From the days of Mr. William Henry Smith, in 1856, the great
Baconian argument has been that Shakespeare could not conceivably
have had the vast learning, classical, scientific, legal, medical,
and so forth, of the author of the plays. Bacon, on the other hand,
and nobody else, had this learning, and had, though he concealed
them, the poetic powers of the unknown author. Therefore, prima
facie, Bacon wrote the works of Shakespeare. Mr. Smith, as we said,
had been partly anticipated, here, by the unlucky Miss Delia Bacon,
to whose vast and wandering book Mr. Hawthorne wrote a preface. Mr.
Hawthorne accused Mr. Smith of plagiarism from Miss Delia Bacon; Mr.
Smith replied that, when he wrote his first essay (1856), he had
never even heard the lady's name. Mr. Hawthorne expressed his
regret, and withdrew his imputation. Mr. Smith is the second
founder of Baconomania.

Like his followers, down to Mr. Ignatius Donnelly, and Mr. Bucke,
and General Butler, and Mr. Atkinson, who writes in 'The
Spiritualist,' and Mrs. Gallup, and Judge Webb, Mr. Smith rested,
first, on Shakespeare's lack of education, and on the wide learning
of the author of the poems and plays. Now, Ben Jonson, who knew
both Shakespeare and Bacon, averred that the former had 'small Latin
and less Greek,' doubtless with truth. It was necessary, therefore,
to prove that the author of the plays had plenty of Latin and Greek.
Here Mr. John Churton Collins suggests that Ben meant no more than
that Shakespeare was not, in the strict sense, a scholar. Yet he
might read Latin, Mr. Collins thinks, with ease and pleasure, and
might pick out the sense of Greek books by the aid of Latin
translations. To this view we return later.