CHAPTER XIII. "Robert Greene." We have just found that the first five letters of the cipher inscription, to the right of the dash, in "T-E," on the second line, inserting an h in the "T-E," were "-hE Dus" and that placing a b under the capitals and an a under the other letters gave us "a bb a a" which is the cipher letter N, and was used to make the word AND. But if we reverse this, we have “a a b ba," and if we turn to the Bacon alphabet, we find this stands for G. So that the symbol which is N, read from left to right, is G read from right to left. There is a fragment of the text running from the dash in "T-E," on the second line, to the dash in the middle of the word "Enclo-Ased" on the same line; and those five letters, which precede the last named dash, “Enclo-," give us the symbol "ba a a a," which is the cipher letter R. If we will now commence at the end of the second line, and divide the text into groups of five letters each, we will have: To diGG|T(h)E Dust Enc|lo-Ased HERE. In these two E's we have the third and fourth letters of the word GREENE. And returning again to the dash in "T-E," on the second line, we have: -h E Dus which is equivalent to abbaa, which is the symbol for N; which gives us GREEN. And as aabaa is E from either end, we take again the E which gave us the fourth cipher letter of GREEN, and reading it in reverse order we have the full name of GREENE. No suggestion has ever been made, before this discovery, that Francis Bacon had anything to do with the plays which go by the name of Robert Greene. Greene was born at Ipswich, in 1560; one year before Francis Bacon saw the light in London. Both were students at the University of Cambridge, and probably at the same time. Bacon left there in 1575, and Greene took his degree in 1578; when he was entered there we do not know. Bacon traveled in Europe from about 1576 until the death of his father in 1579. In 1578 Greene was also traveling abroad. Greene returned, ruined by the dissipations he had learned upon the continent; and thereafter earned a precarious living by his pen, around the play-houses, writing novels and plays. He died in great poverty and degradation in 1592, the very year in which, on March 3, appeared, according to Halliwell Phillipps, the first "Shakespeare play;" and one year before Christopher Marlowe passed away, slain in a drunken brawl. Shakspere and Greene are connected by the fact that the "Winter's Tale" of the former is simply an amplified, poetical copy of Greene's prose novel, "Pandosta;" the identity descending even to the minutest details. The geographical blunder, so often referred to, in "The Winter's Tale," of giving Bohemia a sea-coast, is taken from "Pandosta." It is somewhat remarkable that a dramatist, like Shakspere, should make a play out of a novel, written by another man, his contemporary, so popular that it had passed through fourteen editions during the life of its author. We could not imagine Rudyard Kipling re-writing and enlarging "She." But if the writings of both Greene and Shakspere emanated from the brain of a third party, that party would feel free to work over his own material as often as he pleased. Among Greene's writings were "The History of Orlando Furioso," which has been described as "a stepping stone to Lear and Hamlet;" and "Alphonsus-King of Arragon," which is very much in the style of Marlowe. There was also "The History of Friar Bacon and Friar Bungay;" which the Encyclopædia Britannica refers to as "a comedy brimful of amusing action and genial fun, and at the same time containing a domestic love story of unsurpassed freshness and brightness." The intellectual activity of Francis Bacon began at an early age. At sixteen he was speculating on the laws of the imagination; and yet when the first Shakespeare play appeared in 1592, he was thirty-one years of age. What was he doing during the intervening fifteen years? I have shown in the "Great Cryptogram," p. 939, that he had, prior to 1592, produced a whole body of writings, as extensive as the Shakespeare plays themselves. The cipher on the tomb-stone tells us that we are to add to the catalogue there given the writings of Robert Greene. CHAPTER XIV. "Christopher Marlowe." We have seen how that curious little fragment of the text, on the second line, beginning with a period and ending with a period, thus: "Enclo-Ased HE.Re.", plays an important part, altogether out of proportion to its brevity. And we must expect that the cunning intellect which designed it would utilize it backward and forward, from left to right, and from right to left, and in all possible shapes and methods. We have already seen the important part which ".Re." performed in the production of the word PLAYES; but we have not yet reached the limit of its possibilities. Suppose we begin at the period, at the front of that baby fragment of a cipher “.Re.”, and put, as usual, a b under the "R" and an a under the terminal "e", and move backward toward the beginning of the line, the second line; then we have "ab." Where are the other three letters necessary to make a cipher letter? Having begun at the last period, let us start again from the |