The essay was first printed in 1625, nine years after Shakespeare's death. It follows that Bacon, who had made a study of gardens all his life, either borrowed from Shakespeare or wrote the play.

8. In 1867, there was discovered in a private library in London, a box of old papers, among which were some manuscripts of Francis Bacon, bound together in the form of a volume. In the table of contents on the title-page, among the names of other compositions known to be Bacon's, appear those of two of the Shakespeare Plays, Richard II. and Richard III., though the Plays themselves have been abstracted from the book. Judge Holmes adds the following piece of information in regard to this discovery :

"The blank space at the side and between the titles is scribbled all over with various words, letters, phrases, and scraps of verse in English and Latin, as if the copyist were merely trying his pen and writing down whatever first came into his head. Among these scribblings, beside the name of Francis Bacon several times, the name of William Shakespeare is written eight or nine times over."

It is also at least a singular coincidence that the extraordinary word "honorificabilitudino," found here, occurs with a slight change of ending in Love's Labor's Lost.

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9. At the death of Queen Elizabeth, John Davis, the poet and courtier, went to Scotland to meet James I. him while on the journey northward, Bacon addressed a letter, asking kind intercession in his behalf with the King, and expressing the hope, in closing, that he (Davis) would be "good to concealed poets."

10. Stratford, the home of Shakespeare, is not referred to in any of the Plays, nor the beautiful river Avon, on which it is situated; but St. Albans, the residence of Bacon, is mentioned twenty-three times. Tender memories of Yorke Place, where Bacon was born,* and of the County of Kent, the home of his father's ancestry, are conspicuous in more than one of the Historical Plays.

II. Bacon was remarkably painstaking in preparing his works for the press. He rewrote the Novum Organum twelve times, and the Essays thirty times, before he deemed them fit for publication. No wonder the editors of the Plays remarked upon the beauty and neatness of

the copy.

12. With the exception of a brief but brilliant career in Parliament, and an occasional service in unimportant causes

*"Francis Bacon, the glory of his age and nation, the adorner and ornament of learning, was born in York House, or York Place, in the Strand, on the two and twentieth day of January, in the year of our Lord, 1560.”—Life of Bacon, published in 1657, by Rawley, his Lordship's Chaplain, and subsequently Chaplain to the King.

as attorney for the crown, Bacon seems to have been without employment from 1579, when he returned from France at the age of eighteen, to 1597, when he published his first volume of Essays. Here were nearly twenty of the best years of his life apparently run to waste. The volume of Essays was a small 12mo, containing but ten out of the fifty-eight sparkling gems which subsequent editions gave to the admiration and delight of posterity. His philosophical works, excepting a slight sketch in 1585, did not begin to appear till several years later. From 1597 to 1607, when he was appointed Solicitor General, he was again, sc far as we know, substantially unemployed—a period of ten years, contemporaneous with the appearance of the great tragedies of Hamlet (rewritten), Julius Cæsar, King Lear, and Macbeth. In the meanwhile, he was hard pressed for money, and failing to get relief (unhappily, before the days of Samuel Weller) in a vain effort to marry a wealthy widow, he was actually thrown into prison for debt.*

That he was idle all this time, under great pecuniary pressure, his mind teeming with the richest fancy, it is

* On one of these occasions, the debt was due to a Jewish money-lender, and was paid by Anthony, brother of Francis. At about that time appeared the great play, The Merchant of Venice, in which a money-lending Jew is pilloried for all time, and the friend of the debtor is Antonio.

impossible to admit. Such a hypothesis is utterly inconsistent with the possession of those fixed, almost phenomenal, habits of industry with which he afterward achieved magnificent results. On this point, indeed, we have interesting testimony from his mother. A woman of deep piety, mindful of the proprieties of her station in life, she evidently became alarmed over some mystery connected with her son. Probably she had a suspicion of its nature, for not even the genius that created Hamlet could subdue maternal instincts. In a letter to Anthony, the brother of Francis, under date of May 24, 1592, she expresses her solicitude, as follows:

"I verily think your brother's weak stomach to digest hath been much caused and confirmed by untimely going to bed, and then musing nescio quid* when he should sleep."

At another time, when the two brothers were together at Gray's Inn, and full of enthusiasm, as she knew, for the wicked drama, she wrote, begging them

Not to mum nor mask, nor sinfully revel."

In these recreations, of which, according to Chamberlain (who wrote in 1613), Bacon was the chief contriver," he gained that practical knowledge of stage machinery which afterward served him so well, and which we find

* I know not what.