There will then be nothing sacred involved in this Bacon-Shakespeare controversy except what is sacred to me. That will simplify the whole matter, and trouble will cease. There will be irreverence no longer, because I will not allow it. The first time those criminals charge me with irreverence for calling their Stratford myth an Arthur-OrtonMary-Baker-Thompson-Eddy-Louis-theSeventeenth- Veiled - Prophet-of-Khorassan will be the last. Taught by the methods found effective in extinguishing earlier offenders by the Inquisition, of holy memory, I shall know how to quiet them.

ΙΟ

XIII

SN'T it odd, when you think of it:

ISN

that you may list all the celebrated Englishmen, Irishmen, and Scotchmen of modern times, clear back to the first Tudors a list containing five hundred names, shall we say?-and you can go to the histories, biographies and cyclopedias and learn the particulars of the lives of every one of them. Every one of them except one-the most famous, the most renowned-by far the most illustrious of them all-Shakespeare! You can get the details of the lives of all the celebrated ecclesiastics in the list; all the celebrated tragedians, comedians, singers, dancers, orators, judges, lawyers, poets, dramatists, historians, biographers,

editors, inventors, reformers, statesmen, generals, admirals, discoverers, prizefighters, murderers, pirates, conspirators, horse - jockeys, bunco - steerers, misers, swindlers, explorers, adventurers by land and sea, bankers, financiers, astronomers, naturalists, Claimants, impostors, chemists, biologists, geologists, philologists, college presidents and professors, architects, engineers, painters, sculptors, politicians, agitators, rebels, revolutionists, patriots, demagogues, clowns, cooks, freaks, philosophers, burglars, highwaymen, journalists, physicians, surgeonsyou can get the life-histories of all of them but one. Just one-the most extraordinary and the most celebrated of them all-Shakespeare!

You may add to the list the thousand celebrated persons furnished by the rest of Christendom in the past four centuries, and you can find out the life-histories of

all those people, too. You will then have listed 1500 celebrities, and you can trace the authentic life-histories of the whole of them. Save one-far and away the most colossal prodigy of the entire accumulation-Shakespeare! About him you can find out nothing. Nothing of even the slightest importance. Nothing worth the trouble of stowing away in your memory. Nothing that even remotely indicates that he was ever anything more than a distinctly commonplace person-a manager, an actor of inferior grade, a small trader in a small village that did not regard him as a person of any consequence, and had forgotten all about him before he was fairly cold in his grave. We can go to the records and find out the life-history of every renowned race-horse of modern times but not Shakespeare's! There are many reasons why, and they have

been furnished in cartloads (of guess and
conjecture) by those troglodytes; but
there is one that is worth all the rest of
the reasons put together, and is abundant-
ly sufficient all by itself-he hadn't any nene
history to record. There is no way of
getting around that deadly fact. And
no sane way has yet been discovered of
getting around its formidable significance.

Its quite plain significance to any but those thugs (I do not use the term unkindly) is, that Shakespeare had no prominence while he lived, and none until he had been dead two or three generations. The Plays enjoyed high fame from the beginning; and if he wrote them it seems a pity the world did not find it out. He ought to have explained that he was the author, and not merely a nom de plume for another man to hide behind. If he had been less intemperately solicitous about his bones, and more solicitous