{275b} He had then leisure enough; that he was not anonymously supplying the stage with plays I can neither prove nor disprove:  but there is no proof that he wrote Love’s Labour’s Lost!  By 1591-2, we learn much of him from his letter to Cecil, who never would give him a place wherein he could meditate his philosophy.  He was apparently hard at scientific work.  “I account my ordinary course of study and meditation to be more painful than most parts of action are.”  He adds, “The contemplative planet carries me away wholly,” and by contemplation I conceive him to mean what he calls “vast contemplative ends.”  These he proceeds to describe:  he does not mean the writing of Venus and Adonis (1593), nor of Lucrece (1594), nor of comedies!  “I have taken all knowledge to be my province,” and he recurs to his protest against the pseudo-science of his period.  “If I could purge knowledge of two sorts of rovers whereof the one, with frivolous disputations, confutations, and verbosities; the other with blind experiments, and auricular traditions and impostures, hath committed so many spoils, I hope I should bring in industrious observations, grounded conclusions, and profitable inventions and discoveries . . .  This, whether it be curiosity, or vainglory, or nature, or (if one take it favourably) philanthropy, is so fixed in my mind that it cannot be removed.”  If Cecil cannot help him to a post, if he cannot serve the truth, he will reduce himself, like Anaxagoras, to voluntary poverty, " . . . and become some sorry bookmaker, or a true pioneer in that mine of truth . . . " {276a} Really, from first to last he was the prince of begging-letter writers, endlessly asking for place, pensions, reversions, money, and more money.

Though his years were thirty-one, Bacon was as young at heart as Shelley at eighteen, when he wrote thus to Cecil, “my Lord Treasurer Burghley.”  What did Cecil care for his youngish kinsman’s philanthropy, and “vast speculative ends” (how modern it all is!), and the rest of it?  But just because Bacon, at thirty-one, is so extremely “green,” going to “take all knowledge for his province (if some one will only subsidise him, and endow his research), I conceive that he was in earnest about his reformation of science.  Surely no Baconian will deny it!  Being so deeply in earnest, taking his “study and meditation” so hard, I cannot see him as the author of Venus and Adonis, and whatever plays of the period,—­say, Love’s Labour’s Lost, The Two Gentlemen of Verona, Henry vi, Part I,—­are attributed to him, about this time, by Baconians.  Of course my view is merely personal or “subjective.”  The Baconians’ view is also “subjective.”  I regard Bacon, in 1591, and later, as intellectually preoccupied by his vast speculative aims:- what he says that he desires to do, in science, is what he did, as far as he was able.  His other desires, his personal advancement, money, a share in the conduct of affairs, he also hotly pursued, not much to his own or the public profit.  There seems to be no room left, no inclination left, for competition in their own line with Marlowe, Greene, Nash, and half a dozen other professed playwrights:  no room for plays done under the absurd pseudonym of an ignorant actor.