handling of it. They know by old experience that when they get
hold of a presumption-tadpole he is not going to STAY tadpole in
their history-tank; no, they know how to develop him into the giant
four-legged bullfrog of FACT, and make him sit up on his hams, and
puff out his chin, and look important and insolent and come-to-
stay; and assert his genuine simon-pure authenticity with a
thundering bellow that will convince everybody because it is so
loud. The thug is aware that loudness convinces sixty persons
where reasoning convinces but one. I wouldn’t be a thug, not even
if–but never mind about that, it has nothing to do with the
argument, and it is not noble in spirit besides. If I am better
than a thug, is the merit mine? No, it is His. Then to Him be the
praise. That is the right spirit.
They “presume” the lad severed his “presumed” connection with the
Stratford school to become apprentice to a butcher. They also
“presume” that the butcher was his father. They don’t know. There
is no written record of it, nor any other actual evidence. If it
would have helped their case any, they would have apprenticed him
to thirty butchers, to fifty butchers, to a wilderness of butchers-
-all by their patented method “presumption.” If it will help their
case they will do it yet; and if it will further help it, they will
“presume” that all those butchers were his father. And the week
after, they will SAY it. Why, it is just like being the past tense
of the compound reflexive adverbial incandescent hypodermic
irregular accusative Noun of Multitude; which is father to the
expression which the grammarians call Verb. It is like a whole
ancestry, with only one posterity.
To resume. Next, the young Bacon took up the study of law, and
mastered that abstruse science. From that day to the end of his
life he was daily in close contact with lawyers and judges; not as
a casual onlooker in intervals between holding horses in front of a
theatre, but as a practicing lawyer–a great and successful one, a
renowned one, a Launcelot of the bar, the most formidable lance in
the high brotherhood of the legal Table Round; he lived in the
law’s atmosphere thenceforth, all his years, and by sheer ability
forced his way up its difficult steeps to its supremest summit, the
Lord Chancellorship, leaving behind him no fellow craftsman
qualified to challenge his divine right to that majestic place.
When we read the praises bestowed by Lord Penzance and the other
illustrious experts upon the legal condition and legal aptnesses,
brilliances, profundities and felicities so prodigally displayed in
the Plays, and try to fit them to the history-less Stratford stage-
manager, they sound wild, strange, incredible, ludicrous; but when
we put them in the mouth of Bacon they do not sound strange, they
seem in their natural and rightful place, they seem at home there.
Please turn back and read them again. Attributed to Shakespeare of
Stratford they are meaningless, they are inebriate extravagancies–
intemperate admirations of the dark side of the moon, so to speak;
attributed to Bacon, they are admirations of the golden glories of
the moon’s front side, the moon at the full–and not intemperate,
not overwrought, but sane and right, and justified. “At every turn
and point at which the author required a metaphor, simile or
illustration, his mind ever turned FIRST to the law; he seems
almost to have THOUGHT in legal phrases; the commonest legal
phrases, the commonest of legal expressions were ever at the end of
his pen.” That could happen to no one but a person whose TRADE was
the law; it could not happen to a dabbler in it. Veteran mariners
fill their conversation with sailor-phrases and draw all their
similes from the ship and the sea and the storm, but no mere
PASSENGER ever does it, be he of Stratford or elsewhere; or could
do it with anything resembling accuracy, if he were hardy enough to
try. Please read again what Lord Campbell and the other great
authorities have said about Bacon when they thought they were