book I

"hold in my hand," and "whose star is in the ascendant," does not agree with it. All this is extremely neat and convincing, apparently, to the crowd in Tremont Temple. With all Germany at his disposal, however, it must be acknowledged that our lecturer makes a very sparing use of his resources. He quotes Helmholtz and Wundt every now and then with warm approval, though wherein they should be found any more acceptable to the orthodox world than Tyndall and Spencer it is not easy to see, save that the ill repute of German free thinkers takes somewhat longer to get diffused in New England than the ill repute of English free thinkers.

Then, among these Germans who are to set the English-speaking world aright we have Delitzsch! To speak of Wundt and Delitzsch is as if one were to bracket together John Stuart Mill and Frederick Denison Maurice. And then comes the admirable Lotze, whom Mr. Cook is continually setting off as a foil to Herbert Spencer. On page 179 of the lectures on "Heredity" he enumerates, with emphasis, those opinions of Lotze which he deems of especial importance with regard to the relations between matter and mind, and then proceeds to deprecate the "thunder" which he presumes he has evoked "from all quarters of the Spencerian sky." But, considering that the propositions he quotes from Lotze express the very views of Herbert Spencer, only somewhat inadequately worded, it would seem that the lecturer's alarm cannot be very real, and the thunder in question is only a kind of comic-opera thunder manufactured behind the curtain for the benefit of the acquiescent audience. For example, the fourth proposition quoted with approval from Lotze reads thus: "Physical phenomena point to an underlying being to which they belong, but do not determine whether that being is material or immaterial." Now this is Spencerism, pure and simple, and it is a crucial proposition, too, pointing out the drift of the whole philosophy before which it is set up. The fact that Mr. Cook adopts such an opinion when stated by Lotze, but vituperates the same opinion when stated by Spencer, reveals to us, with a pungent though not wholly delicious flavour, the "true inwardness" of his fundamental method of procedure.

That method, it must be acknowledged with due regard to the _bon mot_ of the old Greek statesman, is a method well adapted to conciliate the favour of an immense audience,--even in Boston. We are all descended from fighting ancestors, and many of us, who care little for the disinterested discussion of scientific theories, still like to see a man knocked down or impaled, provided the knocking down be done with a syllogistic club, or the impaling be restricted to such a hard substance as is afforded by the horns of a dilemma. It satisfies our combative instincts, without shocking our physical sympathies or making any great demand on our keener thinking powers, which most people do most of all dislike to be called upon to exercise. To this kind of feeling Mr. Cook's lectures appeal, and the peculiar character of his success seems to show that he knows well how to deal with it. In a moment of winning frankness he exclaims: "Do you suppose that I think that this audience can be _cheated_? I do not know where in America there is another weekly audience with as many brains in it; at least, I do not know where in New England I should be so likely to be tripped up, if I were to make an incorrect statement, as here."[34] After this coaxing little dose, Mr. Cook proceeds to show his respect for the learning of his audience in some remarks on _bathybius_, which, as he condescendingly explains, is a name derived from two Greek words, meaning _deep_ and _sea_!! The profound knowledge of Greek thus exhibited is quite equalled by his account of bathybius from the zoölogical point of view. He begins by telling his hearers that, in a paper published in the "Microscopical Journal" in 1868, Professor Huxley "announced his belief that the gelatinous substance found in the ooze of the beds of the deep seas is a sheet of living matter extending around the globe." Furthermore, of "this amazingly strategic [!!] and haughtily trumpeted substance ... Huxley assumed that it was in the past, and would be in the future, the progenitor of all the life on the planet." Now it is not true that, in the paper referred to, Huxley announces any such belief or makes any such assumption as is here ascribed to him; but we shall see, in a moment, that Mr. Cook's system of quotation is peculiar in enabling him to extract from the text of an author any meaning whatever that may happen to suit his purposes. This ingenious garbling enables the lecturer to come in with telling effect at the close of his third lecture, and earn an ignoble round of applause by holding up the current number of the "American Journal of Science and Arts" (which he would appear to have picked up at a bookstall on his way to the lecture room) and citing from it, as the fifty-first and closing "concession" of evolutionists, "that bathybius has been discovered in 1875, by the ship Challenger, to be--hear, O heavens! and give ear, O earth!--sulphate of lime; and that when dissolved it crystallizes as gypsum. [Applause.]" This is what Mr. Cook calls striking, with the "latest scientific intelligence," at the "bottom stem" of the great tree of evolution. The "latest scientific intelligence," with him, means the last book or article which he has glanced over without comprehending its import, but from which he has contrived to glean some statement calculated to edify his audience and scatter the hosts of Midian. In point of fact, the identification of bathybius with sulphate of lime was set down by Sir Wyville Thomson only as a suspicion, to which Huxley, like a true man of science, at once accorded all possible weight, while leaving the question open for further discussion. Only a mountebank, dealing with an audience upon whose ignorance of the subject he might safely rely, could pretend to suppose that the fate of the doctrine of evolution was in any way involved in the question as to the organic nature of bathybius. The amazing strategy was all Mr. Cook's own, and the haughty trumpeting appears to have been chiefly done with his own very brazen instrument.

I said a moment ago that Mr. Cook's system of quotation is peculiar. The following instance is so good that it will bear citing at some length. According to Mr. Cook, Professor Huxley says, in his article on Biology in the ninth edition of the "Encyclopædia Britannica:" "_Throughout almost the whole series of living beings, we find agamogenesis, or not-sexual generation._" After a pause, Mr. Cook proceeded in a lower voice: "When the topic of the origin of the life of our Lord on the earth is approached from the point of view of the microscope, some men, who know not what the holy of holies in physical and religious science is, say that we have no example of the origin of life without two parents." He went on to cite the familiar instances of parthenogenesis in bees and silk moths, and then proceeded as follows: "Take up your Mivart, your Lyell, your Owen, and you will read [where?] this same important fact which Huxley here asserts, when he says that the law that perfect individuals may be virginally born extends to the higher forms of life. I am in the presence of Almighty God; and yet, when a great soul like that tender spirit of our sainted Lincoln, in his early days, with little knowledge but with great thoughtfulness, was troubled by his difficulty, and almost thrown into infidelity by not knowing that the law that there must be two parents is not universal, I am willing to allude, even in such a presence as this, to the latest science concerning miraculous conception. [Sensation.]"

The vulgarity of this rhetoric is as glaring as its absurdity. All that concerns me now, however, is to point out the Brobdignagian dimensions of the misstatement of facts. Let us look back for a moment at the italicized quotation from Huxley, upon which Mr. Cook builds up the wondrous assertion "that the law that perfect individuals may be virginally born extends to the higher forms of life." Then let us turn to Huxley's article and see what he really does say.

Treating of the whole subject of agamogenesis in the widest possible way by including it under the more general process of cell-multiplication, Huxley says: "Common as the process is in plants and in the lower animals, it becomes rare among the higher animals. In these, the reproduction of the whole organism from a part, in the way indicated above, ceases. At most we find that the cells at the end of an amputated portion of the organism are capable of reproducing the lost part, and in the very highest animals even this power vanishes in the adult.... _Throughout almost the whole series of living beings, however, we find concurrently with the process of agamogenesis, or asexual generation_, another method of generation, in which the development of the germ into an organism resembling the parent depends on an influence exerted by living matter different from the germ. This is _gamogenesis_, or sexual generation."[35]

Comparing the italicized passage here with Mr. Cook's italicized quotation, we see vividly illustrated the fundamental method of procedure by which the "Monday Lectureship" jumps from a statement about the reproduction of a lobster's claw to the inference that a man may be born without a father. It reminds one of that worthy clergyman who introduced a scathing sermon on a new-fangled variety of ladies' headdress by the appropriate text, "Top-knot come down!" On being reminded by one of his deacons that the full verse seemed to read, "Let him that is upon the housetop not come down," the pastor boldly justified his abridgment on the ground that any particular collocation of words in Scripture is as authoritative as any other, since all parts of the Bible are equally inspired. Perhaps there are some who would justify Mr. Cook's peculiar principle of abridgment on the familiar ground that the end sanctifies the means, and that if a statement seems helpful to "the truth" in general, it is no matter whether the statement itself is true or not.

Enough of this. If we were to go through with these volumes in detail, we should find little else but misrepresentations of facts, misconceptions of principles, and floods of tawdry rhetoric, of which the specimens here quoted are quite sufficient to illustrate the lecturer's "fundamental method of procedure." If I have treated him somewhat lightly, it is because there is nothing in his matter or in his manner that would justify, or even excuse, a more serious style of treatment. The only aspect of his career which affords matter for grave reflection is the ease with which he succeeded for a moment in imposing on the credulity and in appealing to the prejudices of his public. The eagerness with which the orthodox world hailed the appearance of this new champion could not but remind one, with sad emphasis, of Oxenstjern's famous remark: "Quam parva sapientia mundus regitur!" It is comforting to remember that one of the world's greatest naturalists, Asa Gray,--whose orthodoxy is as unimpeachable as his science,--very promptly declared in print that such championship is something of which orthodoxy has no reason to feel proud.

_December, 1880._

XIII

FORTY YEARS OF BACON-SHAKESPEARE FOLLY[36]

Some time ago, while I happened to be looking over a wheelbarrow-load of rubbish written to prove that such plays as "King Lear" and "The Merry Wives of Windsor" emanated from one of the least poetical and least humorous minds of modern times, I was reminded of a story which I heard when a boy. I forget whether it was some whimsical man of letters like Charles Lamb, or some such professional wag as Theodore Hook, who took it into his head one day to stand still on a London street, with face turned upward, gazing into the sky. Thereupon the next person who came that way forthwith stopped and did likewise, and then the next, and the next, until the road was blocked by a dense crowd of men and women, all standing as if rooted in the ground, and with solemn sky-ward stare. The enchantment was at last broken when some one asked what they were looking at, and nobody could tell. It was simply an instance of a certain remnant of primitive gregariousness of action on the part of human beings, which exhibits itself from time to time in sundry queer fashions and fads.

So when Miss Delia Bacon, in the year which saw the beginning of "The Atlantic Monthly," published a book purporting to unfold the "philosophy" of Shakespeare's dramas, it was not long before other persons began staring intently into the silliest mare's nest ever devised by human dulness; and the fruits of so much staring have appeared in divers eccentric volumes, of which more specific mention will presently be made. Neither in number nor in quality are they such as to indicate that the Bacon-Shakespeare folly has yet become fashionable, and we shall presently observe in it marked suicidal tendencies which are likely to prevent its ever becoming so; but there are enough of such volumes to illustrate the point of my anecdote.

Another fad, once really fashionable, and in defence of which some plausible arguments could be urged, was the Wolfian theory of the Homeric poems, which dazzled so many of our grandparents. It is worth our while to mention it here by way of prelude. The theory that the Iliad and Odyssey are mere aggregations of popular ballads, collected and arranged in the time of Pisistratus, was perhaps originally suggested by the philosopher Vico, but first attracted general attention in 1795, when set forth by Friedrich August Wolf, one of the most learned and brilliant of modern scholars. Thus eminently respectable in its parentage and quite reasonable on the surface, this ballad theory came to be widely fashionable; forty years ago it was accepted by many able scholars, though usually with large modifications.

The Wolfians urged that we know absolutely nothing about the man Homer, not even when or where he lived. His existence is merely matter of tradition, or of inference from the existence of the poems. But as the poems know nothing of Dorians in Peloponnesus, their date can hardly be so late as 1100 B. C. What happened, then, when "an edition of Homer" was made at Athens, about 530 B. C., by Pisistratus, or under his orders? Did the editor simply edit two great poems already six centuries old, or did he make up two poems by piecing together a miscellaneous lot of ancient ballads? Wolf maintained the latter alternative, chiefly because of the alleged impossibility of composing and preserving such long poems in the alleged absence of the art of writing. Having thus made a plausible start, the Wolfians proceeded to pick the poems to pieces, and to prove by "internal evidence" that there was nothing like "unity of design" in them, etc.; and so it went on, till poor old Homer was relegated to the world of myth. As a schoolboy I used to hear the belief in the existence of such a poet derided as "uncritical" and "unscholarly."

In spite of these terrifying epithets, the ballad theory never made any impression upon me; for it seemed to ignore the most conspicuous and vital fact about the poems, namely, the _style_, the noble, rapid, simple, vivid, supremely poetical style,--a style as individual and unapproachable as that of Dante or Keats. For an excellent characterization of it, read Matthew Arnold's charming essays "On Translating Homer." The style is the man, and to suppose that this Homeric style ever came from a democratic multitude of minds, or from anything save one of those supremely endowed individual natures such as get born once or twice in a millennium, is simply to suppose a psychological impossibility. I remember once talking about this with George Eliot, who had lately been reading Frederick Paley's ingenious restatement of the ballad theory, and was captivated by its ingenuity. I told her I did not wonder that old dry-as-dust philologists should hold such views, but I was indeed surprised to find such a literary artist as herself ignoring the impassable gulf between Homer's language and that which any ballad theory necessarily implies. She had no answer for this except to say that she should have supposed an evolutionist like me would prefer to regard the Homeric poems as gradually evolved rather than suddenly created! A retort so clever and amiable most surely entitled her to the woman's privilege of the last word.

The Wolfian theory may now be regarded as a thing of the past; it has had its day and been flung aside. If Wolf himself were living, he would be the first to laugh at it. Its original prop has been knocked away, since it has become pretty clear that the art of writing was practised about the shores of the Ægean Sea long before 1100 B. C. Even Wolf would now admit that it might have been a real letter that Bellerophon carried to the father of Anteia.[37] All attempts to show a lack of unity in the design of the Iliad and the Odyssey have failed irretrievably, and the discussion has served only to make more and more unmistakable the work of the mighty master. The ballad theory is dead and buried, and he who would read its obituary may find keen pleasure, as well as many a wholesome lesson in sound criticism, in the sensible and brilliant book by Andrew Lang on "Homer and the Epic."

