LIBRARY OF CONGRESS. | 
 
 Shelf _.._t-^'7 o« 
 
 UNITED STATES OF AMERICA. ^ 
 
Mr. Donnelly's Reviewers 
 
 WILLIAM D. O'CONNOR. 
 
 1889. 
 
 CHICAGO, NEW YORK, SAN' FRANCISCO, 
 BKLI'ORD, CI.ARKK & CO. 
 
 C^ 
 

 COP^-RIGHT BV 
 
 W. D. O'CONNOR, 
 
 1880. 
 
 DONOHUE & HENNEBERRY, 
 
 printers and binders, 
 
 Chicago. 
 
mote: 
 
 Ifn ^emoriam. 
 
 During the progress of these pages through the 
 press, the author, William D. O'Connor, Assistant 
 General Superintendent of the Life-Saving Service, 
 passed suddenly away from the conflicts and contro- 
 versies of life. He had suffered for a long time 
 from partial paralysis. He was regarded as a con- 
 firmed sufferer, and the announcement of his death 
 at Washington on the morning of May 9, 188/, 
 came as a sad surprise to a wide circle of admiring 
 friends. Mr. O'Connor was an enthusiast in the 
 work in which he was engaged. He was very proud 
 of his department of the Government service, and 
 often spoke hopefully of a time when shipwrecks 
 on the American coast would be almost impossible. 
 
 There can be no doubt that if Mr. O'Connor had 
 devoted himself wholly to literature he would have 
 made more than a connnon mark. As it is, he has 
 left behind him more than one powerful contribu- 
 tion to the current controversy on the Baconian 
 authorship of the " Shakspearean plays." He took 
 issue with the late Richard Grant White on this 
 question, and made most chivalrous appeals in 
 
 1 
 
defense of Delia Bacon and Mrs. Potts. Of " Ham- 
 let's Note-book," one of his most effective pieces of 
 work, a critic says: ''This book — whether one 
 believes in Bacon as the author of ' Shakspeare's 
 Plays ' or not — is as fine a piece of rhetorical special 
 pleading as the annals of controversial literature 
 will show." 
 
 These pages, the last literary effort of his life, 
 prove how earnestly he could champion a cause, 
 how steadfastly he could defend a man whom he 
 thought to have been unfairly dealt with. 
 
 Speaking of Mr. O'Connor's personal qualities, 
 Mr. Henry Latchford says : 
 
 '*From time to time, in the afternoon, I called 
 at his office in the Treasury Building, and helped 
 him down stairs and to the street cars on Pennsyl- 
 vania avenue. He always had something delight- 
 fully original to say on any subject I 
 
 had heard O'Connor spoken of in Dublin, London, 
 Paris and Boston as 'a spirit finely touched.' It is 
 almost impossible to describe the charm of his 
 presence, his character, his voice, grey eyes, silken 
 yellow hair and his wonderful conversation. But it 
 is possible for those of us who knew him to say 
 that when so much high endeavor, such splendid 
 intellect, such wide sympathies, and such a gentle 
 voice have been embodied in one human being, the 
 death of this rare person means that * there has 
 passed away a glory from the earth."* 
 
Mr. DONNELLY'S REVIEWERS. 
 I. 
 
 In the opening pages of the little volume on 
 Bacon-Shakespeare matters, entitled Hamle{!s Note- 
 Book^ which the present writer published a couple of 
 years ago, the question was raised whether reviews 
 are of an}^ real advantage to literature — whether 
 they are not, on the contrary, a serious detriment, 
 mainly because the}^ have the power, through the 
 facile medium of current journals and periodicals, to 
 give a book a bad name in advance, and, by deterring 
 readers, either absolutely prevent or greatly delay 
 its recognition. Just in proportion to the depth or 
 worth of the book, is this what is likely to hap- 
 pen to it. 
 
 The case under consideration at the time Avas 
 that of Mrs. Constance M. Pott's edition of the 
 Promus^ Avhich, until then, had been Lord Bacon's 
 only unpublished manuscript. As such, it was of 
 evident value, but it had become doubly so because 
 Mrs. Pott had illustrated its sixteen hundred sen- 
 tences by parallel passages from the Shakespeare 
 drama, nearly all of which were plainly in relation, 
 and a great number actually identical in thought and 
 terms. As the Proimts was a private note-book of 
 Bacon's, antedating most of the plays, and as the man 
 William Shakspere, could not possibly have had 
 access to it, the significance of the coincidences estab- 
 lished by the parallels in such quantities is n]V):n'eiit 
 
8 MR. DONXELLY'S REVIEWERS. 
 
 to ail}' candid mind, and the book was, therefore, of 
 exceptional importance. Nevertheless, Mr. Eichard 
 Grant AVIiite so reviewed it in the Atlantic 31onthly 
 when it appeared, as to create the conviction, aided 
 by the journals which followed his lead, that it was a 
 work of lunacy, and to actually arrest its circu- 
 lation. At the time he did this, he himself, as I have 
 had since the best authority for knowing, had 
 become a secret convert to the Baconian theory, and 
 despised and loathed the Stratford burgher with a 
 sort of rancor ^ — a fact which his papers on the 
 Anatomization of tHutkespeare sufficiently indicate. 
 The lack of international copyright as an existing 
 evil, is less to be mourned than the cold-hearted sur- 
 render of literature to the tribe of Jack the Ripper, 
 involved in cases like these. There are bitter hours 
 when we could well yearn for the spacious days 
 when authors had only to get past the official cen- 
 sorship, bad as it was, and face the free judgment of 
 the public, without the perennial intervention of the 
 gangs of ignorant and impudent men, self-styled 
 reviewers. It was that warm, spontaneous, disinter- 
 ested popular judgment that gave welcome to the 
 works we know as Cervantes and Calderon, Dante 
 and Rabelais, Moliere and Shakespeare, and saw 
 them securely lodged in eternal favor, before any 
 banded guild of detraction could exist to fret their 
 authors' spirits, check their genius, or lessen them 
 beforehand in public interest and honor. AVhat 
 would the modern reviewers have done to them? 
 
 The worthlessness of the critical verdicts of this 
 century, in which they first began, is measured by 
 the fame of the works they once assailed. It would 
 
MR. DONXELLY'S REVIEWERS. ♦ 9 
 
 be difficult to name any cardinal book that upon its 
 appearance was not belittled, censured or condemned 
 by the literary authorities of the periodicals. Every 
 one of the great British poets, from Scott to Tenny- 
 son, had to run the gauntlet of abuse and denial, and 
 received his meed of praise, after long waiting, only 
 from the slow justice of the common reader. It is 
 true that the intelligent critics who disparaged and 
 reviled the entire galaxy, including Keats, Shelley, 
 Coleridge, Wordsworth and Byron, closed up with 
 astonishing unanimity in roaring eulogy on Alex- 
 ander Smith, who certainly was a memorable geyser 
 of splendid metaphors, but is now almost forgotten. 
 In France, Victor Hugo, altogether supreme among 
 the geniuses of modern Europe, an instance almost 
 unexampled in literature of demiurgic power and 
 splendor, was so derided and denounced for years by 
 these men, that at one time, so George Sand tells us, 
 he nearly resolved in his despair to lay down his pen 
 forever. George Sand herself, the greatest without 
 exception of all the women that ever wrote, whose 
 works have changed the tone of the civilized world 
 in respect to womankind, and who has insensibly 
 altered every statute book in Europe and America 
 in favor of her sex, was for many years, and is even 
 at times now, seen only through the reviewers' tem- 
 pestuous veiling of mud for darkness and bilge water 
 for rain. Her great romance, Consuelo^ which, were 
 the image not too small, might be compared for 
 purity to the loveliest new-blown rose, glittering 
 with the dew of dawn — a book whose central char- 
 acter is the very essence of noble womanliness, 
 kindred in art to Murillo's Virgin — was made for 
 
10 MR. DOXNELL T'S RE VIE WEES. 
 
 years the very s3^nonym of infamy. Her exquisite 
 id}^ of village life in France, La petite Fadette^ I 
 saw once in translation here disguised under the 
 title of Fanclion^ and the author's name withheld 
 from the title page — all for the sake of decency ! In 
 one of her novels, Lelia^ she makes her beautiful 
 heroine, after talking to her lover purely and elo- 
 quently of the celestial nature of love, draw his 
 head to her bosom and press upon it her sacred 
 kisses ; and I am told that an apparently true born 
 reviewer, one of her latest French critics, evidently a 
 moral demon, the academician Caro— refers to this 
 incident as a sample of what he calls her '^ sensual 
 ideality," and holds it up as something dripping 
 with offense and stench and horror ! The critical de- 
 traction of the marvelous Balzac delayed his success 
 until late in life, and the vital and life-giving dra- 
 matic creations of the elder Dumas, with their extra- 
 ordinary and recondite research, their measureless 
 exuberance of invention, and the unique, jovial 
 humor they have as a distinct element, were ignored 
 or mocked by the mandarins long after their quali- 
 ties had made them dear to the whole reading world. 
 '^o variety of books has escaped the injury of this 
 fool system, which sets mediocrity or malignity to 
 arbitrate over talent or genius. Every one can 
 remember the reception given to Buckle's History of 
 Civilization^ a w^ork of diversified and enormous 
 learning, of fresh and noble views into the life of 
 nations like the opening of new vistas, and among 
 its great merits the qualit}^, inestimable in a book, 
 of breaking up that narcolepsia which even the best 
 reading will induce^ and rousing and holding in 
 
MR, DONNELLY'S REYIEWEB8. 11 
 
 animation the mind of the peruser. The misrepresent- 
 ation and detraction heaped upon it by the critical 
 prints were profuse and incessant until the appear- 
 ance of the second volume, when its author turned 
 upon his assailants in a lengthy foot note, and like a 
 gallant bull gored an Edinburgh reviewer in a way 
 to make the matadors and picadors alike wary. 
 Who can forget the foaming assaults of the army of 
 reviewing boobies and bigots through which Darwin 
 at length swept in victory to his triumph and his 
 rest behind the rampart of his proud, immortal tomb 
 in the old abbey ? On the poetry of Walt Whit- 
 man, in which Spirituality appears as the animating 
 soul, creating and permeating every word and every 
 line, as it does every detail, gross or delicate, of the 
 natural world, and whose simple grandeur has 
 entered the spirits of all who are greatest in Europe 
 and this country, the current criticism w^as long, and 
 until recently, nothing but a storm of brutal pas- 
 quinades. As one looks back and sees, by the ulti- 
 mate triumph of the sterling books in every 
 instance, upon what paltry and fictitious pretenses 
 the indictments upon them must have been made, 
 it becomes more and more a marvel that such an 
 abominable order of tribunals should have ever come 
 into vogue or been so long tolerated. 
 
 II. 
 
 The latest example in point is the treatment which 
 Mr. Donnelly's extraordinary work, The Great Cryp- 
 togram^ has received from the critics of a number of 
 our leading journals. So much has already been 
 said that it is not necessary to more than briefl\" 
 
12 MR. DONNELLY'S REVIEWEBS. 
 
 describe the character of this volume. Although 
 nearly a thousand pages in length, it has, by the 
 general admission of its readers, an absorbing inter- 
 est. The first half contains a formidable argument, 
 supported at every point by copious facts, against 
 Shakspere as the author of the drama aflBliated 
 upon his name, and in favor of Lord Bacon ; and 
 whatever may be its flaws or defects, every sensible 
 and unbiased mind will consider it masterly. The 
 second part is devoted to the exhibition of the nar- 
 rative wdiich Mr. Donnelly asserts was interwoven 
 by Bacon, word by Avord, through the text of the 
 plays. This, so far as the extracts of it given can 
 show, is to be Bacon's autobiography^; comprising the 
 history of his relation to the actor and manager 
 Shakspere and to the Shakespeare dramas; to 
 the life of the Elizabethan court ; and to the uni- 
 multiplex transactions of his time. Of course, 
 though sufficiently ample, a comparatively small 
 part of the marvelous tale is given, for the reason 
 that the labor of a number of years, which even 
 the worst enemies of the book concede to have been 
 stupendous in patience and dihgence, did not enable 
 Mr. Donnelly to completely decipher more; and it 
 was to enable himself to finish the work he had 
 begun on two interlocking plays that, forced into 
 print, he decided for prudential reasons connected 
 with the preservation of his copyright to withhold 
 the basic or root numbers of the cipher for the 
 present. With this reservation, the book, perfectly 
 unanswerable in its main argument, was published, 
 and at once, and before it could get to the public, 
 the reviewers of several journals of enormous 
 
MR. BONj^ELLY'S REVIEWERS. 13 
 
 circulation and great popular credit fell upon it pell- 
 mell. The pretext given for its critical demolition 
 was that the primary numbers of the cipher had 
 been withheld; and hence it was assumed or argued 
 that Mr. Donnelh^ must be, at least, a victim of 
 unconscious cerebration or a lunatic, but moreprob- 
 bly and reasonably a fraud, a forger, a cheat, a liar, 
 a swindler and a scoundrel. The singular and strik- 
 ing narrative he had extricated from the text of the 
 pla^^s was declared to be nothing but a cento ob- 
 tained by picking out the words he Avanted and 
 stringing them together as he chose, without any 
 logical connection with the figures he paraded. The 
 brave zealots for the truth who thus exposed him in 
 all his hideous moral deformity, ignored, what any 
 merely thoughtful or candid person would have 
 observed, that, although the basic numbers of the 
 cipher had been withheld, the working numbers 
 which remained showed a uniformity and limitation, 
 which made the idea of imposture not only impossible 
 but perfectly ridiculous, and at the very least, cre- 
 ated a tremendous presumption in favor of the reality 
 and validity ofthe cryptogram. But the revilers, in 
 their prepense determination to reduce to nothingness 
 the results of years of weary toil, looked out of sight 
 a still more important consideration. It is manifest 
 thatj after all, a great mathematical problem must 
 be decided by an adept in mathematics. If doubt 
 exists in regard to the verity of a complex crypto- 
 graph, none but a skilled cryptologist can resolve it. 
 In the case under notice this had been done. Im- 
 mediately upon the publication of the book Pi'o- 
 fessor Colbert, a distinguished mathematician, 
 
lit, ^^R' DONNELLY'S REVIEWERS, 
 
 having previously been admitted in confidence to a 
 complete knowledge of all the laws and numbers of 
 the cipher, disclosed or withheld, came out in a 
 length}" article in the Chicago Tribune^ a journal of 
 great distinction and circulation, and roundly certi- 
 fied, without any qualification, to the absolute 
 validity and reality of the cryptogram! In view of 
 this decisive scientific judgment, coming from a 
 source unaccused and inaccusable by even the most 
 unscrupulous of the anti-Donnelly banditti, how^ 
 could any one dare to call the verity and regularity 
 of the cipher into question? And how^, in view of 
 the decree of an authority like Professor Colbert, 
 could even the most unprincipled and reckless of the 
 patient scholar's abusers, have had the measureless 
 brass to go the length of covering him with scurril 
 epithets ? But the case against the dealers in stigma 
 is even worse than as stated. At about the date of 
 Professor Colbert's finding, Mr. Donnelly, who was 
 then in London, consented, at the solicitation of Mr. 
 Knowles, the editor of the Nineteenth Century 
 magazine, a disinterested person, to submit the entire 
 cipher to the judgment of a scientific expert, to be 
 chosen by Mr. Knowles. The selection fell upon 
 'Mr. George Parker Bidder, a Queen's Counsel, 
 which is the highest grade of lawyers in Great 
 Britain, and one of the most eminent mathema- 
 ticians in England. After a careful study, Mr. 
 Bidder reported that Mr. Donnell}^ had made a 
 great and extraordinary discovery, and that, although 
 the work was not without errors in execution, the 
 existence of the cipher was undeniable. Here, then, 
 w^as additional and incontestible proof that Mr. 
 
MR. DONNELL T'S RE VIE WERS. 15 
 
 Donnelly's cryptogram was neither a delusion nor a 
 fraud, but a reality. The finding rested now upon 
 the perfect knowledge and unquestioned integrity of 
 two eminent men, widely removed from each other. 
 Under these circumstances it is nothing but folly or 
 impudence in any reviewer to deny evidence w^hich 
 is not based on opinion, but on certainty. The exis- 
 tence of the Baconian cipher in the Shakespeare 
 text, in view of the decision of persons who are 
 authorities, is no longer a hypothesis ; it is a fact ! 
 Suppose an astronomer should announce, simply by 
 astronomical calculations based on certain phe- 
 nomena, the existence and locality of a new planet, 
 as Leverrier did in the case of the planet Neptune, 
 subsequently found by Dr. Galle's telescope : a host 
 of people might assert its non-existence, but if 
 Laplace and Herschel said, " We have verified the 
 calculations ; the star is there," doubt and debate 
 would end, for the experts had spoken. Nothing 
 after, but to wait until the lens made the discovery. 
 The confirmations of astronomers as to the exis- 
 tence of an undiscovered planet are no more 
 decisive than those of cryptographers as to the 
 existence of an uncompleted cipher. 
 
 Subsequent to the decision of Messrs. Colbert and 
 Bidder, two other eminent authorities, after examin- 
 ation, rendered a similar judgment. One of them 
 is Sir Joseph Neale McKenna, a distinguished crypt- 
 ologist and member of Parliament ; at Dublin, the 
 other the Count D'Eckstadt, a celebrated Austrian 
 scholar and diplomat, all his life versed in secret 
 writing as used in European courts. 
 
16 MR. DONNELLY'S REVIEWERS. 
 
 Of the existence of the scientific decision, sup- 
 porting the claims of the cipher, the reviewers were 
 well aware, for it was widely pubhshed prior to 
 their onslaughts. But what care they for decis- 
 ions? The purpose of the flippant persifleur or 
 the literary slasher holds against all oracles. These 
 men would have denied algebra, and ''reviewed," 
 without mercy, the Arab that devised it. 
 
 III. 
 
 I do not wish to include Professor Davidson 
 among them. He was the first to put forth, in two 
 columns of the ISTew York World (April 29th, '88), an 
 adverse judgment on the cipher part of Mr. Don- 
 nelly's book, and this was prior to the verdict of 
 Professor Colbert and Mr. Bidder. Had he been 
 aware of it, being one who knows what is due to a 
 scientific decree, it might have arrested his action, 
 which I am confident he will yet retract and be 
 sorry for. I withhold an examination of his article, 
 being content to remark that it is ma^nifestly wholly 
 based on suppositions and assumptions, as the reader 
 might have seen, and that these are not borne out 
 by the facts,, as I happen to know. More, however, 
 to be regretted than any of his badl\" -taken points is 
 the haste with which he rushed into print to dis- 
 credit Mr. Donnelly's volume. His article was 
 dated April 29th, written, of course, at a date still 
 earlier, and the book was issued on the 2d of May 
 following. Thus, for at least three days before 
 publication, he had a clear field with hundreds of 
 thousands of readers, prejudicing them against the 
 book, not only by his plausible statements, but by 
 
MR. D ONJSfELL Y'S RE VIE WERS. ir 
 
 his personal distinction as a brilliant and learned 
 man. The blow came from him with double force 
 in view of the fact that he, more than anyone else, 
 had advanced the credit of the cipher by his long 
 and favorable provisional report, based upon a 
 partial investigation in a former issue of The World, 
 His later article had, therefore, all the effect of a 
 formal retraction or palinode. This virtual change 
 of front was surely astounding. Some persons have 
 ascribed it to sheer timidity. It may be so, but I 
 sincerely hope not. Certainly he showed valiancy 
 enough when, in his extended report in The Woiid, 
 he faced the bitter and silly Shaksperean prejudice, 
 and threw just and favoring light in advance on 
 Mr. Donnelly's magnificent discovery. It is said, 
 however, that Marshal Saxe, queller of armies, 
 would sink into what De Quincey and his English 
 call, " a blue funk," and quake with terror if a mouse 
 appeared in his private chamber; and it may be 
 that at last, with the cipher before him not abso- 
 lutely proved, and the mountain of Shakspereolatry 
 in full throe on the horizon, Professor Davidson 
 quailed at the prospect of the contemptible small 
 derision that threatened to enter his cloister. 
 
