to mush in it. Was there any doubt as to who had made that mighty
trail? Were there a dozen claimants? Were there two? No–the
people knew who it was that had been along there: there was only
one Hercules.
There has been only one Shakespeare. There couldn’t be two;
certainly there couldn’t be two at the same time. It takes ages to
bring forth a Shakespeare, and some more ages to match him. This
one was not matched before his time; nor during his time; and
hasn’t been matched since. The prospect of matching him in our
time is not bright.
The Baconians claim that the Stratford Shakespeare was not
qualified to write the Works, and that Francis Bacon was. They
claim that Bacon possessed the stupendous equipment–both natural
and acquired–for the miracle; and that no other Englishman of his
day possessed the like; or, indeed, anything closely approaching
it.
Macaulay, in his Essay, has much to say about the splendor and
horizonless magnitude of that equipment. Also, he has synopsized
Bacon’s history: a thing which cannot be done for the Stratford
Shakespeare, for he hasn’t any history to synopsize. Bacon’s
history is open to the world, from his boyhood to his death in old
age–a history consisting of known facts, displayed in minute and
multitudinous detail; FACTS, not guesses and conjectures and might-
have-beens.
Whereby it appears that he was born of a race of statesmen, and had
a Lord Chancellor for his father, and a mother who 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.” It is the atmosphere we
are reared in that determines how our inclinations and aspirations
shall tend. The atmosphere furnished by the parents to the son in
this present case was an atmosphere saturated with learning; with
thinkings and ponderings upon deep subjects; and with polite
culture. It had its natural effect. Shakespeare of Stratford was
reared in a house which had no use for books, since its owners, his
parents, were without education. This may have had an effect upon
the son, but we do not know, because we have no history of him of
an informing sort. There were but few books anywhere, in that day,
and only the well-to-do and highly educated possessed them, they
being almost confined to the dead languages. “All the valuable
books then extant in all the vernacular dialects of Europe would
hardly have filled a single shelf”–imagine it! The few existing
books were in the Latin tongue mainly. “A person who was ignorant
of it was shut out from all acquaintance–not merely with Cicero
and Virgil, but with the most interesting memoirs, state papers,
and pamphlets of his own time”–a literature necessary to the
Stratford lad, for his fictitious reputation’s sake, since the
writer of his Works would begin to use it wholesale and in a most
masterly way before the lad was hardly more than out of his teens
and into his twenties.
At fifteen Bacon was sent to the university, and he spent three
years there. Thence he went to Paris in the train of the English
Ambassador, and there he mingled daily with the wise, the cultured,
the great, and the aristocracy of fashion, during another three
years. A total of six years spent at the sources of knowledge;
knowledge both of books and of men. The three spent at the
university were coeval with the second and last three spent by the
little Stratford lad at Stratford school supposedly, and
perhapsedly, and maybe, and by inference–with nothing to infer
from. The second three of the Baconian six were “presumably” spent
by the Stratford lad as apprentice to a butcher. That is, the
thugs presume it–on no evidence of any kind. Which is their way,
when they want a historical fact. Fact and presumption are, for
business purposes, all the same to them. They know the difference,
but they also know how to blink it. They know, too, that while in
history-building a fact is better than a presumption, it doesn’t
take a presumption long to bloom into a fact when THEY have the