The Bacon-Shakespeare folly has never been set forth by scholars of commanding authority, like Wolf and Lachmann, or Niese and Wilamowitz Moellendorff. Among Delia Bacon's followers not one can by any permissible laxity of speech be termed a scholar, and their theory has found acceptance with very few persons. Nevertheless, it illustrates as well as the Wolfian theory the way in which such notions grow. It starts from a false premise, hazily conceived, and it subsists upon arguments in which trivial facts are assigned higher value than facts of vital importance. Mr. Lang's remark upon certain learned Homeric commentators, "that they pore over the hyssop on the wall, but are blind to the cedar of Lebanon," applies with tenfold force to the Bacon-Shakespeare sciolists. In them we always miss the just sense of proportion which is one of the abiding marks of sanity. The unfortunate lady who first brought their theory into public notoriety in 1857 was then sinking under the cerebral disease of which she died two years later, and her imitators have been chiefly weak minds of the sort that thrive upon paradox, closely akin to the circle-squarers and inventors of perpetual motion. Underlying all the absurdities, however, there is something that deserves attention. Like many other morbid phenomena, the Bacon-Shakespeare folly has its natural history which is instructive. The vagaries of Delia Bacon and her followers originated in a group of conditions which admit of being specified and described, and which the historian of nineteenth-century literature will need to notice. In order to understand the natural history of the affair, it is necessary to examine the Delia Bacon theory at greater length than it would otherwise deserve. Let us see how it is constructed.

It starts with a syllogism, of which the major premise is that the dramas ascribed to Shakespeare during his lifetime, and ever since believed to be his, abound in evidences of extraordinary book-learning. The minor premise is that William Shakespeare of Stratford-on-Avon could not have acquired or possessed so much book-learning. The conclusion is that he could not have written those plays.

The question then arises, Which of Shakespeare's contemporaries had enough book-lore to have written them? No doubt Francis Bacon had enough. The conclusion does not follow, however, that he wrote the plays; for there were other contemporaries with learning enough and to spare, as for example George Chapman and Ben Jonson. These two men, to judge from their acknowledged works, were great poets, whereas in Bacon's fifteen volumes there is not a paragraph which betrays poetical genius. Why not, then, ascribe the Shakespeare dramas to Chapman or Jonson? Here the Baconizers endeavour to support their assumption by calling attention to similarities in thought and phrase between Francis Bacon and the writer of the dramas. Up to this point their argument consists of deductions from assumed premises; here they adduce inductive evidence, such as it is. We shall see specimens of it by and by. At present we are concerned with the initial syllogism.

And first, as to the major premise, it must be met with a flat denial. The Shakespeare plays do not abound with evidences of scholarship or learning of the sort that is gathered from profound and accurate study of books. It is precisely in this respect that they are conspicuously different from many of the plays contemporary with them, and from other masterpieces of English literature. Such plays as Jonson's "Sejanus" and "Catiline" are the work of a scholar deeply indoctrinated with the views and mental habits of classic antiquity; he has soaked himself in the style of Lucan and Seneca, until their mental peculiarities have become like a second nature to him, and are unconsciously betrayed alike in the general handling of his story and in little turns of expression. Or take Milton's "Lycidas:" no one but a man saturated in every fibre with Theocritus and Virgil could have written such a poem. An extremely foreign and artificial literary form has been so completely mastered and assimilated by Milton that he uses it with as much ease as Theocritus himself, and has produced a work that even the master of idyls had scarcely equalled. After the terrific invective against the clergy and the beautiful invocation to the flowers, followed by the triumphant hallelujah of Christian faith, observe the sudden reversion to pagan sentiment where Lycidas is addressed as the genius of the shore. Only profound scholarship could have written this wonderful poem,--could have brought forth the Christian thought as if spontaneously through the medium of the pagan form. Now there is nothing of this sort in Shakespeare. He uses classical materials, or anything else under the sun that suits his purpose. He takes a chronicle from Holinshed, a biography from North's translation of Plutarch, a legend from Saxo Grammaticus through Belleforest's French version, a novel of Boccaccio, a miracle play,--whatever strikes his fancy; he chops up his materials and weaves them into a story without much regard to classical models; defying rules of order and unity, and not always heeding probability, but never forgetful of his abiding purpose, to create live men and women. These people may have Greek or Latin names, and their scene of action may be Rome or Mitylene, decorated with scraps of classical knowledge such as a bright man might pick up in miscellaneous reading; but all this is the superficial setting, the mere frame to the picture. The living canvas is human nature as Shakespeare saw it in London and depicted with supreme poetic faculty. Among the new books within his reach was Chapman's magnificent translation of the Iliad, which at a later day inspired Keats to such a noble outburst of encomium; and in "Troilus and Cressida" we have the Greek and Trojan heroes set before us with an incisive reality not surpassed by Homer himself. This play shows how keenly Shakespeare appreciated Homer, how delicately and exquisitely he could supplement the picture; but there is nothing in its five acts that shows him clothed in the garment of ancient thought as Milton wore it. Shakespeare's freedom from such lore is a great advantage to him; in "Troilus and Cressida" there is a freedom of treatment hardly possible to a professional scholar. It is because of this freedom that Shakespeare reaches a far wider public of readers and listeners than Milton or Dante, whose vast learning makes them in many places "caviare to the general." Book-lore is a great source of power, but one may easily be hampered by it. What we forever love in Homer is the freshness that comes with lack of it, and in this sort of freshness Shakespeare agrees with Homer far more than with the learned poets.

It is not for a moment to be denied that Shakespeare's plays exhibit a remarkable wealth of varied knowledge. The writer was one of the keenest observers that ever lived. In the woodland or on the farm, in the printing shop or the alehouse, or up and down the street, not the smallest detail escaped him. Microscopic accuracy, curious interest in all things, unlimited power of assimilating knowledge, are everywhere shown in the plays. These are some of the marks of what we call _genius_,--something that we are far from comprehending, but which experience has shown that books and universities cannot impart. All the colleges on earth could not by combined effort make the kind of man we call a genius, but such a man may at any moment be born into the world, and it is as likely to be in a peasant's cottage as anywhere.

There is nothing in which men differ more widely than in the capacity for imbibing and assimilating knowledge. The capacity is often exercised unconsciously. When my eldest son, at the age of six, was taught to read in the course of a few weeks of daily instruction, it was suddenly discovered that his four-year-old brother also could read. Nobody could tell how it happened. Of course the younger boy must have taken keen notice of what the elder one was doing, but the process went on without attracting attention until the result appeared.

This capacity for unconscious learning is not at all uncommon. It is possessed to some extent by everybody; but a very high degree of it is one of the marks of genius. I remember one evening, many years ago, hearing Herbert Spencer in a friendly discussion regarding certain functions of the cerebellum. Abstruse points of comparative anatomy and questions of pathology were involved. Spencer's three antagonists were not violently opposed to him, but were in various degrees unready to adopt his views. The three were: Huxley, one of the greatest of comparative anatomists; Hughlings Jackson, a very eminent authority on the pathology of the nervous system; and George Henry Lewes, who, although more of an amateur in such matters, had nevertheless devoted years of study to neural physiology, and was thoroughly familiar with the history of the subject. Spencer more than held his ground against the others. He met fact with fact, brought up points in anatomy the significance of which Huxley confessed that he had overlooked, and had more experiments and clinical cases at his tongue's end than Jackson could muster. It was quite evident that he knew all they knew on the subject, and more besides. Yet Spencer had never been through a course of "regular training" in the studies concerned; nor had he ever studied at a university, or even at a high school. Where did he learn the wonderful mass of facts which he poured forth that evening? Whence came his tremendous grasp upon the principles involved? Probably he could not have told you. A few days afterward I happened to be talking with Spencer about history, a subject of which he modestly said he knew but little. I told him I had often been struck with the aptness of the historic illustrations cited in many chapters of his "Social Statics," written when he was twenty-nine years old. The references were not only always accurate, but they showed an intelligence and soundness of judgment unattainable, one would think, save by close familiarity with history. Spencer assured me that he had never read extensively in history. Whence, then, this wealth of knowledge,--not smattering, not sciolism, but solid, well-digested knowledge? Really, he did not know, except that when his interest was aroused in any subject he was keenly alive to all facts bearing upon it, and seemed to find them whichever way he turned. When I mentioned this to Lewes, while recalling the discussion on the cerebellum, he exclaimed: "Oh, you can't account for it! It's his genius. Spencer has greater instinctive power of observation and assimilation than any man since Shakespeare, and he is like Shakespeare for hitting the bull's-eye every time he fires. As for Darwin and Huxley, we can follow their intellectual processes, but Spencer is above and beyond all; he is inspired!"

Those were Lewes's exact words, and they made a deep impression upon me. The comparison with Shakespeare struck me as a happy one, and I can understand both Spencer and Shakespeare the better for it. Concerning Spencer one circumstance may be observed. Since his early manhood he has lived in London, and has had for his daily associates men of vast attainments in every department of science. He has thus had rare opportunities for absorbing an immense fund of knowledge unconsciously.

It is evident that the author of Shakespeare's plays possessed an extraordinary "instinctive power of observation and assimilation." There was nothing strange in such a genius growing up in a small Warwickshire town. The difficulty is one which the Delia-Baconians have created for themselves. As it is their chief stock in trade, they magnify it in every way they can think of. Shakespeare's parents, they say, were illiterate, and he did not know how to spell his own name. It appears as Shagspere, Shaxpur, Shaxberd, Chacsper, and so on through some thirty forms, several of which William Shakespeare himself used indifferently. The implication is that such a man must have been shockingly ignorant. The real ignorance, however, is on the part of those who use such an argument. Apparently, they do not know that in Shakespeare's time such laxity in spelling was common in all ranks of society and in all grades of culture. The name of Elizabeth's great Lord Treasurer, Cecil, and his title, Burghley, were both spelled in half a dozen ways. The name of Raleigh occurs in more than forty different forms, and Sir Walter, one of the most accomplished men of his time, wrote it Rauley, Rawleyghe, Ralegh, and in yet other ways. The talk of the Baconizers on this point is simply ludicrous.

Equally silly is their talk about the dirty streets of Stratford. They seem to have just discovered that Elizabeth's England was a badly drained country, with heaps of garbage in the streets. Shakespeare's father, they tell us, was a butcher, and evidently from a butcher's son, living in an ill-swept town, and careless about the spelling of his name, not much in the way of intellectual achievement was to be expected! In point of fact, Shakespeare's parents belonged to the middle class. His father owned several houses in Stratford and two or three farms in the neighbourhood. As a farmer in those days, he would naturally have cattle slaughtered on his premises and would sell wool off the backs of his own flocks, whence the later tradition of his having been butcher and wool dealer. That his social position was good is shown by the facts that he was chief alderman and high bailiff of Stratford, and justice of the peace, and was styled "Master John Shakespeare," or (as we should say) "Mr.;" whereas, had he been one of the common folk, his style had been "Goodman Shakespeare." A visit to his home in Henley Street, and to Anne Hathaway's cottage at Shottery, shows that the two families were in eminently respectable circumstances. The son of the high bailiff would see the best people in the neighbourhood. There was in the town a remarkably good free grammar school, where he might have learned the "small Latin and less Greek" which his friend Ben Jonson assures us he possessed. This expression, by the way, is usually misunderstood, because people do not pause to consider it. Coming from Ben Jonson, I should say that "small Latin and less Greek" might fairly describe the amount of those languages ordinarily possessed by a member of the graduating class at Harvard in good standing. It can hardly imply less than the ability to read Terence at sight, and perhaps Euripides less fluently. The author of the plays, with his unerring accuracy of observation, knows Latin enough at least to use the Latin part of English most skilfully; at the same time, when he has occasion to use Greek authors, such as Homer or Plutarch, he usually prefers an English translation. At all events, Jonson's remark informs us that the man whom he addresses as "sweet swan of Avon" knew _some_ Latin and _some_ Greek,--a conclusion which is so distasteful to one of our Baconizers, Mr. Edwin Reed, that he will not admit it. Rather than do so, he has the assurance to ask us to believe that by the epithet "sweet swan of Avon" Jonson really meant Francis Bacon! Dear me, Mr. Reed, do you really mean it? And how about the editor of Beaumont and Fletcher in 1647, when, in his dedication to Shakespeare's friend the Earl of Pembroke, he speaks of "Sweet Swan of Avon Shakespear"? Was he too a participator in the little scheme for fooling posterity? Or was he one of those who were fooled?

Whether Shakespeare had other chances for book-lore than those which the grammar school afforded, whether there was any interesting parson at hand, as often in small towns, to guide and stimulate his unfolding thoughts,--upon such points we have no information. But there were things to be learned in the country town quite outside of books and pedagogues. There, while the poet listened to the "strain of strutting chanticleer," and watched the "sun-burn'd sicklemen, of August weary," putting on their rye-straw hats and making holiday with rustic nymphs, he could rejoice in

"Earth's increase, foison plenty, Barns and garners never empty; Vines with clust'ring bunches growing; Plants with goodly burthen bowing;"

there he could see the "unbacked colts" prick their ears, advance their eyelids, lift up their noses, as if they smelt music; there he knew, doubtless, many a bank where the wild thyme grew and on which the moonlight sweetly slept; there he watched the coming of "violets dim," "pale primroses," flower-de-luce, carnations, with "rosemary and rue" to keep their "savour all the winter long,"

"When icicles hang by the wall, And Dick the shepherd blows his nail, And Tom bears logs into the hall, And milk comes frozen home in pail."

Such lore as this no books or college could impart.

It was this that Milton had in mind when he introduced Shakespeare and Ben Jonson into his poem "L'Allegro." Milton was in his thirtieth year when Jonson, poet laureate, was laid to rest in Westminster Abbey; he was only a boy of eight years when Shakespeare died, but the beautiful sonnet written fourteen years later shows how lovingly he studied his works:--

"What needs my Shakespeare, for his honoured bones," etc.

The poem "L'Allegro" and its fellow "Il Penseroso" describe the delights of Milton's life at his father's country house near Windsor Castle. He used often to ride into London to hear music or pass an evening at the theatre, as in the following lines:--

"Then to the well-trod stage anon, If Jonson's learned sock be on, Or sweetest Shakespeare, fancy's child, Warble his native woodnotes wild."

This accurate and happy contrast exasperates the Baconizers, for it spoils their stock in trade, and accordingly they try their best to assure us that Milton did not know what he was writing about. They asseverate with vehemence that in all the seven-and-thirty plays there is no such thing as a native woodnote wild.

