"Well, the laugh is on you," said Doctor Johnson. "If you wrote _Hamlet_
and didn't have the sense to acknowledge it, you present to my mind a
closer resemblance to Simple Simon than to Socrates. For my part, I
don't believe you did write it, and I do believe that Shakespeare did. I
can tell that by the spelling in the original edition."

"Shakespeare was my stenographer, gentlemen," said Lord Bacon. "If you
want to know the whole truth, he did write _Hamlet_, literally. But it
was at my dictation."

"I deny it," said Shakespeare. "I admit you gave me a suggestion now and
then so as to keep it dull and heavy in spots, so that it would seem more
like a real tragedy than a comedy punctuated with deaths, but beyond that
you had nothing to do with it."

"I side with Shakespeare," put in Emerson. "I've seen his autographs,
and no sane person would employ a man who wrote such a villanously bad
hand as an amanuensis. It's no use, Bacon, we know a thing or two. I'm
a New-Englander, I am."

"Well," said Bacon, shrugging his shoulders as though the results of the
controversy were immaterial to him, "have it so if you please. There
isn't any money in Shakespeare these days, so what's the use of
quarrelling? I wrote _Hamlet_, and Shakespeare knows it. Others know
it. Ah, here comes Sir Walter Raleigh. We'll leave it to him. He was
cognizant of the whole affair."

"I leave it to nobody," said Shakespeare, sulkily.

"What's the trouble?" asked Raleigh, sauntering up and taking a chair