The Bacon - Shakspere Question. By C. Stopes. (T. G. Johnson.) —Without
in any way wishing to detract from Mr. Stopes's work, we honour Shakespearian scholars for their silence. Shakespeare can defend himself against the Baconian arguments, which take the form, as the writer neatly puts it, of the well-known legal formula, —" No case; abuse plaintiff's attorney or himself." Mr. Stopes has selected as one of the crucial tests, the respective attitudes taken by the poet and philosopher on the question of temperance. The contrast is obvious, and becomes heightened by the greatness of the two. Mr. Donnelly finds here an identity of thought and expression, a manifestly absurd statement. The writer then pro- ceeds to gather together a number of references by Jonson and other contemporaries to Shakespeare. They, indeed, knew the man, his genius, his wit, his faults, and his scanty scholarship, and praised him ; none had an evil word for him, the "gentle Shakespeare." If we turn from this overwhelming mass of evidence to Bacon, and consider his writings apart from the moral weakness of their author, the calm philosophy, the rigid reasoning, the science, and easeful elaboration, we wonder, and, with Mr. Stopes, conclude that surely no insult to the character and knowledge, the style and dignity of his work, was ever like to this : "that he could have invented and inserted Donnelly's [sic] cipher in the plays. It crowns all." It does indeed.
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