 Another critic who deserves to be noticed no 
 less mildly than Professor Davidson, if only out of 
 the respect due to misfortune, is Mr. John J. Jen- 
 nings, who, at that time, on May 6th, occupied nearly 
 three solid columns of the St. Louis Post-Despatch in 
 the effort to establish that the Donnelly cipher is only 
 a simple case of arithmetical progression ; that Mr. 
 Donnelly is the deluded victim of his own arithmetic ; 
 that the numerical arra}^ of cipher figures is really 
 
2S MR. DONNELLY'S REVIEWERS. 
 
 all mirage; and that as for the cipher itself, like the 
 crater of Vesuvius, according to the hlase Sir 
 Charles Coldstream, there is '^ nothing in it." Vol- 
 taire says of Dante, that his obscurity causes him 
 to be no longer understood, adding that he has had 
 commentators, which is perhaps another reason. I 
 will not insist upon anj^ parallel between Mr. Jen- 
 nings and Dante (the action of the imagination of 
 these two poets being widely different), further than 
 to remark that the mathematical exhibit in Mr. 
 Jennings' article is a decided case of woven darkness; 
 and, as he has been favorably accepted and com- 
 mented on by several of the intellectual reviewers 
 under notice, it may be that their exegesis has 
 greatly obscured, in my apprehension, the mochis ojyer- 
 andi of his ingenious rebus. Certainl}^ it would 
 seem, by the terms in which his scholiasts interpret 
 and approve liis demonstrations, that each of their 
 brains had turned into a pint of small white beans, 
 a condition to which his composition assuredly tends 
 to reduce the minds of all his readers. His general 
 object is to show the utter shallowness and absurd- 
 ity of Mr. Donnelly in attempting to withhold and 
 conceal his primary or root number, which he 
 declares is perfectly patent, and then, by a series of 
 bewildering little computations, proceeds to expose. 
 The number, he says, is always and everj^where, by 
 all permutations and in all sorts of ways, simply 
 222, and to this he conjoins in some mysterious 
 fashion, perfectly dumbfoundering to me, what he 
 calls '' a beautiful and buoyant little modifier — the 
 ' figure one.'^'^ When I read all this, it made me think 
 of the equally luminous method by which certain 
 
 1 
 
MR. D ONNELL T'S RE VIE WERS. • 19 
 
 persons, according to good old Father Eabelais, get 
 at the ages of the heroic and daemonic cycle. The 
 cure of Meudon says in his profuse and jolly manner : 
 "As for the demigods, fauns, satyrs, s^dvans, hob- 
 goblins, aegipanes, nymphs, heroes and demons, 
 several men have, from the total sum which is the 
 result of the divers ages calculated by Hesiod, 
 reckoned their life to be nine thousand seven hun- 
 dred and twenty years; this sum consisting of four 
 special numbers, orderly arising from one*^ the same 
 added together and multiplied by four every way, 
 amounts to forty ; these forties being reduced into 
 triangles by five times, make up the total of the 
 aforesaid number." Mr. Jennings' explication of 
 the Donnelly cipher, conceived in all seriousness, 
 though tossed with nonchalant and gay assurance 
 to the public, and culminating in his ubiquitous 222, 
 ''orderly arising from one," would perfectly match 
 the dumfoozler of Rabelais if it only had some- 
 thing of its sane mockery. When it first appeared, 
 there were three or four persons in the country, who, 
 knowing Mr. Donnelly's real basic number, must 
 have smiled to the depths of their midriffs at the 
 spectral unreality of the substitute. Weeks later, 
 when Mr. Donnelly, yielding to a general desire, 
 published the root number in question, which was 
 836, it must have been interesting to see Mr. Jen- 
 nings' face lengthen at the suddenly disclosed dis- 
 crepancy between the true figure, and the one he 
 had revealed with such dogmatic confidence, together 
 with its ''buoyant and beautiful little modifier — 
 the figure 07ie.^^ Perhaps, however, the conscious- 
 ness that his figment had, in the interim, wrought 
 
m 31 R. D OXXELL Y 'S BE VIE WEES, 
 
 some injury to the circulation of the Donnelly 
 volume^ ma}^ have consoled him for the disaster that 
 had befallen his sapient revelation. That before its 
 refutation or exposure, an}" part of the population 
 could have been deterred by such a baseless fabric 
 of a vision from reading the book before rejecting 
 it, would seem to show that we have among us 
 Captain Cook's Pelew Islanders in all their guileless 
 innocence. 
 
 Still another proof of the Arcadian simplicity of 
 some readers is afforded by the credit which appears 
 to have been given to an article in the St. Paul 
 Pioiieer-Press of May 6th, afterward promoted to 
 the dignity of a pamphlet, and widely circulated, 
 especially at the West. It is entitled The Little 
 Cryptogram, and is the work of Mr. J. Gilpin Pyle. 
 Its strain is that of a rather venomous badinage, 
 and its serious object to destroy the credibility of 
 the cipher, b;v showing that under its rules j^ou can 
 get any narrative you choose. The way the author 
 illustrates this is to compose an insulting sentence 
 made up from the text of Hamlet^ and lay alongside 
 its several words the figures of a mock-cipher. Of 
 course the process differs from Mr. Donnelly's in 
 being perfecth^ arbitrary, and equally of course the 
 performance is sheer travesty. Yet I was credibly 
 informed, by a gentleman who had traveled at the 
 time through the Xorthwest that numbers of people 
 considered this rank and shallow burlesque irresisti- 
 ble in point of humor, and an utter refutation of 
 the methods of the cr3q3togram. Messrs. Colbert 
 and Bidder, witnesses to the science of Mr. Donnelly's 
 solutions, would hardly think Mr. Pyle's transparent 
 
 
MB. DONNELLY'S REVIEWERS. SI 
 
 buffoonery worth a smile, but thej^ might easily be 
 led to stare at the spectacle of sensible people giving 
 it the slightest credence. A similar excursion was 
 made in the New York Sun of May 6th. The author 
 of the Cryptogram had deciphered of Ann Hatha- 
 way, '' She hath a fine complexion, with a high 
 color and long red hair," and the witty editor, paro- 
 dying the cipher method, continued with, '' She 
 sometimes rode, perforce, a costermonger's white 
 horse." But as this chimed in with the current fad 
 that a white horse is always seen in the neighbor- 
 liood of a red-headed girl, one could be merely 
 amused, and say lightly, '' The 8un is a jolly joker; 
 it smiles for all." Whoever felt in the witticism an 
 unfair mockery felt also that the injurious intention 
 was quenched in the fun, and could declare like 
 Jupiter in Hugo's poem, " I have laughed, therefore 
 I pardon." The effect in Mr. Pyle's squib is differ- 
 ent. He is not witty, and only produces a piece of 
 sardonic slang, w^hich aims to do harm, and rests 
 upon naked misrepresentation. The sentence he pre- 
 tends to extract from Hamlet by the cipher method 
 is this : *' Dou-nill-he, the author, politician and 
 mountebanke, will work out the secret of this play. 
 The sage is a daysie." One might as easily find in 
 \\\Q Midsummer'^ s Night Dream b}^ such a cipher- 
 method : '' If Jay-Gil-Pin-Pyle will onlie tie his ears 
 over his heade in a neat bow-knot, and put on his 
 liatte and keepe it on, no one will readily find out 
 his resemblance to Nick Bottom. The hoodlum is a 
 ])each-blossom." But Mr. Pyle might think this 
 style of cipher rather personal. It certainly is entirely 
 apocryphal, which is another resemblance. Such 
 
fS MR. DOXXELL J 'S RE VIE WERS. 
 
 an attempt at invalidation is really beneath even 
 contempt, but one can hai'dly help feeling something 
 like indignation to think that means like these 
 should be employed to break down an honest author. 
 
 IT. 
 
 The foregoing are samples of some outlying varie- 
 ties of ill treatment to which The Great Cryptogram^ 
 has been subjected. But the full force of hostile 
 criticism is not seen until we come to the pure 
 hteraiy censure, where the small deceit and sinful 
 games of the professional reviewer have full play. 
 A writer in the Boston Daily Advertiser having 
 announced that Mi\ Donnelly's book is dead, adds 
 that it is because "'the best judges'* have condemued 
 it. Let us see, therefore, by their judgments, what 
 manner of men are '* the best judges/* 
 
 First in order of dignity is Mr. Appleton Morgan, 
 the president of the New York Shakespeare Society. 
 As Mr. Morgan for some time, long before he could 
 really know anything about the cipher, for the book 
 was not then published, had done his best in various 
 ways to sap and break it down in advance, his public 
 api>eamnce against it in an elaborate article, nearly 
 three columns long, close type, in the Xew York 
 World of May 6th, was simply logical, though per- 
 haps unexpected. He had been an avowed Baconian. 
 a still more avowed anti-Shakespearean ; and what 
 had actuated his private enmit}^ to the Donnelly 
 book before he had read it, and his subsequent o\^e\^ 
 attempt to set the myriad readers of The World 
 against it, is best known to himself. 
 
MR DONNELLY'S REVIEWERS, 23 
 
 It is curious to follow his points. He begins 
 with the dogmatic assertion, shotted to the muzzle 
 with insult and dishonor, that Mr. Donnelly has 
 fabricated a story which is merely a cento — a novel- 
 lette compacted of Shakespeare words; and has 
 foisted it off by a trick of figures as a cipher nar- 
 rative of Lord Bacon's. 
 
 To show that no real cipher exists in the text, he 
 asserts, with the air of one who was present when 
 the first folio was printed, and knows all about it, 
 that four printing houses in London were concerned 
 in its manufacture, viz. : the establishments of W. 
 Jaggard, Ed. Blount, I. Southweeke and W. Aspley, 
 whose names were printed in the colophon as respon- 
 sible for the press- work; and that consequently no 
 four printing liouses, nor one printing house, could 
 have preserved the particular arrangement of the 
 words on the page on which, as Mr. Donnelly has 
 found, the order of the cipher depends. Does not 
 Mr. Donnelly see this? he asks, tauntingly. If Mr. 
 Donnelly sees what I see, he sees that the mflexible 
 rule of the old printing offices was, '' Follow copy, if 
 you have to follow it out of the window ! " and this 
 disposes at once of Mr. Morgan's idle objection. 
 Under the orders of the hired proof-reader, or the 
 master of the establishment, paid to secure compli- 
 ance, the printers would set up with Chinese fidelity 
 exactly what was put before them, and preserve 
 intact the arrangement of the words upon the page, 
 whether they were in four printing houses or forty. 
 That exactly tliis was done in the case of the great 
 folio, we have positive evidence. The folio is gen- 
 erally well, and even carefully gotten up, but there 
 
JD2L DOySELLY 
 
 :: — --^ - - oTial 
 
 pages, whole 
 
 n of the book 
 
 deccentiica- 
 
 -"er coaM 
 
 -_ mechat- 
 
 - z^d false 
 
 ^ impn^ 
 
 :' ^ords 
 
 aie ootaiii ^buses in 
 ^jS; and notably :: 
 caBed SiMories — ^_t 
 ties and Yii^tk»5 
 have been made ez 
 katlj in blind ck-^ 
 paging woidsnnpr 
 erir brai^eted^ a 
 f<xced and sixaine xtge 
 
 GT cciomn, with it mg just 
 
 ^> many there, nei — . — hich 
 
 no ma^^'-printa _ t k or 
 
 tolerate in a book unless by design, and which Mn 
 DcMmellj has fonz e conditions of the cipher. 
 
 That these pecoL ~^^ intentional k proTed 
 
 by the following f I 32, nine years after the 
 
 pablicaticm of the first folio^ Baocm and Shake^eare 
 being both dead« anodier editicm of the fcdio was 
 ^4 ii^< ^'': e'^ exist, and the book 
 Zt t was an opportonity 
 
 :!al errcHS. ostensibly mon- 
 iy directing printer, which 
 What do we find I A few 
 petty erriKS^ mostly typogia^icad, are corrected, 
 showing that the book was reset nnder saperrisicHi. 
 not medianically ; bnt the most notable are spared. 
 
 Stcieo(^rpe 
 was cexiainlr rese: 
 to ccHTect the tyi^^ 
 stioQS. and impose 
 defonned the toL~. 
 
 and the section of i 
 the historical p. ~5 
 peiT»sic»s n: 
 oToitrandab- 
 infez^^iceisine 
 
 f-^' called Hisdiofrim — that is. 
 e seeming mistakes and 
 tJ jongle of incm- 
 -plicated! The 
 T -:inrired to com- 
 pd the types to maintain the a^arratly false order 
 :f :iizt :«fcMre^ and presrare intac: :ie ^ring 
 
MR. DONNELLY'S REVIEWERS. 25 
 
 pagination, the ridiculous hyphenation and bracket- 
 ing, the grotesque word-crowding, and all the other 
 eccentricities which mark the original folio. Mr. 
 Morgan says that this typographical anarchy could 
 not have been deliberately carried out in the first 
 folio. That it was carried out in the first folio is 
 decisively proved by the fact that it was carried out 
 again, without the least variation (exceptions noted), 
 in the second folio. It was done in bolli cases 
 simply by the printers following cop\^, as they were 
 bound to do, and as it was an iron rule to do. Mr. 
 Morgan can never make any person of sense or fair- 
 ness, who knows these facts, believe that it was done 
 without design or by accident, and his attempt to 
 show that Mr. Donnelly has thus no basis in reason 
 for his cipher, is obviously a piece of pitiable weak- 
 ness and futility. 
 
 His remarks immediately following are not worth" 
 comment. They seem singularly mud-witted and 
 wandering, and are simply in continuation of his 
 assertion, already disproved, that Mr. Donnelly has 
 failed to see that the typographical eccentricities of 
 the folio are due to mere '' shiftlessness'' on the 
 part of the printers, and therefore afford no basis 
 for cipher computations. To establish this, he 
 descants with ludicrous incoherence on the odd fact 
 that only one or two pages of the folio version of 
 Troilus and Cressida are paged, while the rest are 
 left unnumbered. This he explains on the theory 
 that the printer did not know where to put the 
 play. I do not see, nor can anybody see, wh}^ this 
 should have made him fail to complete paging it, 
 nor do I see liow the fact can in any wav affect 
 
S6 MR. DOXXELL T'S BEVIEWERS. 
 
 injariously those conclusions of Mr. Donnelly to 
 which great experts in crjptology have done rever- 
 ence. 
 
 Some floundering, however, may be expected 
 from Mr. Moro^n on these unfamiliar orrounds. and 
 his foot is only on his native heath when he comes 
 upon philology, essaying to show that the cipher 
 language is that of the mneteenth, and not of the 
 seventeenth century : and hence that Mr. Donnelly 
 is a clumsy forger. To expose the awkward villain 
 by pure philological tests is now his purpose, and he 
 begins by citing a sentence from the cipher narra- 
 rative. The itahcs are mine : 
 
 •^' He [Shakspere] is the son of a poor peasant, who 
 yet follows the trade of glove-making in the hxtJe 
 where he was bom and bred — one of the peasant 
 towns of the West. And there are even rumors that 
 Will and his brother did themselves follow the trade 
 for some time before they came here.^' 
 
 To this sentence Mr. Morgan at once apphes the 
 fatal philological pick. '• Yet " in the sense of 
 '' still.'- he says, is considerably later than Bacon's 
 date. The assertion of so eminent an authority 
 must have been very damaging to Mr. Donnelly in 
 the mincLs of the multitudinous readers of TJie World. 
 who doubtless at once thought the cipher fairly 
 convicted and. exposed. As Mr. Morgan, however, 
 unaccountably mentioned Dr. Abbott's Shakespearean 
 Grammar in this connection. I at once tumeil to the 
 lx»ok, and found in the ver\' first instance of the 
 Elizabethan use of the word, his assertion flatly 
 contradicted. " Yet in the sense of stUl^ explains 
 Dr Abbott : and showing that it is not. as Mr. 
 
MB. DONNELLY'S REVIEWERS. 27 
 
 Morgan says, '^ considerably later than Bacon's 
 date," he quotes : 
 
 "You, Diana, 
 Under ray poor instructions yet must suffer, 
 Something in my behalf.'" 
 
 Alls Well That Ends Well, Act IV, Sc, 4, 
 
 One might expect a better knowledge of the text 
 of Shakespeare in the president of the New York 
 Shakespeare Society. But Mr. Morgan has been a 
 Baconian, as he avows, and we poor Baconians are 
 so ignorant ! 
 
 Here is another instance, not in Dr. Abbott (but 
 the instances are plentiful), of "yet" being used in 
 the sense of " still." It is Portia chiding Brutus : 
 
 **I urged you further; then you scratched your head 
 And too impatiently stamped with your foot: 
 Yet I insisted, yet you answered not." 
 
 Julius Ccesar, Act II, Sc. 1. 
 And here, again, is Brutus in the battle: 
 '^Yet, countrymen, O yet hold up your heads!" 
 
 Julius Civsar, Act F, Sc. 4. 
 
 It is noticeable that Mr. Morgan gets away, 
 Avith perhaps instinctive brevity, from this j)eril()us 
 point of cavil, and comes swiftly to his second 
 instance — " hole." '' The allusion to a country town 
 as a hole is," he says, ^' a very modern usage." I am 
 not at all sure that the word '^hole" in the cipher 
 does not refer to the river valley of Stafford on-iVvon, 
 the term then being archaic Saxon or Anglo-Saxon 
 for dale or valley. I do not assert this, however, 
 but assume that a town is meant in the cipher. In 
 this sense it is commonly used contumeliously, in the 
 vernacular of this country and also of Great Britain, 
 though probably rarely in literature. I heard of a 
 
28 MR. D ONNELL 7'S RE VIE WERS. 
 
 lively lady saying with much bounce, j^ears ago, 
 •'Before I'd live in such a miserable hole as Chelsea, 
 I'd die I " Lately a letter came to me from England 
 which mentions a village as '' a pretty place enough, 
 but a wretched hole." So in Robert Elsmere (Cliap. 
 XY), where a dilapidated hamlet is described as ''a 
 God-forsaken hole." The truth is that this common 
 unliterary idiom is traditional, dating from time 
 immemorial, and so prevalent was the term once that 
 it w^as even frequentl}^ added to the proper names 
 of towns in their derogation, as in the case of Stan- 
 gate Hole, the village in tlie inland county of Hunt- 
 ingdonshire, where the frightful murderer Masham 
 w^as liano;ed in the old time: or Limehouse Hole, 
 somewhere not far from London ; and in a quantity 
 of such instances. The use of tlie word as in Holmes' 
 Hole, Wood's Hole, (now altered to Holl, quite 
 needlessh^,) or the Hole-in-the-Wall, is different, indi- 
 cating here a sort of running-in place for vessels, a 
 definition which the lexicographers are much at fault 
 to make no note of. But apart from these designa- 
 tions are those thrown more formerly than at pres- 
 ent on mean or disliked places ; and Mr. Appleton 
 Morgan knows ver}^ little of ''English as she is 
 spoke" in England, when he ventures to consider 
 '4iole" in this sense merely modern. Koget in his 
 profoundly learned Thesaurus^ gives it repeatedly as 
 indicative of a place, a precinct, an abode, an address, 
 a seat, a habitation, as it always has been. Of 
 course, everyone knows its antiquity as referring to 
 a single dwelling. ''This worm-eaten hole," says 
 Shakespeare, fleering at Warkworth castle. Here 
 we have it as denoting in the words of Dryden, "a 
 
MR, DONNELLY'S REVIEWERS. 29 
 
 mean habitation." ISTovv, if a whole town or city 
 was called in the sixteenth century ''a mean habita- 
 tion," as when King James' Bible terms Babylon "a 
 habitation of dragons," I do not see why Mr. Mor- 
 gan should bring into question the antiquity of the 
 cipher-English which calls such a habitation a hole. 
 He continues his proof that Mr. Donnelly is a 
 fraudulent manufacturer of words in their modern 
 sense for his cipher, by averring that ^^even," as the 
 above cited paragraph gives it, would not be used in 
 Bacon's day. Still further, that it is doubtful 
 whether it can be found much earlier than Pope, 
 who says, '' Here all their rage and even their mur- 
 murs cease ", this being exactly the sense in which 
 the cipher employs it. He says that Mr. Donnelly 
 uses it to mean '' likewise," etc., which is obviously 
 untrue. It is used to carry the meaning of ^^as you 
 would not have thought," or ''as you might not 
 expect," the same as it does now. 
 
 Let us see how ''even" was used in Bacon's day. 
 '' Even that your pity is enough to cure me." 
 
 Shakespeare Sonnets^ CXL. 
 Meaning " even your pity," says Dr. Abbott. Will 
 anyone deny that this is the grammatical equivalent 
 of "even their murmurs?" Then the word does 
 occur earlier than Pope, does it not, Mr. Morgan ? 
 Here are other instances : 
 
 ''O^ use all arts, or haunt all companies, 
 That may corrupt her, even in his eyes." 
 
 Ben Jonson : Underwoods, 
 **Mine eyes even seeing it.'' 
 
 / Iiiings, L: j^S^ 
 "That thy trust may be in the Lord, I have made known 
 
 to thee this day, even to thee. ^ , ^^tt 
 
 *^' Proverbs, XXIL: 19, 
 
so MR. DONWELL T\S REYIE WERS. 
 
 Be it remembered that the translation in which 
 these texts occur is contemporary with Lord Bacon. 
 Here are some sentences from Sir Thomas Browne, 
 a writer, whose youth is contemporary with Bacon's 
 age, and whose diction is so much hke one of the 
 Yerulamian styles that S[>edding rejects on internal 
 evidence, after due cogitation, some of Bacon's 
 posthumous essays, conjecturally ascribing them to 
 the author of the Rdigio Medicu rashly, I think, 
 for how should any of Sir Thomas Browne's manu- 
 scripts have gotten among Lord Bacon's private 
 papers ? He says : 
 
 ^^or when eten cn>ws were funerally bunit.'* 
 
 Urn, Burial^ CJu^pter I. 
 "Z i 5 hope to rise again would not be content, '' etc 
 
 Urn Burial^ Chapier L 
 **E^: .. -_ -izaes of subiectioD.^ etc. 
 
 Urn Burial^ Chapter I. 
 An 5 ■:--: :n Jm: r 1 ::ini Cymbiica, in Anglia Sleswick, 
 urns with : I'^rS vrere ::und.** etc. 
 
 Urn Burial, Chapter II. 
 
 Sir Thr: 3^ Ei rune's writings are fuU of this 
 idiom. 
 
 To multiply these instances would be easy, but 
 those given show plainly that the sense in which 
 '• even" is used in the cipher narrative, is no more 
 modem than the times of Elizabeth and James. 
 
 It is the same with the word "rumois." Mr. 
 Morgan says that the word in the sense given in the 
 cited paragraph, would not be used in Bacon's day, 
 when it was always in the possessive, always per- 
 sonified, and never pluralized. Let us see if this 
 accomplished philologist speaks truly : 
 
 '* But I can tell yon one thiDg, my lord, which I hear from 
 eoBUgumrumortL^^ Timon^ Act Z27, 6c. 2. 
 
MR. DONNELLY'S BEVIEWERS. SI 
 
 Here is a clear case, found in Shakespeare, though 
 not known to the president of the Is'ew York 
 Shakespeare Society, wiiere the word is not in the 
 possessive, not personified, and is distinctly plural- 
 ized ! And here are other samples, still from Shakes- 
 peare : 
 
 '' When I came hither to transport the tidings 
 Which I have heavily borne, there ran a rumo7% 
 Of many worthy fellows that were out." 
 
 Macbeth, Act IV., Sc, 3, 
 '* I find the people strangely fantasied, 
 Possessed with rumors,'''' 
 
 King John, Act IV, Sc. 2, 
 
 For a test to prove the language of the cipher 
 bogus, great is Mr. Appleton Morgan's philology ! 
 
 He proceeds to fresh triumphs in this direction by 
 citing the following sentence, given, he says, '' by 
 Mr. Donnelly as written by Francis Lord Bacon.'' 
 