But before leaving the contrast we may pause for a moment to ask, Where did Ben Jonson get his learning? He was, as he himself tells us, "poorly brought up" by his stepfather, a bricklayer. He went to Westminster School, where he was taught by Camden, and he may have spent a short time at Cambridge, though this is doubtful. His schooling was nipped in the bud, for he had to go home and lay brick; and when he found such an existence insupportable he went into the army and fought in the Netherlands. At about the age of twenty we find him back in London, and there lose sight of him for five years, when all at once his great comedy "Every Man in his Humour" is performed, and makes him famous. Now, in such a life, when did Jonson get the time for his immense reading and his finished classical scholarship? Reasoning after the manner of the Delia-Baconians, we may safely say that he could not possibly have accumulated the learning which is shown in his plays: therefore he could not have written those plays; therefore Lord Bacon must have written them! There are daring soarers in the empyrean who do not shrink from this conclusion; a doctor in Michigan, named Owen, has published a pamphlet to prove, among other things, that Bacon was the author of the plays which were performed and printed as Jonson's.

To return to Shakespeare. Somewhere about 1585, when he was one-and-twenty, he went to London, leaving his wife and three young children at Stratford. His father had lost money, and the fortunes of the family were at the lowest ebb. In London we lose sight of Shakespeare for a while, just as we lose sight of Jonson, until literary works appear. The work first published is "Venus and Adonis," one of the most exquisite pieces of diction in the English language. It was dedicated to Henry, Earl of Southampton, by William Shakespeare, whose authorship of the poem is asserted as distinctly as the title-page of "David Copperfield" proclaims that novel to be by Charles Dickens, yet some precious critics assure us that Shakespeare "could not" have written the poem, and never knew the Earl of Southampton. Some years ago, Mr. Appleton Morgan, who does not wish to be regarded as a Baconizer, published an essay on the Warwickshire dialect, in which he maintained that since no traces of that kind of speech occur in "Venus and Adonis," therefore it could not have been written by a young man fresh from a small Warwickshire town. This is a specimen of the loose kind of criticism which prepares soil for Delia-Baconian weeds to grow in. The poem was published in 1593, seven or eight years after Shakespeare's coming to London; and we are asked to believe that the world's greatest genius, one of the most consummate masters of speech that ever lived, could tarry seven years in the city without learning how to write what Hosea Biglow calls "citified English"! One can only exclaim with Gloster, "O monstrous fault, to harbour such a thought!"

In those years Shakespeare surely learned much else. It seems clear that he had a good reading acquaintance with French and Italian, though he often uses translations, as for instance Florio's version of Montaigne. In estimating what Shakespeare "must have" known or "could not have" known, one needs to use more caution than some of our critics display. For example, in "The Winter's Tale" the statue of Hermione is called "a piece ... now newly performed by that rare Italian master, Julio Romano." Now, since Romano is known as a great painter, but not as a sculptor, this has been cited as a blunder on Shakespeare's part. It appears, however, that the first edition of Vasari's "Lives of the Painters," published in 1550 and never translated from its original Italian, informs us that Romano did work in sculpture. In Vasari's second edition, published in 1568 and translated into several languages, this information is not given. From these facts, the erudite German critic Dr. Karl Elze, who is not a bit of a Delia-Baconian, but only an occasional sufferer from _vesania commentatorum_, introduces us to a solemn dilemma: either the author of "The Winter's Tale" must have consulted the first edition of Vasari in the original Italian, or else he must have travelled in Italy and gazed upon statues by Romano. Ah! prithee not so fast, worthy doctor; be not so lavish with these "musts." It is, I think, improbable that Shakespeare ever saw Italy except with the eyes of his imperial fancy. On the other hand, there are many indications that he could read Italian, but among them we cannot attach much importance to this one. Why should he not have learned from _hearsay_ that Romano had made statues? In the name of common sense, are there no sources of knowledge save books? Or, since it was no unusual thing for Italian painters in the sixteenth century to excel in sculpture and architecture, why should not Shakespeare have assumed without verification that it was so in Romano's case? It was a tolerably safe assumption to make, especially in an age utterly careless of historical accuracy, and in a comedy which provides Bohemia with a sea-coast, and mixes up times and customs with as scant heed of probability as a fairy tale.

In arguing about what Shakespeare "must have" or "could not have" known, we must not forget that at no time or place since history began has human thought fermented more briskly than in London while he was living there. The age of Drake and Raleigh was an age of efflorescence in dramatic poetry, such as had not been seen in the twenty centuries since Euripides died. Among Shakespeare's fellow craftsmen were writers of such great and varied endowments as Chapman, Marlowe, Greene, Nash, Peele, Marston, Dekker, Webster, and Cyril Tourneur. During his earlier years in London, Richard Hooker was master of the Middle Temple, and there a little later Ford and Beaumont were studying. The erudite Camden was master of Westminster School; among the lights of the age for legal learning were Edward Coke and Francis Bacon; at the same time, one might have met in London the learned architect Inigo Jones and the learned poet John Donne, both of them excellent classical scholars; there one would have found the divine poet Edmund Spenser, just come over from Ireland to see to the publication of his "Faerie Queene;" not long afterward came John Fletcher from Cambridge, and the acute philosopher Edward Herbert from Oxford and one and all might listen to the incomparable table-talk of that giant of scholarship, John Selden. The delights of the Mermaid Tavern, where these rare wits were wont to assemble, still live in tradition. As Keats says:--

"Souls of poets dead and gone, What Elysium have ye known, Happy field or mossy cavern, Choicer than the Mermaid Tavern?"

It has always been believed that this place was one of Shakespeare's favourite haunts. By common consent of scholars, it has been accepted as the scene of those contests of wit between Shakespeare and Jonson of which Fuller tells us when he compares Jonson to a Spanish galleon, built high with learning, but slow in movement, while he likens Shakespeare to an English cruiser, less heavily weighted, but apt for victory because of its nimbleness,--the same kind of contrast, by the way, as that which occurred to Milton.

But our Baconizing friends will not allow that Shakespeare ever went to the Mermaid, or knew the people who met there; at least, none but a few fellow dramatists. We have no documentary proof that he ever met with Raleigh, or Bacon, or Selden. Let us observe that, while these sapient critics are in some cases ready to welcome the slightest circumstantial evidence, there are others in which they will accept nothing short of absolute demonstration. Did Shakespeare ever see a maypole? The word occurs just once in his plays, namely, in the "Midsummer Night's Dream," where little Hermia, quarrelling with tall Helena, calls her a "painted maypole;" but that proves nothing. I am not aware that there is any absolute documentary proof that Shakespeare ever set eyes on a maypole. It is nevertheless certain that in England, at that time, no boy could grow to manhood without seeing many a maypole. Common sense has some rights which we are bound to respect.

Now, Shakespeare's London was a small city of from 150,000 to 200,000 souls, or about the size of Providence or Minneapolis at the present time. In cities of such size, everybody of the slightest eminence is known all over town, and such persons are sure to be more or less acquainted with one another; it is a very rare exception when it is not so. Before his thirtieth year, Shakespeare was well known in London as an actor, a writer of plays, and the manager of a prominent theatre. It was in that year that Spenser, in his "Colin Clout's Come Home Again," alluding to Shakespeare under the name of Aëtion, or "eagle-like," paid him this compliment:--

"And there, though last, not least, is Aëtion; A gentler shepherd may nowhere be found; Whose muse, full of high thought's invention, Doth, like himself, heroically sound."

Four years after this, in 1598, Francis Meres published his book entitled "Palladis Tamia," a very interesting contribution to literary history. The author, who had been an instructor in rhetoric in the University of Oxford, was then living in London, near the Globe Theatre. In this book Meres tells his readers that "the sweet witty soul of Ovid lives in mellifluous and honey-tongued Shakespeare; witness his 'Venus and Adonis,' his 'Lucrece,' his sugared sonnets among his private friends, etc.... As Plautus and Seneca are accounted the best for comedy and tragedy among the Latins, so Shakespeare among the English is the most excellent in both kinds for the stage: for comedy, witness his 'Gentlemen of Verona,' his 'Errors,' his 'Love's Labour's Lost,' his 'Love's Labour's Wonne,'[38] his 'Midsummer Night's Dream,' and his 'Merchant of Venice;' for tragedy, his 'Richard II.,' 'Richard III.,' 'Henry IV.,' 'King John,' 'Titus Andronicus,' and his 'Romeo and Juliet.' As Epius Stolo said that the Muses would speak with Plautus's tongue if they would speak Latin, so I say that the Muses would speak with Shakespeare's fine filed phrase if they would speak English." In other passages Meres mentions Shakespeare's lyrical quality, for which he likens him to Pindar and Catullus; and the glory of his style, for which he places him along with Virgil and Homer. It thus appears that, at the age of thirty-four, this poet from Stratford was already ranked by critical scholars by the side of the greatest names of antiquity. Let me add that the popularity of his plays was making him a somewhat wealthy man, so that he had relieved his father from pecuniary troubles, and had just bought for himself the Great House at Stratford where the last years of his life were spent. His income seems already to have been equivalent to $10,000 a year in our modern money. His position had come to be such that he could extend patronage to others. It was in 1598 that through his influence Ben Jonson obtained, after many rebuffs, his first hearing before a London audience, when "Every Man in his Humour" was brought out at Blackfriars Theatre, with Shakespeare acting one of the parts.

To suppose that such a man as this, in a town the size of Minneapolis, connected with a principal theatre, writer of the most popular plays of the day, a poet whom men were already coupling with Homer and Pindar,--to suppose that such a man was not known to all the educated people in the town is simply absurd. There were probably very few men, women, or children in London, between 1595 and 1610, who did not know who Shakespeare was when he passed them in the street; and as for such wits as drank ale and sack at the Mermaid, as for Raleigh and Bacon and Selden and the rest, to suppose that Shakespeare did not know them well--nay, to suppose that he was not the leading spirit and brightest wit of those ambrosial nights--is about as sensible as to suppose that he never saw a maypole.

The facts thus far contemplated point to one conclusion. The son of a well-to-do magistrate in a small country town is born with a genius which the world has never seen surpassed. Coming to London at the age of twenty-one, he achieves such swift success that within thirteen years he is recognized as one of the chief glories of English literature. During this time he is living in the midst of such a period of intellectual ferment as the world has seldom seen, and in a position which necessarily brings him into frequent contact with all the most cultivated men. Under such circumstances, there is nothing in the smallest degree strange or surprising in his acquiring the varied knowledge which his plays exhibit. The major premise of the Delia-Baconians has, therefore, nothing in it whatever. It is a mere bubble, an empty vagary,--only this, and nothing more.

Before leaving this part of the subject, however, there are still one or two points of interest to be mentioned. Shakespeare shows a fondness for the use of phrases and illustrations taken from the law; and on such grounds our Delia-Baconians argue that the plays must have been written by an eminent lawyer, such as the Lord Chancellor Bacon undoubtedly was. They feel that this is a great point on their side. One instance, cited by Nathaniel Holmes and other Baconizers, is the celebrated case of Sir James Hales, who committed suicide by drowning, and was accordingly buried at the junction of crossroads, with a stake through his body, while all his property was forfeited to the Crown. Presently his widow brought suit for an estate by survivorship in joint-tenancy. Her case turned upon the question whether the forfeiture occurred during her late husband's lifetime: if it did, he left no estate which she could take; if it did not, she took the estate by survivorship. The lady's counsel argued that so long as Sir James was alive he had not been guilty of suicide, and the instant he died the estate vested in his widow as joint-tenant. But the opposing counsel argued that the instant Sir James voluntarily made the fatal plunge, and therefore before the breath had left his body, the guilt of suicide was incurred and the forfeiture took place. The court decided in favour of this view, and the widow got nothing.

There can be little doubt that this decision is travestied in the conversation of the two clowns in "Hamlet" with regard to Ophelia's right to Christian burial. The first clown makes precisely the point upon which the ingenious counsel for the defendant had rested his argument: "If I drown myself wittingly, it argues an act, and an act hath three branches; it is to act, to do, and to perform." In making this distinction the counsel had maintained that the second branch, or the doing, was the only thing for the law to consider. The talk of the clowns brings out the humour of the case with Shakespeare's inimitable lightness of touch.

The report of the Hales case was published in the volume of "Plowden's Reports" which was issued in 1578; and Mr. Holmes informs us that "there is not the slightest ground for a belief, on the facts which we know, that Shakespeare ever looked into 'Plowden's Reports.'" This is one of the cases where your stern Baconizer will not hear of anything short of absolute demonstration. Mere considerations of human probability might disturb the cogency of a neat little pair of syllogisms:--

(1.) The author of "Hamlet" must have read Plowden. Shakespeare never read Plowden. Therefore Shakespeare was not the author of "Hamlet."

(2.) The author of "Hamlet" must have read Plowden. The lawyer, Bacon, must have read Plowden. Therefore Bacon wrote "Hamlet."

With regard to the major premise here, one might freely deny it. The author of "Hamlet" might easily have got all the knowledge involved from an evening chat with some legal friend at an alehouse. Then as to the minor premise, what earthly improbability is there in Shakespeare's having dipped into Plowden? Can anybody but lawyers or law students enjoy reading reports of law cases? I remember that, when I was about ten years old, a favourite book with me was one entitled "Criminal Trials of All Countries, by a Member of the Philadelphia Bar." I read it and read it, until forbidden to read such a gruesome book, and then I read it all the more. One of the most elaborate reports in it was that of the famous case of Captain Donellan, tried in 1780 on a charge of poisoning his wife's brother, Sir Theodosius Boughton, a dissipated and diseased young man, who died very suddenly one day. A post-mortem inspection showed spots in the intestine, which three ordinary country doctors ascribed to poisoning by laurel water, while Sir John Hunter, one of the greatest authorities in Europe, testified that they might equally well have ensued upon death from apoplexy. The judge, Sir Francis Buller, saw fit, in his charge, to reckon this as the testimony of three experts against one; and thus the jury were driven to a verdict of murder, though it was not proved that any murder had been committed. Captain Donellan, who lived in his brother-in-law's house, was a man of blameless life, an amateur chemist, much given to fooling with odorous liquids and hissing retorts. It was proved that he had been distilling laurel water, and one or two other suspicious circumstances were alleged. The whole trial was begun and ended on the same day, the jury were about twenty minutes in finding the captain guilty, and three days afterward he was hung. It was a case where reason was submerged and drowned under a wave of angry prejudice shrieking for a victim.

Now, if I did not forthwith write a play, and take the occasion to ridicule the judge's charge to the jury, it was because I could not write a play, not because I did not fully appreciate the insult to law and common sense which that unfortunate case involved. In view of this and other experiences, when I now read a play or a novel that contains an intelligent allusion to some law case, I am far from feeling driven to the conclusion that it must have been written by a lord chancellor.

