These two views of Bacon are, if you like, incongruous.  The person spoken of is in both cases Bacon, say the Baconians, and Mr. Greenwood sympathetically alludes to their ideas, {264a} which I cannot qualify in courteous terms.  Baconians “would, of course, explain the difficulty by saying that however sphinx-like were Jonson’s utterances, he had clearly distinct in his own mind two different personages, viz.  Shakspere the player, and Shakespeare the real author of the plays and poems, and that if in the perplexing passage quoted from the Discoveries he appears to confound one with the other, it is because the solemn seal of secrecy had been imposed on him.”  They would say, they do say all that.  Ben is not to let out that Bacon is the author.  So he tells us of Bacon that he often made himself ridiculous, and so forth,—­but he pretends that he is speaking of Shakespeare.

All this wedge of wisdom, remember, is inserted between the search for “the efficient cause” of Ben’s panegyric (1623), in the Folio, on his Beloved Mr. William Shakespeare, and the discovery of Ben’s visits to Bacon in 1621-3.

Does Mr. Greenwood mean that Ben, in 1623 (or earlier), knew the secret of Bacon’s authorship, and, stimulated by his hospitality, applauded his works in the Folio, while, as he must not disclose the secret, he throughout speaks of Bacon as Shakespeare, puns on that name in the line about seeming “to shake a lance,” and salutes the Lord of Gorhambury as “Sweet Swan of Avon”?  Mr. Greenwood cannot mean that; for he is not a Baconian.  What does he mean?

Put together his pages 483, 489-491.  On the former we find how “it would appear” that Jonson thought the issue of the Folio (1623) “a very special occasion,” and that perhaps if we could only “get to the back of his 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.”  Then skip to pp. 489-491, and you find very special occasions:  Bacon’s birthday feast with its” mystery”; Ben as one of Bacon’s “good pens,” in 1623.  “The best of these good pens, it seems, was Jonson.” {266a} On what evidence does it “seem”?  The opinion of Judge Webb.

Is this supposed collaboration with Bacon in 1623, “the efficient cause operating to induce” Ben “to give the best possible send-off” to the Folio?  How could this be the “efficient cause” if Bacon were not the author of the plays?

Mr. Greenwood, like the Genius at the birthday supper,

“Stands as if some mystery he did.”

On a trifling point of honour, namely, as to whether Ben were a man likely to lie, tortuously, hypocritically, to be elaborately false about the authorship of the Shakespearean plays, it is hopelessly impossible to bring the Baconians and Mr. Greenwood (who “holds no brief for the Baconians”) to my point of view.  Mr. Greenwood rides off thus—­what the Baconians do is unimportant.