Page:Wit, humor, and Shakspeare. Twelve essays (IA cu31924013161223).pdf/259

 And this probability was not rebutted by Lord Palmerston; when, alluding to Jonson's remarks, he jauntily said, "Oh, these fellows will always stand up for each other!" for what reasons existed for protecting Shakspeare by reticence or by elaborate lying?

In the discussion, which has lately been renewed, upon the authorship of the plays, the points which are chiefly relied on by the Baconians are these: 1. The plays are too great, and out of all proportion to the obscurity which rests upon Shakspeare's life, and to the insignificance of his contemporary fame. 2. They are filled with all kinds of classical allusion, professional information, legal, medical, horticultural, scientific, to an extent which an obscure play actor could not possibly comprise within the limits of his ragged and scanty education. 3. The plays contain remarkable parallelisms with passages in Bacon's works, and coincidences of thought and expression.

These are the points of chief consequence which claim the plays for Bacon. To the critics who make this claim it is wonderful that one man from Stratford, so little known and prized, of whom no account of education and career survives, should have sent down to posterity, side by side with the great works of Bacon, compositions which are parallel in greatness and abreast of them in fame. They are too great for any one man of that epoch, unless that man be the greatest and wisest of his day. But how much more wonderful is the problem which, by implication, these critics set before us,—namely, to account for the fact that Bacon should have