shifted the burden of the 'Waverley Novels' on to Terry the actor.
Bacon may, conceivably, have had Scott's pleasure in secrecy, but
Bacon selected a mask much more impossible (on the theory) than
Terry would have been for Scott. Again, Sir Walter Scott took pains
to make his identity certain, by an arrangement with Constable, and
by preserving his manuscripts, and he finally confessed. Bacon
never confessed, and no documentary traces of his authorship
survive. Scott, writing anonymously, quoted his own poems in the
novels, an obvious 'blind.' Bacon, less crafty, never (as far as we
are aware) mentions Shakespeare.

It is arguable, of course, that to write plays might seem dangerous
to Bacon's professional and social position. The reasons which
might make a lawyer keep his dramatic works a secret could not apply
to 'Lucrece.' A lawyer, of good birth, if he wrote plays at all,
would certainly not vamp up old stock pieces. That was the work of
a 'Johannes Factotum,' of a 'Shakescene,' as Greene says, of a man
who occupied the same position in his theatrical company as Nicholas
Nickleby did in that of Mr. Crummles. Nicholas had to bring in the
vulgar pony, the Phenomenon, the buckets, and so forth. So, in
early years, the author of the plays (Bacon, by the theory) had to
work over old pieces. All this is the work of the hack of a playing
company; it is not work to which a man in Bacon's position could
stoop. Why should he? What had he to gain by patching and vamping?
Certainly not money, if the wealth of Shakespeare is a dark mystery
to the Baconian theorists. We are asked to believe that Bacon, for
the sake of some five or six pounds, toiled at refashioning old
plays, and handed the fair manuscripts to Shakespeare, who passed
them off, among the actors who knew him intimately, as his own.
THEY detected no incongruity between the player who was their