magnified, distorted, dramatic rumours. That a ballad-writer should
promote a Queen's tirewoman into a Queen's Marie, and substitute
Darnley (where HE is the lover, which is not always) for the Queen's
apothecary, is a license quite in keeping with precedent. Mr.
Child, obviously, would admit this. In producing a Marie who never
existed, the 'maker' shows the same delicacy as Voltaire, when he
brings into 'Candide' a Pope who never was born.

Finally, a fragment of a variant of the ballad among the Abbotsford
MSS.* does mention an apothecary as the lover of the heroine, and,
so far, is true to historical fact, whether the author was well
informed, or merely, in the multitude of variations, deviated by
chance into truth.

There can, on the whole, be no reasonable doubt that the ballad is
on an event in Scotland of 1563, not of 1719, in Russia, and Mr.
Child came to hold that this opinion was, at least, the more
probable.**

*Child, vol. iv. p. 509.
**Ibid., vol. v. pp. 298, 299.



XII. THE SHAKESPEARE-BACON IMBROGLIO*



The hypothesis that the works of Shakespeare were written by Bacon
has now been before the world for more than forty years. It has