 '^ I was in the greatest fear that they would say 
 that the image shown upon the title-leaf of his 
 volume was but a mask to hide my own face." 
 
 Comment upon his perfectly ridiculous and 
 utterly groundless philological objection to these 
 words is rendered unnecessary by tlie fact that no 
 such sentence is in the cipher, nor attributed to Lord 
 Bacon anywhere in the book. False citations like 
 this are what Montaigne calls '^ pinching the pig to 
 make him speak." However, '' anything to beat 
 Grant," is an axiom still in order. Mr. Donnelly 
 must be vanquished, and when facts are wanting, 
 let us have inventions. The sentence, it is true, 
 occurs in the book, though not in the cipher, but it 
 is purely suppositive on the part of Mr. Doiinell}^ and 
 not ascribed to Lord Bacon at all — an illustration 
 
82 MB. DONNELLY'S REVLEWERS. 
 
 of the sentence a reader might form, suspecting 
 a cipher, when he saw a number of significant 
 words near each other on a printed page ; and ^as 
 Mr. Morgan, no matter what may be his defects m 
 philological knowledge, knows how to read, no one 
 was better aware of the fact than he. 
 
 He continues the effort to convict Mr. Donnelly 
 of forgeries by ferreting out a string of alleged 
 anachronisms, at the character of which the reader 
 cannot but marvel. They are the merest common- 
 places, such as might have been uttered equally in 
 the seventeenth or nineteenth century, having no 
 ear-mark of style or manner to denote the date of 
 their origin. '' The plays are much admired and draw 
 great numbers.'' " The subjects are far beyond his 
 ability." "Although I am acquainted with him, I 
 would not have known him, the transformation was 
 so great." " His looks prove it." Well I As Dr. 
 McGlynn said of the doctrine of papal infallibility, 
 "Good Lord ! " Does Mr. Morgan really expect any 
 one to identify phrases as ordinary as these ? I could 
 bring him fifty such, culled from the greatest Eliza- 
 bethan writers, and defy him to name their century. 
 The fact is that these citations look very like a 
 trick on the part of Mr. Morgan, the suggestion as 
 anachronisms of phrases so featureless that no one 
 can give them the phj^siognom}^ of one time or 
 another, at the same time leaving his own defama- 
 tory intimation as a quasi-proof of the literarv 
 villany of Mr. Donnelly. 
 
 He goes on in this direction by affecting to quote 
 from the cipher more phrases, whicli he avers 
 belong to the language of another age. One of 
 
 ^ 
 
MR. DONNELLY'S BEVLEWERS. 33 
 
 these is ^' appearance of danger/' and comes from a 
 passage in the book, decidedly off-cipher, given to 
 show, roughly, how under the control of different 
 root-numbers, the same words contribute to three 
 different narratives. As Mr. Donnelly makes no 
 pretense to verbal accuracy in this passage, but ex- 
 pressly the contrary, it would seem somewhat high- 
 handed to select a phrase from it as proof of philologi- 
 cal anachronism. But this Mr. Moro;an does, citino^ 
 ''appearance of danger" as unknown to Bacon's 
 time, and therefore a forgery by Mr. Donnelly. 
 Yet here is the same idiom in Shakespeare : 
 
 ^ ^Appearance of fanc}'." 
 
 Much Ado, Act ILL, Sc, ^. 
 
 And here it is in King James' Bible: 
 
 ^'Appearance of fire." 
 
 Numlers: IX, L5, 
 
 Besides, if the word '' appearance " in the cipher 
 "phrase is to be understood, which is very possible, in 
 the sense of '' probabihty " or ''likelihood," it is 
 still a well-known idiom of Shakespeare's time, for 
 in that sense Bacon uses it when he says, " There is 
 that which hath no appearance.'^' Either way, Mr. 
 Morgan's assertion has no validity. 
 
 ''Had fled" is another phrase he brings u]) for 
 the conviction of Mr. Donnelly. Here we ai^e 
 reminded ao^ain of Montaigne's saying, for the 
 words are not in the ciplier, and once more the ])ig 
 has been pinclied to make him speak. Anothei* 
 pinch, and we have "a body of twenty", whicli is 
 also not in the ciplier. Pinch the pig again, and 
 
S4 J^- DOXXELL F >" REVIEWERS. 
 
 for, another quotation from an imaginary cipher 
 text, Mr. Moi^n thinks it fair to present these 
 fictitious phrases as proofs of the ignorance and 
 wickedness of the man whose work he is pretending 
 to estimate! I offer the spectacle as a picture of 
 the ideal reviewer. 
 
 He proceeds with the declaration that the phrase 
 in which the cipher mentions the faihng Shakes- 
 peare^ ^ He can not last long/' is in '-an idiom which 
 certainly can not be fifty years old in the English 
 lansroa^.'' On the contrary, the verv idiom occurs 
 repeatetlly in the plays and in the other literature of 
 the time: 
 
 "The wonder is Lf ':: v:'_ ^ - ' ^ 
 
 ^ r, AH V. St. S. 
 " A [dead] in ^e eight year.'' 
 
 *' And /rtjf 9o„ lamg enc : _ ^ 
 *' WelK T CM not losf €T^r 
 
 :U Act r Se. 1. 
 -If r Se.t. 
 
 e. 
 
 "To be free minded and 
 meat, and of sleep, and of exer 
 of 20119 loMtrng,^ — Beam's E^mmk 
 
 Next we are instructed thai liie pmase * t : 
 himself '^ was certainly not to be found in thai ag 
 the allusion being to the cipher sentence "He is 
 flattering himself with the hope and expectation that 
 he will get well.'' But in Shakespeare we have : 
 •• Flitf'^T'hirf Ik n.^J.f \^^ project of a power. ^ 
 
 nmnty /r. Act L Se. 3. 
 
 And m King James' Bible we have: 
 '• He f..tLtd"df\ 'r iiffV'iii his own eyes.'* 
 
 Bialmf XXXVT: 5. 
 
 The idiom m ti-e lJ:u^?e cases is precisely the same. 
 
MB. DONNELLY' F; UEYTEWEUS. So 
 
 Mr. Morgan's finest feat in the philological line 
 is perhaps his attempt to trip Mr. Donnelly on the 
 phrase of the Bishop of Worcester in the cipher con- 
 cerning Shakspere's age — '^ Mthough he is not yet 
 thirty-three." Here he lets one see he has him foul ! 
 Nobody in that age, he declares, would say 'Hhirty- 
 three," and the sentence is a manifest forger3\ ''Ask 
 an Englishman to-day," says this unerring detective, 
 '' how old a man is of the age indicated in the last 
 sentence, and he will tell j^ou — not thirty-three, but 
 three and thirty ; and I can not trace a time in the 
 history of English when a contrary rule oldained!'^ 
 Can not, indeed ! What does Mr. Morgan say to 
 this: 
 
 ^^Ilast thou any grene cloth, said our kyngc, 
 That thou wilt sell nowe to me? 
 Ye, for God, sayd Eobyn, 
 
 Thirty yerdes and tltree.'^ 
 
 A Ljytell Geste of llohjn ILode: Ritson. 
 
 It appears that Englishmen did not always say 
 ''three and thirty," but quite as often " thirty and 
 three." Here is more evidence of similar liberty, 
 dating from the fourteenth centur3\ 
 
 ^'In Jerusalem he reigned tldrty-three years and a luilf." 
 
 Sir John 3fandeviUe, Cha]). VL 
 "He was thirty -three years and three months old/' 
 
 Hir Joint M(fndeviJIe^ Chap. VLL 
 
 ** Our Lady was conversant with her son thirty-three 
 
 years and tliree months." 
 
 Sir John Manderille, Cluip. X. 
 
 Yet Mr. Morgan '' can not trace a time in the 
 history of English " when people did not say " three 
 and thirtv " instead of '' thirtv-three ! " 
 
3G MR. DOXyELLY'S nETIEWERS, 
 
 If he were as conversant witli the plays as one 
 Tvouid naturally expect the Grand Co]3ht of a Shakes- 
 peare society to be, he would know that the great 
 dramatist himself did not always, or even usually, 
 put the cart before the horse in these constructions. 
 
 For example : 
 
 ^' Whom thou obeyedst thirty and six years " 
 
 3 Henry TT., Act III, Sc. 3. 
 ^' Toad that under the cold stone 
 Days and night hast tltirfy-one." 
 
 Macl)€th, Act IV Sc. 1. 
 *'I have years on my \y.\Q\ forty -eight.'' 
 
 Lear, Act I Sc. 4. 
 '• He had before this hast expedition, tcenty-Jivev^oxnid^ui^oii 
 him - — — Xow it'' ticerity-seven.'^ 
 
 Coriolanus, Act II, Sc. 1. 
 '• I have known thee these twenty-nine years.'''' 
 
 2 Henry IV. Act II, Sc. 4. 
 ^' Ticenty-flve years have I but gone in travail." 
 
 Comedy of Errors, Act F, Sc. 3. 
 " TTere I but twenty-one, 
 Your father's image is so hit in you — 
 His very air — that I should call you brother.'' 
 
 Winters Tale. Act V, Sc. 2. 
 ^'Methought I did recoil 
 Twenty-three years.'' 
 
 Wlntefs Tale, JLct I, Sc. 2. 
 
 Of course. Shakespeare, whoever he was. might 
 have said, and would have properly said, if he had 
 chosen, six and thirty, one and thirty, eight and 
 forty, five and twenty, etc.. instead of the locutions 
 cited, but it was optional with him, as it Avas with 
 Englishmen before and after him. and the way be 
 used his option forms a fatal bar of precedent to the 
 accusation Mr. Morgan brings against the Donnelly 
 cipher in this particular. 
 
MR. DONNELLY'S REVLEWER8. 
 
 37 
 
 His final effort to invalidate the cipher text, and 
 fix a mean crime on Mr. Donnelly, is probably the 
 smallest thing he has done in the philological line, 
 and certainly not the least disastrous to himself as a 
 critic. Professing to quote from the cipher, he finds' 
 " bitter beer" as one item of the supper at Stratford, 
 and asks skeptically, " was there such a thing as 
 ' bitter beer ' ? " As there was beer called " sweet," 
 of course, the other beer was discriminated as ''bit- 
 ter." The discrimination continues to this day, and in 
 England, I am told, you constantly hear of '' bitter 
 beer." In one of our popular song-books, years ago, 
 there was a catch with the doggerel lines : 
 
 ^' We'll drink Bass and Allsop's 
 Glorious bitter beer." 
 
 All this, however, is of no consequence bej^ond 
 showing how little equipment Mr. Morgan has for 
 his self -chosen task of defamatory criticism, the true 
 point being that this is the closing instance of pinch- 
 ing the pig to make him speak, and arousing squawk 
 we get from him. The quotation is a sheer manu- 
 facture. There is nothing about bitter beer in the 
 cipher. The phrase used is ''bottle-ale." 
 
 Later it came out that while Mr. Morgan pro- 
 fessed in his World article to cite from the cipher, 
 he was really citing from a letter Mr. Donnelly had 
 written him long before, in which, I presume, no 
 effort had been made to give the exact cryptic 
 language. The reader will admire the ingenuous- 
 ness of this proceeding, especially when nice points 
 of philology were involved, depending u])on precise 
 terms. A month after the book was published, he 
 appeared in the June Shakef^j)ereana, correcting his 
 
38 ME, DONNELLY'S REVIEWERS, 
 
 false citation to read '• bottle-ale," and carelessly ob- 
 serving, as though it were of no consequence, that 
 he had not obtained it from the book he had been 
 reviewing. He then charged that Mr. Donnelly had 
 made an alteration in the cipher since he wrote the 
 letter, offering not the slightest evidence in support 
 of this assertion; and further that he had '' laid 
 one question but opened up another, naftiely: Was 
 there any ale in bottles in those days ? " Ale was 
 home-brewed everywhere, he saj^s, not stowed away, 
 nor exported. " Wh v should it have been brought 
 upon Shakespeare's table in bottles? " Still harping 
 on the cipher, you see ! He will not allow the pub- 
 lic to believe that Mr. Donnelly, is, even on one 
 point, anything but a forger of documents. 
 
 Nevertheless, there was ^^ bottle-ale " in those 
 days, as people know who are not so silly and ill- 
 read as to raise a question about it. Here is one 
 reference to it among many : 
 
 * 'Everyone that can frame a booke in rime, though it be 
 but in commendation of copper noses or hottle ale, wiU catch 
 at the garlande due to poets."" 
 
 Webl)es Discourse of English Foetrie, 1586. 
 
 Here again the President of the New York Shakes- 
 peare society's lack of familiarity with the pages of 
 the Shakespeare drama, kept from his knowledge , 
 further instances, which would have prevented him 
 from publicly doubting the existence of Elizabethan 
 ale in bottles. As thus: 
 
 "The Myrmidons are no ho ttle-ale houses,^'' 
 
 Tioelfth Night, Act II, Sc. 3. . 
 
 And again : 
 **Whata beard of the general's cut, and a horrid suit of the 
 camp, wiW do among foaming lottles and ale-'iDashed wits is 
 wonderful to be thought of." 
 
 Henri/ V, Act III, Sc. 3, 
 
MB. D ONNELL Y 'S BE VIE WEBS. 39 
 
 And jfinally, (it is hoped that no indignant Bacon- 
 ian will utter the line with significance,) 
 
 **Away you lottle-ale rascal !" 
 
 2 Henry IV, Act II, Sc. 4. 
 
 The rain of philological learning with which Mr. 
 Morgan has been fertilizing the public mind, drib- 
 bles away here into a few scattering drops. One 
 is that the cipher sentence, "His purse is well 
 lined with the gold he receives from the plays," 
 '^does not sound like Baconian or Jacobean English." 
 " Does not sound^^^ indeed. A rare touchstone for 
 a student of language. To Ime a coffer, a pocket, a 
 purse with gold, occurs constantly in seventeenth- 
 century English. "What if I do line one of their 
 hands ? " says Shakespeare. "I to line my Christmas 
 coffers," says Massinger. " When thou feelest thy 
 purse well lined," says Eatsei. But one need not 
 linger on such trivia, which simply show Mr. Mor- 
 gan's remarkable ignorance of his subject. The only 
 point worth notice in this part of his article is his 
 muddy-headed effort to catch Mr. Donnelly in an 
 anachronism showing fraud. It appears by the 
 cipher that the Bishop of Worcester wrote a letter 
 to Cecil, about Shakespeare, in which he reports, "It 
 is thought he will buy all the land appurtenant to 
 jN'ew Place." Now this, says Mr. Morgan, could not 
 possibly have been inserted in cipher in the Henry IV 
 quartos of 1598-1600, nor in the folio of 1623, because 
 Shakespeare had already bought the land at New 
 Place a year or two prior to the date of the first 
 quarto. Hence, Mr. Donnelly has forged the sentence 
 and is to be held up to public derision. But what was 
 the date of the Bisho2)^s letter to Cecil ? Oh, no matter I 
 
J^O MR. DONNELLY'S REYLEWERS. 
 
 Admirable reasoner. Boiled down to a single 
 allspice, Mr. Morgan's point is just this, Bacon could 
 not have put the sentence into a cipher in the quartos 
 of 1598-1600, or the folio of 1623, because the 
 Bishop of Worcester wrote his letter to Cecil prior 
 to Shakespeare's making the purchase in 1597. 
 Peerless logician ! 
 
 V. 
 
 An additional proof that there is really no cipher 
 in the text, and that the one presented is entirely 
 spurious and made by Mr. Donnelly, is the fact, says 
 Mr. Morgan, that it does not resemble any of Lord 
 Bacon's acknowledged works; and he asks with 
 crushing force, "Does the cipher narrative remind 
 us of the Essays^ or of the Novum Orgcmxim^ or of 
 the De Augmentis ? " Why let us see : 
 
 "Atque quemadmoduin sectge conditores non sumus, ita 
 nee operum particularium largitories aut promissores." 
 
 — Novum Organum^ CXYII. 
 
 Certainly the difference between the style of the 
 cipher and the Novum Organitm is obvious, and the 
 parallel is discouraging; but let us look further: 
 
 *' Urbes munitge plena armamentaria equorum propagines 
 generosge, currus armati, elephanti, machinse atque tormenta 
 bellica omnigena, et similia, " etc. — De Augmentis. 
 
 It appears we fare no better with the De Aug- 
 mentis^ and must in all frankness admit that the sim- 
 ple English of the cipher story does not ''remind us" 
 of Bacon's rolling and resounding Latin. As for the 
 Essays^ their matter is quite matched by their art ; 
 they are studiously apothegmic, almost gnomic, in 
 their construction ; and the reader must concede to 
 Mr. Morgan that the cipher is not cast in their 
 
MR. DONNELLY'S REYIEWERH, 4I 
 
 mold. But who but a genius like him would 
 require that it should be, or demand that an English 
 style should tally with a Latin ? Had he sought to 
 bring into the comparison Lord Bacon's Apotliegms^ 
 or some of his somewhat stiff and ineloquent private 
 letters, or even certain paragraphs of his History of 
 Henry VII, ^ there might be some sense in it, but he 
 advances the plain tale of the cryptograph, sets it 
 against the powerful rhetoric, cast for eternity, of 
 three of Bacon's greatest works, and asks, with 
 bland simplicity, whether the one '^reminds "us of 
 the others. This is truly pastoral, and what Mr. 
 Morgan wants is a broad hat of plaited straw, blue 
 ribbons, a crook, and some sheep. One would think 
 that the fact would have occurred to him that the 
 cipher story must necessarily have been seriously 
 cramped by having to move in the shackles of the 
 outer text, and that this condition alone would have 
 prevented any great effects of style, or resemblance 
 to any rhetorical masterpiece. The greatest artist 
 in language, set to move in the interior of a grand 
 play with a cipher narrative, would find that he had 
 to perform a fetter-dance of singular difficulty. But 
 Mr. Morgan sees nothing of all this, and rolls off 
 with complacency his shallow guff about the want 
 of ''parallel" between a necessarily restricted and 
 labored secret text, and the might\^, untrammeled 
 diction of the Novum Organnm, 
 
 Whether the manner of the cipher does not 
 coincide with Lord Bacon's more than the critic 
 imagines, is a question which need not be entered 
 upon. The immediate concei*n is with Mr. Morgan's 
 critical exploits, the next of vv^hich is quite worthy of 
 
MR. DOXXELLY'S REVIEWERS. 
 
 all that precede it. Keeping in view tlie destruction 
 of Mr. Donnelly's book, he o^oes on to declare that 
 the great folio of 1623 is not authentic ! Here 
 is a book put forward as a inagnuni ojjus — the first 
 collected edition of plays then famous with the pub- 
 lic: a book which at once mounted to supremacy, and 
 so kept it that a perfect copy of it to-day is worth 
 $5,000 : a book on which we reh" for our fullest 
 knowledge of itsauthor*s works, containing, as Mr. 
 Morgan himself says, several of the plays never 
 heard of tmtil its publication ; and Mr. Morgan 
 declares it is not authentic, and gives this as a reason 
 why Lord Bacon would never have chosen it as a 
 place of concealment for his cipher narrative ! What 
 place should he have chosen ? The '* stolen and 
 surreptitious copies '" The scattered quartos? The 
 absurdity of this position has never been excelled. 
 It is obvious that whether the first folio were 
 *' authentic'' or not, it would have been a sufficient 
 depository for Lord Bacon's secret history, if only 
 because it was unique, famous, and assured of popu- 
 lar permanence, as it has proved to be. Another 
 palpable absurdity Mr. Morgan commits, in his zeal 
 to impugn Mr. Donnelly's veracity, is to assert that, if 
 Bacon chose the folio for his cover, he would have 
 been careful to have the text exact — fi^ee from inter- 
 polations, which, he says, it is not. What has the 
 purity of the text to do with its capacity for enfold- 
 ing a secret reading ? Manifestly nothing. In fact, 
 it appears that in certain cases the corruption of the 
 text is caused by the exigencies of the cipher. 
 Moreover, it is clear enough that some of these 
 impurities which Mr. Morgan considers *• actors' 
 
MR, DONNELLY'S REVIEWERS. 43 
 
 interpolations," are so only in his own fancy. For 
 example, the folio gives in Lear.thQ following lines : 
 
 " Pray do not mocke me, 
 
 I am a very foolish, fond old man, 
 
 Four score and upwards, 
 
 Not an hour more or less; 
 
 And to deal plainly, 
 
 I fear I am not in my perfect mind. " 
 The line in italics Mr. Morgan thinks an actor's 
 interpolation, adding that the author would never have 
 put it there, because it is incoherent and makes the 
 other lines ridiculous by impairing their pathos. But 
 it is at once a question, with the reader, whether this 
 incoherence is not in perfect keeping with Lear's 
 weak and wandering mental condition ; and this is 
 comfirmed by his immediate misgiving in the next 
 lines, where he seems to feel that w^hat he has just 
 said is nonsense, and fears that he is not in his per- 
 fect mind. A stroke of genius like this flickering 
 lapse from noble pathos to pitiable incongruity, is 
 not usually characteristic of actors' interpolations. 
 ITor is it at all clear that the speech of Falstaff in 
 the Merry Wives, where he prays '' God bless me 
 from that Welsh fairy!" is a bit of actor's burlesque. 
 Mr. Morgan's misreading here is really amazing. 
 Falstaff, crouched in the fern around Heme's oak, 
 sees the company enter, with their pretty twinkling 
 tapers, disguised as fairies. Evans, the AVelshman? 
 one of them, speaks his lines, and Falstaff, not recog- 
 nizing him, but hearing his Welsh accent, naturally 
 in his scared and bewildered condition, thinks him 
 a Welsh fairy, and delivers himself accordingly. 
 Could anything be plainer? Yet Mr. Morgan must 
 find this, like the other, an instance of '' changes 
 
U Jffi. BOJS^ELLT S EEVIEWMB& 
 
 made by players,'' spurred against reason, by his 
 desire to make oat that Mr. Donnelly is a cheat 
 and a liar! 
 
