Page:Songs of the Road Doyle.djvu/113



Masters, I sleep not quiet in my grave,

There where they laid me, by the Avon shore,

In that some crazy wights have set it forth

By arguments most false and fanciful,

Analogy and far-drawn inference,

That Francis Bacon, Earl of Verulam

(A man whom I remember in old days,

A learned judge with sly adhesive palms,

To which the suitors' gold was wont to stick)—

That this same Verulam had writ the plays

Which were the fancies of my frolic brain.