Page:Mr. Sidney Lee and the Baconians.djvu/18

 only that the Baconians seek. Other men of "habits of mind" as scholarly as Mr. Lee's have been engaged in the Shakespeare "mystery" all their lives, and have found difficulties in reconciling the life of the actor with the works of the dramatist ; but Mr. Lee extricates himself from all his difficulties with the aid of "possibly," "probably," "doubtless," and other qualifying adverbs. Guesses and fictions he substitutes for what he calls "facts." One of his most extraordinary "facts" is that Mr. Donnelly "pretended to have discovered among Bacon's papers a numerical cypher which enabled him to pick out letters appearing at certain intervals in the pages of Shakespeare's First Folio, and the selected letters formed words and sentences categorically stating that Bacon was author of the plays." This precious criticism contains only three mis-statements! Mr. Lee can never have seen The Great Cryptogram, and I challenge him to prove his dicta in the passage I have quoted.

I am afraid my letter is already too long; but there are other details in this authoritative "personal history" that I would like to inquire about from its author. Mr. Lee says, "Shakespeare had no title to rank as a classical scholar, and he did not disdain a liberal use of translations." Mr. Churton Collins has shown in his recently published Studies in Shakespeare that "so far from Shakespeare having no pretension to classical scholarship &hellip; of the Greek classics in the Latin versions he had a remarkably extensive knowledge," and that he borrowed right and left from Sophocles and Euripides, of whose plays there were no English translations at the time; while in the Nineteenth Century the Rev. R. S. Laffan has shown that the author of the plays was intimately acquainted with Æschylus. Yet Mr. Collins abuses Baconians for believing that "the man of Stratford" did not