"No one mistook the condemnation for a moral censure; no one treated Lord St. Albans as a convicted judge. The House of Commons had refused to adopt the charge of bribery; the House of Lords had rejected the attempt to brand him with a personal shame; and society treated the event as one of those struggles for place which may hurt a man's fortunes without hurting his fame. The most noble and most generous men, the best scholars, the most pious clergymen, gathered round him in his adversity, more loving, more observant, more reverential, than they had ever been in his days of splendor.

"Such was also the reading of these transactions by the most eminent of foreign ministers and travelers. The French Marquis

left him there for awhile alone. Whilst his lordship was gone, there comes,' he said, 'into the study one of his lordship's gentlemen, and opens my lord's chest of drawers wherein his money was, takes it out in handfuls, fills his pockets, and goes away without saying a word to me. He was no sooner gone but comes another gentleman, opens the same drawers, fills both his pockets with money, and goes away as the former did, without speaking a word.' Bacon, being told when he came back what had passed in his absence, merely shook his head, and all he said was, 'Sir, I cannot help myself."""

Montagu relates another incident to the same effect:

One day, immediately after Bacon's removal from the chancellorship, he happened to enter his servants' hall while they were at dinner. On their rising (about one hundred in number) to receive him, he said: "Be seated; your rise has been my fall."

"His principal fault seems to have been the excess of that virtue which covers a multitude of sins. This betrayed him to so great an indulgence toward his servants, who made a corrupt use of it, that it stripped him of all those riches and honors which a long series of merits had heaped upon him."—Addi

son.

"Bacon was generous, easy, good natured, and naturally just; but he had the misfortune to be beset by domestic harpies who, in a manner, farmed out his office."- Guthrie.

d'Effiat, the Spanish Conde de Gondomar, expressed for him in his fallen fortunes the most exalted veneration. That the judges on the bench, that the members of both Houses of Parliament, even those who, at Buckingham's bidding, had passed against him that abominable sentence, concurred with the most eminent of their contemporaries, native and alien, is apparent in the failure of every attempt made to disturb his judicial decisions. These efforts failed because there was no injustice to overthrow, and there was no injustice to overthrow because there had been no corruption on the bench."-Dixon.

History presents to us no more pathetic figure than that of the great Lord Bacon beseeching in vain that he might not be compelled to close his career-a career of unexampled usefulness to the world-in ignominy. The authorities that condemned him remind us of a pack of wolves, turning upon and rending a wounded comrade.

V.

Let us now examine the internal evidences, presented in the Plays themselves, of Bacon's authorship.

a. A prominent characteristic of Bacon in his literary work was the frequency with which he invented new words. It is safe to say that no other writer, with possibly one exception, ever did so much to diversify and enrich our English tongue. We find many of these words actually taking shape before our eyes in the Promus, perhaps a bright nucleus from the Latin in a nebulous envelope of prefixes and suffixes, preparing to shine forever, with a radiance of its own, in human speech.

In this business of word-building, however, Bacon had a strange double. It is estimated that Shakespeare gave five thousand new words, inclusive of old words with new meanings, to our language. And these additions were also, like Bacon's, derived chiefly from the Latin. They were such as only a scholar could impose upon the king's vernacular.*

* Hallam calls attention to Shakespeare's fondness for words in their primitive meanings. He sees a student's instinct in this attempt, contrary in

b. Bacon had also a wonderful variety at his command in manner of writing. In this respect, he was a literary chameleon.

Abbott says of him:

"His style varied almost as much as his handwriting; but it was influenced more by the subject matter than by youth or old age. Few men have shown equal versatility in adapting their language to the slightest change of circumstance and purpose. His style depended upon whether he was addressing a king, or a great nobleman, or a philosopher, or a friend; whether he was composing a state paper, magnifying the prerogative, extolling truth, discussing studies, exhorting a judge, sending a New Year's present, or sounding a trumpet to prepare the way for the kingdom of man over nature."

It does not follow, of course, that because he had this "wonderful ductility," as Hallam calls it, therefore he wrote the Plays. The converse of the proposition, however, is worth noting, viz.: without it, he would have been disqualified for the task.

c. Again, Bacon was constantly making alterations in his writings, even after they had gone to press. Of the ten essays which he published in 1597, nearly all were more

many cases to popular usage, to keep our language true to its Latin roots. The following are a few examples: "Things base and vile, holding no quantity" (for value); "rivers, that have overborn their continents" (the continente ripa of Horace); "imagination all compact"; "something of great constancy" (for consistency); "sweet Pyramus translated there"; "the law of Athens, which by no means we may extenuate."

or less changed and enlarged for the edition of 1612. Those of 1612, including the ten before mentioned, were again enlarged for publication in 1625. It seems to have been almost impossible for an essay to get to the types a second time without passing through his reforming hand, in one instance actually losing identity in the transition.

This was precisely the fate of the Plays. Some of them underwent complete transformation between the quartos and the folio, becoming practically new compositions, and, what is very singular, working away from the requirements of the stage into forms more purely artistic and literary.

If there were two workshops, it is certain that one set of rules governed both.

d. Bacon's sense of humor, as has already been shown, was phenomenal, and yet it had one curb which it always obeyed. In his Essay of Discourse, he lays down the rule, among others, that religion should never be the butt of a jest. Accordingly, it is impossible to find, in all the wild, rollicking fun of the Plays, even a flippancy at the expense of the Church.

e. Bacon was very fond of puns. He not only handed down to posterity numerous specimens found in his reading, but he immortalized some of his own in the Apothegms. The Spanish Ambassador, a Jew, happening to leave England Easter morning, paid his parting respects to Bacon,