If the reader will turn to the play of Henry V., IV, 8, he will find in this line "with charity enclosed in clay," the word spelled, in the First Folio, as here given. The same method of spelling the word is used in "We by Anthony are all enclosed," (Jul. Cæs., V, 3); and "Titinius is enclosed around about," ibid.

There was no excuse, therefore, in the custom of the period, for splitting this word, on the tomb-stone, into two parts, and heading the last fragment with a capital A. But we shall see the necessity for this course as we proceed.

To make the frame-work of the cipher plainer, we will repeat the inscription with the dashes made more conspicuous.

"Good Frend for Jesus SAKE forbeare

To diGG T-E Dust Enclo-Ased HE.Re.

Blese be T-E Man

T

T

Y spares T-Es Stones

And curst be He Y moves my Bones."

The lines may be thus represented:

66

It will be found as we proceed that these four dashes are the boundary posts of the cipher; supplemented by the periods in the middle and at the end of the word— "HE.Re."

CHAPTER IX.

The Word "SHAKE."

Mr. Black, as we have shown, found that if the letters constituting the first line were divided into groups of five letters each, as proposed in Bacon's De Augmentis, and a b placed under the capital letters and an a under the other letters, we would have this result:

"Good Frend for Jesus SAKE forbeare"
baaa baaaa aaa baaaa bbbb aaaaaaaa

If now we apply to these symbols the Baconian alphabet, we have these results:

This last combination, baaaa, stands for R, if read from left to right, or B if read from right to left. It then becomes aaaab.

The first thing that occurred to me, based on my cipher studies in the Plays, where the words move alternately up and down the columns, was, that it was not likely that the cipher would go straight ahead along the line. This would be too simple a scheme for the subtlety of the great

cryptographer-the most penetrating and ingenious intellect that ever lived.

It seemed to me that if S was the first letter of the inner sentence, A would be the third letter, and E the fifth letter.

What letters could come between S, A and E and make a word?

And then it came to me that they might possibly be H and K; and that would give us :

ShAkE.

If there is a cipher on Shakspere's tomb-stone, as seemed certain, and that cipher is precisely the one invented by Francis Bacon, when a youth in Paris, then it follows that it must have been put there by Bacon, or some of his friends, to tell some hidden story. The dead man, Shakspere, was not likely to have prepared, before he died, a cipher for his own grave-stone, and framed it according to the formula of the philosopher of Verulam. If Shakspere was Shakespeare he would have had no secret to reveal in a cipher. All that would have been needed on his grave-stone-so far as he was concerned,—was his own name; and that,—strange to say,—did not appear upon it!

Now, if Francis Bacon, or any one for him, desired to put a secret writing over the corpse of Shakspere, it must have been something about the man Shakspere, or his alleged plays. And hence the cipher story would very naturally contain the word "Shakspere" or "Shakespeare;" for the former spelling seemed to have represented the man of Stratford, and the latter form his

nom de plume, or the body of writings which were attributed to him.

But where do we get the letters H and K which, with S A E, will make up the first syllable, SHAKE? It is clear there is no K on the first line; and while there is an H, it is not in a position to be inserted between S and A. We must look elsewhere.

There is that pillar-mark, that boundary stone, on the second line, formed by the dash between the T and the E.

"To diGG T-E Dust Enclo-Ased HE.Re".

Is this "our butt and very sea-mark?" Do we turn back from that point? Is this the complement of the first subdivision of the first line?

Let us see:

Take that combination of letters: "To diGG T-." T—.” If we place under each capital letter a b, as directed by Bacon, beginning at the dash, we have this result:

diGGT
aabbb

And this is Bacon's letter H!

This gives us, with the first letter of the first line and the second letter of the second line, the letters:

SHA

The question comes, where is the K, which, with the third letter of the first line, will make:

SHAKE

As A, the third letter of the word, Shake, came from the first line, and began where the first letter S termi

nated, it follows that the letter K should come from the second line, and should begin where the first letter from the dash, (H,) terminated.

But the letter H: "diGG T-," moving away from the dash mark, left but two letters, "To," before it reached the beginning of the second line; and to obtain the other three letters, necessary to make up the group of five, which constitutes a cipher letter, we must go elsewhere. And where is it more natural to go than to that same first line, with which we have been interlocking, to obtain the letters S, H and A?

But as the movement is away from the dash, then the "To" is to be read in an inverse order, and that will give us a b.

We go to the beginning of the first line, and take the first three letters thereof, still progressing backward, as we did with "To," and we have "oo G." Place an a under the small letters and b under the large letter G, and we have a a b. Add the first two letters to this, and we have

a baab,

which is Bacon's sign for K!

Insert this between the A and the E, on the first line, and we have: