"Quis quis, thou consonant?
The last of five vowels if you repeat them, the
fifth if I.
I will repeat them a, e, I.
The Sheepe, the other two concludes it o, u."
Now here we are told that a, e, I, o, u is the answer to Quis quis, and we must note that the I is a capital letter. Therefore a is followed by e, but I being a capital letter does not follow e but starts afresh, and we must read I followed by o, and o followed by u.
[Illustration: Plate XXIII. Facsimile of a Contemporary Copy of a Letter of Francis Bacon.]
Is it possible that these vowels will give us the Christian name of Bacon? Can it be that we are told on what page to look? The answer to both these questions is the affirmative "Yes."
The great Folio of Shakespeare was published in 1623, and in the following year, 1624, there was brought out a great Cryptographic book by the "Man in the Moon." We shall speak about this work presently; suffice for the moment to say that this book was issued as the key to the Shakespeare Folio of 1623. If we turn to page 254 in the Cryptographic book we shall find Chapter XIV. "De Transpositione Obliqua, per dispositionem Alphabeti."
[Illustration: Plate XXIV. FACSIMILES FROM PAGE 255 OF "GU TAVI SELENI CRYPTOMENYTICES," PUBLISHED 1624. [The Square Table is much enlarged].]
This chapter describes how, by means of square tables, one letter followed by another letter will give the cypher letter. On the present page appears the square, which is shown in Plate 24, which enables us to answer the question "Quis quis."
By means of this square we perceive that "a" followed by "e" gives us the letter F, that "I" followed by "o" gives us the letter R, and that "o" followed by "u" gives us the letter A. The answer therefore to Quis quis (which Bacon do you mean) is Fra [Bacon]. See Plate 23, Page 107.
[Illustration: Plate XXV. FACSIMILE FROM PAGE 2O2b OF "TRAICTE DES CHIFFRES OU SECRETES MANIERES D'ESCRIRE," PAR VlGENÈRE.]
But what should induce us to look at this particular chapter on page 254 of the Cryptographic book for the solution? The answer is clearly given in the wonderful page 136 of the 1623 Folio of Shakespeare.