tation and in reading. As food is necessary to preserve life, and summer showers to refresh the earth, so is beauty needful to invigorate his mind. His love for him is like the love of a miser for his gold, at one time proud of his delineation, then fearful that he may be robbed of his attractiveness by others. He is pleased to contemplate him in private; he affords food for conversation, and like a feast which fills him with delicacies, feasts his eyes and heart to the full in theatrical representations. "And by and by clean starved for a look" (when sometime absent from his thought he becomes eager for his recall). And "day by day" all his delight is in his presence, and all his misery in his absence.

SONNET 76.

Why is my verse so barren of new pride,
So far from variation or quick change?
Why, with the time, do I not glance aside

To new-found methods and to compounds strange?
Why write I still all one, ever the same,

And keep invention in a noted weed,

That every word doth almost tell My name,

Showing their birth, and where they did proceed ?

O, know, sweet love, I always write of You,
And You and love are still My argument;
So all My best is dressing old words new,
Spending again what is already spent:
For as the sun is daily new and old,

So is My Love still telling what is told.

In this stanza he tells his name. "Why is my verse so barren of new pride, so far from variation.

and quick change?" (why in this poem does he not announce some new achievements of his pen, which like those of other writers for the stage sacrifice truth and beauty to the public taste for variety and sudden changes and effects in theatrical portraiture? Why not, in imitation of them, find something new and strange, and compound. a play instead of adhering to the same straightforward course with which he commenced, of presenting the one great theme, Truth, in all that he writes?) "And keep invention in a noted weed, that every word doth almost tell my name. " (Bacon found constant use in all his writings, as well those he acknowledged as the plays attributed to Shakespeare, for the word "invention." It contained wider meaning for him than any other word in the language, and the offices attributed to it in philosophy are fully analyzed and discussed in the "Advancement of Learning." Its greatest power was in origination, and understood in that sense, it was the power by which the plays were created). This he says he kept in a "noted weed." The only weed of which history gives account in Elizabeth's time was tobacco. It was introduced into England by some of the crews who returned from the first expedition to Virginia, fitted out by Sir Walter Raleigh. Its use by Raleigh soon popularized it among the nobility and upper classes. When James I. ascended the throne, smoking was so prevalent

that in dread of its effects upon his subjects, the king himself denounced its use in a strong essay entitled "A Counterblast against Tobacco." Camden also published a powerful argument against its use..

Orthography in those days was unsettled. Words were spelled by sound rather than by rule, and generally the best scholars adopted rules of their own. The word "tobacco," by its various forms of pronunciation, was blessed with an orthography that would fill a small dictionary. The following furnish a few of the varieties: Tobaco, tobacco, tobaca, tobacy, tobaccy, 'bacco, 'bacy, etc., ad infinitum. The second syllable was as perfect then as now.

Bacon, by confession in this stanza, must have enjoyed his pipe. It soothed him, quieted his nerves, and favored that composure of the faculties needful to reflection and invention. It was undoubtedly his habit to resort to it in the hours. given to the creation of his great dramas. It was in the placidity which it imparted to his system and the meditative mood it inspired that he virtually "kept invention." His thoughts were clearer, his plots better in development, and his poesy more exuberant than they would have been. without this sedative.

In every form which spelling gave to tobacco, it almost told the name of Bacon. This evidence of the true origin of the dramas of Shakespeare,

written by their author and published nearly three centuries ago, during Shakespeare's life, cannot by any force of logic or ingenuity be destroyed. It is unargumentable. It imparts the force of truth to this entire history, and relieves it of the suggestion, improbable in itself, that Shakespeare, for aught that appears, might have written it himself. No other name can fill the requirements of the line but that of Bacon. No anagram could be constructed which would avoid that conclusion connected with the lines preceding and following it. How plain, then, does it appear that Bacon alone was the author, when we connect the announcement made in this stanza with those parts of the poem which describe his compulsory attendance upon the queen, after his appointment as counsel extraordinary; his long months of suspense, sorrow, and disappointment spent in the effort to obtain the office of solicitorgeneral, and his transfer of the dramas to "Will" (Shakespeare),—matters which could not possi-bly have formed any part of Shakespeare's life.

Aside from other evidences the poem may contain, the appearance of Bacon's name shows a deliberate purpose in him to reveal himself to posterity as the author of the dramas. He would not otherwise have written this stanza, or for that matter this poem, for both were unnecessary for any other purpose. The poem, with the exception of a few stanzas, has no special merit, and being

entirely unintelligible and silly without interpretation of some kind, no such person as the author of the great dramas would have written it for mere pastime. All former interpretations it has received have been nearly as incomprehensible as the bare poem itself. They tell no credible, no consecutive, story; make Shakespeare a licentious fool, and hold him up before the world as the vilest kind of a debauchee, and most unprincipled of men among men, on his own confession. This cannot be true. Regarding it as an allegory which contains the history of the great dramas, and those parts of it which cursorily considered convey a prurient meaning, as parts illustrative of the circumstances and conditions under which those dramas were written, it becomes a work of the greatest possible importance, full of interest and worth, and invaluable in the history it reveals of the greatest works in all literature.

Half the persons accused of and tried for the highest crimes known to our laws have been convicted and punished on much weaker testimony than is herein contained in proof of Bacon's authorship. Great lawyer as he was, Bacon was not unmindful of this, and shaped his narrative accordingly. The only fault that can be found with it is, that he succeeded too well in eluding detection, and reared an image which has been so long and so universally idolized, that it has become easier for the world to cling to the false worship than to receive the real divinity.