Of course this is all topsy turvydom, for in Queen Elizabeth's reign Bacon was never "Lord" Bacon or Lord Chancellor.
But to continue, Shakspeare tells Bacon "Near to Castalia there bubbles also a fountain of petrifying water, wherein the muses are wont to dip whatever posies have met the approval of Apollo; so that the slender foliage which originally sprung forth in the cherishing brain of a true poet becomes hardened in all its leaves and glitters as if it were carved out of rubies and emeralds. The elements have afterwards no power over it."
Bacon. Such will be the fortune of your own
productions.
Shakspeare. Ah my Lord! Do not encourage me to
hope so. I am but a poor unlettered man,
who seizes whatever rude conceits his own
natural vein supplies him with, upon the
enforcement of haste and necessity; and
therefore I fear that such as are of deeper
studies than myself, will find many flaws in
my handiwork to laugh at both now and
hereafter.
Bacon. He that can make the multitude laugh and
weep as you do Mr. Shakspeare need not
fear scholars.... More scholarship
might have sharpened your judgment
but the particulars whereof a character is
composed are better assembled by force of
imagination than of judgment....
Shakspeare. My Lord thus far I know, that the first
glimpse and conception of a character in
my mind, is always engendered by chance
and accident. We shall suppose, for instance,
that I, sitting in a tap-room, or
standing in a tennis court. The behaviour
of some one fixes my attention.... Thus
comes forth Shallow, and Slender,
and Mercutio, and Sir Andrew Aguecheek.
Bacon. These are characters who may be found alive
in the streets. But how frame you such
interlocutors as Brutus and Coriolanus?
Shakspeare. By searching histories, in the first place,
my Lord, for the germ. The filling up
afterwards comes rather from feeling than
observation. I turn myself into a Brutus
or a Coriolanus for the time; and can, at
least in fancy, partake sufficiently of the
nobleness of their nature, to put proper
words in their mouths....
My knowledge of the tongues is but small,
on which account I have read ancient
authors mostly at secondhand. I remember,
when I first came to London, and
began to be a hanger-on at the theatres, a
great desire grew in me for more learning
than had fallen to my share at Stratford;
but fickleness and impatience, and the
bewilderment caused by new objects, dispersed
that wish into empty air....
This ridiculous and most absurd nonsense, which appeared in 1818 in Blackwood's Edinburgh Magazine was deemed so excellent and so instructive that (slightly abridged) it was copied into "Reading lessons for the use of public and private schools" by John Pierpont, of Boston, U.S.A., which was published in London nearly twenty years later, viz., in 1837.
As I said before, the dialogue is really all topsy turvydom, for the writer must have known perfectly well that Bacon was not Lord Keeper till 1617, the year after Shakspeare's death in 1616, and was not made Lord Chancellor till 1618, and that he is not supposed to have began to write the "Novum Organum" before the death of Queen Elizabeth.