PROPERTY TO BE EVER YOUNG,' and the herb, in the play, has a
'VIRTUOUS PROPERTY.'

For such exquisite reasons as these the masque and the 'Midsummer
Night's Dream' are by one hand, and the masque is by Bacon. For
some unknown cause the play is full of poetry, which is entirely
absent from the masque. Mr. Holmes was a Judge; sat on the bench of
American Themis--and these are his notions of proof and evidence.
The parallel passages which he selects are on a level with the other
parallels between Bacon and Shakespeare. One thing is certain: the
writer of the masque shows no signs of being a poet, and a poet
Bacon explicitly 'did not profess to be.' One piece of verse
attributed to Bacon, a loose paraphrase of a Greek epigram, has won
its way into 'The Golden Treasury.' Apart from that solitary
composition, the verses which Bacon 'prepared' were within the
powers of almost any educated Elizabethan. They are on a level with
the rhymes of Mr. Ruskin. It was only when he wrote as Shakespeare
that Bacon wrote as a poet.

We have spoken somewhat harshly of Mr. Holmes as a classical
scholar, and as a judge of what, in literary matters, makes
evidence. We hasten to add that he could be convinced of error. He
had regarded a sentence of Bacon's as a veiled confession that Bacon
wrote 'Richard II.,' 'which, though it grew from me, went after
about in others' names.' Mr. Spedding averred that Mr. Holmes's
opinion rested on a grammatical misinterpretation, and Mr. Holmes
accepted the correction. But 'nothing less than a miracle' could
shake Mr. Holmes's belief in the common authorship of the masque
(possibly Bacon's) and the 'Midsummer Night's Dream'--so he told Mr.
Spedding. To ourselves nothing short of a miracle, or the