These plays F Bacon's offspring are preserved for the world.
This explanation of the real meaning to be derived from the long word honorificabilitudinitatibus seems to be so convincing as scarcely to require further proof. But the Author of the plays intended when the time had fully come for him to claim his own that there should not be any possibility of cavil or doubt. He therefore so arranged the plays and the acts of the plays in the folio of 1623 that the long word should appear upon the 136th page, be the 151st word thereon, should fall on the 27th line and that the interpretation should indicate the numbers 136 and 151, thus forming a mechanical proof so positive that it can neither be misconstrued nor explained away, a mechanical proof that provides an evidence which absolutely compels belief.
The writer desires especially to bring home to the reader the manifest fact that the revealed and revealing sentence must have been constructed before the play of "Loues Labor's lost" first appeared in 1598, and that when the plays were printed in their present form in the 1623 folio the scenes and the acts of the preceding plays and the printing of the columns in all those plays as well as in the play of "Loues Labour's lost" required to be arranged with extraordinary skill in order that the revealing page in the 1623 folio should commence with the first word of the revealing page in the original quarto of 1598, and that that page should form the 136th page of the folio, so that the long word "Honorificabilitudinitatibus" should appear on page 136, be the 151st word, and fall upon the 27th line.
Bacon tells us that there are 24 letters in the alphabet (i and j being deemed to be forms of the same letter, as are also u and v). Bacon was himself accustomed frequently to use the letters of the alphabet as numerals (the Greeks similarly used letters for numerals). Thus A is 1, B is 2 ... Y is 23, Z is 24. Let us take as an example Bacon's own name—B=2, a=1, c=3, O=14, n=i3; all these added together make the number 33, a number about which it is possible to say a good deal.[7] We now put the numerical value to each of the letters that form the long word, and we shall find that their total amounts to the number 287, thus:
H O N O R I F I C A B I L I T U
8 14 13 14 17 9 6 9 3 1 2 9 11 9 19 20
D I N I T A T I B U S
4 9 13 9 19 1 19 9 2 20 18 = 287
From a word containing so large a number of letters as twenty-seven it is evident that we can construct very numerous words and phrases; but I think it "surpasses the wit of man" to construct any "sentence" other than the "revealed sentence," which by its construction shall reveal not only the number of the page on which it appears—which is 136—but shall also reveal the fact that the long word shall be the 151st word printed in ordinary type counting from the first word.
On one side of the facsimile reproduction of part of page 136 of the 1623 folio, numbers are placed shewing that the long word is on the 27th line, which was a skilfully purposed arrangement, because there are 27 letters in the word. There is also another set of numbers at the other side of the facsimile page which shews that, counting from the first word, the long word is the 151st word. How is it possible that the revealing sentence, "Hi ludi F. Baconis nati tuiti orbi," can tell us that the page is 136 and the position of the long word is the 151st word? The answer is simple. The numerical value of the initial letters and of the terminal letters of the revealed sentence, when added together, give us 136, the number of the page, while the numerical value of all the other letters amount to the number 151, which is the number of words necessary to find the position of the long word "Honorificabilitudinitatibus," which is the 151st word on page 136, counting those printed in ordinary type, the italic words being of course omitted.
The solution is as follows
HI
LUDI
F
BACONIS
NATI
TUITI
ORBI
the initial letters of which are
H L F B N T O