Page:Notes and Queries - Series 9 - Volume 10.djvu/20

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NOTES AND QUERIES. [9* s. x. JULY s, 1902.

plays which he himself had written ? He was careful not to give himself away in this man- ner. But Bacon was not the only writer of the time who apparently knew not Shake- speare.

Dr. Ingleby, editor of the ' Shakespeare Allusion Books' and the ' Centurie of Prayse,' says :

" The absence of sundry great names with which no pains of research, scrutiny, or study could con- nect the most trivial allusion to the bard or his works (such, e.g., as Lord Brooke, Lord Bacon, Selden, Sir John Beaumont; Henry Vaughan, and

Lord Clarendon) is tacitly significant It is plain,

for one thing, that the bard of our admiration was

unknown to the men of that age Doubtless he

knew his men ; but assuredly his men did not know him."

Spedding says :

"Though numbers of contemporary news-letters, filled with literary and fashionable intelligence, have been preserved, it is only in the Stationers' Register and the accounts kept by the Master of the Revels that we find any notices of the publica- tion or acting of Shakespeare's plays. In the long series of letters from John Chamberlain to Dudley Carleton, scattered over the whole period from 1598 to 1623 letters full of news of the month, news of the Court, the city, the pulpit, and the bookseller's shop, in which Court masques are described in minute detail, author, actors, plot, performances, reception and all we look in vain for the name of Shakespeare."

Then of Henslowe's ' Diary ' Collier writes :

" Recollecting that the names of nearly all the other play-poets of the time occur, we cannot but wonder that that of Shakespeare is not met with in any part of the manuscript.

In this ' Diary ' there are frequent notices of Jonson, Dekker, Chettle, Marston, Drayton, Munday, Heywood. Middleton, Webster, Rowley, and others, but the name of Shake- speare is completely ignored, as it is also in the Alleyn Papers, where it does not appear among the notices of the large army ot con- temporary dramatists and their productions. Mr. Fleay, the distinguished Shakespearean, writes :

" Neither as addressed to him [Shakespeare] by others, nor by him to others, do any comniendatory verses exist in connection with any of his or other men's works published in his lifetime a notable fact, in whatever way it may be explained. '

Mr. Richard Grant White writes :

" Of his eminent countrymen, Raleigh, Sydney, Spenser, Bacon, Cecil, Walsingham, Coke, Camden, Hooker, Drake, Hobbes, Inigo Jones, Herbert of Cherbury, Laud, Pym, Hampden, Selden. Walton, Wotton, and Donne may be properly reckoned his contemporaries, and yet there is no evidence what- ever that he was personally known to either of these men, or to any others of less note among the statesmen, scholars, soldiers, and artists of his day, excepting a few of his fellow-craftsmen."

Adolphus in his ' Letters to Heber ' puts an analogous case rather patly when he says :

" How is it to be explained that the author of ' Waverley ' has taken occasion in his writings to make honourable mention of almost every distin- guished contemporary poet, except the Minstrel of do so, because he was himself that Minstrel ; and a man of ingenuous mind will shrink from publishing a direct commendation of his own talent, although tie may feel confident that the eulogy will never oe traced home."
 * he Border? The answer is obvious : he could not

If so with Scott, why not the same with Bacon ?

So that Bacon, by not mentioning Shake- speare in his works if Bacon was not Shake- speare appears to have erred in very good company the company of well-known con- temporaries. GEORGE STRONACH."

Edinburgh.

Following up Q. A., MR. WATSON, and Wordsworth, may I mention what Mr. John Leycester Adolphus, in the letters which he published in 1821 to prove that the then unknown Waverley novelist was Scott, says ?

" How is it to be explained that the author of 'Waverley' has taken occasion in his writings to make honourable mention of almost every distin- guished contemporary poet, except the Minstrel of the Border ? The answer is obvious : he could not do so, because he icas himself that Minstrd."

Surely the Baconians may be permitted to make use of the same argument and claim for it much the same kind of validity as Mr. Leycester Adolphus claims for his ''obvious answer" to the question raised as to the silence of the Waverley novelist about the Minstrel of the Border.

R. M. THEOBALD.

" PROSPICIMUS MODO " (9 th S. viii. 445 ; ix. 34, 273). Adverting to the last paragraph of PROF. BENSLY'S note, I would refer him to Bailey's dictionary of 1727, sub voce 'Hexa- meter,' where he will find six very ingenious ' Versifying Tables for Hexameters,' with full directions for each table. Bailey says : "The following Tables being a curious and admir- able Contrivance, not doubting but that they will be acceptable to the curious Reader, I present them." I have not tried to work them. Hoc opus, hie labor. I prefer the uningenious method I was taught many years ago. MICHAEL FERRAR.

Little Gidding.

. WEEK (9 th S. ix. 147, 277). Christianity is only skin-deep ; almost all the customs of pur forefathers survive, only the label is Christian. This is a well-known fact, so that I do not in any way dream of teaching persons versed in the history of culture anything new. Let