If Shakespeare's dramas are proved by such internal evidence to have been written by a lawyer, that lawyer, by parity of reasoning, could hardly have been Francis Bacon. For he was preëminently a chancery lawyer, and chancery phrases are in Shakespeare conspicuously absent. The word "injunctions" occurs five times in the plays, once perhaps with a reference to its legal use ("Merchant of Venice," II. ix.); but nowhere do we find any exhibition of a knowledge of chancery law. His allusions to the common law are often very amusing, as when, in "Love's Labour's Lost," at the end of a brisk punning-match between Boyet and Maria, he offers to kiss her, laughingly asking for a grant of pasture on her lips, and she replies, "Not so; my lips are no common, though several they be." Again, in "The Comedy of Errors," "Dromio asserts that there is no time for a bald man to recover his hair. This having been written, the law phrase suggested itself, and he was asked whether he might not do it by fine and recovery, and this suggested the efficiency of that proceeding to bar heirs; and this started the conceit that thus the lost hair of another man would be recovered."[39] In such quaint allusions to the common law and its proceedings Shakespeare abounds, and we cannot help remembering that Nash, in his prefatory epistle to Greene's "Menaphon," printed about 1589, makes sneering mention of Shakespeare as a man who had left the "trade of Noverint," whereunto he was born, in order to try his hand at tragedy. The "trade of Noverint" was a slang expression for the business of attorney; and this passage has suggested that Shakespeare may have spent some time in a law office, as student or as clerk, either before leaving Stratford, or perhaps soon after his arrival in London. This seems to me not improbable. On the other hand, "The Merchant of Venice" contains such crazy law that it is hard to imagine it coming even from a lawyer's clerk. At all events, we may safely say that the legal knowledge exhibited in the plays is no more than might readily have been acquired by a man of assimilative genius associating with lawyers. It simply shows the range and accuracy of Shakespeare's powers of observation.

Let us come now to the second part of the Delia Bacon theory. Having satisfied herself that William Shakespeare could not have written the poems and plays published under his name, she jumped to the conclusion that Francis Bacon was the author. Surely, a singular choice! Of all men, why Francis Bacon?[40] Why not, as I said before, George Chapman or Ben Jonson, men who were at once learned scholars and great poets? Chapman, like Marlowe, could write the "mighty line." Jonson had rare lyric power; his verses sing, as witness the wonderful "Do but look on her eyes," which Francis Bacon could no more have written than he could have jumped over the moon. To pitch upon Bacon as the writer of "Twelfth Night" or "Romeo and Juliet" is about as sensible as to assert that "David Copperfield" must have been written by Charles Darwin. After a familiar acquaintance of more than forty years with Shakespeare's works, of nearly forty years with Bacon's, the two men impress me as simply antipodal one to the other. A similar feeling was entertained by the late Mr. Spedding, the biographer and editor of Bacon; and no one has more happily hit off the vagaries of the Baconizers than the foremost Bacon scholar now living, Dr. Kuno Fischer, in his recent address before the Shakespeare Society at Weimar.[41] I used to wonder whether the Bacon-Shakespeare people really knew anything about Bacon, and, now that chance has led me to read their books, I am quite sure they do not. To their minds, his works are simply a storehouse of texts which serve them for controversial missiles, very much as scattered texts from the Bible used to serve our uncritical grandfathers.

Francis Bacon was one of the most interesting persons of his time, and, as is often the case with such many-sided characters, posterity has held various opinions about him. On the one hand, his fame has grown brighter with the years; on the other hand, it has come to be more or less circumscribed and limited. Pope's famous verse, "The wisest, brightest, meanest of mankind," may be disputed in all its three specifications. Bacon's treatment of Essex, which formerly called forth such bitter condemnation, has been, I think, completely justified; and as for the taking of bribes, which led to his disgrace, there were circumstances which ought largely to mitigate the severity of our judgment. But if Bacon was far from being a mean example of human nature, it is surely an exaggeration to call him the wisest and brightest of mankind. He was a scholar and critic of vast accomplishments, a writer of noble English prose, and a philosopher who represented rather than inaugurated a most beneficial revolution in the aims and methods of scientific inquiry. He is one of the real glories of English literature, but he is also one of the most overrated men of modern times. When we find Macaulay saying that Bacon had "the most exquisitely constructed intellect that has ever been bestowed on any of the children of men," we need not be surprised to find that his elaborate essay on Bacon is as false in its fundamental conception as it is inaccurate in details. For a long time it was one of the accepted commonplaces that Bacon inaugurated the method by which modern discoveries in physical science have been made. Early in the present century, such writers on the history of science as Whewell began to show the incorrectness of this notion, and it was completely exploded by Stanley Jevons in his "Principles of Science," the most profound treatise on method that has appeared in the last fifty years. Jevons writes: "It is wholly a mistake to say that modern science is the result of the Baconian philosophy; it is the Newtonian philosophy and the Newtonian method which have led to all the great triumphs of physical science, and ... the 'Principia' forms the true Novum Organon." This statement of Jevons is thoroughly sound. The great Harvey, who knew how scientific discoveries are made, said with gentle sarcasm that Bacon "wrote philosophy like a lord chancellor;" yet Harvey would not have denied that the chancellor was doing noble service as the eloquent expounder of many sides of the scientific movement that was then gathering strength. Bacons mind was eminently sagacious and fertile in suggestions, but the supreme creative faculty, the power to lead men into new paths, was precisely the thing which he did not possess. His place is a very high one among intellects of the second order; but to rank him with such godlike spirits as Newton, Spinoza, and Leibnitz simply shows that one has no real knowledge of the work which such men have done.

So much for Bacon himself. With regard to him as possible author of the Shakespeare poems and plays, it is difficult to imagine so learned a scholar making the kind of mistakes that abound in those writings. Bacon would hardly have introduced clocks into the Rome of Julius Cæsar; nor would he have made Hector quote Aristotle, nor Hamlet study at the University of Wittenberg, founded five hundred years after Hamlet's time; nor would he have put pistols into the age of Henry IV., nor cannon into the age of King John; and we may be pretty sure that he would not have made one of the characters in "King Lear" talk about Turks and Bedlam. In this severely realistic age of ours, writers are more on their guard against such anachronisms than they were in Shakespeare's time; in his works we cannot call them serious blemishes, for they do not affect the artistic character of the plays, but they are certainly such mistakes as a scholar like Bacon would not have committed.

Deeper down lies the contrast involved in the fact that Bacon was in a high degree a subjective writer, from whom you are perpetually getting revelations of his idiosyncrasies and moods, whereas of all writers in the world Shakespeare is the most completely objective, the most absorbed in the work of creation. In the one writer you are always reminded of the man Bacon; in the other the personality is never thrust into sight. Bacon is highly self-conscious; from Shakespeare self-consciousness is absent.

The contrast is equally great in respect of humour. I would not deny that Bacon relished a joke, or could perpetrate a pun; but the bubbling, seething, frolicsome, irrepressible drollery of Shakespeare is something quite foreign to him. Read his essays, and you get charming English, wide knowledge, deep thought, keen observation, worldly wisdom, good humour, sweet serenity; but exuberant fun is not there. In writing these essays Bacon was following an example set by Montaigne, but, as contrasted with the delicate effervescent humour of the Frenchman, his style seems sober and almost insipid. Only fancy such a man trying to write "The Merry Wives of Windsor"!

Both Shakespeare and Bacon were sturdy and rapacious purloiners. They seized upon other men's bright thoughts and made them their own without compunction and without acknowledgment; and this may account for sundry similarities which may be culled from the plays and from Bacon's works, upon which Baconizing text-mongers are wont to lay great stress as proof of common authorship. Some such resemblances may be due to borrowing from common sources; others are doubtless purely fanciful; others indicate either that Shakespeare cribbed from Bacon or _vice versa_. Here are a few miscellaneous instances:--

Where Bacon says, "Be so true to thyself as thou be not false to others" ("Essay of Wisdom"), Shakespeare says:--

"To thine own self be true, And it must follow, as the night the day, Thou canst not then be false to any man."

(Hamlet, I. iii.)

This looks as if one writer might have copied from the other. If so, it is Bacon who is the thief, for the lines occur in the quarto "Hamlet" published in 1603, whereas the "Essay of Wisdom" was first published in 1612.

Again, where Bacon, in the "Essay of Gardens," says, "The breath of flowers comes and goes like the warbling of music," it reminds one strongly of the exquisite passage in "Twelfth Night" where the Duke exclaims:--

"That strain again! it had a dying fall: O, it came o'er my ear like the sweet south, That breathes upon a bank of violets, Stealing and giving odour."

I have little doubt that Bacon had this passage in mind when he wrote the "Essay of Gardens," which was first published in 1625, two years later than the complete folio of Shakespeare. This effectually disposes of the attempt to cite these correspondences in evidence that Bacon wrote the plays.

Another instance is from "Richard III.:"--

"By a divine instinct men's minds mistrust Ensuing danger; as, by proof, we see The waters swell before a boisterous storm."

Bacon, in the "Essay of Sedition," writes, "As there are ... secret swellings of seas before a tempest, so there are in states." But this essay was not published till 1625, so again we find him copying Shakespeare. Many such "parallelisms," cited to prove that Bacon wrote Shakespeare's works, do really prove that he read them with great care and remembered them well, or else took notes from them.

An interesting illustration of the helpless ignorance shown by Baconizers is furnished by a remark of Sir Toby Belch in "Twelfth Night." In his instructions to that dear old simpleton, Sir Andrew Aguecheek, about the challenge, Sir Toby observes, "If thou thou'st him some thrice, it shall not be amiss." In Elizabethan English, to address a man as "thou" was to treat him as socially inferior; such familiarity was allowable only between members of the same family or in speaking to servants, just as you address your wife, and likewise the cook and housemaid, by their Christian names, while with the ladies of your acquaintance such familiarity would be rudeness. The same rule for the pronoun survives to-day in French and German, but has been forgotten in English. In the trial of Sir Walter Raleigh in 1604, Justice Coke insulted the prisoner by calling out, "Thou viper! for I _thou_ thee, thou traitor!" Now, one of our Baconizers thinks that his idol, in writing "Twelfth Night," introduced Sir Toby's suggestion in order to recall to the audience Coke's abusive remark. Once more, a little attention to dates would have prevented the making of a bad blunder. We know from Manningham's Diary that "Twelfth Night" had been on the stage nearly two years before Raleigh's trial. On the other hand, to say that the play might have suggested to Coke his coarse speech would be admissible, but idle, inasmuch as the expression "to _thou_ a man" was an every-day phrase in that age.

Here it naturally occurs to me to mention the "Promus," about which as much fuss has been made as if it really furnished evidence in support of the Baconian folly. There is in the British Museum a manuscript, in Bacon's handwriting, entitled "Promus of Formularies and Elegancies." "Promus" means "storehouse" or "treasury." A date at the top of the first page shows that it was begun in December, 1594; there is nothing, I believe, to show over how many years it extended. It is a scrap-book in which Bacon jotted down such sentences, words, and phrases as struck his fancy, such as might be utilized in his writings. These neatly turned phrases, these "formularies and elegancies," are gathered from all quarters,--from the Bible, from Virgil and Horace, from Ovid and Seneca, from Erasmus, from collections of proverbs in various languages, etc. As there is apparently nothing original in this scrap-bag, Mr. Spedding did not think it worth while to include it in his edition of Bacon's works, but in the fourteenth volume he gives a sufficient description of it, with illustrative extracts. In 1883 Mrs. Henry Pott published the whole of this "Promus" manuscript, and swelled it by comments and dissertations into a volume of 600 octavo pages. She had found in it several hundred expressions which reminded her of passages in Shakespeare, and so it confirmed her in the opinion which she already entertained that Bacon was the author of Shakespeare's works. Thus, when the "Promus" has a verse from Ovid, which means, "And the forced tongue begins to lisp the sound commanded," it reminds Mrs. Pott of divers lines in which Shakespeare uses the word "lisp," as for example, in "As You Like It," "you lisp and wear strange suits;" and she jumps to the conclusion that when Bacon jotted down the verse from Ovid, it was as a preparatory study toward "As You Like It," and any other play that contains the word "lisp:" therefore Bacon wrote all those plays, _Q. E. D._! On the next page we find Virgil's remark, "Thus was I wont to compare great things with small," made the father of Falstaff's "base comparisons," and Fluellen's "Macedon and Monmouth," as well as honest Dogberry's "comparisons are odorous." When one reads such things, evidently printed in all seriousness, one feels like asking Mrs. Pott, in the apt words of Shakespeare's friend Fletcher, "What mare's nest hast thou found?" ("Bonduca," V. ii.)

There are many phrases, however, in the "Promus" which undoubtedly agree with phrases in the plays. They show that Bacon heard or read the plays with great interest, and culled from them his "elegancies" with no stinted hand. As for Mrs. Pott's bulky volume, it brings us so near to the final _reductio ad absurdum_ of the Bacon theory that we hardly need spend many words upon the gross improbabilities which that theory involves. The plays of Shakespeare were universally ascribed to him by his contemporaries; many of them were published during his lifetime with his name upon the title-page as the author; all were collected and published together by Hemminge and Condell, two of his fellow actors, seven years after his death; and for more than two centuries nobody ever dreamed of looking for a different authorship, or of associating the plays with Bacon. But this Chimborazo of _prima facie_ evidence becomes a mere mole-hill in the hands of your valiant Baconizer. It is all clear to him. Bacon did not acknowledge the authorship of these works because such literature was deemed frivolous, and current prejudices against theatres and playwrights might injure his hopes of advancement at the bar and in political life. Therefore, by some sort of private understanding with the ignorant and sordid wretch Shakespeare,[42] at whose theatre they were brought out, their authorship was ascribed to him, the real author died without revealing the secret, and the whole world was deceived until the days of Delia Bacon.