 The same motive drives him into the attempt to 
 estabUsh that the plays most have been written by 
 an actor, (Shakespeare) ; and that therefore Mr. 
 Donnelly is without his prime basis, because the 
 histrionic profession arrays itself soUdly, by instinct^ 
 against the Baconian theory. Actors themselves, 
 he declares, are never Baconians. Mr. Morgan is 
 mistaken. Charlotte Cushman was a Baconian ; and 
 doubtless, if the matter were looked into, there 
 would be found others. But Miss Cushman was not 
 only a great actor — in certain roles of comedy, as 
 in As You Uke 1% or the Jealous Wife^ never 
 excelled by anyone — ^but she was also a woman of 
 wide culture, and of a strong and scholarly intellect. 
 This enabled her to study the plays by lights which 
 the very profession of most actors excludes, and to 
 which as a cla^ their whole training and experience 
 are foreign. What is there in the discipline of 
 actors, as suclu to make them critical umpire of a 
 vast and difficult literary question, Uke that of the 
 origin, purpose and relation of the Shakespeare 
 plays ! Who made them judges? Their business is 
 strictly and purely personation; to act^ and to study 
 to act, by mastering the means which magnetic elo- 
 cution, delivery and presence offer for the moving of 
 the mind and souL It is a great function; how 
 great they know best in our generation who have 
 been transported by Henry Placideor William War- 
 ren in comedy, or electrified by the elder Booth or 
 Bachel in tragedy. But it is not allied to the 
 
MR. DONNELLY'S REVIEWERS. 45 
 
 function of criticism. When I think of some actors I 
 have seen or known — sterling old John Gilbert, a 
 great star who has never starred, sound as oak in 
 sense and judgment; Forrest, matchless in his subtle 
 comprehension of the meaning of his text; that 
 majestic elder Booth, just named, whose intuitions 
 were as broad and bright as tropic lightning ; that 
 incomparable Rachel, also named, less a woman than 
 a sibyl in her intelligence; Coquelin, whose Avriting 
 alone, notably his recent fine appreciation of the 
 lyric beauty and grandeur of Victor Hugo's genius, 
 shows an intellect of no common scope and deli- 
 cacy ; the incomparable William Warren, Hackett, 
 the two Placides, Burton, Henry Irving — when I 
 think of them, or their few equals, I could almost 
 regard them competent to express as wise a judg- 
 ment, by native insight, on the true authorship of the 
 Shakespeare pla^^s as did their peer, Charlotte Cush- 
 man. Still the trust Avould be hazardous, for they 
 would be off their beat, and as actually as though 
 the problem were one of astronomy. If one would 
 be warned of what might be expected in such a field 
 from the ordinary run of actors, let him consult the 
 article by Lawrence Barrett, Concerning Shakespeare^ 
 in the North American Review^ of last December. 
 Mr. Barrett is an actor of talent, representing a high 
 average of his profession, and stands eminent in 
 popular esteem. But no one fairly conversant with 
 the literature of the Bacon-Shakespeare controversy, 
 or with literature at all, can read his contribution 
 without amused disdain. To his a]^prehension, the 
 whole enquiry is nothing but an emanation ol" the 
 literary skepticism and ''blind irreverence'' of 
 
J^e MR. DOXXELLT\S REVIEWERS. 
 
 which, he says, Huxley, Darwin and Tyndall have 
 proved the forerunners! This stroke of judgment 
 would make a cat laugh, since it is notoriously 
 known that our fruitful modern criticism began, (at 
 least since it ceased to be subterranean), with Vol- 
 taire and the Encyclopedists ; and continued with the 
 mio:htv breed of Germans, like ]S'iebuhr, who revised 
 the old statements and made them conform to sense 
 and fact, long before Huxley, Darwin and Tyndall 
 were born. As for the startling anomaly, the down- 
 right contradiction, between Shakespeare's personal 
 record and his reputed works, which staggered Guizot, 
 Hallam, Schlegel, Coleridge, Emerson and a host of 
 perfectly orthodox scholars, he appears to be entirely 
 oblivious of it ; a slight lack, one would think, to any 
 proper consideration of the question. All through the 
 article, even from the start. Bacon is for him the 
 impossible monster Pope invented and the world 
 never saw: — '*the wisest, brightest, meanest of man- 
 kind ; '' — and to think of him as the author of the plays, 
 is, to his mind, simply reason gone to seed in folly. 
 A notable feature is the biographical sketch he 
 gives of Shakespeare, bald as the head of Martin Van 
 Buren, and leaving out all the incidents that would 
 make it graphic, possibly because they would also 
 make it discreditable. The story of the outrageous 
 and wanton trespass, which no owner of a country 
 estate would endure, any more than did Sir Thomas 
 Lucy; the traditions and proofs of his coarse amours, 
 his drunkenness, his greed, his usury ; his jparvemi 
 ambitions ; his attempt to wring from the hard hands 
 of peasants their poor landed rights : his impudent 
 and dishonest efforts to obtain armorial bearings, 
 
MB. DONNELLY'S REVIEWERS. 47 
 
 are all omitted. The only salient point is that Mrs. 
 Shakespeare, who survived her lord, put up the 
 monument to his memory in Stratford church. (For 
 a bold bouncer, this takes the cake and bears the 
 bell.) To the present day, it is an utter mystery who 
 erected the monument, with the bust on top, which 
 the great sculptor, Chantrey, thought, by certain 
 tokens, was carven from a death-mask ; with the two 
 little cherubs, one blowing a trump of fame, or hold- 
 ing an inverted torch (I forget which), the other 
 pointing downward with a spade; and with the 
 tributary inscriptions, one of them in Latin, in which 
 the poet is compared to Nestor, Socrates and Yirgil. 
 But this oracular actor states that it w^as Mrs. 
 Shakespeare that did it — states it, too, with careless 
 assurance as something always known. " The facts 
 am false", averred the colored orator; and there are 
 a great number of positions, assumptions and asser- 
 tions in Mr. Barrett's article, to which the expression 
 is applicable. He seems quite imbued, rightly 
 enough, with the idea of Shakespeare's personal illit- 
 eracy or scant education ; but, therefore, in defer- 
 ence to his fetish, he thinks it necessar}^ to assume 
 the most supercillious attitude toward learning as a 
 correlative of genius. Scholarship, he thinks, has 
 never been the concomitant of creative literature, 
 though he could be safely defied to show a single 
 poet or author, of the first magnitude, antique or 
 modern, who was not a scholar also. It is in this 
 connection that he actually has the fatuity to ad- 
 vance the notion that the mighty Eschylus, and his 
 almost compeers, Sophocles and Euripides, were less 
 in attainment than Plato. lie tacitly, and even 
 
48 2tB, DO^rXZZ I 7 5. Z r WEBS. 
 
 more than tacitly, assumes the unlettered condition 
 of Shakespeare, seomfallT saying in this general 
 relation, " Collies do not create poets ; ", and then 
 glorifies MoUere, who, he seems to imply, was one of 
 the same kind ; leaving his readers with the impres- 
 sion that, like Shakespeare, he was all genius and no 
 learning. He forgets that Moliere was thoroughly 
 educated at Clermont, then one of the finest collies 
 in Europe; was also the special pupil of the great 
 philosopher Gassendi ; and was afterward for some 
 years a student of law. He ought to know that 
 there is no parallel in educational proficiency be- 
 tween this actor and the one of the Globe Theatre, 
 at whom ''Bye. Quyney/^ in his life-time, spat 
 the Jeering epithets, ^^HiMrio! mima/'^ But 
 the crowning enormity of this grotesque article, 
 by a flower of the profession, is the unseemly 
 manner in which its author permits himself to speak 
 of Lord Bacon. He ignores, if he ever knew with 
 what adoring ardor, what glowing veneration. Bacon 
 was regarded by that very Gassendi, the illustrious 
 master of his revered MoUere, whose old French 
 eyes would have blazed with noble anger, could he 
 have heard one he knew to be good and great so 
 foully vilified. The histrionic reviewer needs to be 
 told that his censure is as unfitting as unmannerly, 
 for, even should the varied infamy charged on Bacon 
 be proved, as it never has been, he would stiU remain 
 a majestic man : still remain, even then, in the words 
 of Browning, our "spirit's arbiter, magnificent in 
 sin : '' and, whatever the disclosures, never would 
 deserve, as Mr. Barrett says, ""immortal contempt as 
 his portion." The tone adopted toward Bacon is as 
 
MR. DONNELLY'S UEVtBWEUS. Ifi 
 
 sophomorical as it is ferocious and diracefsgul, and 
 shows how ignorant the critic is of his subject, and 
 of the results of recent investigation. When he 
 mentions "that withering denunciation of Lord 
 Macaulay, which will cling to Bacon w4ien the 
 Shakespeare myth is forgotten," he makes it evident 
 that he has not got far enough in his knowledge to 
 know that the denunciations of the unscrupulous 
 Scotch sophist are not much for clinging, especially 
 among w^ell-read Americans. He has apparently 
 never heard of Hepworth Dixon, who, on this sub- 
 ject, laid out both Lord Campbell and Macaulay 
 uncommonly cold. He seems to have never read 
 the Evenings with a Reviewer^ that work in which 
 the illustrious Spedding, a pedestrian mind, not 
 talaria-ankled, not " clinquant, all in gold," like 
 Macaulay, but slow, sure, terrible in the possession 
 of his patient research, and in his unflawed veracity 
 and perfect candor, plods on, like Zisca in the battle 
 with his scythe, mowing down the host of verbal 
 tricks and lies arrayed against Bacon, and destroy- 
 ing forever the historic credit of the shameless 
 defamer of William Penn, who also blackened the 
 fame of the greatest of Englishmen. If Mr. Barrett 
 had read these books he would then have been only 
 in the beginning of knowledge, but he would have 
 learned enough to know that Bacon was never false 
 to Essex — that violent and turbulent young man, 
 long estranged from his great guide, who sank from 
 his noble early promise into the life of a dissolute 
 libertine, broke out at last into a selllsh and bloody 
 treason, and meanly sacrificed, when doonunl, the 
 wretched comrades whom he had led into his bad 
 
50 ME, D ONNELL T'S EE VIE WEES. 
 
 enterprise. He would have learii!:d further that 
 Bacon never corrupted justice as Chancellor, every 
 one of his decisions being unrevoked b}^ the very 
 Parliament that ruined him, and standino; intact to 
 this day; that he never, not in a single instance, 
 took bribes, but only the fees and free gifts apper- 
 taining to his office, vrhich he was expected to take ; 
 which stood as make-weight to its petty salary ; and 
 which Sir Thomas More and every Chancellor took, 
 unimpeached, before him; that he never, as Mr. 
 Barrett dechares, — parroting the brilliant knave, 
 Macaulay, — " favored torture," but in the very case 
 of Peacham referred to, opposed it, being simply 
 present, under protest, as a subordinate member of 
 the council that examined the poor miscreant ; and 
 that he never, either b}^ character or action, merited 
 the vile insolence thrown upon him by this theat- 
 rical popinja}" when he calls him the '•meanest of 
 mankind/' Mr. Barrett's essay, in fine, does not 
 sustain Mr. Morgan's notion that actors, as such, are 
 competent to ntter judgment on the authorship of 
 the plays. Its miserable farrago of toadying plati- 
 tudes, sophomoric invective, misstatement, suppres- 
 sion in consequence and ignorance, and can never win 
 a deeper tribute than a sardonic smile from the 
 ordinary well-read reader; — a reader who will close 
 his perusal with a curling lip, and perchance remem- 
 ber the superb and savage gibe Junius flung at the 
 actor Garrick, '' Keep to your pantomimes, you 
 vagabond I " 
 
 ri. 
 Mr. Morgan labors to prove that the dramas 
 could not have been written by Bacon, because of 
 their manifest adaptability in action to the stage ; 
 
MR. DONNELLY'S REVIEWERS, 51 
 
 because, in his own words, '' they are too evidently 
 the work of a practical inventor of plays." I remem- 
 ber reading an article ten years ago by Julius Ben- 
 edix, a distinguished German authority, the author 
 of over thirty dramas, so successful that several of 
 them have been translated into other languages, and 
 himself the practical manager of several leading 
 German theaters; and he demonstrated beyond 
 cavil that from the point of view of the playwright, 
 the dramas of Shakespeare violate the requirements 
 of the stage in every particular. The proof of their 
 relative unfitness for representation, and of their not, 
 therefore, having originated in the brain of a dra- 
 matic manager, is found in the fact that some of them 
 are never acted, and all the others, without excep- 
 tion, exist only for the theatre in a stage edition, 
 abridged, altered and excised, often in the most 
 radical manner. So much for Mr. Morgan's idea 
 that their structure shows that they must have been 
 written by an actor. Besides, the argument proves 
 too much: — nothing less than that all successful 
 dramas must have had actors for their authors, 
 w^hich is notoriously untrue. Is there anything 
 finer than the elder Dumas' Lady of Belle Isle'l 
 Are not Victor Hugo's plays, Ilernani, Riiy Bias 
 and the others, almost incomparable for stage effect, 
 as for ideal picturesqueness and beauty ? What 
 play better keeps the stage for its acting merits, 
 than Bulwer's Richelieu^ So with a hundred in- 
 stances. But the authors were not actors. The 
 idea is simple folly. 
 
 Such is the kind of article relied on to damage or 
 destroy Mr. Donnelly's book, and srnt out to many 
 
5-2 MR. DONNELLY'S REVIEWERS. 
 
 thousands of readers. Such is one of ^'the best 
 judges/- Do ^>ye coraphiin without reason of such 
 reviewing or reviewers' 
 
 Mr. Morgan ends by asserting that Mr. Donnelly 
 has killed the Baconian theoiy and buried it "- deeper 
 than ever plummet sounded." Has he, indeed? 
 That is just exactly what we are going to see ! 
 Meanwhile Mr. Morgan personally abjures the 
 Baconians, of whose Spartan band he was, he says, a 
 member. Stand fast, brood of Leonidas! You can 
 spare him I Ten j^ears ago he published a book, The 
 SlKCkesjyeare 2fyth. I will not claim that it was 
 faultless, but it was a strong, and in the main admir- 
 able, brief in the case against Shakespeare ; and it 
 stands to-day unanswered and unanswerable. Be- 
 fore he takes his leave of the Baconians, I recom- 
 mend him to confute his own volume. To do that 
 would justif\^ his apostacy, but I tell him plainly 
 that the task is bevond his powers! 
 
 VII. 
 
 The next one of '* the best judges " who deserves 
 attention, is Mr. H. A. Clapp, who appeared by 
 special editorial announcement, in the Boston Daily 
 Ad'certiser of May 18, of which eminent paper he 
 is understood to be the dramatic critic. He is also 
 known as a fine lecturer on Shakespeare. 
 
 It is simply sorrowful to find him on the wool- 
 sack with Mr. Appleton Morgan, in such a trial. 
 The Advertiser itself is a comfort among journals, 
 and its dramatic notices especially have always 
 seemed to me unexcelled for judiciousness and 
 charm. Alas ! to find their graceful author alter- 
 nately hooting among '• the best judges" and hopping 
 
MB. DONNELLY'S REVIEWERS. 53 
 
 along upon bladders, like a giddy Bassaride, in a 
 vindictive chase after Mr. Donnelly ! 
 
 He has over two columns of unqualified condem- 
 nation, based upon the initial declaration that '' no 
 competent critic will have the patience " to go 
 through the Great Cryptogram ; so that the world, 
 he avers, will never know whether the author's solu- 
 tions are justified. Unless Mr. Clapp owns that he 
 is not a " competent critic," in which case he is only 
 an ordinary review^er, and no good except for defa- 
 mation, this is tantamount to saying that he has 
 never read the book he is going to criticise. His 
 course is sensible. To read a book, before deciding 
 on its value, interrupts the flowing freedom of one's 
 periods in condemning it. Mr. Clapp's article, apart 
 from its express avowal, shows that this has been 
 his method. It is an interesting confession to start 
 with. 
 
 Honest perusal thus given the go-by, for lack of 
 '' patience," his plan is to prance hoppety-skip over 
 a small part of the volume, flippantly picking out 
 here and there such phrases as may be used to show 
 that Mr. Donnelly is a multitudinous ignoramus, 
 knowing little or nothing of the rules of mathemat- 
 ics or logic, or matters relating to the text of the 
 plays, and generally incompetent. His aim is to 
 invalidate the book by a series of minute cavils on 
 side issues. Nothing like comprehensive or substan- 
 tial treatment is even attempted. A few {|uibbles 
 are all the base of objection. It is told of a gay 
 French editor that, one terribly sultry day, he 
 plumped down at his desk, seized liis editorial pen, 
 and shouted, '^ I am o'oini>' to i»'ive it to the sun 
 
5J^ MR. DONI^ELLT'S LEYIEWERS, 
 
 good ! " The Great Cryptogram^ too, has now to 
 catch it, and it appears that this sun is to be judged 
 by its spots. But, as tliese are mainly Mr. Clapp's 
 ink-spots, and not an essential part of the luminar^^ 
 I submit that they form no proper basis for its 
 denunciation. 
 
 Here are the assaults, seriatim : Mr. Donnelly 
 says that authors have a parental love for their 
 works, citing, as apropos, lines from the Shakespeare 
 Sonnets, such as those which call a writer's thoughts 
 ''the children of his brain," or declare them to have 
 a worth which will make them outlive the monu- 
 ments of princes, etc. " Clear blunderheadedness," 
 Mr. Clapp's retorts, '4ie mistakes the author's asser- 
 tion of the enduring worth of his sonnets for an 
 assertion of the worth of his plays." Not at all, 
 and Mr. Clapp here combines essential misrepresen- 
 tation with flippant insult. Mr. Donnelly, manifestly, 
 cites the sonnet lines to illustrate the general truth 
 that an authors thoughts are to him as precious 
 offspring ; just as he might have cited lines from 
 Spenser or Shelley, and with no less appositeness. 
 But at any rate it is fine in Mr. Clapp to assume, for 
 a basis, that an author does not necessarily love " the 
 children of his brain." He ought to have knoAvn 
 that 'Hhe contrary opinion of critics," and ''the 
 almost universally accepted belief," which he as 
 gratuitously as insolently reproaches Mr. Donnelly 
 for " never having heard of," are mighty poor evi- 
 dence that Shakespeare, whoever he was, did not 
 cherish his plays ; and also mighty good evidence 
 that the fool-killer is as sound asleep as Frederick 
 Barbarossa in his cavern. Meanwhile, how does any 
 
ME. DONNELLY'S REVIEWERS. 55 
 
 awkwardness in illustration, even if it existed, or 
 any possible ignorance of '' the opinion of critics," 
 or of ^'universally accepted (and highly asinine) 
 beliefs, affect the substantial value of the Great 
 Cryptogram? Really the non-sequitur here is so 
 gross as to suggest the no7i compos ! 
 
 The reviewer's labors continue with the assertion 
 that Mr. Donnelly beginning his toils on the cipher 
 by '' picking out words without the help of a con- 
 cordance," shows what sort of a mind he has. The 
 information in regard to this piece of oafishness, or 
 leaden stupidity, is derived from the book, and is 
 flat misrepresentation. Mr. Donnelly simply says 
 that when he began, fifteen 3^ears ago, to look over 
 the plays for surface indications of a cipher, he had 
 no concordance : — naturally enough, being then in a 
 lonely mansion, in Minnesota, on tlie banks of the 
 Mississippi. This petty perversion shows the spirit 
 in which his critic assails him. 
 
 Mr. Clapp next shows that Ford in the Merry Wives 
 buffets himself on the forehead, crying '' peere-out," 
 in allusion to the horns of hiscuckoldry, and derides 
 Mr. Donnelly mercilessly for having failed to catch - 
 the meaning of his exclamation, and also for consid- 
 ering it a '^ forced" expedient to get a word for the 
 second syllable of Shakespeare's name. Here is 
 another mountain made out of a mole hill! At 
 most the error pointed out is a mere misreading — a 
 solitary mistake too small formorethan good-natured 
 correction without comment. But in I'egard to the 
 phrase, '^ peere-out," Mr. Donnelly is plainly right, 
 for while it is well enough, it shows more ingenuity 
 than felicity, and is certainly sufficiently " forced" 
 
56 MR. DONNELLY'S REVIEWERS. 
 
 into the text to attract attention by its peculiarity. 
 Horns do not naturally " peer," Mr. Clapp, though 
 eyes do ! 
 
 Mr. Donnelly is next accused of '* ignorance" or 
 ''foolishness" for noticing, as a similar pecuharity, 
 the evident dragging in of a name in the Mei^ry 
 Wives, The host bombastically bawls to Dr. Caius 
 — '' Is he dead, my Ethiopian ? Is he dead, my Fran- 
 cisco? Ha, bully! What says my Esculapius?" 
 '' As there is no Francisco in the play," observes Mr. 
 Donnelly, 'Hhis is all rambling nonsense, and the 
 word seems dragged in for a purpose." '' And what 
 pray," retorts Mr. Clapp, '4s the quality of the 
 Host's rhodomontade ? Is not Ethiopian also dragged 
 in ? " Softly, good critic ! As the jolly host is spout- 
 ing buffoonery, he may, with artistic propriety, cail 
 Dr. Caius, " my Ethiopian ;" he may also, with even 
 better cause, call him '^ nw Esculapms ;" and he 
 might further call him ^' my iguanodon," ot "my 
 trilobite ; " or " my right-angled triangle," or " my 
 cassowary," or " my jub-jub bird ; " but the odd rea- 
 son there is in nonsense forbids him to call him '' my 
 Francisco " since it is not in the cateo-orv of mere 
 nonsense w^ords, as one Avould think Mr. Clapp 
 might see. To a cipher hunter the introduction of 
 a proper name here is certainly suspicious, being 
 incongruous and peculiar, and forming, you might 
 say, a protuberance on the level surface of the text. 
 
