out of the odd forty just referred to, and ten extra plays which had never before been in print, and about six of which there is a very scanty Shakespearean tradition.  Of the twenty-six old plays, seventeen had been printed in small Quartos, possibly surreptitiously, in Shakespeare’s lifetime, but the Folio does not reprint from these Quartos, but from enlarged, amended, and enormously improved copies.  Messrs. Heminge and Condell, the editor of this priceless treasure, the First Folio, wrote a long-winded dedication to Lords Pembroke and Montgomery, which contains but one pertinent passage, in which they ask their readers to believe that it had been the office of the editors to collect and publish the author’s ‘mere writings,’ he being dead, and to offer them, not ‘maimed and deformed,’ in surreptitious and stolen copies, but ’cured and perfect of their limbs and all the rest, absolute in their numbers as he conceived them, who as he was a happie imitator of Nature was a most gentle expresser of it.  His mind and hand went together, and what he thought, he uttered with that easiness, that we have scarce received from him a blot in his papers.’

From whose custody did those ‘papers’ come?  Where had they been all the seven years?  Of what did they consist?  If in truth unblotted, all the seventeen Quartos as well as the new plays must have been printed from fair manuscript copies.  From whom were these unblotted copies received, and what became of them?  The silence of these players is irritating and perplexing,—­though, possibly, the explanation of the mystery, were it forthcoming, would be, as often happens, of the simplest.  It may be that these unblotted copies were in the theatre library all the time.

Whether these interrogatories, now unanswerable, raise doubts in the mind of sufficient potency to destroy the tradition of centuries, and to prevent us from sharing the conviction of Milton, of Dryden, of Pope, and Johnson that Shakespeare was the author of Shakespeare’s plays must be left for individual consideration.  But, however destructive these doubts may prove, they do not go a yard of the way to let in Bacon.

Once more I will quote Spedding, for he, of all the moderns, by virtue of his taste and devouring studies, is the best qualified to speak: 

’Aristotle was an extraordinary man.  Plato was an extraordinary man.  That two men each severally so extraordinary should have been living at the same time in the same place was a very extraordinary thing.  But would it diminish the wonder to suppose the two to be one?  So I say of Bacon and Shakespeare.  That a human being possessed of the faculties necessary to make a Shakespeare should exist is extraordinary.  That a human being possessed of the necessary faculties to make Bacon should exist is extraordinary.  That two such human beings should have been living in London at the same time was more extraordinary still.  But that one man should have existed