But there are questions which even this ingenious hypothesis fails to answer. Why should Bacon have taken the time to write those thirty-seven plays, two poems, and one hundred and fifty-four sonnets, if they were never to be known as his works? Not for money, surely, for that grasping Shakespeare seems to have got the money as well as the fame; Bacon died a poor man. His principal aim in life was to construct a new system of philosophy; on this noble undertaking he spent such time as he could save from the exactions of his public career as member of Parliament, chancery lawyer, solicitor-general, attorney-general, lord chancellor; and he died with this work far from finished. The volumes which he left behind him were only fragments of the mighty structure which he had planned. We may well ask, Where did this overburdened writer find the time for doing work of another kind voluminous enough to fill a lifetime, and what motive had he for doing it without recompense in either fame or money? Baconizers find it strange that Shakespeare's will contains no reference to his plays as literary property. The omission is certainly interesting, since it seems to indicate that he had parted with his pecuniary interest in them,--had perhaps sold it out to the Globe Theatre. If this omission can be held to show that Shakespeare was lacking in fondness for the productions of his own genius, what shall be said of the notion that Bacon spent half his life in writing works the paternity of which he must forever disown?

This question is answered by Mr. Ignatius Donnelly, a writer who speculates with equal infelicity on all subjects, but never suffers for lack of boldness. He published in 1887 a book even bigger than that of Mrs. Pott, for it has nearly 1000 pages. Its title is, "The Great Cryptogram," and its thesis is, that Bacon really did claim the authorship of the Shakespeare plays. Only the claim was made in a cipher, and if you simply make some numbers mean some words, and other words mean other numbers, and perform a good many sums in what the Mock Turtle called "ambition, distraction, uglification, and derision," you will be able to read this claim between the lines, along with much other wonderful information. Thus does the arithmetical Donnelly carry us quite a long stride nearer to the _reductio ad absurdum_, or suicide point, than we were left by Mrs. Pott, with her lisping and limping comparisons.

But before we come to the jumping-off place, let us pause for a moment and take a retrospective glance at the natural history of the Bacon-Shakespeare craze. What was it that first unlocked the sluice-gates, and poured forth such a deluge of foolishness upon a sorely suffering world? It will hardly do to lay the blame upon poor Delia Bacon. Her suggestions would have borne no fruit had they not found a public, albeit a narrow one, in some degree prepared for them. Who, then, prepared the soil for the seeds of this idiocy to take root? Who but the race of fond and foolish Shakespeare commentators, with their absurd claims for their idol? During the eighteenth century Shakespeare was generally underrated. Voltaire wondered how a nation that possessed such a noble tragedy as Addison's "Cato" could endure such plays as "Hamlet" and "Othello." In the days of Scott and Burns a reaction set in; and Shakespeare worship reached its height when the Germans took it up, and, not satisfied with calling him the prince of poets and peerless master of dramatic art, began to discover in his works all sorts of hidden philosophy and impossible knowledge. Of the average German mind Lowell good-naturedly says that "it finds its keenest pleasure in divining a profound significance in the most trifling things, and the number of mare's nests that have been stared into by the German _Gelehrter_ through his spectacles passes calculation."[43] But the Germans are not the only sinners; let me cite an instance from near home. In the quarto "Hamlet" of 1603 we read:--

"Full forty years are past, their date is gone, Since happy time joined both our hearts as one: And now the blood that filled my youthful veins Runs weakly in their pipes," etc.

Whereupon Mr. Edward Vining calls upon us to observe how Shakespeare, "to whom all human knowledge seems to be but a matter of instinct, in [these lines] asserts the circulation of the blood in the veins and 'pipes,' a truth which Harvey probably did not even suspect until at least thirteen years later," etc.[44] Does Mr. Vining really suppose that what Harvey did was to discover that blood runs in our veins? A little further study of history would have taught him that even the ancients knew that blood runs in the veins.[45] About fourteen hundred years before "Hamlet" was written, Galen proved that it also runs in the arteries. After Galen's time, it was believed that the dark blood nourishes such plebeian organs as the liver, while the bright blood nourishes such lordly organs as the brain, and that the interchange takes place in the heart; until the sixteenth century, when Vesalius proved that the interchange does not take place in the heart, and the martyr Servetus proved that it does take place in the lungs; and so on till 1619, when Harvey discovered that dark blood is brought by the veins to the right side of the heart, and thence driven into the lungs, where it becomes bright and flows into the left side of the heart, thence to be propelled throughout the body in the arteries. That it then grows dark and returns through the veins Harvey believed, but no one could tell how, until, forty years later, Malpighi with his microscope detected the capillaries. Now to talk about Shakespeare discerning as if by instinct a truth which Harvey afterward discovered is simply silly. Instead of showing rare scientific knowledge, his remark about blood running in the veins is one that anybody might have made.

This is a fair specimen of the ignorant way in which doting commentators have built up an impossible Shakespeare, until at last they have provoked a reaction. Sooner or later the question was sure to arise, Where did your Stratford boy get all this abstruse scientific knowledge? The keynote was perhaps first sounded by August von Schlegel, who persuaded himself that Shakespeare had mastered "all the things and relations of this world," and then went on to declare that the accepted account of his life must be a mere fable. Thus we reach the point from which Delia Bacon started.

It may safely be said that all theories of Shakespeare's plays which suppose them to be attempts at teaching occult philosophical doctrines, or which endow them with any other meanings than those which their words directly and plainly convey, are a delusion and a snare. Those plays were written, not to teach philosophy, but to fill the theatre and make money. They were written by a practised actor and manager, the most consummate master of dramatic effects that ever lived; a poet unsurpassed for fertility of invention, unequalled for melody of language, unapproached for delicacy of fancy, inexhaustible in humour, profoundest of moralists; a man who knew human nature by intuition, as Mozart knew counterpoint or as Chopin knew harmony. The name of that writer was none other than William Shakespeare of Stratford-on-Avon.

It was inevitable that the Bacon folly, after once adopting such methods as those of Mrs. Pott and Mr. Donnelly, should proceed to commit suicide by piling up extravagances. By such methods one can prove anything, and accordingly we find these writers busy in tracing Bacon's hand in the writings of Greene, Marlowe, Shirley, Marston, Massinger, Middleton, and Webster. They are sure that he was the author of Montaigne's Essays, which were afterward translated into what we have always supposed to be the French original. Mr. Donnelly believes that Bacon also wrote Burton's "Anatomy of Melancholy." Next comes Dr. Orville Owen with a new cipher, which proves that Bacon was the son of Queen Elizabeth by Robert Dudley, and that he was the author of the "Faerie Queene" and other poems attributed to Edmund Spenser. Finally we have Mr. J. E. Roe, who does not mean to be outdone. He asks us what we are to think of the notion that an ignorant tinker, like John Bunyan, could have written the most perfect allegory in any language. Perish the thought! Nobody but Bacon could have done it. Of course Bacon had been more than fifty years in his grave when "Pilgrim's Progress" was published as Bunyan's. But your true Baconizer is never stopped by trifles. Mr. Roe assures us that Bacon wrote that heavenly book, as well as "Robinson Crusoe" and the "Tale of a Tub;" which surely begins to make him seem ubiquitous and everlasting. If things go on at this rate, we shall presently have a religious sect holding as its first article of faith that Francis Bacon created the heavens and the earth in six days, and rested on the seventh day.

_November, 1896._

XIV

SOME CRANKS AND THEIR CROTCHETS

"Now, by two-headed Janus, Nature hath framed strange fellows in her time!"

_Merchant of Venice_, I. i.

About five-and-twenty years ago, when I was assistant librarian at Harvard University, much of my time was occupied in revising and bringing toward completion the gigantic pair of twin catalogues--of authors and subjects--which my predecessor, Dr. Ezra Abbot, had started in 1861. Twins they were in simultaneity of birth, but not in likeness of growth. Naturally, the classified catalogue was much bigger than its brother, filled more drawers, cost more money, and made a vast deal more trouble. For while some books were easy enough to classify, others were not at all easy, and sometimes curious questions would arise.

One day, for example, I happened to be looking at a pamphlet on the value of Pi; and, should any of my readers ask what that might mean, I should answer that Pi (π) is the Greek letter which geometers use to denote the ratio of the circumference of a circle to its diameter. The arithmetical value of this symbol is 3.1415926536, and so on in an endless fraction. Is it not hard to see what there can be in such an innocent decimal to irritate human beings and destroy their peace of mind? Yet so it is. Many a human life has been wrecked upon Pi. To a certain class of our fellow-creatures its existence is maddening. It interferes with the success of a little scheme on which they have set their hearts,--nothing less than to construct a square which shall be exactly equivalent in dimensions to a given circle. Nobody has ever done such a thing, for it cannot be done. But when mathematicians tell these poor people that such is the case, they howl with rage, and, dipping their pens in gall, write book after book bristling with figures to prove that they have "squared the circle." The Harvard library does not buy such books, but it accepts all manner of gifts, and has thus come to contain some queer things.

When I consulted the subject catalogue, to see under what head it had been customary to classify these lucubrations on Pi, I found, sure enough, that it was Mathematics § Circle-Squaring. Following this cue, I explored the drawers in other directions, and found books on "perpetual motion" formed a section under Physics, while crazy interpretations of the book of Daniel were grouped along with works of solid Biblical scholarship by such eminent writers as Reuss and Kuenen and Cheyne. Clearly, here was a case for reform. The principle of classification was faulty. In one sense, the treatment of the quadrature of the circle may be regarded as a section under the general head of mathematics; as, for example, when Lindemann, in 1882, showed that Pi cannot be represented as the root of any algebraic equation with rational coefficients. But our circle-squaring literature is very different. It is usually written by persons whose mathematical horizon scarcely extends beyond long division: just as the writers on perpetual motion know nothing of physics; just as so many expositors have dealt with the ten-horned beast in blissful ignorance alike of ancient history and of the principles of literary criticism. What all such books illustrate, however various may be their ostensible themes, is the pathology of the human mind. They are specimens of Insane Literature. As such they have a certain sort of interest; and to any rational being it is the only sort they can have.

So I culled from many a little drawer the cards appertaining to divers printed products of morbid cerebration, and gathered them into a class of Insane Literature; and under this rubric such sections as Circle-Squaring, Perpetual Motion, Great Pyramid, Earth not a Globe, etc., were evidently in their proper place. The name of the class was duly inscribed on the outside of its drawer, and the matter seemed happily disposed of.

The way of the reformer, however, is beset with difficulties, and it is seldom that his first efforts are crowned with entire success. Not many days had elapsed since this emendation of the catalogue, when one of my assistants brought me the card of a book on the Apocalypse, by a certain Mr. Smallwit, and called my attention to the fact that it was classified as Insane Literature.

"Very well," I said, "so it is."

"I don't doubt it, sir," said she; "but the author lives over in Chelsea, and I saw him this morning in one of the alcoves. Perhaps, if he were to look in the catalogue and see how his book is classified, he mightn't altogether like it. Then, as I looked a little further along the cards, I came upon this pamphlet by Herr Dummkopf, of Breslau, upsetting the law of gravitation; and--do you know?--Herr Dummkopf is spending the winter here in Cambridge!"

"To be sure," said I, "it was very stupid of me not to foresee such cases. Of course we can't call a man a fool to his face. In a catalogue which marshals the quick along with the dead some heed must be paid to the amenities of life. Pray get and bring me all those cards."

By the time they arrived a satisfactory solution of the difficulty had suggested itself. I told the assistant simply to scratch out "Insane," and put "Eccentric" instead. For while the harsh Latin epithet would of course infuriate Messrs. Dummkopf, Smallwit & Co., it might be doubted if their feelings would be hurt by the milder Greek word. Some people of their stripe, to whom notoriety is the very breath of their nostrils, would consider it a mark of distinction to be called eccentric. At all events, the harshness would be delicately veiled under a penumbra of ambiguity.

Thus the class Eccentric Literature was established in our catalogue, and there it has remained, while the books in the library have increased from a hundred thousand to half a million. Once or twice, I am told, has some disgusted author uttered a protest, but the quiet of Gore Hall has not been disturbed thereby. Care is needed in treating such a subject, and my rule was that no amount of mere absurdity, no extremity of dissent from generally received opinions, should consign a book to the class of Eccentric Literature, unless it showed unmistakable symptoms of crankery, or the buzzing of a bee in the author's bonnet. This rule has been strictly followed. One lot of books--the Bacon-Shakespeare stuff--which I intended to put in this class, but forgot to do so because of sore stress of work, still remain absurdly grouped along with the books on Shakespeare written by men in their senses. With this exception, the class offers us a fairly comprehensive view of the literature of cranks.

Just where the line should be drawn between sanity and crankery is not always easy to determine, and must usually be left to soundness of judgment in each particular case, as with so many other questions of all grades, from the supreme court down to the kitchen. One of the most frequent traits of your crank is his megalomania, or self-magnification. His intellectual equipment is so slender that he cannot see wherein he is inferior to Descartes or Newton. Without enough knowledge to place him in the sixth form of a grammar school, he will assail the conclusions of the greatest minds the world has seen. His mood is belligerent; since people will not take him at his own valuation, he is apt to regard society as engaged in a conspiracy to ignore and belittle him. Of humour he is pretty sure to be destitute; an abounding sense of the ludicrous is one of the best safeguards of mental health, and even a slight endowment will usually nip and stunt the fungus growth of crankery.

The slightest glimmering sense of humour would have restrained that inveterate circle-squarer, James Smith, from publishing (in 1865) his pamphlet entitled "The British Association in Jeopardy, and Dr. Whewell, the Master of Trinity, in the Stocks without Hope of Escape." His case, with those of many other ingenious lunatics, was racily set forth by the late Professor De Morgan in his "Budget of Paradoxes" (London, 1872), a bulky book dealing with the author's personal experiences with cranks and their crotchets. It was De Morgan's lot as an eminent mathematician to be outrageously bored by circle-squarers and their kin, and it was a happy thought to put on record the queer things that happened. His friends asked him again and again why he took the trouble to mention and expose such absurdities. He replied that, when your crank publishes a book "full of figures which few readers can criticise, a great many people are staggered to this extent, that they imagine there must be the indefinite _something_ in the mysterious _all this_. They are brought to the point of suspicion that the mathematicians ought not to treat _all this_ with such undisguised contempt, at least. Now I have no fear for π; but I do think it possible that general opinion might in time demand that the crowd of circle-squarers, etc., should be admitted to the honours of opposition; and this would be a time-tax of five per cent. one man with another, upon those who are better employed." At any rate, continues De Morgan, with a twinkle in the corner of his eye, whether in chastising cranks he has any motive but public good "must be referred to those who can decide whether a missionary chooses his pursuit solely to convert the heathen." He confesses that perhaps he may have a little of the spirit of Colonel Quagg, whose principle of action was thus succinctly expressed: "I licks ye because I kin, and because I like, and because ye's critters that licks is good for!"

