Page:Mr. Sidney Lee and the Baconians.djvu/23

, "Dr." Hall, who believed in the curative properties of "frog-spawn water, juice of goose-excrements, powdered human skulls, and restoratives made from snails, earth-worms, and swallows' nests!"

In conclusion, may I ask Mr. Lee how he accounts for the fact that two such diverse men in Elizabethan literature used the same expressions, aired the same ideas, the one the counterpart in prose of the other in verse—"the one an aristocrat, the other a plebeian; the one the first subject of the realm, the other an actor; the one highly educated, the other uneducated; the one the son of scholarly parents, the other the son of illiterates, who could not write their names"? The positions and circumstances of Shakspere and Bacon were as wide apart as the poles, and yet their thoughts, their expressions, their mistakes are identical. "There is an understanding," says Carlyle, "manifested in the construction of Shakespeare's plays equal to that in Bacon's Novum Organum." "The wisdom displayed in Shakespeare," says Hazlitt, "was equal in profoundness to the great Lord Bacon's Novum Organum.'" Well might Lowell speak of "the apparition known to moderns as Shakespeare;" and Coleridge write: "What! are we to have miracles in sport? &hellip; Does God choose idiots by whom to convey divine truth to man?" According to Mr. Lee, the answer is in the affirmative, and he quotes with approval Pope's contemptible couplet:

Before I finish, I would ask Mr. Sidney Lee's authority for the following personal history: "Shakespeare, it it should also be remembered, must have been a regular attendant at the parish church, and may at times have