clear, perfect, and complete as possible, that every one may be satisfied. That this argument may have full force, all possibility of plagiarism, borrowing, or imitation, must be excluded. In the several instances which have already been stated, the fact has been made to appear, as it will be in many more, that the works of Bacon, in which the most evident parallelism is found, were not printed until after the plays in question had appeared; and this, of course, excludes the possibility that Shakespeare could have drawn from Bacon, in these instances; and this is enough effectually to establish the entire proposition. On the other hand, is it possible that Bacon may have borrowed from William Shakespeare? The very question would seem to be next to absurd. But let us look at the matter. Francis Bacon had been four years at the bar, and was twenty-five years of age, when William Shakespeare is supposed to have come to London, and joined the theatre as an underactor, in 1586-7, at the age of twenty-two. He was already a finished scholar, well stored in all the learning of the ancients, or of his own time, an accomplished master in English and Latin composition, a skilful observer and interpreter of Nature in all her departments, familiar with the manners of the highest society, and, in a word, well-furnished at all points for a beginning in this kind of writing; and to suppose such a man would have any occasion to borrow resources of thought, art, style, manner, or diction, from an unlearned under-actor of the Globe Theatre, would be to conceive it possible for a rich man to be made richer by plundering a beggar. So, when, as in the story of the soothsayer, the story of Julius Cæsar and the crown, Aristotle's morals, the doctrine of witches, incantations, visions, prophecy, feigned history, and the immateriate virtues and secret sympathies and antipathies of things, in metaphysical ideas and scientific knowledge, in acquaintance with men and manners, with philosophy, history, and poetry, and in acquisitions of every sort, we find more in Bacon than is to be found in the plays themselves, and more than William Shakespeare could possibly have possessed, together with genius, art, wit, ability, and leisure enough to make the necessary use of his own in the way that pleased him best, it becomes utterly preposterous to imagine he was a plagiarist or an imitator of Shakespeare. Again, in several instances, as in the case of the "Macbeth" and the "Antony and Cleopatra" as compared with the Natural History and the Intellectual Globe, the "Romeo and Juliet" compared with the Fables of Cupid and Nemesis, the "Comedy of Errors" and "Midsummer Night's Dream" compared with the Masques, and many others, considering the dates of publication and approximate times of composition, it is plain that the author must have been engaged upon the corresponding works, at about the same times, with scarcely a possibility of plagiarism either way; and as more is found in Bacon's works than in the plays where the resemblances are greatest, it is a necessary conclusion, not only that Bacon did not borrow from Shakespeare, nor Shakespeare from him, otherwise than as Shakespeare was Bacon himself, but also, that he was himself the author of both the poetry and the prose. These works appeared from time to time, almost yearly, during a period of twenty-five years or more; and it would be idle to imagine a continuous plagiarism of one author upon another, or a reciprocal exchange between them, for such a length of time, in works of the highest order like these. In both writings, the mode of thinking and the style of composition are incorporate with the man, and completely sui generis. No writer of the time, neither Ben Jonson, nor Marlow, nor Raleigh, nor Wotton, Donne, or Herbert, whose poetry approaches nearest, perhaps, of any of that age to the Shakespearean vein, can be brought into any doubtful comparison with this author. Nor are these similitudes any merely borrowed gems set in a meaner gold. And what should be finally conclusive of the whole matter is, the profound reflection, with which the learned writer, who, in fact, first made this discovery, sums up her very luminous and eloquent view of the subject, namely, that in him, we find "one, at least, furnished for that last and ripest proof of learning, which the drama, in the unmiraculous order of human development, must constitute; that proof of it, in which philosophy returns from history, from its noblest fields, and from her last analysis, with the secret and the material of the creative synthesis, with the secret and material of art." 1 The following instances of striking resemblances, in particular words and phrases, lying beyond the range of accidental coincidence, or common usage, and not elsewhere made the subject of special comment, have been collated, and will be given here in one body, by way of sample of the innumerable similitudes and identities that everywhere pervade these works; for we, too, " will undertake, by collating the styles, to judge whether he were the author or no." "God hath framed the mind of man as a mirrour or glass, capable of the image of the universal world."