But, says Mr. Greenwood, “if we could only get to the back of Jonson’s mind, we should find that there was some efficient cause operating to induce him to give the best possible send-off to that celebrated venture.” {260a}

Ben was much in the habit of giving “sendoffs” of great eloquence to poetic “ventures” now forgotten.  What could “the efficient cause” be in the case of the Folio?  At once Mr. Greenwood has recourse to Bacon; he cannot, do what he will, keep Bacon “out of the Memorial.”  Ben was with Bacon at Gorhambury, on Bacon’s sixtieth birthday (January 22, 1621).  Ben wrote verses about the Genius of the old house,

“Thou stand’st as if some mystery thou didst.”

“What was that ’mystery’?” asks Mr. Greenwood. {260b} What indeed?  And what has all this to do with Ben’s commendatory verses for the Folio, two years later?  Mr. Greenwood also surmises, as we have seen, {260c} that Jonson was with Bacon, helping to translate The Advancement of Learning in June, 1623.

Let us suppose that he was:  what has that to do with Ben’s verses for the Folio?  Does Mr. Greenwood mean to hint that Bacon was the “efficient cause operating to induce” Ben “to give the best possible send-off” to the Folio?  One does not see what interest Bacon had in stimulating the enthusiasm of Ben, unless we accept Bacon as author of the plays, which Mr. Greenwood does not.  If Mr. Greenwood thinks that Bacon was the author of the plays, then the facts are suitable to his belief.  But if he does not,—­“I hold no brief for the Baconians,” he says,—­how is all this passage on Ben’s visits to Bacon concerned with the subject in hand?

Between the passage on some “efficient cause” “at the back of Ben’s mind,” {261a} and the passage on Ben’s visits to Bacon in 1621-3, {261b} six pages intervene, and blur the supposed connection between the “efficient cause” of Ben’s verses of 1623, and his visits to Bacon in 1621-3.  These intercalary pages are concerned with Ben’s laudations of Bacon, by name, in his Discoveries.  The first is entirely confined to praise of Bacon as an orator.  Bacon is next mentioned in a Catalogue of Writers as “He who hath filled up all numbers, and performed that in our tongue which may be preferred or compared either to insolent Greece or haughty Rome,” words used of Shakespeare by Jonson in the Folio verses.

Mr. Greenwood remarks that Jonson’s Catalogue, to judge by the names he cites (More, Chaloner, Smith, Sir Nicholas Bacon, Sidney, Hooker, Essex, Raleigh, Savile, Sandys, and so on), suggests that “he is thinking mainly of wits and orators of his own and the preceding generation,” not of poets specially.  This is obvious; why should Ben name Shakespeare with More, Smith, Chaloner, Eliot, Bishop Gardiner, Egerton, Sandys, and Savile?  Yet “it is remarkable that no mention should be made of the