When we read the praises bestowed by Lord Penzance and the other
illustrious experts upon the legal condition and legal aptnesses,
brilliances, profundities and felicities so prodigally displayed in
the Plays, and try to fit them to the history-less Stratford stage-
manager, they sound wild, strange, incredible, ludicrous; but when
we put them in the mouth of Bacon they do not sound strange, they
seem in their natural and rightful place, they seem at home there.
Please turn back and read them again. Attributed to Shakespeare of
Stratford they are meaningless, they are inebriate extravagancies--
intemperate admirations of the dark side of the moon, so to speak;
attributed to Bacon, they are admirations of the golden glories of
the moon's front side, the moon at the full--and not intemperate,
not overwrought, but sane and right, and justified. "At every turn
and point at which the author required a metaphor, simile or
illustration, his mind ever turned FIRST to the law; he seems
almost to have THOUGHT in legal phrases; the commonest legal
phrases, the commonest of legal expressions were ever at the end of
his pen." That could happen to no one but a person whose TRADE was
the law; it could not happen to a dabbler in it. Veteran mariners
fill their conversation with sailor-phrases and draw all their
similes from the ship and the sea and the storm, but no mere
PASSENGER ever does it, be he of Stratford or elsewhere; or could
do it with anything resembling accuracy, if he were hardy enough to
try. Please read again what Lord Campbell and the other great
authorities have said about Bacon when they thought they were
saying it about Shakespeare of Stratford.



CHAPTER X