as Bacon might have heard of from Essex and Southampton. There is no
"familiarity with all the gossip of the Court"; there is no greater
knowledge of foreign proverbs than could be got from common English
books. There is abundance, indeed overabundance of ridicule of
affected styles, and quips, with which the literature of the day was
crammed: call it Gongorism, Euphuism, or what you please. One does
not understand how or where Judge Webb (in extreme old age) made all
these discoveries, sympathetically quoted by Mr. Greenwood. {127a}
"Like Bacon, the author of the play must have had a large command of
books; he must have had his "Horace," his "Ovidius Naso," and his
"good old 'Mantuan.'" What a prodigious "command of books"! Country
schoolmasters confessedly had these books on the school desks. It
was not even necessary for the author to "have access to the
Chronicles of Monstrelet." It is not known, we have said, whether or
not such plot as the play possesses, with King Ferdinand and the
100,000 ducats, or 200,000 ducats (needed to bring the Princess and
the mythical King Ferdinand of Navarre together), were not adapted by
the poet from an undiscovered conte, partly based on a passage in
Monstrelet.

Perhaps it will be conceded that Love's Labour's Lost is not a play
which can easily be attributed to Bacon. We do not know how much of
the play existed before Shakespeare "augmented" it in 1598. We do
not know whether what he then corrected and augmented was an early
work of his own or from another hand, though probably it was his own.
Moliere certainly corrected and augmented and transfigured, in his
illustrious career in Paris, several of the brief early sketches
which he had written when he was the chief of a strolling troupe in
Southern France.