All these activities of Bacon, in the year of Venus and Adonis, do not exhaust his exercises.  Bacon, living laborious days, plunged into the debate in the Commons on Supply and fell into Elizabeth’s disgrace, and vainly competed with Coke for the Attorney-Generalship, and went on to write a pamphlet on the conspiracy of Lopez, and to try to gain the office of Solicitor-General, to manage Essex’s affairs, to plead at the Bar, to do Crown work as a lawyer, to urge his suit for the Solicitorship; to trifle with the composition of “Formularies and Elegancies” (January 1595), to write his Essays, to try for the Mastership of the Rolls, to struggle with the affairs of the doomed Essex (1600-1), while always “labouring in secret” at that vast aim of the reorganisation of natural science, which ever preoccupied him, he says, and distracted his attention from his practice and from affairs of State. {281a} Of these State affairs the projected Union with Scotland was the most onerous.  He was also writing The Advancement of Learning (1605).  “I do confess,” he wrote to Sir Thomas Bodley, “since I was of any understanding, my mind hath in effect been absent from that I have done.” {281b} His mind was with his beloved Reformation of Learning:  this came between him and his legal, his political labours, his pamphlet-writing, and his private schemes and suits.  To this burden of Atlas the Baconians add the vamping-up of old plays for Shakespeare’s company, and the inditing of new plays, poems, and the Sonnets.  Even without this considerable addition to his tasks, Bacon is wonderful enough, but with it—­he needs the sturdy faith of the Rationalist to accept him and his plot—­to write plays under the pseudonym of “William Shakespeare.”

Talk of miracles as things which do not happen!  The activities of Bacon from 1591 to 1605; the strain on that man’s mind and heart,—­ especially his heart, when we remember that he had to prosecute his passionately adored Essex to the death; all this makes it seem, to me, improbable that, as Mrs. Pott and her school of Baconians hold, he lived to be at least a hundred and six, if not much older.  No wonder that he turned to tragedy, Lear, Macbeth, Othello, and saw life en noir:  man delighted him not, nor woman either.

The occupations, and, even more, the scientific preoccupation of Bacon, do not make his authorship of the plays a physical impossibility.  But they make it an intellectual miracle.  Perhaps I may be allowed to set off this marvel against that other portent, Will Shakspere’s knowledge and frequent use of terms of Law. {282a} I do not pretend to understand how Will came to have them at the tip of his pen.  Thus it may be argued that the Sonnets are by Bacon and no other man, because the Law is so familiar to the author, and his legal terms are always used with so nice an accuracy, that only Bacon can have been capable of these mysterious productions. (But why was Bacon so wofully inaccurate in points of scholarship and history?)