Page:Wit, humor, and Shakspeare. Twelve essays (IA cu31924013161223).pdf/264

 was acquainted with Ben Jonson. Did Ben Jonson and Shakspeare never go to Gray's Inn together? Shakspeare helped Johnson to write his tragedy of "Sejanus;" and the latter was frequently with Bacon during the period of composition? I love to think, as it cannot be disproved, that Shakspeare met high themes of speculation, Nature's curious secrets, and choice allusions of learning, amid the books and apparatus of the philosopher, where problems dear to both these men were discussed. Such an intercourse as this, which varied his close companionship with Essex and Southampton, would be quite sufficient to account for the coincidences which support the Baconian theory: there is, for instance, the passage in "Troilus and Cressida" that puts into Hector's mouth a queer bit of didactic anachronism. Reproving Paris and Troilus, he says,—

"You have both said well; And on the cause and question now in hand Have gloz'd,—but superficially; not much Unlike young men, whom Aristotle thought Unfit to hear moral philosophy."

Aristotle really alluded to "political philosophy;" and when we find that Bacon made the same mistake in his "Advancement of Learning," printed before the play, we think we can see that book in Shakspeare's hand, or overhear with him the error lapsing in the flow of conversation. But perhaps the passage which includes it was one of the parts of "Troilus and Cressida" which did not proceed from Shakspeare's pen. Certainly there was not poetic license enough in Bacon's mind to plant a seaport in Bohemia, and make Aristotle a contem