Page:Mr. Sidney Lee and the Baconians.djvu/22

 We are informed that "Shakespeare's accurate reference in Macbeth to the 'nimble' and 'sweet climate ' of Inverness, and the vivid impression he conveys of the aspects of wild Highland heaths &hellip; can be satisfactorily accounted for by his inevitable intercourse with Scotsmen in London and the theatres." Obliging Scotsmen! I wonder how many London (or Scotch) Scotsmen of the period had ever been so far north as Inverness in the days of Queen Bess.

"It was doubtless," also, we learn, "to Shakespeare's relations with men and women of the Court that his Sonnets owed their existence," and probably where he obtained his marvellous knowledge of Court ceremonial. The actor and playwright hobnobbed probably with the nobility at the Court of Elizabeth and James, flirted with the Queen (incog.) on the stage of the "Globe," and the King wrote him a letter, with which probably he lit his pipe, as it has never since been forthcoming. Probably, it was also through these "personal relations" that we are to account for the author of the plays being a thorough aristocrat—"a Tory and a gentleman," as Hartley Coleridge calls him,—although he was hounded from Stratford for stealing an aristocrat's deer. The masses he detested—"tag-rag people," "disordered rabble," "beastly plebeians," etc., he calls them—not a good word for, or a scrap of sympathy with, the "toiling masses" is to be found in Shakespeare, but then Shakspere held aristocrats' horses at the stage door, and associated with Raleigh at the "Mermaid." I am under the impression that Bacon was an aristocrat, and a persona grata at Court; but then Mr. Lee tells us that Bacon could have had nothing to do with the plays, and that is, of course, conclusive.

Then, probably, Shakspere obtained his medical knowledge — including the anticipation of Harvey's discovery of the circulation of the blood—from his son-in-