Among the creatures whose malady seemed to call for such drastic treatment was Captain Forman, R. N., who in 1833 wrote against the law of gravitation, and got not a word of notice. Then he wrote to Sir John Herschel and Lord Brougham, asking them to get his book reviewed in some of the quarterlies. Receiving no answer from these gentlemen, he addressed in one of the newspapers a card to Lord John Russell, inveighing against their "dishonest" behaviour. Still getting no satisfaction, the valorous captain wrote to the Royal Astronomical Society with a challenge to controversy. To this letter came a polite but brief answer, advising him to study the rudiments of mechanics. It was not in the paradoxer's nature to submit tamely to such treatment; and he replied in a printed pamphlet, wherein he called that learned society "craven dunghill cocks," and bestrewed them, with other choice flowers of rhetoric, much to the relief of his feelings.

One of this naval officer's fellow sufferers was a farm labourer, who took it into his head that the Lord Chancellor had offered £100,000 reward to any one who should square the circle. So Hodge went to work and squared it, and then hied him to London, blissfully dreaming of sudden wealth. Hearing that De Morgan was a great mathematician, he left his papers with him, including a letter to the Lord Chancellor, claiming the £100,000. De Morgan returned the papers with a note, saying that no such prize had ever been offered, and gently hinting that the worthy Hodge had not sufficient knowledge to see in what the problem consisted. This elicited from the rustic philosopher a long letter, from which I must quote a few sentences, so characteristic of the circle-squaring talent and temper:--

Doctor Morgan, Sir. Permit me to address you

Brute Creation may perhaps enjoy the faculty of beholding visible things with a more penitrating eye than ourselves. But Spiritual objects are as far out of their reach as though they had no being Nearest therefore to the brute Creation are those men who Suppose themselves to be so far governed by external objects as to believe nothing but what they See and feel And Can accomedate to their Shallow understanding and Imaginations

... When a Gentleman of your Standing in Society ... Can not understand or Solve a problem That is explicitly explained by words and Letters and mathematacally operated by figuers He had best consult the wise proverd

Do that which thou Canst understand and Comprehend for thy good.

I would recommend that Such Gentleman Change his business

And appropriate his time and attention to a Sunday School to Learn what he Could and keep the Litle Children form durting their Close

With Sincere feelings of Gratitude for your weakness and Inability I am

Sir your Superior in Mathematics.

X. Y.

A few days after this elegant epistle there came to De Morgan another from the same hand. Hodge had sent his papers to some easy-going American professor, whose reply must clearly have been too polite. It is never safe to give your crank an inch of comfort; it will straightway become an ell of assurance. This American savant, crows Rusticus, "highly approves of my work. And Says he will Insure me Reward in the States I write this that you may understand that I have knowledge of the unfair way that I am treated in my own nati County I am told and have reasons to believe that it is the Clergy that treat me so unjust. I am not Desirious of heaping Disonors upon my own nation. But if I have to Leave this kingdom without my Just dues. The world Shall know how I am and have been treated

"I am Sir Desirous of my Just dues

"X. Y."

A cynical philosopher once said that you cannot find so big a fool but there will be some bigger fool to swear by him; and so our agricultural friend had his admiring disciple who felt bound to break a lance for him with the unappreciative De Morgan:--

"He has done what you nor any other mathematician as those who call themselves such have done. And what is the reason that you will not candidly acknowledge to him ... that he has squared the circle shall I tell you? it is because he has performed the feat to obtain the glory of which mathematicians have battled from time immemorial that they might encircle their brows with a wreath of laurels far more glorious than ever conqueror won it is simply this that it is a poor man a humble artisan who has gained that victory that you don't like to acknowledge it you don't like to be beaten and worse to acknowledge that you have miscalculated, you have in short too small a soul to acknowledge that he is right.... I am backed in my opinion not only by Mr. Q. a mathematician and watchmaker residing in the boro of Southwark but by no less an authority than the Professor of mathematics of ... College United States Mr. Q and I presume that he at least is your equal as an authority and Mr. Q says that the government of the U. S. will recompense X. Y. for the discovery he has made if so what a reflection upon Old england the boasted land of freedom the nursery of the arts and sciences that her sons are obliged to go to a foreign country to obtain that recompense to which they are justly entitled."[46]

Ordinarily, the aim of the paradoxers is to achieve renown by doing what nobody ever did. Hence the fascination exercised upon them by those apparently simple problems which already in ancient times were recognized as "old stickers," the quadrature of the circle, the trisection of angles, and the duplicature of the cube. The ancients found these geometric problems insolvable, though it was left for modern algebra to point out the reason, namely, that no quantities can be geometrically constructed from given quantities, except such as can be formed from them algebraically by the solution of quadratic equations; if the algebraic solution comes as the root of a cubic or biquadratic equation, it cannot be constructed by geometry. Against this hopeless wall the crowd of paradoxers will doubtless continue to break their heads until the millennium dawns.

Sometimes, however, our crank has a practical end in view, as in the numerous attempts to discover "perpetual motion," or, in other words, to invent a machine out of which you can get indefinitely more energy than you put in. It is not strange that many thousands of dollars have been wasted in this effort to recover Aladdin's lost lamp. The notorious Keely motor is but one of a host of contrivances born and bred of crass ignorance of the alphabet of dynamics. But perpetual motion is not the only form assumed by wealth-seeking crankery. In 1861 a Captain Roblin, of Normandy, having ascertained to his own satisfaction, from the prolonged study of the zodiac of Denderah, the sites of sundry gold-mines, came forward with proposals for a joint stock company to dig and be rich. The labours of Herr Johannes von Gumpach were of a more philanthropic turn. He published in 1861 a pamphlet entitled "A Million's Worth of Property and Five Hundred Lives annually lost at Sea by the Theory of Gravitation. A Letter on the True Figure of the Earth, addressed to the Astronomer Royal." Next year this pamphlet grew into a stout volume. It maintained that a great many shipwrecks were occasioned by errors of navigation due to an erroneous conception of the shape of the earth. Since Newton's time, it has been supposed to be flattened at the poles, whereas the amiable Gumpach calls upon his fellow-creatures to take notice that it is elongated, and to mend their ways accordingly.

The desire to prove great men wrong is one of the crank's most frequent and powerful incentives. The name of Newton is the greatest in the history of science: how flattering to one's self it must be, then, to prove him a fool! In eccentric literature the books against Newton are legion. Here is a title: "David and Goliath, or an Attempt to prove that the Newtonian System of Astronomy is directly opposed to the Scriptures. By William Lander, Mere, Wilts, 1833." And here is De Morgan's terse summary of the book: "Newton is Goliath; Mr. Lander is David. David took five pebbles; Mr. Lander takes five arguments. He expects opposition; for Paul and Jesus both met with it."

There are few subjects over which cranks are more painfully exercised than the figure of the earth, and its relations to heavenly bodies. Aristotle proved that the earth is a globe; Copernicus showed that it is one of a system of planets revolving about the sun; Newton explained the dynamics of this system. But at length came a certain John Hampden, who with dauntless breast maintained that all this is wrong! His pamphlet was prudently dedicated "to the unprofessional public and the common sense men of Europe and America;" he knew that it could find no favor with bigoted men of science. This Hampden, like his great namesake, is nothing if not bold. "The Newtonian or Copernican theory," he tells us, "from the first hour of its invention, has never dared to submit to an appeal to facts!" Again, "Defenders it never had; and no threats, no taunts or exposure, will ever rouse the energies of a single champion." In other words, astronomers do not waste their time in noticing Mr. Hampden's taunts and threats. Why is this so? His next sentence reminds us that "cowardice always accompanies conscious guilt." He goes on to tell us the true state of the case: "The earth, as it came from the hands of its Almighty Creator, is a motionless Plane, based and built upon foundations which the Word of God expressly declares cannot be searched out or discovered.... The stars are hardly bigger than the gas jets which light our streets, and, if they could be made to change places with them, no astronomer could detect the difference." The North Pole is the centre of the flat earth, and its extreme southern limit is not a South Pole, but a circle 30,000 miles in circumference. Night is caused by the sun passing behind a layer of clouds 7000 miles thick. It is not gravitation which makes a river run down hill, but the impetus of the water behind pressing on the water before. Is not this delicious? As for Newton, poor fellow, he "lived in a superstitious age and district; he was educated among an illiterate peasantry." This is like the way in which the Baconizing cranks dispose of Shakespeare. So zealous was Mr. Hampden that in 1876 he began publishing a periodical called "The Truth Seeker's Oracle." Similar views were set forth by one Samuel Rowbotham, who wrote under the name of "Parallax," and by a William Carpenter, whose pamphlet, "One Hundred Proofs that the Earth is not a Globe" (Baltimore, 1885), is quite a curiosity; for example, Proof 33: "If the earth were a globe, people--except those on top--would certainly have to be fastened to its surface by some means or other;... but as we know that we simply walk on its surface, without any other aid than that which is necessary for locomotion on a plane, it follows that we have herein a conclusive proof that Earth is not a globe." Since Mr. Carpenter understands the matter so thoroughly, can we wonder at the earnestness with which he rebukes the late Richard Proctor? "Mr. Proctor, we charge you that, whilst you teach the theory of the earth's rotundity, you KNOW that it is a plane!"

More original than Messrs. Hampden and Carpenter are the writers who maintain that the earth is hollow, and supports a teeming population in its interior. Early in the present century this idea came with the force of a revelation to the mind of Captain John Cleves Symmes, a retired army officer engaged in trade at St. Louis. In 1818 he issued a circular, of which the following is an abridgment: "TO ALL THE WORLD I declare the earth is hollow and habitable within; containing a number of solid concentric spheres, one within the other, and that it is open at the poles twelve or sixteen degrees. I pledge my life in support of this truth, and am ready to explore the hollow, if the world will support and aid me in the undertaking.... My terms are [Hear, Messrs. Quay and Platt! and give ear, O Tammany!] _the_ PATRONAGE _of_ THIS _and the_ NEW WORLDS.... I select Dr. S. L. Mitchell, Sir H. Davy, and Baron Alexander von Humboldt as my protectors. I ask one hundred brave companions, well equipped, to start from Siberia, in the fall season, with reindeer and sleighs, on the ice of the frozen sea. I engage we find a warm and rich land, stocked with thrifty vegetables and animals, if not men, on reaching one degree northward of latitude 82°. We will return in the succeeding spring."

This circular was sent by mail to men of science, colleges, learned societies, legislatures, and municipal bodies, all over the United States and Europe; for when it comes to postage, your crank seems always to have unlimited funds at his disposal. At Paris, the distinguished traveller, Count Volney, doubtless with a significant shrug, presented the precious document to the Academy of Sciences, by which it was mirthfully laid upon the table. Nowhere did learned men take it seriously; it was generally set down as a rather stupid hoax. But, nothing daunted by such treatment, the worthy Symmes began giving lectures on the subject, and succeeded in making some impression upon an uninstructed public. In 1824 his audience at Hamilton, Ohio, at the close of a lecture, "_resolved_, that we esteem Symmes' Theory of the Earth deserving of serious examination and worthy of the attention of the American people." At a theatre in Cincinnati, a benefit was given for the proposed polar expedition, and verses were recited suitable to the occasion:--

"Has not Columbia one aspiring son By whom the unfading laurel may be won? Yes! history's pen may yet inscribe the name Of SYMMES to grace her future scroll of fame."

The captain's petitions to Congress, however, praying for ships and men, were heartlessly laid on the table, and nothing was left him but to keep on crying in the wilderness, which he did until his death in 1829. In the cemetery at Hamilton, the freestone monument over his grave, placed there by his son, Americus Symmes, is surmounted with a hollow globe, open at the poles.

Half a century later the son published a pamphlet,[47] in which he gave a somewhat detailed exposition of his father's notions. From this we learn that the interior world is well lighted; for the sun's rays, passing through "the dense cold air of the verges" (that is, the circular edge of the big polar hole), are powerfully refracted, and after getting inside they are forthwith reflected from one concave surface to another, with the result that the whole interior is illuminated with a light equal to 3600 times that of the full moon. We learn, too, that the famous Swedish geographer, Norpensjould (_semper sic!_), after passing the magnetic pole, found a timbered country with large rivers and abundant animal life. Afterward one Captain Wiggins visited this country, where he found flax and wheat, highly magnetic iron ore, and rich mines of copper and gold. The trees are as big as any in California; hides, wool, tallow, ivory, and furs abound. The inhabitants are very tall, with Roman noses, and speak Hebrew. Yes, echoes Captain Tuttle, an old whaler, who also has visited this new country, they speak Hebrew, and are a smart people. "Would it not be logical," writes Americus, "to think that this was one of the lost tribes of Israel? for we read in the Bible that they went up the Euphrates to the north and dwelt in a land where man never dwelt before." Just so; evidently, Messrs. "Norpensjould," Wiggins, and Tuttle sailed "across the verge" and into the interior country, the concave world, which shall henceforth be known as Symmzonia! The book ends with the triumphant query, "Where were those explorers if not in the Hollow of the Earth, and would they not have come out at the South Pole if they had continued on their course?"

It is sad to have such positive conclusions disputed, but even in eccentric lore the doctors are found to disagree. Scarcely had Americus put forth his revised edition, when a pamphlet entitled "The Inner World," by Frederick Culmer, was published at Salt Lake City (1886). Its chapters have resounding titles: "I. The Universal Vacuity of Centres; II. The Polar Orifices of the Earth; III. The Alleged Northwest Passage and Symmes' Hole." We are told that although the polar orifices have diameters of about a thousand miles each, nevertheless, in spite of Wiggins and Tuttle, "there is no passage to the inner world on the north of America;" on the contrary, it must be sought within the antarctic circle. But Mr. Culmer would discourage rash attempts at exploration, and believes that "no man will be able to plant the standard of his country on any land in that region worth one dime to himself or any one else at present." For this gloomy outlook we must try to console ourselves with the knowledge that Mr. Culmer has detected the true explanation of the Aurora Borealis: "It is the sun's rays shining on a placid interior ocean and reflecting upon the outer atmosphere."