— Adv., II. 9.2 "You do carry two glasses or mirrours of State."— Speech, VII. 259. "If there be a mirrour in the world worthy to hold men's eyes, it is that country."- New Atlantis, II. 851. "Give me leave to set before you two glasses, such as certainly the like never met in one age; the glass of France, and the glass of England, And my lords, I cannot let pass, but in these glasses which I speak of, to show you two things."— Charge, II. (Phil.) 389. "That which I have propounded to myself is, . . . to show you your true shape in a glass, . . . one made by the reflection of your own words and actions." - Letter to Coke, V. 403. -"whose end, both at the first, and now, was, and is, to hold, as 'twere, the mirrour up to nature; to show virtue her own feature, scorn her own image, and the very age and body of the time his form and pressure." Ham., Act III. Sc. 2. 1 Delia Bacon; Putnam's Magazine, Jan. 1856, p. 19. 2 The references by figures alone are to Montagu's Works of Bacon, Lond., -"to make true direction of him his semblable is his mirrour."-Ham. "Whose wisdom was a mirrour to the wisest." — Hen. VIII., Act III. Sc. 8. -"two mirrours of his princely semblance.” — Rich. III., Act III. Sc. 1. "You go not, till I set you up a glass Wherein you may see the inmost part of you."-Ham., Act III. Sc. 4. "Nor feels not what he owes but by reflexion." —Tro. and Cr., Act III. Sc. 3. "Good Lord, Madam, how wisely and aptly can you speak and discern of physic ministered to the body, and consider not that there is the like occasion of physic ministered to the mind." — Apology. -"the particular remedies which learning doth minister to all the diseases of the mind."— II. 82. “Let that be a sleeping honour awhile and cure the Queen's mind in that point."- Advice to Essex. Macb. Throw physic to the dogs, I'll none of it." Macb., Act V. Sc. 3. "But perhaps you will ask the question whether it be not better,-. Yet it is a greater dignity of mind to bear evils by fortitude and judgment, than by a kind of absenting and alienation of the mind from things present to things future, for that it is to hope. . . . For neither is there always matter of hope, and if there be, yet if it fail but in part, it doth wholly overthrow the constancy and resolution of the mind;-... that you have out of a watchful and strong discourse of the mind set down the better success, ... so that this be a work of the understanding and judgment. . . . You have not dwelt upon the very muse and forethought of the good to come." -Med. Sac., I. 69. "He did now more seriously think of the world to come."— Hen. VII. -"Owing to the premature and forward haste of the understanding, and its jumping or flying to generalities.” — Nov. Org., § 64. "And first of all it is more than time that there were an end and surcease made of this unmodest and deformed manner of writing, whereby matter of religion is handled in the style of the stage." — Church Contr., VII. 32. "Ham. To be, or not to be; that is the question: Whether 't is nobler in the mind —.... And makes us rather bear the ills we have, Than fly to others that we know not of? Thus conscience doth make cowards of us all; __" and catch, Ham., Act III. Sc. 1. With his surcease, success; but that this blow "the advancement of unworthy persons."-Essay, XV. That patient merit of the unworthy takes."-Ham., Act III. Sc. 1. "Cardan saith that weeping and sighing are the chief purgers of grief.". Sp. VII. 306. "If I could purge it of two sorts of errors, whereof the one with frivolous disputations, confutations, and verbosities, the other with blind experiments, and auricular traditions and impostures, hath committed so many spoils." - Letter, 1591. "When the times themselves are set upon waste and spoil."- XIII. 269. -"let's purge this choler."— Rich. II., Act I. Sc. 1. "The king is not at the palace; he is gone aboard a new ship to purge melancholy, and air himself.". Win. Tale, Act IV. Sc. 3. "To purge him of that humour."-Win. Tale, Act II. Sc. 8. "I can purge myself of many." -1 Hen. IV., Act III. Sc. 2. "We shall be called purgers." -Jul. Cæs., Act 11. Sc. 1. 66 'Are burnt and purg'd away.” — Ham., Act I. Sc. 5. "And make Time's spoils despised everywhere.". "Run reeking o'er the lives of men, as if 'T were a perpetual spoil."- Cor., Act II. Sc. 2. Sonnet c. "For this giant bestrideth the sea, and I would take and snare him by the foot on this side." Duels, VI. 123. "Why, man, he doth bestride the narrow world Like a Colossus." - Jul. Cæs., Act 1. Sc. 2. "Nevertheless, since I do perceive that this cloud hangs over the House." -Speech, VI. 15. |