Mr. Mallock's adhesion to the Baconian theory has set the
tide of controversy flowing briskly in the columns of the Times. We have no intention of emulating the hospitality of our contemporary, but may permit ourselves one observation on the correspondence so far as it has gone. The fault of most ciphers is that they prove so little, but that two-edged weapon, the biliteral cipher, as wielded by Mrs. Gallup, proves a great deal too much. It has shown, in the passage quoted with enthusiasm by Mr. Mallock, that Bacon in his secret autobiography modelled his prose style on the pseudo- eighteenth-century English of the American novelist. Mr. Marston has further demonstrated that in his translation of Homer, Bacon "cribbed" freely from Pope ; and finally, Pro- fessor Skeat has pointed out that whereas one of the cipher sentences runs, "Look at the Headings of the Comedies," the word "heading" was not used in this sense before the nine- teenth century. At this rate, we need not be surprised to find Mr. Kipling's " Kim" bodily embedded in the text of some Elizabethan folio.
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