To consider thus is to consider too seriously.  The Baconians and Anti-Willians have ceased to deserve serious attention (if ever they did deserve it), and virtuous indignation, and all that kind of thing, when they ask people who care for poetry to “admit” that Ben wrote his verses “with his tongue in his cheek.”  Elsewhere, {253a} in place of Ben’s “tongue in his cheek,” Mr. Greenwood prefers to suggest that Ben “is here indulging in a little Socratic irony.”  Socrates “with his tongue in his cheek”!  Say “talking through his throat,” if one may accept the evidence of the author of Raffles, as to the idioms of burglars.

To return to criticism, we are to admit that Jonson was really writing “with his tongue in his cheek,” knowing that, as a fact, “Shakespeare” (the Great Unknown, the Bacon of the Baconians) “had remarkable classical attainments, and they, of course, open the door to the suggestion that the entire poem is capable of an ironical construction and esoteric interpretation.” {254a}

So this is Mr. Greenwood’s method of “explaining away” the memorable words.  He seems to conjecture that Will was not Shakespeare, not the author of the plays; that Jonson knew it; that his poem is, as a whole, addressed to Bacon, or to the Great Unknown, under his “nom de plume” of “William Shakespeare”; that the address to the “Swan of Avon” is a mere blind; and that Ben only alludes to his “Beloved,” the Stratford actor, when he tells his Beloved that his Beloved has “small Latin and less Greek.”  All the praise is for Bacon, or the Great Unknown (Mr. Harris), the jeer is for “his Beloved, the Author, Mr. William Shakespeare, And what he hath left Us.”

As far as I presume to understand this theory of the “tongue in the cheek,” of the “Socratic irony,” this is what Mr. Greenwood has to propose towards “explaining away” the evidence of Ben Jonson, in his famous commendatory verses.  When we can see through the dust of words we find that the “esoteric interpretation” of the commendatory verses is merely a reassertion of the general theory:  a man with small Latin and less Greek could not have written the plays and poems.  Therefore when Ben explicitly states that his Beloved, Mr. Shakespeare of Stratford, the Swan of Avon did write the plays, and had small Latin and less Greek, Ben meant that he did not write them, that they were written by somebody else who had plenty of Greek and Latin.  It is a strange logical method!  Mr. Greenwood merely reasserts his paradox, and proves it, like certain Biblical critics of more orthodoxy than sense, by aid of his private “esoteric method of interpretation.”  Ben, we say, about 1630, in prose and in cold blood, and in a humour of criticism without the old rancour and envy, or the transitory poetic enthusiasm, pens a note on Shakespeare in a volume styled “Timber, or Discoveries, made upon men and Matter, as they have flowed out of his daily Readings; or had their reflux to his