Of Bacon's mother, Macaulay writes: "She was distinguished both as a linguist and a theologian. She corresponded in Greek with Bishop Jewell, and translated his Apologia from the Latin so correctly that neither he nor Archbishop Parker could suggest a single alteration. She also translated a series of sermons on fate and free-will from the Tuscan of Bernardo Ochino. Her sister, Katherine, wrote Latin hexameters and pentameters which would appear with credit in the Musa Etonenses. Mildred, another sister, was described by Roger Ascham as the best Greek scholar among the young women of England, Lady Jane Grey always excepted." 3. Bacon had a strong desire for public employment, due, it is fair to infer, to the consciousness that he possessed exceptional powers for the service of the state. It was a creditable ambition, though the methods then in vogue to gratify it would, according to modern standards, hardly be deemed consistent with personal honor. It is certain that the reputation of being a poet, and particularly a dramatic poet, writing for pay, would have compromised him at court. In those days play-acting and play-writing were considered scarcely respectable. The first theatre was erected in London in 1575, ten or twelve years only before the earliest production of Hamlet. The Government, in the interest of public morals, frowned upon the performThe Lord Mayor, in 1597, at the very time when the greatest of the Shakespeare Plays were coming out, ances. denounced the theatre as a "place for vagrants, thieves, horse-stealers, contrivers of treason, and other idle and dangerous persons." Taine speaks of the stage in Shakespeare's day as "degraded by the brutalities of the crowd, who not seldom would stone the actors, and by the severities of the magistrates, who would sometimes condemn them to lose their ears." He thus describes the play-house as it then existed : "On a dirty site on the banks of the Thames rose the principal theatre, the Globe, a sort of hexagonal tower, surrounded by a muddy ditch, on which was hoisted a red flag. The common people could enter as well as the rich; there were six-penny, twopenny, even penny seats; but they could not see it without money. If it rained, and it often rains in London, the people in the pit butchers, mercers, bakers, sailors, apprentices-received the streaming rain upon their heads. I suppose they did not trouble themselves about it; it was not so long since that they began to pave the streets of London, and when men like these have had experience of sewers and puddles, they are not afraid of catching cold. "While waiting for the piece, they amuse themselves after their fashion-drink beer, crack nuts, eat fruits, howl, and now and then resort to their fists; they have been known to fall upon the actors and turn the theatre upside down. At other times, when they were dissatisfied, they went to the tavern to give the poet a hiding, or toss him in a blanket. When the beer took effect, there was a great upturned barrel in the pit, a peculiar receptacle for general use. The smell rises, and then comes the cry, 'Burn the juniper!' They burn some in a plate on the stage, and the heavy smoke fills the air. Certainly, the folk there assembled could scarcely get disgusted at anything, and cannot have had sensitive noses." It may easily be imagined that Bacon, considering his high birth, aristocratic connections, and aspirancy for official honors, and already projecting a vast philosophical reform for the human race, would have shrunk from open alliance with an institution like this. 4. To his confidential friend, Sir Toby Matthew, Bacon was in the habit of sending copies of his books as they came from the press. On one of these occasions he forwards, with an air of mystery and half apologetically, certain works which he describes as the product of his "recreation," called by him, also, curiously, “works of the alphabet,” upon which not even Mrs. Pott's critical acumen has been able to throw, from sources other than conjecture, any light. In a letter addressed to Bacon by Matthew while abroad, in acknowledgment of some "great and noble token of favor," we find this sentence: The most prodigious wit that ever I knew of my nation and of this side of the sea, is of your Lordship's name, though he be known by another." It has been suggested, not without reason, that the "token of favor" sent to Matthew was the folio edition of the Shakespeare Plays, published in 1623. It is certain. that Matthew's letter was written subsequently to January 1621.* 27, 5. Bacon kept a commonplace book which he called a Promus, now in the archives of the British Museum. It consisted of several large sheets, on which from time to time he jotted down all kinds of suggestive and striking phrases, proverbs, aphorisms, metaphors, and quaint turns of expression, found in the course of his reading, and available for future use. With the exception of the proverbs from the French, the entries, one thousand six hundred and fifty-five in number, are in his own handwriting. These verbal treasures are scattered, as thick as the leaves of Vallombrosa, throughout the Plays. Mrs. Pott finds, by actual count, four thousand four hundred and four instances in which they are reproduced there-some of them, in more or less covert or modified form, over and over again. We * Various attempts have been made to break the force of this testimony. It has been urged that, as Bacon had been raised to the peerage, he had acquired another name under which to publish his works. This seems too frivolous for serious remark. It has also been conjectured that Matthew may have been in Madrid, where a certain Francisco de Quevedo was writing under a pseudonym. Unfortunately for this theory, the Spaniard (who has never become distinguished, so far as we know, for " prodigious wit") retained the name of Francisco, the only part that suggested Bacon's, in his pseudonym. The simple truth is, Matthew's description exactly fits the Shakespeare Plays and Bacon's literary alias. Indeed, on this ground alone we might ask, if it were legally permissible, that the court instruct the jury to find for plaintiff. can almost see the architect at work, imbedding these gems of beauty and wisdom in the wonderful structures to which, according to Matthew, he gave the name of another. While they appear to a limited extent in Bacon's prose works, they seem to have constituted a store-house of materials for particular use in the composition of the Plays. Two of these entries reappear in a single sentence in Romeo and Juliet. One is the unusual phrase, “golden sleep; " and the second, the new word, "uproused," then added for the first time, like hundreds of others in the Plays, out of the same mint, to the verbal coinage of the realm. "But where unbruisèd youth with unstuffed brain Thou art uproused by some distemperature.”—ii., 3. To one familiar with the laws of chance, these coincidences will fall little short of a mathematical demonstration. Perhaps the most interesting feature of the Promus is the group of salutatory phrases it contains, such as goodmorning, good-day, and good-night, which had not then come into use in England, but which occur four hundred and nineteen times in the Plays. These salutations, however, were common at that time in France, where Bacon, |
