observation. I turn myself into a Brutus
or a Coriolanus for the time; and can, at
least in fancy, partake sufficiently of the
nobleness of their nature, to put proper
words in their mouths....
My knowledge of the tongues is but small,
on which account I have read ancient
authors mostly at secondhand. I remember,
when I first came to London, and
began to be a hanger-on at the theatres, a
great desire grew in me for more learning
than had fallen to my share at Stratford;
but fickleness and impatience, and the
bewilderment caused by new objects, dispersed
that wish into empty air....

This ridiculous and most absurd nonsense, which appeared in 1818 in
_Blackwood's Edinburgh Magazine_ was deemed so excellent and so
_instructive_ that (slightly abridged) it was copied into "Reading
lessons for the use of public and private schools" by John Pierpont, of
Boston, U.S.A., which was published in London nearly twenty years later,
viz., in 1837.

As I said before, the dialogue is really all topsy turvydom, for the
writer must have known perfectly well that Bacon was not Lord Keeper
till 1617, the year after Shakspeare's death in 1616, and was not made
Lord Chancellor till 1618, and that he is not supposed to have began to
write the "Novum Organum" before the death of Queen Elizabeth.

I have therefore arrived at the conclusion that the whole article was