 Mr. Donnelly, having had the temerity to think it 
 singular that Falstaflf's theiving crew should be men- 
 tioned as " St. Nicholas' clerks," unless the word 
 *' Nicholas " was wanted for the cipher, (St. Anthony 
 being the true scampsman's patron), is next 
 
MR. DONNELLY'S BEVIEWERS, 57 
 
 contemptuously told that, " Reference to any well an- 
 notated edition would have taught him that the 
 phrases ' St. N'icholas' clerks ^ and ' St. Nicholas' 
 knights' were common slang of the day for thieves 
 and robbers." Reference to any well annotated 
 edition would have taught him nothing of the kind; 
 see, for example, Howard Staunton, a prince of 
 Shakespeare editors, whose note on the subject is to 
 tlie effect that makino^ St. Nicholas the tutelarv 
 guardian of cut-purses, as two old authors he cites 
 have improperly done, has never been satisfactorily 
 explained. 
 
 The next charge made against the book is too 
 trivial and merely nagging to deserve notice. Mr. 
 Donnelly's point is to show the forced use of lan- 
 guage by which the name of ^^ Bacon" or ^'Bacon's 
 son" is got into the text. The sentence is Falstaff's 
 chaff of the men he is robbing. " On, Bacons, on ! 
 What, ye knaves ? " etc. To call the travelers " Ba- 
 cons" because Avell-fed, certainly seems a forced use 
 of language. But Mr. Donnelly is picked out as no 
 sort of a critic, but rather an inexpressible simple- 
 ton, for remarking that it does not seem a term of 
 contumely, such as Falstaff would naturally use, and 
 hence is brought in somewhat arbitrarilv for the 
 sake of getting the word. After all, it is only a mat- 
 ter of opinion, and the point to be settled is whether 
 '^Bacons," used as an epithet, does not denote a con- 
 straint of language, which it surely seems to do. If 
 it does not, Mr. Donnelly is not, therefore, proved 
 a fool, as his critic ought to know. 
 
 " These," says Mr. Clapp, summing up at this point, 
 "a-re ^specimen bricks' from the edifice of ]\[r. 
 
58 MR, DONNELLY'S REVIEWERS, 
 
 Donnelly's argument.^' It is no dearest foe of the 
 charming critic of the Advertiser — it is himself, per- 
 haps, in this, his own worst enemy, who thus pre- 
 sents him in the character of the comic numbskull 
 of Aristophanes, who comes in upon tlie stage, amidst 
 the laughter of the ages, offering a brick from the 
 core as a specimen of the marble temple. One would 
 think so bright a man would never choose to follow 
 in the footsteps of such an illustrious predecessor as 
 the farcial old sholastikos. Surely a few of the 
 minor components of a book, much less its possible 
 mistakes, can not be justly held to represent the en- 
 tire structure. And wliat are these ^'specimen 
 bricks'^ from the Donnelly edifice ? Six little errors, 
 all but one doubtful, and three of them Mr. Clapp's 
 own! All else of varied and solid excellence abso- 
 lutel}^ ignored. 
 
 As if, at this stage of the indictment, he mis- 
 gave himself that his basis for condemnation was too 
 meager, he proceeds to strengthen it by another 
 instance of the author's '' ignorance and folly," 
 which he thinks establishes the mental kinship of 
 Mr. Donnelly to Lord Dundreary. In detailing 
 how he worked out the cipher, Mr. Donnelly relates, 
 with a good deal of naivete, how he discovered (thus 
 avoiding being led into a plausible error) that 
 because the tenth word of a column from the top 
 is word ten, you can not, therefore, obtain the tenth 
 word from the bottom of a column by simply sub- 
 tracting ten from the whole number. He speaks of 
 this as " a curious fact," which it certainly is in the 
 sense of the word as he uses it, that is, odd, though, 
 of course, like everybody else, he knows the very 
 
MR. DONNELLY' S REYIEWEUS. 59 
 
 simple and obvious rationale of it. But Mr. Clapp, 
 intent upon letting loose the theater guffaw upon 
 him, commences operations by quoting his word 
 " curious " in capitals, — a paltry little trick, which 
 has the effect of giving to a lightly used term a 
 solemnity of import which makes its author seem 
 ridiculous. He then proceeds to establish Mr. Don- 
 nelly's likeness as a reasoner to the stage Dundreary, 
 who counts five fingers on his right hand, counts 
 backward the other five from the tenth finger, adds 
 the numeral six thus obtained to the five, and asks, 
 " Where's the other finger?" This stroke of comic 
 sophistry, offered as ironical argument, may make 
 the groundlings laugh, but must make the judicious 
 grieve. • Mr. Clapp, in truth, should have been 
 ashamed to offer it, for he knows perfectly well that 
 it establishes, in seriousness, no parallel between the 
 bright author of Atlantis and the poor softie of the 
 upper ten ; and that the one taking care against con- 
 founding counting with subtraction is.no twin to the 
 other, puzzling himself with a figment of his own 
 inanity. 
 
 The smart verbiage against the validity of the 
 cipher which follows is trifling in quantity and 
 quality, and may be passed over until Mr. Clapp 
 has swept aside Messrs. Colbert and Bidder, who 
 are decidedly lions in his way. His whole article, 
 of over two columns, is composed entirely of the 
 petty cavils I have cited, and three or four others no 
 more important. For example, that Mr. Donnelly 
 can not have found a Baconian cipher, because Bacon 
 says that a cipher, meaning a cipher in general, 
 "should be easy and not laborious to write,'' whereas 
 
60 MR. DOMNELL Y ' .5' RE VIE WEES. 
 
 the insertion of this .vrn 1 have cost the assiduous 
 labor of mo ths. As : a storj containing 
 
 tlie marvel :^ >: : L i:'e and times, of 
 
 which the iiis: t v areas yet given 
 
 were not wor:l assiduous labor :hs. As, 
 
 if the "easy'' cipiiers mentioned in ti.- _D, A-['Tii'.^n- 
 tis^ precluded difficult cipiiers. when a '^^a - --crecy 
 became necessary! As ii Eacon ^a/^ a:; :a-a]:ion 
 anoilier class of ciphers s: ^ / : a a :.- L- says. 
 tliey " - :"""'^T "^. ^ '^ '' \ . Forexaaa '- ^;a in. 
 
 :ia:a i-:^^ : . . :^_ .. ; . . .- a^r Air. I'^:: :o 
 
 kinds, this being one c»t jlr. Appleron 3iorga\n's 
 . -■:'':nes. As ''1 rh^ terribly C'\\ ■ ' ■- ^ 
 
 _a.:a :- ^ rex: pievcnitd it from Lr_^_ ___... .r :_3 
 rec^ a.._T oi Dante's ciphers, some of which the 
 elder Ec'-: a^ x^ ^ ! As if Montaigne, in 
 
 "^^- ---;' - ^ -^^.ai v:a:a r: I think, a 
 
 ; ci -'^' - a.^ nlnvs 
 
 which ^:.: ais verv liia: i^jEc'. " I have xaown 
 
 authors wh-. \ "^ a. have aaa Varh 
 
 title and lortuuf. v-l ^^.-'j.vii L...c.r appreaa .. aa:'^"^ 
 purposely corrnjyt th^ir ^fyJ-^^ and affect ign'_^:._,T .^ 
 so vulgar a quahty." 
 
 But enough. It can be admart^d that Mr. C^ 
 has ma':''? ^^? ais article a poignaat omeE^^^ ':'a. ..a:: 
 eg^'s . _ ai a mare's nest. His ]u_:„__ ^ -^ is a 
 jxiipable aosurdiry c^: :: h::le absurdities. 
 
 E::-^ main wonder ala a- tliat any considerable 
 
 na.moer of pe":'r'le sla_;^-- _:ave swa'"'''Wprl ir. for it 
 appears that i: i:.a- ::cr:i gr-aEy a^/ _ A that 
 
 its ''specimen bricks" were considered to have 
 quite demolished the ^E/"-'//^ E ' . In Boston. 
 
MR. DONNELLY'S REVIEWERS. 61 
 
 and the many satellite towns which surround that 
 urban planet, it seems to have divided admiration 
 with a two-and-a-half column article, small type, in 
 the Daily Globe of May 27, full of " specimen 
 bricks " to throw at Mr. Donnelly, and much heralded 
 as the work of Mr. George H. Richardson. I read 
 this production attentively, and forbear descant on 
 its elaborate impotence. One of its admirers called 
 it " the death-knell of Donnelly's volume," which 
 made me think of the sonorous bell invented by a 
 man in Pennsylvania, composed of a sheep's trotter 
 hung in an old felt hat. The solemn tolling of such 
 an instrument would be akin to '^ the death-knell of 
 Donnelly's volume" sounded by this ringing review. 
 
 VIII. 
 
 Another of " the best judges" is the reviewer of 
 the New York Herald (May 6,) who occupies five 
 mortal columns, small type, in deploying the variety 
 and extent of his misinformation on Bacon- 
 Shakespeare matters in general. The article is appar- 
 ently not written by one of the Herald staff, 
 a racy tribe, but by some one of the class known 
 ironicallv as " literarv fellers." Nothinn^ more mis- 
 leading has probably been published, and one mar- 
 vels that the magnificent circulation of the Herald 
 should have been given to the dissemination of such 
 egregious flubdub. The radical ignorance wliicli 
 pervades the whole composition like a vicious luunor, 
 and breaks out everywhere in a copious rash of 
 sophisms, falsehoods and perversions, is illustrated 
 by a single rejoinder, which aims to combine serious 
 fact with withering witticism. Mr. Donnelly had 
 mentioned the circumstance that the name of 
 
62 MR. D OS NELL Y'S BE VLE WEBS, 
 
 Shakespeare ia the sixteenth century was considered 
 the quintessence of vulgarity — ^Yhat was called 
 " vile" — just as Snooks, Eamsbottom or Hogsflesh 
 would be with us, and so much so that it is on record 
 that a man of that name got it changed to 
 *' Saunders," as one more patrician. To which the 
 Herald reviewer retorts : '' What are we to think of 
 the name of Bacon, which, if it does not mean Hogs- 
 flesh, has no meaning whatever ? " This is con- 
 sidered a calm and crushing repartee, and its com- 
 placent utterer evidently thinks that the name of 
 Bacon is sjmonymous with smoked pork I The name 
 of Bacon derives from the beech-tree, ''beechen," 
 as everybod}^ interested in such matters has long 
 learned. (Consult the old antiquary, A'erstagan.) But 
 what are we to think, at the outset, of the qualifi- 
 cation of one of ''the best judges," who knows so 
 little of the man he is writing about that he does 
 not even know anything of his illustrious name, and 
 fancies it idential with '• Hogsflesh " ? 
 
 All the statements he presents are, without 
 exception, of the same accurate character. One of 
 his two main reasons, for believing that Bacon could 
 not have written the plays, is, that to write them 
 would alone have taken a lifetime; and further that 
 it was not physically possible for any one man to have 
 done the work attributed to these two. The facts 
 to the contrary are. — first, that for at least thirt\^ 
 years Bacon had no all-engrossing employment : 
 secondly, that so far from occupying the allotted 
 term of three-score and ten, the Shakespeare plays 
 were produced between about 1590 and 1612, thus 
 being scattered over a period of only twenty-two 
 
MR, DONNELLY'S REVIEWERS. 63 
 
 years; and thirdl}^, that many an author has per- 
 formed, single-handed, the work of both Bacon and 
 Shakespeare ; which, by a count hberal to extrava- 
 gance, (each play and each treatise being considered 
 •a book), would be no more than fifty volumes, and 
 very slender ones at that. The count of the plays of 
 ^schjdus is from 90 to 100 ; of Sophocles, certainly 
 115; of Calderon, 185 ; of Lope de Vega, 2,000 ; of 
 the works of Voltaire, 74 volumes ; of Balzac, about 
 97 ; of George Sand, 80 ; and so on. " So much for 
 Buckingham;" but the rest of CoUey Gibber's line 
 can not be rung in here, for the Herald reveiwer 
 must have already lost his head when he entered 
 upon such a statement. 
 
 His second main reason, for believing that Bacon 
 could not have written the plays, is found in the 
 alleged absolute difference in the intellect of the 
 two men, as shown by their respective works. I 
 suppose this is the reason why the unfortunate 
 Shakespereans are kept, as the sailors say, as busy 
 as the devil in a gale of wind, in trying to refute 
 the myriad of identities between the two in idea, 
 thought, expression, vocabularj^, point of view, man- 
 ner of surveying a subject, use of words peculiar to 
 them, particular phrases, and even errors, which the 
 wicked Baconians are forever showering upon them ; 
 and which are apparently, (in many cases, indispu- 
 tably), emanations from a unique mental source. 
 They are always laboring to suppress or explain 
 away these striking parallelisms, which would seem 
 to a plain mind to indicate tliat there is no essential 
 difference in the intellect of the two men, but that 
 they are one and the same ; or as the very knowing 
 
G4 MR. DONNELLY'S REVLEWEES. 
 
 Montaigne significantly hints, in that identical period, 
 " a case of one man who presented himself for 
 another." But no, they are '' accidental resem- 
 blances ; " they are " simple plagiarisms ; " they are 
 '^ such parallels as you can find between writers in an}^ 
 age;" they are examples, as one bright bird has 
 recently said, of how 3"ou can always find Bacon in 
 Shakespeare, but never Shakespeare in Bacon ! These 
 explanations are terribly barred by the fact that the 
 parallelisms are not occasional, but exist by hun- 
 dreds. Mr. Donnelly's book contains a formidable 
 array of them, nearly all striking, intimate, palpable 
 in identit3\ Mrs. Pott shows in her edition of the 
 Promus^ a multitude of Shakespeare thoughts, 
 hints, expressions, neologisms, previously existing in 
 Lord Bacon's private note-book. But better than 
 even these, powerful as the}^ are, are the series of 
 analogies, too subtle and interior, and too massive 
 and comprehensive to be accounted for as acciden- 
 tal, or plagiarized, or imitated. Many of them are 
 pointed out by some of the great German scholars, 
 such as Gervinus, or Dr. Kuno Fischer of Heidel- 
 berg. For example, that the natural history of the 
 human passions, which Bacon severely criticises 
 Aristotle for not supplying, broadl}^ intimates to be 
 extant and an integral and necessary part of his 
 own philosophy, and circumstantiallv describes, has 
 been exactly produced in the plaj^s of Shakespeare. 
 For another example, the lack of intimate intellect- 
 ual S3nnpathv with the Greek mind, and the con- 
 spicuous affinity with the Roman, in both authors. 
 Again, the theor};, peculiar to both, and in both ex- 
 actly the same, that character is the result of natural 
 
MR. DONNELLY'S REVIEWERS. G5 
 
 temperament and historical position, and des- 
 tiny the result of character. Further, such a point 
 as the perception of the central secret of Caesar's 
 mental constitution, namely, his blindness through 
 self-love to danger, contempt for which threw him 
 at length under the knives of the conspirators; a 
 perception perfectly unique and almost miraculous 
 in its penetrant subtlety, considering the coraplexit}^ 
 of the make-up of the great Roman, and Avhich 
 Bacon and Shakespeare have in common. And for 
 another instance, equally striking and original, take 
 Bacon's mention of Mark Antony, as one of onl}^ 
 two signally great pubKc men who ever yielded to 
 the '' mad excess of love ; " together with his saying, 
 in the same essav, that love is '•sometimes like a 
 siren, sometimes like a fury ;'* — the play of Antony 
 and Oleopatra being written to make both of these 
 propositions dramatically evident. In a word, so 
 far from there being an apparently absolute differ- 
 ence in the two intellects, the evidences of their 
 similarity are so conspicuous and numerous, that were 
 simple ignorance substituted for indurated prepos- 
 session, everyone would readily conclude from them 
 that Bacon and Shakespeare were only different 
 names for the same man. 
 
 Some glittering generalities the Herald reviewer 
 sprays the public with in this connection, which make 
 one suspect that after all, though he makes the antith- 
 esis one of substantial intellect, he means that Bacoii 
 and Shakespeare ai*e radically different in style or 
 manner. Not as much as he fancies, as witness the 
 Rev. Mr. Bengough's admirable versifications of soiiu^ 
 
66 MR. D ONNELL Y'S RE ] ^lE WERS. 
 
 of Bacon^s paragraphs, given in last year's August 
 number of the Bacon Journal. Here is a sample : 
 
 "Who taught the raven in a drought to throw pebbles 
 into a hoUow tree where she spied water, that the water might 
 rise so that she might come to it? Who taught the bee to sail 
 through such a vast sea of air, and to find the way from a field 
 in flower, a great way off, to her hive? Who taught the ant to 
 bite every grain of corn she buries in her hill, lest it should 
 take root and grow?" — Advancement of Learning. 
 
 Here is Mr. Bengough's rendering : 
 
 ' 'Who taught the thirsty raven in a drought, 
 Espying water in a hollow tree, 
 To throw in pebbles till it reached her beak? 
 Who taught the bee to sail through seas of air, 
 And find her far-off hive from fields in flower? 
 Who taught the ant to bite each grain of corn 
 She buries in her hill, lest it take root?" 
 No one, not destitute of sense, can fail to see that 
 only Mr. Bengough's versification was necessary to 
 bring out the Shakesperean quality of Bacon's lines. 
 ]Srevertheless, I will never admit the fairness and 
 justice, not to say common sense, of exacting an ex- 
 ternal resemblance between the prose of Bacon and 
 the verse of Shakespeare, until the accomplished 
 Herald reviewer will show the likeness between even 
 a man's own work in the two forms : — between Cole- 
 ridge in his prose Aids to Eejlection and Coleridge 
 in his poem Kiibla Khan '^ or Milton in his enchant- 
 ing Comus. and Milton in his blaring Tetracliordon, 
 Who that ever read the wonderful letters of Lord 
 B3^ron, with their vast gayety and reality, their good 
 salt savor of the world and life, their infinite and 
 brilliant diversit\% would possibly imagine, if Childe 
 Harold had been published anonymously, that all 
 that somber and oceanic grandeur had swept from 
 
MR. DONNELLY'S BEVIEWERS. 67 
 
 the same mind ? To exact that Bacon's prose shall 
 show an exterior likeness to the Shakespeare poetry 
 is supremely ridiculous, though the two will stand 
 the comparison far better than most, as many a good 
 scholar knows. But words are vain to express the 
 utter shallowness and stupidity of insisting on the 
 parallel. The Shakespereolaters, however, are doing 
 it constantly. Why don't they pull out the roots of 
 their hair with tweezers if they want to appear intel- 
 lectual, and not resort to such futile devices as these? 
 
 The Herald reviewer's pudding is full of plums 
 in the part where he contrasts Bacon with Shakes- 
 peare. One is that Bacon " pays no homage to the 
 imagination," a Delphic line which means, I sup- 
 pose, that in him the faculty is subordinate or non- 
 existent. On the contrary. Bacon's imagination is 
 tremendous. The Novum Orgamtm is the proof of 
 it — a creation like a world. ''He has thought," 
 says Taine, '' in the manner of artists and poets, and 
 he speaks after the manner of prophets and seers." 
 In his mind the imagination is the all ; the other 
 faculties are the spicula, the accessories of it, and 
 surcharged with its mighty magnetic life. 
 
 Another plum is that Shakespeare's genius is 
 " essentially dramatic, with all the faults and limita- 
 tions of the stage." How perfectly, how eloquently, 
 Charles Lamb has smashed this preposterous affirma- 
 tion, in the essay where he shows how impossible of 
 representation, how infinitely be^^ond all stage capac- 
 ity and conditions, how absolutely addressed to the 
 rapt imagination of the private reader, are the great 
 plays ! No wonder that Herr Benedix can dem- 
 onstrate that they violate or transcend all stage 
 
68 MB. DOJSfNELLl'S REVIEWERS. 
 
 requirements ; no wonder that the stage managers 
 never let the cm^tain rise on some of them, and cut, 
 slash, and more or less transmogrify the others. For 
 they are not " essentially dramatic," the}^ are too 
 vastly ideal ; too subtle and colossal for the theater ; 
 and, however much the author may be a dramatist, 
 he is infinitely more a dramatist to the mind. It is 
 not as a skilled plaj^wright, but as a mighty poet, 
 that he has his hold upon us. 
 
 Among the other plums is the reviewer's assertion 
 that ^^ there is nothing in Bacon that might not have 
 been written by dozens of philosophers since 
 Aristotle." One would like to see those philos- 
 ophers : Would the reviewer kindly send us up a dozen 
 on the half shell? To think of the dazzling, stupendous 
 panegyric piled to the one only memory of Bacon by 
 the wise and great of every succeeding age and every 
 land, and then to think of such an estimate and 
 such reviewing! But it is quite equaled by the 
 assertion following, that "there are hundreds of 
 passages m Shakespeare that no man or demigod be- 
 fore him could have conceived." This is pure rliodo- 
 montade. Shakespeare is simply one of a limited 
 number of supreme poets, just as great as he, among 
 whom are Homier, ^schylus, Lucretius, Juvenal, 
 the unknown author of Job, Isaiah, Ezekiel and 
 Dante ; and there are no passages of his superior in 
 poetic power and beauty to theirs. It is conceded 
 bj^ all high criticism. 
 
 The reviewer has one saving grace : he does not 
 expressly deny the existence of the cipher story in 
 the plays, as some of his impudent confreres have 
 done, though he does not admit it^ and aims to flout 
 
MR. nONNKLLT'S MEVTEWERS. 69 
 
 and belittle it, sneering at it as *' wretched flimsy 
 ta^ttle." So far as deciphered, it is, as before said, 
 a series of recitals, which begin, so to speak, in the 
 middle of events, and tell of Shakespeare's lawless 
 and dissolute youth ; of his raid upon Sir Thomas 
 Lucy's estate; of the subsequent battle between his 
 party and the gamekeepers, in which he is wounded ; 
 of his flight to London and employment at the 
 theater ; of his making a great hit, in due time, by 
 playing Faistaff, which Bacon conceived on the sug- 
 gestion of his personal appearance; of his enforced 
 marriage to Ann Hathaway, who was with child by 
 him ; of his gross life and maladies; of Cecil seeing 
 sedition in the play of Richard 11,^ and writing to 
 the Queen, denouncing both Marlowe and Shakes- 
 eare as merely covers for Bacon ; of the prosecu- 
 tion of Dr. Ileyward as an accomplice and the per- 
 sonal assault upon him by the Queen with her 
 crutch ; of the occupation of the theater by troops, 
 the flight of the actors, the danger and despair of 
 Bacon, the orders for the arrest and torture of 
 Shakespeare, his escape to France, etc. Now why 
 this extremely novel, interesting and picturesque 
 narrative should be described as '' wretched, flims}^ 
 tattle," no one can say, but I will engage that if it 
 told in favor of Shakespeare, instead of against him, 
 we should never hear a word to its discredit. And 
 as the reviewer tacitly accepts, in Mr. Donnellv's 
 own words, what the remainder is to contain — a 
 recital of "the inner life of kings and queens, the 
 highest, perhaps the basest of their kind ;" of the 
 first colonization of the American continent, in 
 which Bacon and Raleigh were prominent; of ^'the 
 
70 MR. DONXELL Y 'S BE VIE WEBS, 
 
 Spanish Armada;'' of the war of the Huguenots 
 under Henry of Xavarre against the League, in 
 which several of the Ehzabethan men took part ; of 
 Bacon's downfall under King James, and the rest; 
 it is still more difficult to see how such a tale can be 
 included under epithets of dishonor like *'* wretched 
 flimsy tattle.'' 
 
