amazed by even such commonplace acquirements. When the step is made
from cleverness to genius, then the dull disbelieve, or cry out of a
miracle. Now, as 'miracles do not happen,' a man of Shakespeare's
education could not have written the plays attributed to him by his
critics, companions, friends, and acquaintances. Shakespeare, ex
hypothesi, was a rude unlettered fellow. Such a man, the Baconians
assume, would naturally be chosen by Bacon as his mask, and put
forward as the author of Bacon's pieces. Bacon would select a
notorious ignoramus as a plausible author of pieces which, by the
theory, are rich in knowledge of the classics, and nobody would be
surprised. Nobody would say: 'Shakespeare is as ignorant as a
butcher's boy, and cannot possibly be the person who translated
Hamlet's soliloquy out of Plato, "Hamlet" at large out of the
Danish; who imitated the "Hellene" of Euripides, and borrowed
"Troilus and Cressida" from the Greek of Dares Phrygius'--which
happens not to exist. Ignorance can go no further than in these
arguments. Such are the logic and learning of American amateurs,
who sometimes do not even know the names of the books they talk
about, or the languages in which they are written. Such learning
and such logic are passed off by 'the less than half educated' on
the absolutely untaught, who decline to listen to scholars.

We cannot of course furnish a complete summary of all that the
Baconians have said in their myriad pages. All those pages, almost,
really flow from the little volume of Mr. Smith. We are obliged to
take the points which the Baconians regard as their strong cards.
We have dealt with the point of classical scholarship, and shown
that the American partisans of Bacon are not scholars, and have no
locus standi. We shall take next in order the contention that Bacon
was a poet; that his works contain parallel passages to Shakespeare,