A favourite occupation of cranks is the discovery of hidden meanings in things. Whether we are to say that the passionate quest of the occult has been prolific in mental disturbances, or whether we had better say that persons with ill-balanced minds take especial delight in the search for the occult, the practical result is about the same. The impelling motive is not very different from that of the circle-squarers; it is pleasing to one's self-love to feel that one discerns things to which all other people are blind. Hence the number of mare's-nests that have been complacently stared into by learned donkeys is legion. Mere erudition is no sure safeguard against the subtle forms which the temptation takes on, as we may see from the ingenuity that has been wasted on the Great Pyramid. In 1864, Piazzi Smyth, Astronomer Royal for Scotland, published his book entitled "Our Inheritance in the Great Pyramid," and afterward followed it with other similar books. Whatever may have been the original complexion of this gentleman's mind, it was not such as to prevent his attaining distinction and achieving usefulness as a practical astronomer. But the pyramids were too much for his mental equilibrium. As De Morgan kindly puts it, "his work on Egypt is paradox of a very high order, backed by a great quantity of useful labour, the results of which will be made available by those who do not receive the paradoxes."

The pyramidal tombs of Egyptian kings were an evolution in stone or brick from the tumulus of earth which in prehistoric ages was heaped over the body of the war chief. They are objects of rare dignity and interest, not only from their immense size, but from sundry peculiarities in their construction. In their orientation great care was taken, though usually with imperfect success. Their sides face the four cardinal points, and the descending entry-way forms a kind of telescope, from the bottom of which an observer, sixty centuries ago, could look out at what was then the polestar. These and other features of the pyramids are no doubt connected with Egyptian religion, and may very likely have subserved astrological purposes. But what say the pyramid cranks, or "pyramidalists," as they have been called?

According to them, the builders of the Great Pyramid were supernaturally instructed, probably by Melchizedek, King of Salem. Thus they were enabled to place it in latitude 30° N.; to make its four sides face the cardinal points; to adopt the sacred cubit, or one twenty millionth part of the earth's polar axis, as their unit of length; "and to make the side of the square base equal to just so many of these sacred cubits as there are days and parts of a day in a year. They were further by supernatural help enabled to square the circle, and symbolized their victory over this problem by making the pyramid's height bear to the perimeter of the base the ratio which the radius of a circle bears to the circumference."[48] In like manner, by immediate divine revelation, the builders of the pyramid were instructed as to the exact shape and density of the earth, the sun's distance, the precession of the equinoxes, etc., so that their figures on all these subjects were more accurate than any that modern science has obtained, and these figures they built into the pyramid. They also built into it the divinely revealed and everlasting standards of "length, area, capacity, weight, density, heat, time, and money," and finally they wrought into its structure the precise date at which the millennium is to begin. All this valuable information, handed down directly from heaven, was thus securely bottled up in the Great Pyramid for six thousand years or so, awaiting the auspicious day when Mr. Piazzi Smyth should come and draw the cork. Why so much knowledge should have been bestowed upon the architects of King Cheops, only to be concealed from posterity, is a pertinent question; and one may also ask, why was it worth while to bring a Piazzi Smyth into the world to reveal it, since plodding human reason had after all by slow degrees discovered every bit of it, except the date of the millennium? Why, moreover, did the revelation thus elaborately buried in or about B. C. 4000 come just abreast of the scientific knowledge of A. D. 1864, and there stop short? Is it credible that old Melchizedek knew nothing about the telephone, or the Roentgen ray, or the cholera bacillus? Our pyramidalists should be more enterprising, and elicit from their venerable fetish some useful hints as to wireless telegraphy, or the ventilation of Pullman cars, or the purification of Pennsylvania politics. Perhaps the last-named problem might vie in difficulty with squaring the circle!

The lucubrations of Piazzi Smyth, like those of Miss Delia Bacon, called into existence a considerable quantity of eccentric literature. For example, there is Skinner's "Key to the Hebrew-Egyptian Mystery in the Source of Measures originating the British Inch and the Ancient Cubit," published in Cincinnati in 1875, a tall octavo of 324 pages, bristling with diagrams and decimals, Hebrew words and logarithms. The book begins by getting the circle neatly squared, and then goes on to aver that sundry crosses, including the Christian cross, are an emblematic display of the origin of measures. The "mound-builders" come in for a share of the author's attention; for the mounds are "alike Typhonic emblems with the pyramid of Egypt and with Hebrew symbols." A Typhonic emblem relates to Typhon, the "lord of sepulture," whose Egyptian representative was the crocodile, as his Hebrew representative was the hog; "exemplified in the Christian books by the devil leaving the man and passing into the herd of swine, which thereupon rushed into the sea, another emblem of Typhon." Yet another such emblem is a mound in Ohio which simulates the contour of an alligator. A certain Aztec pyramid, described by Humboldt, has 318 niches, apparently in allusion to the days of the old Mexican civil calendar. Mr. Skinner sees in this numeral the value of Pi, and furthermore informs us that 318 is the Gnostic symbol for Christ, as well as the number of Abraham's trained servants. Frequent use of it is made in the Great Pyramid; for example, multiplied by six it gives the height of the king's chamber, and multiplied by two it gives half the base side of that apartment. Our author then puts the pyramid into a sphere, and after this feat it is an easy transition to Noah's flood, the zodiac, and modern ritualism. Of similar purport, though more concise than this octavo, is Dr. Watson Quinby's "Solomon's Seal, a Key to the Pyramid," published at Wilmington, Delaware, in 1880. From this little book we learn that "in the early days of the world some one measured the earth, and found its diameter, in round numbers, to be 41,569,000 feet, or 498,828,000 inches;" also that "Vishnu means Fish-Nuh, Noah-the-Fish, in allusion to his sojourn in the ark." Moreover, the Institutes of Manu were written by Noah, since Maha-Nuh = Great-Noah! With equal felicity, Rev. Edward Dingle (in his "The Balance of Physics, the Square of the Circle, and the Earth's True Solar and Lunar Distances," London, 1885, pp. 246) declares that "my success, let it be held what it may, was secured by cleaving to the Mosaic initiation of the Sabbatic number for my radius." At the end of his book Mr. Dingle exclaims: "To the Lord be all thanksgiving, who has kept my intellect and the directing of its thoughts sound, while seeking to deliver his word from the exulting shouts of his enemies and the seducers of mankind!"

From these grotesque rigmaroles it is not a long step to the lucubrations of the writers in whose bonnets the bee of prophecy has buzzed until they have come to fancy themselves skilled interpreters. There is apt to be the same droll mixing of arithmetic with history that we find among the pyramid cranks, and to the performance of such antics the book of Daniel and the Apocalypse present irresistible temptations. In my library days, I never used to pick up a commentary on either of those books without looking for some of the stigmata or witch-marks of crankery. Many a feeble intellect has been toppled over by that shining image, with head of gold and feet of iron and clay, which Nebuchadnezzar beheld in a dream. For example, let us take a few sentences from "Emmanuel: An Original and Exhaustive Commentary on Creation and Providence Alike. By an Octogenarian Layman," London, 1883, pp. 420: "Upwards of thirty years ago, a fancy for chronological research, fostered by boundless leisure and a competent facility in mental calculation, riveted my attention on the metallic image, in the vague hope of symmetrizing the four sections of the collective emblem with the successive dominations of the individual empires. Failing in so shadowy an aspiration, I seemed to be more than compensated by detecting an identity of duration, equally pregnant and positive, between the gold and the silver and the brass and the iron taken together on the one hand, and the mountain that was to crush them all to powder on the other,--the former aggregate being assumed to stretch from Nebuchadnezzar's succession in 606 B. C. to the dethronement of Augustulus in 476 A. D., and the latter again from the epoch just specified to Elizabeth's purgation of the Sanctuary in 1558." Having thus taken two equal periods of 1082 years, our Octogenarian proceeds to break them up (Heaven knows why!) each into four periods of 68, 204, 269, and 541 years. Then we are treated to the following equations:--

68 = 2 × 34 204 = 6 × 34 269 = 5 × 34 + 3 × 33 541 = 13 × 34 + 3 × 33

Hence, "with such a fulcrum as the Lamb slain before the foundation of the world, and such a lever as the span of the Victim's sublunary humiliation, was I too rash in aiming at a result infinitely grander than Archimedes's speculative displacement of the earth?"

That eminent mathematician, Dr. Nathaniel Bowditch, used to say that sometimes, when Laplace passed from one equation to the next with an "evidently," he would find a week's study necessary to cross the abyss which the transcendent mind of the master traversed in a single leap. I fancy that more than a week would be needed to fathom the Octogenarian's "hence," and it would by no means be worth while to go through so much and get so little. After a few pages of the Octogenarian, we are prepared to hear that in 1750 one Henry Sullamar squared the circle by the number of the Beast with seven heads and ten horns; and that in 1753 a certain French officer, M. de Causans, "cut a circular piece of turf, squared it, and deduced original sin and the Trinity."[49]

The reader is doubtless by this time weary of so much tomfoolery; but as it is needful, for the due comprehension of crankery and its crotchets, that he should by and by have still more of it, I will give him a moment's relief while I tell of a little game with which De Morgan and Whewell once amused themselves. The task was to make a sentence which should contain all the letters of the alphabet, and each only once. "No one," says De Morgan, "has done it with _v_ and _j_ treated as consonants; but _you_ and _I_ can do it" (_u_ and _i_: oh, monstrous pun!). Dr. Whewell got only separate words, and failed to make a sentence: _phiz_, _styx_, _wrong_, _buck_, _flame_, _quid_. Very pretty, but De Morgan beat him out of sight with this weird sentiment; _I, quartz pyx, who fling muck beds!_ Well, what in the world can that mean? "I long thought that no human being could say it under any circumstances. At last I happened to be reading a religious writer--as he thought himself--who threw aspersions on his opponents thick and threefold. Heyday! came into my head, this fellow flings muck beds: he must be a quartz pyx. And then I remembered that a pyx is a sacred vessel, and quartz is a hard stone, as hard as the heart of a religious foe-curser. So that the line is the motto of the ferocious sectarian, who turns his religious vessels into mud-holders for the benefit of those who will not see what he sees."[50]

I cite this drollery to show the world-wide difference between the playful nonsense of the wise man and the strenuous nonsense of the monomaniac; in this little _cabbala alphabetica_, moreover, a great deal of the cabalistic lore which cumbers library shelves is neatly satirized.

As already observed, my rule was never to put into the class of eccentric literature any books save such as seemed to have emanated from diseased brains. To hold and absurd belief, to write in its defense, to shape one's career in accordance with it, is no proof of an unsound mind. Of the hundreds of enthusiasts who spent their lives in quest of the philosopher's stone, many were doubtless cranks; but many were able thinkers who made the best use they could of the scientific resources of the time. Wrong ways must often be tried before the right way can be found. Even the early circle-squarers cannot fairly be charged with crankery; they sinned against no light that was accessible to them. But anybody who to-day should advertise a recipe for turning base metals into gold would meet with a chill welcome from chemists. He would speedily be posted as a quack, though doubtless many weak heads would be turned by him. It is the perverse sinning against light that is one of the most abiding features of crankery, and from this point of view such a book as "Coin's Financial School" has many claims for admission to the limbo of eccentric literature.

About seventy years ago, one John Ranking published in London a volume entitled "Historical Researches on the Conquest of Peru, Mexico, Bogota, Natchez, and Talomeco,[51] in the Thirteenth Century, by the Mongols, accompanied with Elephants." It is well known that in 1281 the Mongols, after conquering pretty much everything from the Carpathian Mountains and the river Euphrates to the Yellow Sea, invaded Japan. A typhoon dispersed their fleet; and their army of more than 100,000 men, cut off from its communications, was completely annihilated by the Japanese. But Mr. Ranking believed that this wholesale destruction was a fiction of the chroniclers. He maintained that most of the army escaped in a new fleet and crossed the Pacific Ocean, taking with them a host of elephants, with the aid of which they made extensive conquests in America and founded kingdoms in Mexico and Peru. The widespread fossil remains of the American mastodon he took to be the bones of these Mongolian elephants. Now, this is an extremely wild theory, unsound and untenable in every particular, but it does not bring Mr. Ranking's book within the class of eccentric literature. The author was deficient in scholarship and in critical judgment, but he was not daft.

A very different verdict must be rendered in the case of Mr. Edwin Johnson's book, called "The Rise of Christendom," published in London in 1890, an octavo of 500 pages. According to Mr. Johnson, the rise of Christendom began in the twelfth century of our era, and it was preceded by two centuries of Hebrew religion, which started in Moslem Spain! First came Islam, then Judaism, then Christianity. The genesis of both the latter was connected with that revolt against Islam which we call the Crusades. What we suppose to be the history of Israel, as well as that of the first eleven Christian centuries, is a gigantic lie, concocted in the thirteenth century by the monks of St. Basil and St. Benedict. The Roman emperors knew nothing of Christianity, and the multifarious allusions to it in ancient writers were all explained by Mr. Johnson as fraudulent interpolations. As for the Greek and Latin fathers, they never existed. "The excellent stylist, who writes under the name of Lactantius, not earlier than the fourteenth century;" "the Augustinian of the fourteenth or fifteenth century, who writes the romantic Confessions,"--such is the airy way in which the matter is disposed of. As for the New Testament, "it is not yet clear whether the book was first written in Latin or in Greek." This reminds me of something once said by Rev. Robert Taylor, a crazy clergyman who in 1821 suffered imprisonment for blasphemy, and came to be known as the Devil's Chaplain. Taylor declared that for the book of Revelation there was no Greek original at all, but Erasmus wrote it in Switzerland, in the year 1516. The audience, or part of it, probably took Taylor's word as sufficient; and in like manner not a syllable of proof is alleged for Mr. Johnson's prodigious assertions. From cover to cover, there is no trace of a consciousness that proof is needed; it is simply, Thus saith Edwin Johnson. The man who can write such a book is surely incapable of making a valid will.

Another acute phase of insanity is exemplified in Nason's "History of the Prehistoric Ages, written by the Ancient Historic Band of Spirits" (Chicago, 1880). This is a mediumistic affair. The ancient band consists of four-and-twenty spirits, the eldest of whom occupied a material body 46,000 years ago, and the youngest 3000 years ago. They dictated to Mr. Nason the narrative, which begins with the origin of the solar system and comes down to Romulus and Remus, betraying on every page the preternatural dullness and ignorance so characteristic of all the spirits with whom mediums have dealings.

