’My Lord,—­If any man has ever studied the writings of Bacon, I have.  For twenty-five years I have done little else.  If any man is keenly alive to his marvellous mental powers, I am that man.  I am also deeply read in the plays attributed to Shakespeare, and I think I am in a condition to say that, whoever was the real author, it was not Bacon.’

That this is exactly what Spedding would have said we know from the letter he wrote on the subject to Mr. Holmes, reprinted in Essays and Discussions, and it completely upsets the whole scheme of arrangement of Lord Penzance’s summing-up, which proceeds on the easy footing that the more difficulties you throw in Shakespeare’s path the smoother becomes Bacon’s.

That there are difficulties in Shakespeare’s path, some things very hard to explain, must be admitted.  Lord Penzance makes the most of these.  It is, indeed, a most extraordinary thing that anybody should have had the mother-wit to write the plays traditionally assigned to Shakespeare.  Where did he get it from?  How on earth did the plays get themselves written?  Where, when, and how did the author pick up his multifarious learnings?  Lord Penzance, good, honest man, is simply staggered by the extent of the play-wright’s information.  The plays, so he says, ‘teem with erudition,’ and can only have been written by someone who had the classics at his finger-ends, modern languages on the tip of his tongue—­by someone who had travelled far and read deeply; and, above all, by a man who had spent at least a year in a conveyancer’s chambers!  And yet, when this has been said, would Lord Penzance have added that the style and character of the playwright is the style and character of a really learned man of his period!  Can anything less like such a style be imagined?  Once genius is granted, heaven-born genius, a mother-wit beyond the dreams of fancy, and then plain humdrum men, ordinary judicial intelligences, will do well to be on their guard against it.  ‘Beware—­beware! he is fooling thee.’  Shakespeare’s genius has simply befooled Lord Penzance.  Seafaring men, after reading The Tempest, are ready to maintain that its author must have been for at least a year before the mast.  As for Shakespeare’s law, which has taken in so many matter-of-fact practitioners, one can now refer to Ben Jonson’s evidence in Hall v.  Russell, where that great dramatist has no difficulty in showing that if none but a lawyer could have written Shakespeare’s plays, a lawyer alone could have preached Thomas Adams’s sermons.  Judge Willis’s profound knowledge of sound old divinity has served him here in good stead.  The fact is it is simply impossible to exaggerate the quick-wittedness and light-heartedness of a great literary genius.  The absorbing power, the lightning-like faculty of apprehension, the instant recognition of the uses to which any fact or fancy can be put, the infinite number and delicacy of the mental feelers,