 The character given Cecil, Bacon's deadly and 
 malicious enemy, is discredited by the reviewer as 
 new to history. It is. he says, *'as fanciful as lago.'' 
 It is nothing of the Idnd. AVhen Cecil died. Bacon, 
 without naming him, drew the same character in 
 his essay 0?i Deformity^ and the London reading- 
 public, recognizing the portrait, laughed in scorn at 
 its felicity. The reviewer represents further, as 
 against the reality of the cipher, that, supposing 
 Bacon to have been convicted of sedition and treason, 
 the motive to destroy him '" in that liberal and whole- 
 some period,'' and the power to do so, were alike 
 wanting. Then how did Southwell and Campian 
 come to the rack, and Xorfolk and Essex to the 
 block, and a multitude of others of note suffer bloody 
 and violent deaths under Elizabeth ? ** That hberal 
 and wholesome period I '' God save us ! 
 
 The reviewer admits with a curiously meek and 
 helpless irrelevance all the sordid, vulgar, profane 
 details of Shakespeare's personal life and surround- 
 ings at Stratford, as indeed he must, for they have 
 been mainly accumulated by the greatest Shakes- 
 peare scholars, men like Halhwell-Phillips, How- 
 ard Staunton, and others ; and the Baconians have 
 had nothing to do with gathering them. They are 
 entirelv unrelieved, as those of his later life also 
 
MR. DONNELLY'S REVIEWERS. 71 
 
 are, by detail of a higher and purer moral quality; 
 and it is a nice reviewer that, liaving to admit them, 
 thinks he can make them compatible with Shakes- 
 peare's reputed genius and the vast exaltation of 
 the plays. The anomaly they constitute is solitary 
 in the history of literature, and has made every 
 thinker recoil. 
 
 A fumbling and nerveless effort is next made to 
 maintain that learning was as accessible to Shakes- 
 peare as to Chatterton and Burns, and that he had 
 acquired it. Everyone who knows anything of the 
 conditions of that time, knows that the difficulties of 
 such an acquisition were far greater then than now ; 
 but no man in anytime, especially Elizabeth's, could 
 get learning without leaving a trail. Shakespeare 
 has left none. From the filthy, savage, bookless 
 hole of a town where he had passed a rough, wild 
 youth, he comes to London, and before long produces 
 an extended poem in the most elegant English of his 
 time, without a trace of the uncouth Warwickshire 
 dialect, full of classic reminiscence and allusion, and 
 redolent of classic grace and charm. How could he 
 have done it ? It is impossible. He was not the 
 man. And what have Burns and Chatterton to do 
 with the case? We know just what they were 
 taught, and how, and where. They were not learned 
 at all ; they were only fairly educated, and their attai n- 
 ments were no more than commensurate with their 
 literary achievement. Burns was simply a fine lyric 
 poet, exquisite in his Ayrshire dialect, commonplace 
 in English ; his whole inerit, apart from his sturdy 
 manliness, lying in his command of a wild sk3''lark 
 music — a power of verbal lilt hardly comparable. 
 
72 ME. D OXNELL Y ' 5 RE T 'IE WEBS. 
 
 Chatterton was an unearthly boy, with a marvelous 
 faculty for catching the spirit and tone of antique 
 poems, which he imitated in forgeries, not quite 
 skillful enough to escape detection. What parallel is 
 there between them and the continental Shakes- 
 peare I What analogy between their known acquire- 
 ment, such as it is, and the unaccountable learnins: 
 of the plays, which is prodigious in every direction ; 
 which, as Miss Bacon nobly says, lies thickly strewn 
 on the surface of all the earlier plays, and in the 
 later has disolved and gone into the clear intelli- 
 gence i Take but a smgle province: law. Better 
 than Lord Campbell, Mr. Eushton of Liverpool, has, 
 if the lapse of years lets me remember rightly, 
 shown Shakespeare's involved mastery of all the 
 depths and breadths of English jurisprudence ; and 
 others, Uke Armitage Brown, that he even knew the 
 local law of French and Italian towns. A marvel of 
 it, too, is that it is always accurate. He is the only 
 signal instance of a literary man who has touched 
 law without blunders. Godwin was a powerful and 
 highly trained mind, but his novel, Caleb WilliamSj 
 is a legal impossibility, with its hero tried again for 
 a murder of which he had been once acquitted I 
 Thackeray, so worldly wise and knowing, makes 
 property fail of the heir, because the donor in dying 
 leaves only his clearly attested oral desire as to its 
 disposition: — a ruling at which all the wise old owls 
 of the Bench would hoot in chorus. So with all 
 English writers, however blight, who have dabbled 
 in law. Shakespeare alone is unimpeachable. 
 Where did be get this mighty erudition i Genius, 
 however great, could not give it to him. It comes 
 
ME. DONNELLY'S REVLEWER8. 73 
 
 alone by hard and special study. "Where and how 
 could he make that study without leaving a record ? 
 And where did he get the learning to enable him to 
 acquire the learning ? For in that time the law was 
 all in Norman- French, law Latin or barbarous Latin- 
 ized English. The law of the immediate past, as in 
 the great treatises, such as Glanville and Bracton, 
 was wholly in law Latin. The year books, or re- 
 ports of cases, from Edward I. to Llenry YIIL, a 
 period of over 200 years, and following them the 
 reports or commentaries of Coke, Plowden, Dyer, 
 reaching to the times of Elizabeth and James, were 
 in If or man -French. The elaborate and intimate 
 satire in Hamlet^ of the proceedings in the case of 
 Hales V. Petit^ involved a knowledge of the report in 
 Plowden, where it appears in that language. What- 
 ever else there was of law, outside of the French and 
 Latin, was in an EngHsh so crabbed with Latinized 
 terms that none but lawyers could understand it. 
 What trace has the man Shakespeare left, what 
 trace could he fail to leave, of his struggle to 
 acquire these tongues ? And 3^et we are told of his 
 similitude to Chatterton and Burns ! Go in peace. 
 Herald reviewer ! The man that knew that world 
 of law, that knew all those other worlds of learning, 
 was not a Chatterton, nor a Burns; nor was he by 
 any discoverable sign or token, the man of Stratford 
 either. 
 
 It is not ingenuous in the reviewer to sneeringly 
 term, at a later stage of his article, the details of 
 Shakespeare's early life in London, Mr. Donnelly's 
 '^ discoveries." They are not his discoveries at all, 
 save in circumstantiality; but substantially the vulgar 
 
?^ MB. DOyXELLTS EEVIEWERS. 
 
 facts collected by all the Shakesi)eare scholars 
 from Theobald, Malone and Stevens downward ; and 
 all that Mr. Donnelly makes of them is to put them 
 forward as palpabU^ incongruous with the claims 
 made for Shakespeare's august genius; though his 
 critic states, without the least warrant, that they are 
 brought up as so many slop pails to empt}^ over the 
 poor young scamp of Stratford. He thinks Shakes- 
 peare could not have been the baddish youth Mr. 
 Donnell}^, together with the students and the facts, 
 finds him. because when he arrived in London, a 
 famished runaway, he did not at once become a foot- 
 pad and take the crooked path to the gallows. He 
 holds him sinofularlv couraoreous and noble because 
 he married the woman he had wronged, and 
 held horses at the theater for a living, instead of 
 deserting her and makino: straiofht for Tvburn. 
 Although the marriage seems to have been compul- 
 sory, and the horse-holding as lucrative as necessary, 
 his course, as nobody denies, was commendable 
 enough, though not deserving of the preposterously 
 fervent eulogies of the reviewer, who even calls his 
 very ordinary good conduct, "' Shakesperean." Far 
 less commendatory, though stoutly defended as by a 
 true devil's attorney, is his outrageous usury : so 
 outrageous that it seems to have become a public 
 scandal at the time, and subjected him to the flings 
 of his acquaintance, and the biting mockery of the 
 Ratsei pamphleteer. To this it appears must also 
 be added skinflint avarice and miserly parsimony. 
 All of it the reviewer excuses and defends, even ex- 
 tols, as '* eminently Shakesperean,'- on the ground 
 that Shakespeare had to make money ; that it was 
 
MR. D ONNELL Y'S RE VIE WERS, 75 
 
 his own no matter how gotten, and that he had a 
 right to be as usurious as he pleased. To complete 
 the defense other literary men are spattered — Vol- 
 taire for his perfectly legitimate speculations ; Words- 
 worth for nobly requiring his guests to pay for other 
 food than he had means to give them ; Byron for 
 wanting money that he had grandly earned, etc. 
 Therefore are they put into the category of the 
 Stratford Shylock. In addition, the reviewer, of 
 course, must include in this rogues' gallery, Bacon, 
 for " taking bribes," a charge which is the stock in 
 trade of Shakesperean sciolists, and simply an ignor- 
 ant lie. It is fairly in consonance with these gallant 
 pleas that Shakespeare, when living at the great 
 New Place, and nuzzling in wealth, should be de- 
 fended for increasing his slender income by using 
 the fine mansion, which afterward lodged a princess, 
 for the brewing of malt and its sale to lowly custom- 
 ers. The defense is made to include his furnishing 
 a clergyman, his guest, with sack and claret and 
 making the town pay for them. Of course, Mr. 
 Donnelly only cites these actions, not to object to 
 them as such, but to put their petty sordor and mean- 
 ness in proper contrast with the histrous character 
 accorded to the great poet. The incongruity would 
 seem apparent. Imagine the magnificent Raleigh 
 personally brewing and selling malt in Durham 
 House. Fancy the majestic Verulam trying liis 
 hand at it in the kitchens of Gorhamburv. And 
 Shakespeare before the ages has a port no less ideal 
 and lofty than these. But no, says tlie ITerald re- 
 viewer, there is no incompatibility ; the only ques- 
 tion is: ''Was Shakespeare's beer well bi*ewcd; 
 
76 3IE. DONNELLY'S REVIEWEB8. 
 
 was the malt honest, and did he give good measure ?" 
 And he charges that Shakespeare, — engaged in the 
 picayune business of brewing, like Burns' Willie, '' a 
 peclc of malt" in his own fine house, and peddling it 
 out to his poor neighbors, — is actually " accused (by 
 Mr. Donnelly) of engaging in an honest employment 
 and selling the results of his industry for gain !" Then, 
 to clinch the assertion that picking up pennies, by 
 making and selling malt in the grand family house, 
 is an action on the part of the opulent Shakespeare 
 not at all mean in itself, nor out of keeping with the 
 grandeur of his genius, we are reminded that the 
 •^shining Prince Bismarck" derives an income from 
 the making of whisky. If this be true, it is no more 
 than might be expected from the ^^^'Z^loving old 
 wehr-wolf, who has turned sad Europe into a camp, 
 and would fain make his bloody ravin on Eepublics ; 
 but it forms no sort of excuse for the shabby dis- 
 grace of the man Shakespeare. 
 
 The attempt to impugn Mr. Donnelly for criticis- 
 ing Shakespeare's dishonest attempt to edge into the 
 aristocracy by fraudulently obtaining a coat of arms 
 from the Herald's College, is nothing but a bit of 
 awkward shuffling with words. Shakespeare is not 
 accused of seeking social elevation ; he is accused, 
 and, what is more, convicted, of trying, with the aid 
 of John Dethick, a rascally Garter King at Arms, to 
 gat armorial bearings by fraud and falsehood. The 
 evidence in the matter is fully given, with fatal 
 candor, by Halliwell-Phillips, the highest modern 
 Shakespeare authorit}^, and also in full detail by 
 Howard Staunton, an equallj^ unimpeachable scholar. 
 
 The five columns of calumniation which compose 
 the review end with something truly beautiful. The 
 
MR. BOyNELLY'S REVIEWERS. 77 
 
 writer is descanting on the mystery which surrounds 
 the personality of Shalvespeare. We know all about 
 the other great men of the time. Essex, Bacon, 
 Raleigh, Casaubon, Sidney, are, he says, perfect in- 
 dividualities to us. But when we look at Shakes- 
 peare, the hgure is dim. We see, what ? ''Only the 
 light!" This is certainly lovely. I remember that 
 at the time of Thackeray's death, some cliarming 
 verses, with the same idea, I think by Mr. Stoddard, 
 appeared*in one of the journals. The poet beholds 
 the laureled ones in their Valhalla : there is Homer, 
 there is Dante, there are they all, one by one, and 
 
 there 
 
 ^^ There — little seen but light — 
 The only Shakespeare is." 
 
 It is a graceful fancy, but as a means of account- 
 ing for the absence of information about a man it 
 is certainly novel. To the ordinary mind, the 
 ''light" about the personal Shakespeare is verv much 
 like the light seen about a bad lobster in a dai'k 
 cellar, and, to one conversant with the details of his 
 unsavory biography, there is a smell also. The talk 
 about his obscurity is utter fustian. In the first 
 place, such a man as he coiddnot be obscure. Living 
 in the midst of a crowded center like London, and 
 his reputed plays enjoying a great popularity, he 
 would become at once the object of intense curiosity, 
 and everything would be known about him that there 
 was to know. Any person of gumption must feel 
 that if we have not learned something different in 
 kind about him, it is because there is no more to 
 learn. But secondly, it is not true that Ave are Avith- 
 out his memoirs; we have an ample biographv of 
 
78 MR. DONNELLY'S REVIEWERS. 
 
 him, and, if it is perplexing, it is only because it is 
 misread, or its significance evaded. The labors of 
 the Shakespeare society, and of numerous scholars 
 and antiquaries, in several countries, have resulted in 
 a considerable mound of details ; and if much of this 
 is only traditional, it must be borne in mind that 
 genuine tradition, as, if I remember rightly. Sir 
 George Cornewall Lewis has superbly proved, 
 possesses all the force of history. The only trouble 
 with the Shakespeare biography is that it Is all one 
 way in kind ; and whenever any new particulars are 
 brought to light, they are invariably of the same 
 sort, and leave the biography still all one way. In 
 a word, the zealous labors of his friends, for two cen- 
 turies, have only shown that personally he was a 
 perfect vulgarian. There is no getting away from 
 the fact, and it is as idle to say that we have not 
 the fullest evidence of it, as it is that we are so 
 deficient in our knowledge of him as to see nothing 
 but the light of his reputed w^orks, when w^e look in 
 his direction. And to refer the absence of creditable 
 information respecting him to his personal modesty, 
 and a desire to keep in the background, is particu- 
 larly fine in the Herald reviewer, fresh from allow- 
 ing and justifying his attempt to render himself ex- 
 ceedingly conspicuous by getting a grant of nobility 
 from the armorial college ! It is also particularly 
 fine in the reviewer to assert that the tone in which 
 '' he was addressed by those who knew him w^as in- 
 variably that of awe." Bacon, indeed, as his sour 
 contemporary Osborne relates of him, " struck all 
 men with an awful reverence ; " and Ben Jonson 
 shows him to us at his birthday festival, " standing 
 
MR. DONNELLY'S REVLEWERS, 79 
 
 amidst the smile of the fires, the wine, the men, as 
 if he did a mystery." But how many are they, who 
 knew the man Skakespeare, to speak of him other 
 than with disrespect and contempt ? " Stageplayer ! 
 Mummer ! " — His kinsman, Eye Quyney, hisses at 
 him w^hen denied, I beheve, a loan. " An upstart 
 crow ... in his own conceit the only Shake-scene 
 in the country," snarls Greene. " One who feeds on 
 men," the bitter ghost of Ratsei brands him. Mani- 
 festly feigning in his verse, in his prose Ben Jonson 
 speaks of him only as an actor, (strange that this 
 manifest fact has not been noticed,) patronizes him, 
 with marked superciliousness, flouts at him, mocks 
 at his blundering tongue, says his talk had often to be 
 "snuffed out/' excuses his shortcomings with good- 
 natured half-contempt, vents on him praise in 
 pompous irony. Where is the " awe ? " Sometimes, 
 it is true, he is mentioned pleasantly. Henrj^ Chettle, 
 writing very diplomatically and guardedly, as one 
 who knew of him only or mainly by report, speaks of 
 him as an excellent actor, as known for "his 
 facetious grace in writing," and in good repute for 
 fair dealing. But who is he that ever mentioned 
 him in a tone of " awe ? " 
 
 Such is the reviewer, who has the advantage of 
 five columns in a widely spread journal, to injure 
 Mr. Donnelly's book by specious defamation. The 
 fact tliat the greater number of people are not, and 
 can not be expected to be conversant with the facts 
 of the matter, and can therefore be misled by the 
 falsest representations, is the only consideration 
 which renders the article of the slightest importance. 
 That a work of sterling e:5^ce]lence and value should 
 
80 MB. nONl^^BLLT'S MEYIEWERS. 
 
 be subject to the assault, and receive the injury of 
 such a Jack o' lantern brigade of lies, is sufficient 
 comment on the precious system of reviewing. 
 
 IX. 
 
 Another of '' the best judges " is the very nearly 
 three-column judge of the New York Tribune (May 
 13). In Anstey's extremely original and amusing 
 novel, The Fallen Idol^ a great effect is produced by 
 the author insisting on the perpetual diabolic expres- 
 sion of the carven image, which seems to suggest 
 something sentient, something at once living and 
 dead, and through all the maze of the story, is ever 
 present to the mind of the reader. An exactly 
 similar, supercihous, infernal, immobile smirk 
 seems immutably fixed on the physiognomy of this 
 amiable article. The author appears to aim at 
 conquering, not by his facts, which, like the darkey's, 
 are false, nor by his arguments, which are of the 
 infant school, but by an overbearing smug serenity 
 of literary deportment, which is truly insufferable. 
 He is calm, he is satisfied, he is softly simpering, he 
 is inexpressibly superior, and he fronts what he 
 thinks the poor little doggish group of Baconians, as 
 Memnon fronts the generations. Through all the 
 monotonous, imperturbable, condesending flow of 
 his bland babble runs still an under murmur, telling 
 of their abjectness, their worthlessness, their insan- 
 ity, their blindness; and yet they have seemed, 
 even to some of their antagonists, no mconsiderable 
 beings. We need not allude to the great number of 
 intellectual and accomplished men and women in 
 private life who accept this theory. We need not 
 even mention the formal advocates, such as Delia 
 
MR DONNELLY'S nEVlEWEBS. 81 
 
 Bacon, with her noble clouded ideality, struck 
 through with such lightnings of insight as seldom 
 make splendid any brain ; nor Judge Holmes, with 
 his solid learning and sterling sense, whose book a 
 Tribune reviewer had once to brassily falsify before 
 he could even try to answer; nor even Mrs. Pott, 
 whose marvelous power of patient research, equal in 
 itself to genius, is coupled with the most delicate 
 and unerring perception. But there is Leconte de 
 Lisle, incomparable but for Victor Hugo, among the 
 French poets, who has the dazzling honor of being 
 the successor to Yictor Hugo's chair in the French 
 Academy, and he has declared unequivocally against 
 the Shakespereans. There is Dr. Kuno Fischer, of 
 Heidelberg, illustrious now above the modern Ger- 
 man philosophers, as the expounder of Kant, who, 
 not long since, was announced to lecture in support 
 of the Baconian theory. There is James Nasmyth, 
 the broad-brained Scotchman, famous as an astrono- 
 mer, the inventor of the steam pile-driver, the steam 
 hammer, improved ordnance, telescopes, what not, 
 whose practical mind saw the same truth. There is 
 Lord Palmerston, the embodiment of the strong 
 British common sense, and he, too, was a Baconian. 
 There is Sir Patrick Colquhoun, one of tlie most 
 eminent of English publicists, who has added his 
 name to the Baconian roster by his lecture, a couple 
 of years since, before the Eoyal Society of Litera- 
 ture in London. There, as said already, is Charlotte 
 Cushman, the powerful actress, whom the stage and 
 the play-goer will long remember. Tliere is General 
 Butler (O rare Ben Butler !),Avhose full mental worth 
 will not be known until some publisher has the wit 
 
MB. DONNELLT'S REVIEWERS. 
 
 to urge him to collect into a volume his trenchant 
 literary essays, such as his cogent defense of the 
 slandered Byron. And there, to go no further, is 
 that justice of our Suprejne Court, who most in mind 
 resembles Marshall, and who long since gave in his 
 adhesion, on judicial grounds, to the cause of Bacon. 
 But no; the Tribune reviewer sees them onlv to 
 contemn; he survej^s them from aloft, with his 
 supercilious. Fallen Idol^ conceited smirk and stare ; 
 his style puts on for them the gold-rimmed monocle, 
 the contumelious single eye-glass ; for him they are 
 " the Baconians ; " and with unrelenting calm, he 
 breathes out, in his dead-level societ}^ voice, that 
 their minds are " abnormally constituted,'' that 
 they are all "• narrowness and triviality ; '' above all, 
 that they are ^'* color-blind." This withering epithet 
 he thinks so felicitous that he repeats it no less than 
 six times in his comparatively short article ; and lest 
 its natural force be abated, he explains that ''mental 
 color-blindness consists in inability to distinguish 
 between strongly opposed literary styles; between 
 radically different intellectual expressions." Thus, 
 we suppose, that when the ''abnormally consti- 
 tuted" Baconian notes that Bacon says that 
 Aristotle thinks J^oung men unfit to hear moral 
 philosophy, and that Shakespeare also says that 
 Aristotle thinks young men unfit to hear moral philos- 
 ophy, and that the error of using the word 
 " moral " instead of " political " is committed by 
 both Bacon and Shakespeare, it only shows that he 
 is "color-blind" — that is, unable "to distinguish 
 between radically different intellectual expressions ! " 
 And when the " narrow and trivial " Baconian rolls 
 
MR. DONNELLY \S REVIEWERS. 83 
 
 up page upon page of twin locutions, epigrams, 
 metaphors, axioms, proverbs and apothegms from 
 Bacon and Shakespeare, which are palpably diffei^ent 
 modes of the same mind, and just as much alike as 
 Bacon speaking prose and Bacon intoning verse, 
 each citation only further shows that he is '^color- 
 blind" — that is, unable to '^distinguish between 
 strongly opposed literary styles ! " But for a full 
 rejoinder, it is quite sufficient to think of the shining 
 list of Baconians I have named — Leconte de Lisle, 
 Palmerston, Kuno Fischer, Nasmy th, and the rest, — 
 and to imagine persons, so sane and strong in intel- 
 lect as they, stigmatized as '' abnormallj^ consti- 
 tuted," full of '' narrowness and triviality," and so 
 '^ mentally color-blind " that they can not tell one 
 thing from another, all by such a little Hindu 
 eidolon as this Tribune reviewer ! 
 
