pen into the original crudeness of some of the plays, particularly into those which set forth periods of history.