Concerning the Bacon-Shakespeare lunacy a word must suffice. As I have shown in a previous essay, the doubt concerning the authorship of Shakespeare's plays was in part a reaction against the extravagances of doting commentators; but in its original form it was simply an insane freak. The unfortunate lady who gave it currency belonged to a distinguished Connecticut family, and the story of her malady is a sad one. At the age of eight-and-forty she died in the asylum at Hartford, two years after the publication of her book, "The Philosophy of Shakespeare's Plays Unfolded." The suggestion of her illustrious namesake, and perhaps kinsman, as the author of Shakespeare's works, was a clear instance of the megalomania which is a well-known symptom of paranoia; and her book has all the hazy incoherence that is so quickly recognizable in the writings of the insane. A friend of mine once asked me if I did not find it hard to catch her meaning. "Meaning!" I exclaimed, "there's none to catch." Among the books of her followers are all degrees of eccentricity. That of Nathaniel Holmes stands upon the threshold of the limbo; while as for Ignatius Donnelly, all his works belong in its darkest recesses.

The considerations which would lead one to consign a book to that limbo are often complex. There is Miss Marie Brown's book, "The Icelandic Discoverers of America; or, Honour to whom Honour is Due." In maintaining that Columbus knew all about the voyages of the Northmen to Vinland, and was helped thereby in finding his way to the Bahamas, there is nothing necessarily eccentric. Professor Rasmus Anderson has defended that thesis in a book which is able and scholarly, a book which every reader must treat with respect, even though he may not find its arguments convincing. But when Miss Brown declares that the papacy has been partner in a conspiracy for depriving the Scandinavians of the credit due them as discoverers of America, and assures us that this is a matter in which the interests of civil and religious liberty are at stake, one begins to taste the queer flavour; and, taking this in connection with the atmosphere of rage which pervades the book, one feels inclined to place it in the limbo. For example: "What but Catholic genius, the genius for deceit, for trickery, for secrecy, for wicked and diabolical machinations, could have pursued such a system of fraud for centuries as the one now being exposed! What but Catholic genius, a prolific genius for evil, would have attempted to rob the Norsemen of their fame,... and to foist a miserable Italian adventurer and upstart upon Americans as the true candidate for these posthumous honours,--the man or saint to whom they are to do homage, and through this homage allow the Church of Rome to slip the yoke of spiritual subjection over their necks!"

A shrill note of anger is sometimes the sure ear-mark of a book from Queer Street. Anger is, indeed, a kind of transient mania, and eccentric literature is apt to be written in high dudgeon. When you take up a pamphlet by "Vindex," and read the title, "A Box on Both Ears to the Powers that ought not to be at Washington," you may be prepared to find incoherency. I once catalogued an edition of Plutarch's little essay on Superstition, and was about to let it go on its way, along with ordinary Greek books, when my eye happened to fall upon the last sentence of the editor's preface: "I terminate this my Preface by consigning all Greek Scholars to the special care of Beelzebub." "Oho!" I thought, "there's a cloven foot here; perhaps, if we explore further, we may get a whiff of brimstone." And it was so.

It thus appears that the topics treated in eccentric literature are numerous and manifold. Not only, moreover, has this department its vigorous prose-writers; it has also its inspired poets. Witness the following lines from the volume entitled "Eucleia" (Salem, 1861):--

"Hark, hear that distant boo-oo-oo, As, walking by moonlight, He whistles, instructing Carlo To be still, and not bite."

But even this lofty flight of inspiration is out-flown by Mr. John Landis, who was limner and draughtsman as well as poet. In his "Treatise on Magnifying God" (New York, 1843) he gives us an engraved portrait of himself surrounded by ministering angels, and accompanies it by an ode to himself, one verse of which will suffice:--

"With Messrs. Milton, Watts, and Wesley, Familiar thy Name will e'er be. Of America's Poets thou Stand'st on the foremost list now; On the pinions of fame does shine, _Landis!_ brightened by ev'ry line, From thy poetic pen in rhyme, Thy name descends to the end of time."

Immortality of fame is something desired by many, but attained by few. Physical immortality is something which has hitherto been supposed to be inexorably denied to human beings. The phrase "All men are mortal" figures in textbooks of logic as the truest of truisms. But we have lately been assured that this is a mistake. It is only an induction based upon simple enumeration, and the first man who escapes death will disprove it. So, at least, I was told by a very downright person who called on me some years ago with a huge parcel of manuscript, for which he wanted me to find him a publisher. He had been cruelly snubbed and ill-used, but truth would surely prevail over bigotry, as in Galileo's case. I took his address and let him leave his manuscript. Its recipe for physical immortality, diluted through 600 foolscap pages, was simply to learn how to go without food! Usually such a regimen will kill you by the fifth day, but if, at that critical moment, while at the point of death, you make one heroic effort and stay alive, why, then you will have overcome the King of Terrors once for all. I returned the gentleman's manuscript with a polite note, regretting that his line of research was so remote from those to which I was accustomed that I could not give him intelligent aid.

On one of the beautiful hills of Petersham, near the centre of Massachusetts, there dwelt a few years since a small religious community of persons who believed that they were destined to escape death. Not science, but faith, had won for them this boon. They believed that the third person of the Trinity was incarnated in their leader or high priest, Father Howland. This community, I believe, came from Rhode Island about forty years ago, and at the height of its prosperity may have numbered twenty-five or thirty men and women. Their establishment consisted of one large mansard-roofed house, with barns and sheds and a good-sized farm. Their housekeeping was tidy, and they put up apple-sauce. They maintained that the eighteen and a half centuries of the so-called Christian era have really been the dispensation of John the Baptist, and that the true Christian era was ushered in by the Holy Ghost in the person of Father Howland, through believing in whom Christians might attain to eternal life on this planet. They had their Sabbath on Saturday, and worked in the fields on Sunday; and they made sundry distinctions between clean and unclean foods, based upon their slender understanding of the Old Testament.

For a few years these worthy people enjoyed the simple rural life on their pleasant hillside without having their dream of immortality rudely tested. When one member fell ill and died, and was presently followed by another, it was easy to dispose of such cases by asserting that the deceased were not true believers; they were black sheep, hypocrites, pretenders, whited sepulchres, and their deaths had purified the flock. But the next one to die was Father Howland himself. On a warm summer day of 1874, as he was driving in his buggy over a steep mountain road, the horse shied so violently as to throw out the venerable sage against a wood-pile, whereupon sundry loose logs fell upon his head and shoulders, inflicting fatal wounds. Then a note of consternation mingled with the genuine mourning of the little community. It was a perplexing providence. About twelve months afterward I made my first visit to these people, in company with my friend Dr. William James and five carriage-loads of city folk who were spending the summer at Petersham. It was a Saturday morning, and all the worshippers were in their best clothes. They received us with a quiet but cordial welcome, and showed us into a spacious parlour that was simply brilliant with cheerfulness. Its west windows looked down upon a vast and varied landscape, with rich pastures, smiling cornfields, and long stretches of pine forest covering range upon range of hills moulded in forms of exquisite beauty. Beyond the foreground of delicate yellow and soft green tints the eye rested upon the sombre green of the woodland, and behind it all came the rich purple of the distant hills, fitfully checkered with shadows from the golden clouds. Here and there gleamed the white church spires of some secluded hamlet, while on the horizon, seventy miles distant, arose the lofty peak of old Greylock. Thence to Mount Grace, in one huge sweep, the entire breadth of Vermont was displayed, a wilderness of pale-blue summits blending with the sky; and over all, and part of it all, was the radiant glory of the September sunshine.

"Truly," said I to one of the brethren, a man of saintly face, "if you are expecting to dwell forever upon the earth, you could not have chosen a more inspiring and delightful spot." "Yes, indeed," he replied, "it seems too beautiful to leave." The topic which agitated the little community was thus brought up for discussion, and, except for a brief prayer, the ordinary Sabbath exercises were set aside for this purpose. All these people seemed polite and gentle in manner; their simple-mindedness was noticeable, and their ignorance was abysmal, though I believe they could all read the Bible and do a little writing and arithmetic. In the facial expression of every one I thought I could see something that betrayed more or less of a lapse from complete sanity. Only one of the whole number showed any sense of humour, a keen-eyed old woman, yclept Sister Caroline, who could argue neatly and make quaint retorts. She and the man of saintly face were the only interesting personalities; the rest were but soulless clods.

It soon appeared that the belief in terrestrial immortality had not yet been seriously shaken by Father Howland's demise. There were some curious incipient symptoms of a resurrection myth. Their leader's death had been heralded by signs and portents. One aged brother, while taking his afternoon nap in a rocking-chair, fell forward upon the floor, bringing down the chair upon his back; and at that identical moment another brother rushed in from the garden, exclaiming, "I have seen with these eyes the glory of the Lord revealed!" Evidently, the fall of the rocking-chair prefigured the fall of the wood-pile, and the moment of Howland's fatal injury was the moment of his glorification. Then it was remembered by Sister Caroline and others that he had lately foretold his apparent death, and declared that it was to be only an appearance. "Though I shall seem to be dead, it will only be for a little while, and then I shall return to you."

The morning's conversation made it clear that these simple folk were unanimous in believing that the completion of Father Howland's work demanded his presence for a short time in the other world, and that he would within a few more weeks or months return to them. It seemed to Dr. James and myself that the conditions were favourable to the sudden growth of a belief in his resurrection, and for some time after that visit we half expected to hear that one or more of the household had seen him. In this, however, we were disappointed. I suspect that its mental soil may, after all, have been too barren for such a growth.

Seven years elapsed before my second and last visit to these worthy people. In the mean time a large addition had been made to the principal house, nearly doubling its capacity; and I was told that the community had been legally incorporated under the Hebrew title of Adoni-shomo, or "The Lord is there." One would naturally infer that the membership had increased, but the true explanation was very different. On a Saturday afternoon in the summer of 1882, in company with fifteen friends, I visited the community. Our reception this time was something more than polite; there was a noticeable warmth of welcome about it. We were ushered into one of the newly built rooms,--a long chapel, with seats on either side and a reading-desk at one end. All the women, both hosts and guests, took their seats on one side, all the men on the other. A whisper from my neighbour informed me that the community was reduced to twelve persons: thus the guests outnumbered the hosts. The high priest, Father Richards, a venerable man of ruddy hue, with enormous beard as white as snow, stood by the reading-desk, and in broken tones gave thanks to God, while abundant tears coursed down his cheeks. Now, he said, at last the word of the Lord was fulfilled. Two or three years ago the word had come that they must build a chapel and add to their living-rooms, for they were about to receive a large accession of new converts. So--just think of it, gentle reader, in the last quarter of this skeptical century--there was faith enough on that rugged mountain-side to put three or four thousand dollars, earned with pork and apple-sauce, into solid masonry and timber-work! And now at last, said Father Richards, in the arrival of this goodly company the word of the Lord was fulfilled! It seemed cruel to disturb such jubilant assurance, but we soon found that we need not worry ourselves on that score. The old man's faith was a rock on which unwelcome facts were quickly wrecked. Though we took pains to make it clear that we had only come for a visit, it was equally clear to him that we were to be converted that very afternoon, and would soon come to abide with the Adoni-shomo.

Then Sister Caroline, stepping forward, made a long metaphysical harangue, at the close of which she walked up one side of the room and down the other, taking each person by the hand and saying to each a few words. When she came to me she suddenly broke out with a stream of gibberish, and went on for five mortal minutes, pouring it forth as glibly as if it had been her mother tongue. After the meeting had broken up, I was informed that this "speaking with tongues" was not uncommon with the Adoni-shomo. A wicked wag in our party then asked Sister Caroline if she knew what language it was in which she had addressed me. "No, sir," she replied, "nor do I know the meaning of what I said: I only uttered what the Lord put into my mouth." "Well," said this graceless scoffer, with face as sober as a deacon's, "I am thoroughly familiar with Hebrew, and I recognized at once the very dialect of Galilee as spoken when our Saviour was on the earth!" At this, I need hardly add, Sister Caroline was highly pleased.

By this time there had been so many deaths that induction by simple enumeration was getting to be too much for the Adoni-shomo. They were beginning to realize the old Scotchman's conception of the elect: "Eh, Jamie! hoo mony d'ye thank there be of the elact noo alive on earth?" "Eh! mabbee a doozen." "Hoot, mon, nae sae mony as thot!" We found our worthy hosts less willing than of old to discuss their doctrine of terrestrial immortality, and there were symptoms of a tendency to give it a Pickwickian construction. Since that day, their little community has vanished, and its glorious landscape knows it no more.

It is a pity that before the end it should not have had a visit from Mr. Hyland C. Kirk, whose book on "The Possibility of Not Dying" was published in New York in 1883. In this book the philosophic plausibleness of the opinion that a time will come when we shall no longer need to shuffle off this mortal coil is argued at some length, but the question as to how this is to happen is ignored. Mr. Isaac Jennings, in his "Tree of Life" (1867), thinks it can be accomplished by total abstinence from "alcohol, tobacco, coffee, tea, animal food, spices, and caraway." This is sufficiently specific; but Mr. Kirk's treatment of the question is so hazy as to suggest the suspicion that he has nothing to offer us.

I once knew such a case of a delusion without any theory, or, if you please, the grin without the Cheshire cat. In the course of a lecturing journey, some thirty years ago, I was approached by a refined and cultivated gentleman, who imparted to me in strict confidence and with much modesty of manner the fact that he had arrived at a complete refutation of the undulatory theory of light! To ask him for some statement of his own theory was but ordinary courtesy; but whenever we arrived at this point--which happened perhaps half a dozen times--he would put on a smile of mystery and decline to pursue the subject. I assured him that he need have no fear of my stealing his thunder, for I had not the requisite knowledge; but he grew more darkly mysterious than ever, and said that the time for him to speak had not yet come.

A few months later, this gentleman, whom I will designate as Mr. Flighty, appeared in Cambridge, and came to my desk in the college library. Distress was written in his face. He had called upon Professor Silliman and other professors in Eastern colleges, and had been shabbily treated. Nobody had shown him any politeness except Professor Youmans, in whom he believed he had found a convert. "Ah!" I exclaimed, "then you told him your theory; perhaps the time has come when you can tell it to me." But no; again came the subtle smile, and he began to descant upon the persecution of Galileo, a favourite topic with cranks of all sorts. He asked me for some of the best books on the undulatory theory, and I gave him Cauchy, whereat he stood aghast, and said the book was full of mathematics which he could not read; but he would like to see Newton's Opticks, for that