 Further on, with the air of one who has invented 
 and orders up the terrible Zalinski gun, which on 
 its first trial scooped with a single shot a cavern in 
 a cliff, he brings in for the demolition of the Bacon- 
 ians, the formidable Dr. Ingleby, whom he calls ^' a 
 ripe Shakesperean scholar." To wheel up and un- 
 limber such an oracle is truly unfortunate. Of all 
 the '' ripe Shakesperean scholars," Dr. Ingleby is the 
 one that has the least force, and is weak even to 
 silliness. His quality is shown by his most famous 
 hook, the Oenturie of Prayse^ in which he aims to 
 show how truly great Shakespeare was; and, indi- 
 rectly, how certainly he was the authoi* of the 
 plays, by citing all the references made to him, and 
 his reputed works, during tw^^nty -three yeai's of his 
 life, and for seventy-seven years after his death. 
 
Si 
 
 JfE. DOXXELL YS REVIEWERS. 
 
 These references he calls " praise/ * Here are speci- 
 mens of some that he inclndes under this title. His 
 book not being at hand. I quote from a volume in 
 which they are collated by one* who holds him in 
 veneration. 
 
 *• William Payne, in 1642, says * Shakes|>eare's 
 plays are better prmted than most Bibles.' " Praise ! 
 
 '• George Peele. in 1607, mentions * Venus and 
 Adonis.' " Praise ! 
 
 ' Til riias Eobinson, in 1630, describing the life 
 of a monk, says • After supper it is usual for him 
 to read a little of Venus and Adonis, or some such 
 scuiTilous book.' " Praise I 
 
 •A manuscript journal of the Duke of Wurtem- 
 berg says, Apidl 30, 1610, ^They play the Moor of 
 Venice at the Globe? ^ More praise ! 
 
 *• In a funeral song by Sir William Harbert, in 
 1594, Shakespeare is rebuked for going into foreign 
 countries for the subiects of his verse/' StUl more 
 praise ! 
 
 ^' In Mereurius Bmttanicus some one writes. 1644, 
 of ' Ben Jonson and his unek Shakespeare.' " 
 Praise unspeakable ! 
 
 There are a great many more entries of the same 
 kind. If such tributes do not show Shakespeare's 
 greatness, and prove that Lord Bacon did not write 
 the plays, nothing wiU. Of these references there 
 are 1S5. Fifty-seven of them were made during 
 Shakespeare's lifetime. Of course a number of 
 them are complimentarv. thouorb, innearlv everv in- 
 stance, as conventionally so as stock puflfs: and 
 scarcely any of them— tcven by hard sti'aining, not 
 more than a dozen — refer to the man, but only to 
 
MP,. DONNELLY'S REVLEWERS. 85 
 
 the books ascribed to him. What theh^ collector 
 thinks he proves by them, and why the merely com- 
 mon-place and derogatory ones are included under 
 the caption of '' Praise " is a mystery. The book, in 
 fact, has no earthly merit or significance. It simiDly 
 shows the calibre of Dr. Ingleby. 
 
 A couple of quotations from this redoubtable 
 man are considered sufficient to crush the Baconians, 
 including Mr. Donnelly. One is where he com- 
 ])ares them to Macadam's sieves, " which retain onl}^ 
 those ingredients unsuited to the end in view." 
 This liappy simile is perfectly characteristic of Dr. 
 Ingleby, and it is evident that the Tribune reviewer 
 admires and loves him for itsfehcity. But 'Hhe end 
 in view" is to macadamize the road, and does Dr. 
 Ingleby or the reviewer really think it a fault in the 
 sieve that it holds back the materials that are not fit 
 for the purpose ? It is a plain road — ^' as common 
 as the way between St. Alban's and London" — 
 (which it is !) and the Baconians are to make it pass- 
 able; is it, cause for censure that, like Macadam's 
 sieves, they screen out only the proper material for 
 the end in view? Less commendable surely are 
 those sieves, not like Macadam's, wherewith Shakes- 
 pereans accumulate irrelevant and worthless stuff for 
 their work, like the Centitrie ofPrayse of Dr. Ingleby. 
 
 The other passage which the reviewer quotes, 
 from this fine satirist, is one in which, to cite it briefly, 
 he finds Lord Bacon so deficient '' in human sympa- 
 thies," that he could not possibly portray a woman 
 like Miranda, Perdita, Cordelia, oranyof tlie others; 
 and hence to a 'nhorougldy sane intelligence," mod- 
 estly implied to 1)(^ the reviewer's own, is separated 
 
86 Mil DONNELLY'S EEVIEWEliS. 
 
 '^ by an impassable gulf" from the mind that wrote 
 the plays. The delicate ^'Imman sympathies" 
 shown by Shakespeare in regard to women, from 
 Ann Hathaway to the wife of the inn-keeper Dave- 
 nant, are attested by the whole tradition about him, 
 and of course prove his utter qualification for such 
 portrayals. Strange, however, we may say in pass- 
 ing, that the beautiful passages in the third scene of 
 the fourth act of the Winte^'^s Tale, where the names 
 of the flowers, their character, their seasonable order, 
 and the sequences in which they are mentioned, are 
 so much the same as in Bacon's essay O^i Gardens, 
 that the wondrous parallel deeply impressed even 
 Spedding, who was no Baconian;— strange that these 
 passages are put into the mouth, and make an 
 integral part of the personality of the exquisite 
 Perdita, whom Dr. Ingleby and his admirer think 
 Bacon could not have portrayed. 
 
 To re-enforce heavy artillery with small musketry 
 seems a useless expenditure of ammunition, but this 
 the reviewer does, by here bringing in Eichard Grant 
 "White to corroborate Dr. Ingleby as to Bacon's want 
 of "human sympathies;" — a man who, as I have 
 said, was a secret Baconian, and secret onlv because 
 a frank avowal of his disbelief in Shakespeare would 
 have made his editions waste paper. O these Shakes- 
 pereans! This is the way they can estimate the 
 man who declared his own nature when he wrote in 
 his essa}^ on Friendship, " For a crowd is not com- 
 pany, and men's faces are but like pictures in a 
 gallery, and talk only a tinkling cymbal, where there 
 is no love." Here is their latest fetch — to pronounce 
 ''deficient in human sympathies" that all-compas- 
 sionate Bacon whose paramount interest was in 
 
Mil. DONNELLY'S llEYLEWERS. 87 
 
 humanity; whose deepest intuitions and divinations, 
 as his Essays show, are w^hen he comes into relation 
 with his fellows ; whose whole life was avowedly and 
 admittedly devoted, in his own sublime words, to 
 'Hhe relief of the human estate;" he, the kniirht- 
 errant, solitary and colossal, of the human adven- 
 ture ; he, the very Cid Campeador of the vast scien- 
 tific battle, still raging, for the victory of the human 
 kind ! The world has long agreed Avith Vanvenar- 
 gues that '^ great thoughts come from the heart," and 
 to think that there should be men so dull as to 
 set up that the great thoughts of Bacon — none 
 greater — had no heart to come from ! The theme is 
 too much to handle here, but the student of his life 
 can not but at once remember some of its salient 
 points, and marvel that he should be taxed with the 
 lack of all that makes a man most a man. To think 
 of his fond and deep rapport with his great brother, 
 Anthony : — '^ my comfort," he sweetly calls him ; and 
 later in life, denotes him with rapt feeling as ''my 
 dear brother, who is now with God." To think of 
 his unfailing, his tender and anxious efforts to pro- 
 tect, to succor and save his poor young Catholic 
 friend, the son of the Bishop of Durham, Sir Tobie 
 Mathew ; how, wdien all faces lowered around the 
 young man in his prison, when even his father and 
 mother forsook him as ''a pervert," he would not 
 cast him out; how from the jail in Avliich his con- 
 science cast him^ he took him to his own house and 
 cherished him; how when in gathering danger, 
 thouo^h innocent, from suspicion of complicity with 
 the frightful plot of Catesby and Guy Fawkes, he 
 aided his escape abroad ; how he maintained a faithful 
 
MR. DOXXELLY'S REVIEWERS. 
 
 and consoling friendship with the poor outlaw 
 throuo'h all the vears of that sorrowful forei^'n 
 sojourn ; and how, at length, through loyal and un- 
 tiring endeavor, he procured for him permission to 
 return to his own England, and eat no more that 
 bread of exile Dante foimd so bitter. And at last, 
 when all was ending, to think how that high heart 
 turned from the many-passioned pageant of service 
 and struggle and glory and noble anguish, which had 
 been his life on earth, from all the airy vision of his 
 immeasurable coming fame and the hopes of 
 heaven, to humbly and with touching pathos leave 
 on record his wish to be buried in the old church at 
 St. Albans, for ** there" he says, ''was my mother 
 buried." and there he lies close by his mother s grave. 
 O poor, great man, so wanting in *' human sym- 
 pathies I " 
 
 The reviewer continues his supercilious but wise 
 and learned efforts to wreak mischief on ^Ir. Don- 
 nelly's book, by admitting that it produces '* plenty " 
 of evidence that the writer of the plays was a law- 
 yer, (a damaging admission, one would say, for the 
 case of "William Shakespeare): but thinks this coun- 
 tervailed by the '* curiously bad law in the 2Lercliant 
 of Yenicep '* with which," he declares '* 2>Ir. Apple- 
 ton Morgan has dealt so fully and ably that there 
 is nothing more to be said about it." The refer- 
 ence is to a long foot note which formed a sad blot 
 in Mr. Morran's fine book vears ao:o, and Mr. Mor- 
 gan it appears, continues to treat the point ''fully 
 and ablv " bv recentlv calling the verdict on Shv- 
 lock a '* most illegal and unrighteous judgment." 
 Unrighteous I This of the verdict on the vindictive. 
 
MR. DONNELLY'S REVIEWERS. 80 
 
 tive, carnivorous, murder-seeking, pound-of-flesh old 
 Jew ! As for its being '' illegal," both Mr. Morgan 
 and the reviewer would do well to inquire whether 
 it was so by the legal usage of an Italian court of 
 the sixteenth century. Their contention is that the 
 court scene in the play shows ignorance of English 
 law. I read long ago a full account of the trial of 
 Beatrice Cenci, and such legal proceedings as passed 
 in that Koman court would certainly seem to the 
 Tr^^'St^n^ reviewer a case of ''curiously bad law," if 
 judged by the standards of England, and would in 
 that country be impossible. In fact, the instance 
 really is another proof that the writer of the 
 plays was a master of jurisprudence ; that he knew, 
 as his critics do not, the legal usage of continental 
 courts, as well as of English ; and, most significant 
 of all, that he had visited Southern Europe with the 
 eye of a lawyer. For an illustration of the differ- 
 ences in procedure, read Mr. J. T. Doyle's admira- 
 ble paper in the Overland Montlily for July, 186(>, 
 giving his curious experience in a Spanish court in 
 Nicarauo^ua. For a statement of the le^'al theorv of 
 the play in which it is shown how law, which is jus- 
 tice, must be tempered with equity, which is mercy 
 — a demonstration which only a mind as great as 
 Bacon's in jurisprudence could have undertaken — 
 read Judge Holmes' masterly exposition in the latest 
 edition of his book on the Authorship of S/uflrs- 
 peare. 
 
 Having settled with cool nonchalance that the 
 writer of the plays ''knew ver}' little law," the 
 reviewer, with the same frigid ease, says that as for 
 his " medical knowledge, there is no reason why he 
 
90 MR. DONNELLY'S REVIEWERS. 
 
 could not have picked that up I*' Dr. Bucknill, one of 
 the most eminent of physicians, has written a book 
 on the OTeatness of that ^' medical kno^yledo:e," 
 which is rather adverse to this sage suggestion. But 
 doubtless the calm reviewer could see no reason why 
 Dr, Bucknill might not have '' picked up " his 
 medical knowledge ; and, hard, vulgar study not 
 being necessary to learn the art of medicine, why 
 should not Galen and Hippocrates, Rabelais and 
 Sydenham, Abernethy and Astlev Cooper, Cabanis 
 and Brown-Sequard, have '^ picked up" theirs also! 
 From tais serene conclusion it is but an easy step, 
 and with eas}^ composure is it taken, to censure 
 Mr. Donnelly for ascribing to Bacon the discovery 
 that heat is a mode of motion. The truth is, he 
 says, that " all Bacon knew on this subject he 
 derived from Plato." Fulgid Hades ! home of 
 heat, where cool reviewers go to when they die! 
 Plato ! If he had only said Aristotle, who really 
 did have some vague idea, first, perhaps, of an}^, of 
 the dynamic nature of heat, though he does not 
 express it either clearly or boldly ; but Plato ! Is it, 
 can it be possible, that this oracular reducer of Bacon 
 to a low denomination, does not know that the doc- 
 trine of heat, as a mode of motion, is derived from 
 the great crucial illustration of the working of the 
 Baconian method of discovery in the Xovum Orga- 
 mim? For this the new instrument is put in 
 motion ; at the end of the radiant processes of induc- 
 tion appears this magic flower of fiame ! See the 
 proud and silent tribute Tyndall renders to Bacon, 
 as the annunciator of the idea, when he prints the 
 glorious Baconian paragraphs at the very outset 'of 
 his own noble book on the subject ! 
 
MR. DONNELLY'S REVIEWERS. 01 
 
 The antarctic airiness of the highly valuable '' best 
 judge" of the Tribune is nowhere more destructive 
 than where he essays to freeze out the Donnelly 
 array of parallelisms by asserting their non-signifi- 
 cance, as evidences of identity of authorship. It is, 
 of course, manifest that parallelisms may be ac- 
 counted for as plagiarisms, but where they occur in 
 great quantity, as in Bacon and Shakespeare, and 
 where, as in the works of these two, they are no 
 more than equal to the remainder of the text in 
 which they are embedded, such an explanation of 
 tlieir presence is perfectly untenable. For example, 
 the elegant poems of Owen Meredith are really 
 Avonderful for plagiarism; he steals right and left 
 from the British poets, and from the French, Italian 
 and Slavic poets ; but we know that his parallehsms 
 are plagiarisms, not only because we find them 
 in the pages whence he appropriated them, but 
 because, though his own poetry has merit, the 
 splendid sentences and phrases he has taken shine 
 in it Uke jewels in an ash-pan, and are out of conso- 
 nance with their surroundings. It is not so with 
 the parallelisms of Bacon and Shakespeare, and here 
 Mr. Donnelly is plainly right. He might advance 
 it as an unanswerable reason why he is right, that 
 the identity of the passages is significant of a single 
 authorship, not alone because they are identical, but 
 because they comport in both cases with all of the 
 context; grow inevitably out of it instead of being 
 Inserted or stuck on ; are never above or below it ; 
 achieve originality by sheer appositeness ; and, in 
 short, have, in each composition, a perfect mutuality 
 of relation to the whole. It is, therefore, far more 
 
9^ ME. D OXXELL Y'S RE VIE WEBS. 
 
 icily superior than irrefragable, in the Trihuiie re- 
 viewer, to consider Mr. DonneIl3^'s book as '' a study 
 in morbid psycholog}^,'' and he himself as one to be 
 valued onh" *' for therapeutic purposes,'' because he 
 ranks as evidences the autorial identities he finds- 
 Nor has the reviewer even any right, in reason, to 
 push these supercilious and insolent phrases to the 
 leno^thofstio-matizing as ''incredible absurditv " Mr. 
 Donnelly-s suggestion, (it is hardly more, and only 
 voices what several of us have long thought and 
 some said), that Bacon is the real author behind 
 Marlowe, Burton and Montaigne. Scholars who are 
 not Baconians have for a great while been strangely 
 stirred by what seemed the vast anticipation of 
 Shakespeare in Marlowe's pages, shown always in 
 the large rhythms of the Marlovian plays ; and at 
 times in strikino; similarities of thouo^ht, cadence, 
 and imager3\ It is not time yet to pronounce abso- 
 lutely, but the learned mind of Bacon is seen pal- 
 pably, though in negligee, in the Anatomy of Melan- 
 choly^ a book originally issued anonymoush\ As 
 for Montaigne's Essays, the evidences of Bacon's 
 hand in them are so strong, so numerous, and so for- 
 tified by external circumstances, that I sometimes 
 wonder anyone can doubt their indication. AVhat 
 does the great Dutch Scholar, Isaac Gruter, the au- 
 thor of the Inscripiions, writing in a singular veiled 
 style from The Hague to Dr. Kawley, Bacon's chap- 
 lain, a little while, apparently, after Bacon's death, 
 concerning the publication of several of his works in 
 Holland — what does he refer to when he speaks of 
 ^' the French interpreter who patched together Lord 
 Bacon's things and tacked that motley "piece to him ;'' 
 
MB. DONNELLY'S REVIEWERS. 93 
 
 and in the next sentence hopes to get leave to pub- 
 lish ^' cqjart, that exotic work " of his lordship's ? 
 What is Lord Bacon's " exotic " work, which has " a 
 motley piece tacked to it " by '^ a French inter- 
 preter ? " Lest the reviewer should lose his beauti- 
 ful, immobile, contumelious smile by a change of 
 countenance, I recommend him not to be too positive 
 that that work is not the so-called Essays of Mon- 
 taigne, for the contrary might be proved on him. 
 
 There is nothing else worth remark in his criti- 
 cism, except that he continues for more than a col- 
 umn to the end, the supercilious assumption of cold 
 superiority which alone gives such speciousness to 
 his shallow and impudent platitudes, as enables them 
 to injure Mr. Donnelly's book with the public. The 
 value of this final column may be estimated by the 
 fact that, in a large part of it, his serene thought butts 
 about, like a summer beetle in a dim room, trying to 
 show that the typographical peculiarities of the folio 
 are not the conditions of a cipher, a point which 
 distinguished cryptologists have already disposed 
 of for him. Further on, with the lofty and com- 
 passionate air of one who would set the poor 
 idiot right, he utters the incredible and self-evident 
 absurdity that, unless Bacon set up the type with his 
 own hands and then read the proofs, he could not 
 have got a cipher narrative into the folio without 
 letting ''the whole chapel" into the secret. He 
 says this, but he knows very well that if his own 
 paper, the 5"rzJ?^;^^, accepted for2:)rint an article four 
 columns long, every tenth word in it might make it 
 a cipher narrative without any one in the oflfice, from 
 the editors to the press-boys, even suspecting its true 
 
9i MK DOXXELL Y 'S REVIEWERS. 
 
 character. In the case put bv Mr. Donnelly, let one 
 well-paid agent, like Heminge, l>e charged hv Bacon 
 to faithfully zee that the printers foDowed copy, and 
 without his knowing anythiug whaterer of the 
 secret writing they were putting in type, the thing 
 would be done. The reviewer s ensuing account of 
 the capriciousness and complexity of the cipher 
 method, and his utterly unwarrantable assertion that 
 the words of the text are selected to fit a precon- 
 ceived story, are plain falsifications, upon which Mr. 
 Donnelly's subsequent disclosure of the method by 
 which his basic numbers and their modifiers are 
 obtained, sets an ineffaceable brand. The same 
 disclosure brings to utter mockery the crowning 
 folly of the article, where he impressively parades, 
 with a sort of veneration, the conclusion reached 
 by Mr, Jennings in the Ptyst-Desjfatjjh; and declares, 
 with an indescribable air of finality, that the 
 cipher has been proved to be delusive nonsense 
 by that gentleman, with his precious discovery of 
 the concealed primary number 222, and its ^' buoy- 
 ant and beautiful little modifier, the figure one.'' 
 Considering that it has been thoroughly exploded 
 by the facts, it is really edifying to see the 
 reviewers cold and uppish confidence in the bursted 
 bladder, and his tranquil assumption that it has 
 already destroyed the Donnelly volume. Why he 
 should condescend to say any more after this, is not 
 known, but he does, and actually, for a brief space, gets 
 very mad at Mr. Donnelly, though still preserving a 
 horrible immobility in his fury, charging that he has 
 made of Bacon in the cipher story an archaic 
 prototype of Dr. Jekyll and Mr Hyde; "noble, 
 
MR. DONNELLY'S REVIEWERS. 95 
 
 magnanimous, lofty -minded '' in the argument, but in 
 the cipher, "' the basest, meanest, most slanderous, 
 malevolent and sneaking of backbiters and calumni- 
 ators." Phew! This touch brings to mind the 
 scene in the Fallen Idol^ where the abominable little 
 image, keeping its movelessness of visage, its satur- 
 nine dead smirk, and its general impassibility, actu- 
 ally yowls with rage at the attempt to bury it. The 
 spurt of epithets, which corresponds in the reviewer 
 to this dismal cry, is all because the cipher contains 
 incidentally, in the very spirit of history, some details 
 of the dissolute life of Shakespeare. But what if 
 these details are true, — and tradition certainly con- 
 firms them ; — are Suetonius and Tacitus to be set 
 down as sneaking backbiters and calumniators be- 
 cause they record the faults and follies of some of 
 their contemporaries? Further on, the cipher story 
 is characterized as a ^'scandalous chronicle," though 
 it contains nothing either in quality or quantity that 
 sets it below the immortal memoirs of Sully. Of 
 course, what it has, of this kind, is but a very small 
 part of the cipher story given, but the ingenuous 
 reviewer is careful to suppress this truth, lest it 
 might seriously qualify the appositeness of his fioiii'- 
 ish about Jekyll and Hyde. 
 
 X. 
 
 The somewhat extended going-over to which this 
 one of '' the best judges,"" credited with having killed 
 Mr. Donnelly's book, has been subjected, in common 
 with several of liis fellow '' judges,'' is undeilaken to 
 show what kind of men have the reviewer's privilege^ ; 
 and what kind of representations they dare to put 
 
96 MR. D OXXEL LY'S BE VIE WEES. 
 
 forth in condemnation of the toilsome and valuable 
 TTork of a reputable author. If I were in Mr. 
 Donnelly's place, I would publish these reviews, 
 without comment, as a supplement to every future 
 copy of the G/^eat Cryptogram, that the reader rising- 
 from its pages (which he would with at least deep 
 res]"ect and probably conviction) might see for him- 
 self the glaring mendacity of their account of the 
 book he had just perused. Xo comment of mine 
 could have the force of such a contrast. The articles 
 referred to here are samples of a number of othei^, 
 equally despicable, which have been evoked by this 
 strong and splendid volume. Most of them are 
 nearly or quite destitute of even average literarv 
 merit, not to say of any gleam of the point and 
 grace of manner which often adorn and half redeem 
 the unscrupulous and shameless re^iews frequent in 
 the periodicals of Europe. They are woven of 
 misrepresentations, and, at best, succeed only by 
 blocking up into high relief a few petty flaws and 
 errors, which are non-significant, and making them 
 stand for the character of the whole work. By such 
 tricks, which only the professional reviewer can 
 practice, they contrive to give the reader, who is 
 simple enough to pay any attention to them, an 
 impression of the book such as he would never 
 receive, even though hostile or prejudiced, from an 
 independent perusaL This latest instance of the 
 ability of their writers to make one thing take on 
 the semblance of another, makes me feel, as I have 
 been often made to feel, the sober force of Sweden- 
 borg's iron epithet, when he calls the whole triiie 
 conjurers. False, even to utter worthlessness, as their 
 
MR. DONNELLY'S REVIEWEB8. 97 
 
 report of an author's work may be, it has the 
 Infernal quahty of a glamour, which deceives even 
 people of fair intelligence, and can often effect 
 measureless injury. A gentleman who is by no 
 means a fool, recently writes : ^' I was much inter- 
 ested in the Great Cryptocjrain^ and intended to 
 secure an early copy, but have read a very adverse 
 review of it in one of the great New York journals 
 and have therefore concluded not to make the 
 purchase." Here is an instance of the practical 
 operation of the institution. The impressive repre- 
 sentations of an asinine Ananias, masquerading as a 
 critic, were accepted by him without suspicion ; and 
 he was deterred from procuring a valuable book, 
 which undoubtedly would have given him full satis- 
 faction. Multiply the instance by thousands, and 
 you have an idea of the injustice wrought by the 
 system of reviewing. 
 
 The deprivation to the general reader, and the 
 pecuniary injury to the author and publisher, are 
 alike evident. One does not forget Emerson's radiant 
 first volume, Nature^ consigned to the publishers' 
 shelves, as Theodore Parker said, for twelve years 
 — hardly a copy of the whole edition sold — owing 
 to the hocus-pocus of the critical representations. 
 Who among the readers that have felt the transfig- 
 uration of that volume, — felt its effect upon the soul, 
 as of a holy and immeasurable dawn, — would not 
 rank it as among one of life's losses if he had been 
 kept from its sweet influences by having received 
 the false impressions spread abroad by periodical 
 criticism? It is idle to la}^ the blame upon the 
 reader, and say that he ought not to b(^ unduly 
 
98 MB. DOJS'NELLY'S REVIEWERS, 
 
 affected by what the critic says of a volume. As 
 things are, tlie best of us are attracted or deterred 
 by what is plausibly reported of a book by a repu- 
 table critical journal; andean be cheated in two 
 ways, either unjustly in its favor or unjustly against 
 it. 
 
 As for the pubhshers, who are business men, I 
 wonder that on mere business grounds they put up 
 with the treatment they often receive from these 
 road-agents. I personally know of one recent in- 
 stance — and doubtless the instances are many — 
 where a pile of freshly issued books was made over, 
 everv week, bv the manaofino- editor to his salaried 
 reviewer, with strict instructions not to praise them, 
 whatever theuMnerit — without special instructions! 
 Leavino- the riohts and interests of the author out 
 of the question, what sort of a chance to do business 
 has a publisher, subjected to such treatment as this ? 
 At best, even when the dice are not thus loaded, the 
 books of whose character the public is to be informed, 
 are at the mercy of a critic whose temper, qualifica- 
 tions and conditions are, like himself, unknown. 
 Under our practice, the verdict on an eternal book, 
 like Don Quixote^ Bobbison Crusoe^ or Les Jliserahles, 
 which can only be justly made by '- the great variety 
 of readers.'- is confided to a single, often anonymous, 
 irresponsible man, whose dictum is to be accepted by 
 thousands. There could be no better premium on 
 adverse judgments. The critic may be an evil man, 
 whose excellent dio^estion onlv stimulates his literarv 
 malignity ; or he may be a good man. whose view of 
 the work before him is poisoned by a dyspepsia 
 which makes him feel that he has breakfasted dailv 
 
MR. DONNELLY'S REVIEWEBS, 99 
 
 on a fried handsaw, split up the back, and a half 
 dozen of stewed gimlets. He may be a dunce, a 
 sciolist, a snarleyyow, a dullard, a persilieur, an ossi- 
 fied intelligence, a born Philistine, a man without 
 perception or receptivity, generosity or equity ; one 
 subject to his humors^ to moods of resistance or 
 caprice, to insomnia or east winds. In any of which 
 cases the fate of the book he is to judge, is in the 
 hands of a citizen of Lyford or Jedburgh, and gets 
 hanged first to be tried afterward. Now the pub- 
 lisher of that book has put his money in it. To him 
 it is rightfully nothing but a commodity, which he 
 has to sell in the worldly interest of the author and 
 his own. Should the obscure manikin, w^hodoes the 
 reviewing, use his unjust and tremendous opportunity 
 and set the public dead against it, the sales are 
 blocked, no matter w^hat its merit ; the publisher 
 loses his investment, and the author his reward. It 
 is a direct injury, base and unwarrantable, to a legiti- 
 mate business interest; and, as I have said, I w^onder 
 that publishers put up with it. The quality of the 
 literary commodity they offer is almost wholly a 
 matter of opinion, and I see no equity in an institu- 
 tion which is arranged to sacrifice, to the mere 
 opinion of a single writer, often venal and oftener 
 stupid, the material interests of business men. 
 Would any other mercantile or trading enterprise 
 think itself fairly served by such organized raiding 
 on its rights, or endure the pecuniary loss involved? 
 Perhaps, however, logic being logic, this is what we 
 must come to. To be consistent, we must see that 
 all merchants who have wares to sell, are subjected to 
 mendacious 'Miterarv criticism," adorned with such 
 
100 . ME. DONNELLY'S REVIEWERS, 
 
 rhetorical phrases of defamation as glow in the 
 critical essays on Mr. Donnelly's volume. One emi- 
 nent journal, with an audience of half a million, will 
 keep an assassin who will devote two columns to the 
 proposition, fluently and plausibly stated, that a 
 respectable grocer, '• through unconscious cerebra- 
 tion," offers for sale flour which is full of chalk. 
 Another journal as eminent, and as widely circulated, 
 will demonstrate in three and a half columns, that 
 his coffee is wholly made up of roasted beans, and is 
 " valuable only for therapeutic purposes." A third 
 authority, widely in vogue, will have four columns 
 to assert that being '' unable to distinguish between 
 intellectual colors," he confounds the substance of 
 the beach with pure Muscovado, and sands his sugar. 
 And a fourth, which reaches nearly all the popula- 
 tion, will have five columns, to prove that after temper- 
 ing the molasses with mucilage and water, he never 
 goes up to family prayers, and is considerably worse 
 than Colonel Ingersoll. How will the honest grocer 
 of the future like such an instituted freedom of the 
 press, when it thus decries his goods and hurts his 
 business ? But the grocers are safe ; it is onl}^ the 
 publishers, — agents for the authors, — for whom the 
 case is possible. Miserable anarchist! To think 
 that books should have the same right to unimpeded 
 sales as groceries! To claim that a publisher's sales 
 should not be lessened, nor an author's heart dark- 
 ened, by " independent criticism ! " 
 
 Better that books should never be noticed at all — 
 better that even fine critics, like Ste. Beuve, like 
 Emile Montegut or Paul St. Victor, like Mathew 
 Arnold, like George Saintsbury or Professor Minto, 
 
MR. DONNELLY'S REVIEWERS. 101 
 
 should break their pens and close their inkstands 
 forever — than let continue a literary usage which 
 intercepts the reader on his way to the volume, and 
 turns him from it by shameful defamation. It is a 
 usage which has become general, and has reached 
 the dimensions of a serious harm to literature. In 
 the case of Mr. Donnelly's important production, for 
 one serious and honest estimate, like the just, tem- 
 perate, kindly and altogether admirable notice Mr. 
 Medill gave it in the Chicago Tvihune^ there have 
 been fifty of the worst character. This is about the 
 proportion of exception which exists in the infamous 
 rule. I think the needed remedy for such a condi- 
 tion is to suppress the professional functionary of 
 the critical periodicals, with his dogmatic lying 
 oracles, and substitute the free cliampions of the 
 pro and con. All the reading public wants and 
 needs in criticism, is to hear what can be said, the 
 stronger the better, both for and against, the 
 product of an author's thought or imagination. 
 The ideal of a critical journal is a publication which 
 shall be an arena for discussion, in which all that 
 can be uttered, on every side of a theme, shall be ex- 
 pressed on the single condition of proper literary 
 ability. A journal governed by such a pi'inciple, is, 
 I believe, demanded by the democratic genius of 
 this country, and by all interests, including those of 
 literature. In every domain of our national intel- 
 lectual activity, the one imperative requisite is Light. 
 To this, in literature, the present institution of 
 reviewing is a fatal barrier. 
 
THE GREAT CRYPTOGRM 
 
 FRANCIS BACON'S CIPHER IN THE SHAKES- 
 PEARE PLAYS. 
 
 lOXATIUS DONNELLY, 
 
 Author of ''Atlantis, Tlie Antedilurian World/' and ''Bagnarok, 
 The Aot of Fir € ar.d Grai^L" 
 
 ^y E ARL Y all great discoveries have been received with incredu- 
 ^ iity, and it is not to be wondered at, therefore, that Ignatius 
 Donnelly's announcement that he had found a cipher in the 
 Shakespeare Plays should have subjected him to unfair attacks 
 in the public journals, even though eminent mathematicians, 
 after thorough examination, had indorsed his claims. In spite of 
 adverse criticism, however, and on its merits alone, Mr. Donnelly's 
 great work is steadily gaining in popularity, and eminent men 
 everywhere, convinced by his arguments, are gradually creating 
 a change in popular opinion. The mere fact that Prof. Elias 
 Colbert, in his character as a mathematician, has indorsed the 
 cipher, is a sufficient certificate of its validity. The same is true 
 of Mr. George Parker Bidder, who is as eminent as he is imbiased, 
 ranking, as he does, the first mathematician of England. The 
 decisions of th^e men cannot rightly be regarded as opinioris. 
 They are the decrees ofscunc^. 
 
 "NO BOOK of modem times has excited so much inrerest all over the 
 civilized world as tliis volume, and its sale will probably reach 
 a million co'pies,^'— Sew Tori: Morning J ourna.. 
 
 "THE MOST startling announcement that has been hurled at mankind 
 since Galileo proclaimed his theory of the earth's motion.**— Aeir 
 TorJi World, 
 
 "IT INVOLVES the most interesting literary possibility of our genera- 
 tion.'*— Julia ?i Haidhonu. 
 
 *■* I KNOW all about Gov. Donnelly, and I am very sure that he has dis- 
 covered all he claims. I am a firm believer in the Baconian theory." 
 — BtJiJamin F. Butkr. 
 
 ** I SAY without hesitation that I am obUged to endorse the claim made 
 by Donnelly that he has found a cipher in some of the Shakespeare 
 Plays. » » » xhe cipher is there, as claimed, and he has done 
 enough to prove its existenc-e to my satisfaction."— Pyo/. Elias 
 
 C<Abt1-t^ ASTROSOyiKR AND MaTHEMATICL^JN. 
 
''PHIS extraordinary book has been the subject of so much discussion, 
 1 both in Europe and America, that the notices ol it in maji'azines, 
 reviews and newspapers would till several volumes. Never has any 
 book been so heralded by the curiosity ot the world. 
 
 And this is not to be wondered at. The author has found in the 
 Shakespeare Plays a cipher story, curiously infolded in the text, holding 
 a certain uniform relation to the pag-ing of the great FoUo of 1623, and 
 the beginnings and ends of acts, scenes, etc. 
 
 This work upon which Governor Donnelly has been engaged for so 
 many years is now fairly before the world on its merits. His discovery 
 is now, and will continue to be, the chief topic ot general discussion 
 among educated people. 
 
 The key to the cipher and the text of the secret narrative disclosed 
 by it is made public only in*' The Great Cryptogram.'' As to the 
 actuality of the cipher," says Governor Donnelly in the Preface of his 
 gTeat work, "there can be but one conclusion. A long continuous nar- 
 rut ve running through many pa.ges^ detailing historical events in a per- 
 fectly sijmnietricaU rhetorical, grammatical manner, and always growing 
 out of the same numbers, employed in the same way, and counting from the 
 same or similar starting-points, cannot he otherwise than a prearranged 
 arithmetical cipher. Let those who would deny this produce a single 
 page of a connected story, eliminated by an arithmetical rule from any 
 other w^ork ; in fact, let them find five words that will cohere, by acci- 
 dent, in due order, in any publication where they were not first placed 
 with intent and aforethought. I have never yet been able to find 
 three such." 
 
 Governor Donnelly also says : 
 
 "The Key, turned for the first time in the secret wards of the cipher, will yet unlock 
 a vast history, nearly as great iu bulk as the Plays themselves, and tell a mighty story of 
 one of the greatest and most momentous eras of human history, illuminated by the 
 most gifted human being- that has ever dwelt upon the eaith. ***** 
 
 "I have no hesitation in saying that the publication of my book will convince the 
 world that these plays are the most marvelous specimens of ingenuity, and mental 
 suppleness, and adroitness, to say nothing of genius, power, and attainments, e\er put 
 together by the wit of man. There is no parallel for them on earth. There never will be. 
 No such man can ever again be born. His coming marked an era in the history of the 
 world." 
 
 Apart from the cipher discovery. The Great Cryptogram would, 
 by its lacts and arguments, create a revolution in public opinion as to 
 the authorship of the Shakespeare Plays. It is a profound and exhaust- 
 ive argument, presented in that forcible yet fascinating style for which 
 the author is noted. 
 
 The Great ''Cryptogram" Is published in one imperial octavo vol- 
 ume of nearly 1,C00 pages. The illustrations include a steel portrait of Lord 
 Bacon, from the painting of Van Somer ; portraits of Queen Elizabeth, 
 of the Earl of Essex, and of Ben Jonson, and portraits of the leading 
 '' Baconians." It contains also a f ac-simile of the famous Shakespeare 
 portrait printed as a frontispiece to the great Folio of 1623, and fac- 
 similes of the text of that great work, engraved by photographic process 
 from a perfect and authentic copy of the same in the Librarj^ of Colum- 
 bia College. 
 
 The title and semi-titles are engraved on wood, from original designs, 
 in anti<iue style, and the letter-press is from electrotype plates cast from 
 new type. 
 
 The work is printed on an extra quality of calendered paper, and 
 will be furnished to subscribers at the following prices : 
 Plain Edition.— In extra English cloth, stamped in maroon and 
 
 gold, unique design, plain edges $4 50 
 
 Popular Edition.- -In extra English cloth, gold and maroon 
 
 stamping, full gilt edges 6 50 
 
 Library Edition. — In half seal Kussia, burnished edges, gold 
 
 medallion portrait of Lord Bacon on side 6 50 
 
 Presentation Edition.— In full seal Russia, full gilt edges S r>0 
 
 In territory where we have no agent, we will snpi)]y The Ghkat 
 Cryptogram at $2.50 in Cloth. Address all ordcis to 
 
 R. S. PEALE & CO., Publishers, 
 
 315-321 WABASH AVENUE, CHICAGO. 
 
RAGNAROK: 
 
 THE AGE OF FIRE AXD GRAVEL. 
 
 IGNATIUS DONNELLY, 
 
 Author of • 'Atlantis, the Ahtediluviart World, " and ' ^ TJte Great 
 
 Cryphjgrarii : Francis Bacon's Cipher in the 
 
 Shakespeare Plays.''- 
 
 V/ith Illustrations, 
 
 i2mo, Vellum Cloth, $2.00. 
 
 '"T^HE title of this book is taken from the Scandinavian sagro.?, 
 1 or legends, and means 'the darkness of the gods.* The 
 work consists of a chain of arguments and facts to prove a series 
 of extraordinary theories, viz. : That the Drift Age, with its vast 
 deposits of clay and gravel, its decomposed rocks, and its great 
 rents in the face of the globe, was the result of contact between 
 the earth and a comet, and that the Drift-material was brought to 
 the earth by the comet ; that man lived on the earth at that time ; 
 that he was highly civilized ; that all the human family, with the 
 exception of a few persons who saved themselves in caves, perished 
 from the same causes which destroyed the mammoth and the 
 other pre-glacial animals : that the legends of all the races of the 
 world preserve references to and descriptions of this catastrophe : 
 that following it came a terrible age of ice and snow, of great 
 floods while the clouds were restoring the waters to the sea, and 
 an age of darkness while the dense clouds infolded the globe. 
 These startling ideas are supported by an array of scientific facts, 
 and by legends drawn from all ages and all regions of the earth." 
 ''Ragxarok" supplies a new theory as to the origin of the 
 Glacial Age, coherent in all its parts, plausible, not opposed to 
 any of the teachings of modern science, and curiously supported 
 by the traditions of mankind. If the theory is true, it will be 
 productive of far-reaching consequences ; it will teach us to look 
 to cosmical causes for many things on the earth which we have 
 heretofore ascribed to telluric causes, and it will revolutionize 
 the present science of geology. 
 
• PRESS OPINIONS • 
 
 •*It is impossible to withhold respect for the ingenious logic and 
 industrious scholarship which mark its pages."— Chicago Tribune, 
 
 ** This theory is set forth with the dexterity and earnestness 
 
 with which, in a previous work, the author tried to prove the whilom 
 existence of the fabled Atlantis, and it is equally certain to rouse the 
 curiosity and enchain the attention of a large body of readers."— iV^ew; 
 York Sun, 
 
 '' Whatever may be the judgment concerning the scientific value of 
 Mr. Donnelly's >Ragnarok,' no one can read it without a thrill of 
 excited interest. It has a primeval sensationalism."— Boston Traveler. 
 
 **The work is marvelous if true, and almost equally marvelous if not 
 true."— Baltimore Da?/. 
 
 "All is interesting, seemingly plausible, and certainly informing."— 
 Boston Commonwealth. 
 
 " Whollj^ interesting, and in some respects as thrilling and as enter- 
 taining as the most absorbing romances."— JBosto?i Gazette. 
 
 ** The book altogether is, perhaps, the most interesting one of the 
 year. ' '— Hartford Tim es . 
 
 *'It is as entertaining and fascinating as a novel."— C/irjstia/i at 
 Work. 
 
 **A vast amount of curious information has been gathered into its 
 pages."— Cincinnati Gazette. 
 
 **No mere summary can do justice to this extraordinary book, which 
 certainly contains many strong arguments against the generally accepted 
 theory that all the gigantic phenomena of the Drift were due to the 
 action of ice. Whether readers believe Mr. Donnelly or not, they will 
 find his book intensely interesting."— T/jc Guardian^ Banbury, England. 
 
 *' It is one of the most x^owerf ul and suggestive books of the day, and 
 deserves respectful attention, not only from the general reader but 
 from the scientist."— T/jc Continent. 
 
 *'Mr. Donnelly can claim the credit of furnishing a theory which is 
 consistent with itself, and, as he evidently thinks, with the scientitic 
 requirements of the problem, and also with the teachings of Hoi j- Scrip- 
 ture The book is well worth studying. If it is true, it answers 
 
 two very important purposes — the first connected with science, and the 
 second with prophec5^ It gives a reasonable account for the tremendous 
 changes which the earth has undergone, and it shows how its dissolution, 
 so clearly described in St. Peter's Second Epistle, may be accomplished." 
 — The Churchman, New York. 
 
 '''RagnakokMs a strong and brilliant literary ])roduction, which 
 will command the interest of general readers, and the admiration and 
 respect, if not the universal credence, of the conservative and the scien- 
 tific."— Professor Alexander AVinchell, in The Dial. 
 
 "In a fCAV sharp, short and decisive chapters the author disposes of 
 the theory that the vast phenomena of the ' Drift' could have been pro- 
 duced by the action of ice, no matter if the ice swept over the continent. 
 His facts and their application are certainly impressive. In fact, liis 
 book is very original."— IJart/orcl Times, 
 
 "Mr. Donnelly has presented the scientific world with another nut, 
 the cracking of which we confess to an anxiety to see the scientitic 
 world attempt."— Philadelphia. Telegram . 
 
 ' Chicago: K. S. PEALE 6c CO., D15 Wabash Ave. 
 
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