November 1, 1887.] 



♦ KNOWLEDGE ♦ 



17 



might be preserved ready for reading, when, later, the key 

 of the cipher was indicated. As a matter of fact, when 

 dealing with " Writing," in the third division of his section 

 on the " Organ of Speech " in his " De Augmentis," Bacon 

 does describe a cipher of his own, which he invented in his 

 youth, at Paris.* But Mr. Donnelly would have done well 

 to notice that Bacon very definitely expresses his opinion 

 about the qualities which a good cipher should poosess. If 

 Mr. Donnelly is right about the imagined cipher in the 

 folio edition of Shakespeare, that cipher would be a very 

 bad one, according to Bacon's ideas. " A good cipher," 

 says Bacon, " mu.-t absolutely elude the labour of the de- 

 cipherer," which the folio cipher has failed to do ; and " it 

 must yet be commodious enough to be readUy written and 

 read," whereas the cipher in the folio, according to Mr. 

 Donnelly'.s own account of it, would have been fearfullj' 

 difficult to write, and, as we can judge from the long delay 

 of Mr. Donnelly's promised volume, and the small portion 

 of the folio which he promises to decipher at first, the cipher 

 is singularly difficult to read, even when its key has been 

 discovered. 



Passing over the overwhelming antecedent improbability 

 that Bacon ever wrote a line of the Shakespeare plays, and 

 the extreme unlikelihood that he would have devised so 

 cumbrous a cipher (when a few documents left to be read 

 fifty j"eai's or so after his death would have served the full 

 purpose attributed to him), let us consider the evidence in 

 detail. 



Mr. Donnelly believes that the words of a hidden narra- 

 tive were to be placed in such situations in the plays, as 

 printed in the folio edition, that when the key was dis- 

 covered the whole narrative could be put together, Bacon's 

 authorship proved, and many un.suspected details of his life, 

 and of the history of his period, disclosed. It is not easy to 

 present with gravity the first pait of the evidence on which 

 this idea, antecedently so absurd, has been baaed. We ai'e 

 told that Bacon felt sure some student of Shakespeare would 

 notice the frequent appearance of the words " Francis," 

 " Bacon," " Nicholas," " William," " Shakes," " peere," 

 " Shake," " speare," " spurs," " spheres," &c., in the his- 

 torical plays ; he knew further that the ingenious student 

 of the future would immediately associate this observed fact 

 with what Bacon had said about ci]jhers in his " De 

 Augmentis," and, " having once started upon the scent, 

 would never abandon the chase until he had dug out the 

 cipher." The mixed metaphor is Mr. Donnelly's own. 



But now see what curious proof of the existence of special 

 peculiarities Mr. Donnelly has obtained. On page o3 of 

 the '■ Histories" the word " Bacon" is the 371st from the 

 top of the first column. Now there are seven italic words 

 in that column. Multiply 53 by 7 and we get 371! On 

 page .54, we find in the first column twelve words in itjdics. 

 Midtiply 54 by 12 and we get 648. Counting words from 

 the top of the first column of page 54, we come to the word 

 " Chuffes," in which even the lively fancy of a Donnelly 

 cannot recognise any specially Baconian significance. It is 

 rather hard, because the word " Bacon " occurs in the poetic 

 compound " bacon-fed," thirty-two words earlier, and the 

 word " Bacons," eight words further on.f 



* The cipher is interesting as anticipating the Morse alphabet, in 

 so far as it depends on the varied placing of things of two different 

 kinds — Italic letters and Koman letters in the case Bacon describes. 



t I venture to offer Mr. Donnelly a hint, just here. May not 

 these numbers, .32 and S, be highly sigaiticant i Eight is contained 

 four times in thirty-two. Xow the word " Bacon'' appears only 

 four times in all Shakespeare's plays; and in two of these cases it 

 appears not simply as " Bacon," but in one place as " Bacons " and 

 in the other as part of the compound " bacon-fed." Now, applying 

 a certain rule we imagine we have discovered, we fail to get any 

 Baconian word, but we find two of the " Bacons " out of all the 



But Mr. Donnelly is not to be foiled by such a difficulty 

 as this. Nay, he does not even mention it. Not finding 

 anything to suit him on page 54, from which he had obtained 

 the number (j48, he turns back to page 53, without any 

 reason assigned, and finds there the t548th word to be 

 Nicholas — tlie Christian name of Francis Bacon's father. 

 Even this marvellous result is only obtained by humouring 

 the count. Mr. Donnelly admits that in this case words in 

 brackets are to be omitted ; and he must have some system 

 of counting hyphenated words as one or two to bring out 

 the desii-ed result, or else such words as "'twere" for "it 

 were " " a clocke " for " o'clock," and so forth, may be con- 

 sidered single or double as required. 



Mr. Donnelly appears not to have been deterred by the 

 failure of the method on page 54 from trying it on page 

 after page, until at last, coming to page 67, he obtained 

 something like a success — at least, to one so sanguine as 

 himself. There are six italic words in the first column of 

 page 67, 6 times 67 is 40l*, and the 402nd word on page 67 

 is " S. Albores," for " St. Albans," the place from which 

 Bacon's title was fciken. It rather impairs the value of 

 this coincidence that if we are to take " S. Albones " thus 

 as one word, so also should we take " S. Nicholas " as one. 

 Mr. Donnelly has already taken just so much of this word 

 as his case wanted ; though, indeed, the iniquity which his 

 theory attributes to Bacon, Shakespeare, Ben Jonson, and 

 all others supposed to be in the plot, is so great, that he 

 might well have taken the whole word — the name of the 

 patron saint of those who commit rascality under cover of 

 darkness — as specially belonging to the imagined cipher 

 system. What he does in one case he should do in the 

 other, only it would not suit his theory to have only 

 " Albones." 



I cannot weary the reader with examples of other methods 

 of counting, invented by Mr. Donnelly to serve as occasion 

 mav require. It must be admitted that it is not his fixult 

 that no constant rule will serve him. Sometimes he must 

 be free to multiply by the number of words in brackets 

 instead of by the number of words in italics ; sometimes to 

 count from the top of the page itself, sometimes from the 

 page before, sometiiues from the page after; sometimes to 

 count hyphenated words as single, sometimes as double, and 

 so on. But I cannot follow him in detail, because no 

 sensible reader can be expected to examine many of these 

 inanities. Suffice it that among the words found by these 

 multitudinous devices are " volume," " maske," " his," 

 " greatest," '• therefore," " shown," " image," " but," " own," 

 and others, which assuredly no one but Mr. Donnelly will 

 regard as amazingly significant. 



One case only will I cite as illu.strating Mr. Donnelly's 

 singular readiness to be startled into conviction by casual 

 coincidence. The reader should carefully note each detail 

 separately, for there is absolutely nothing to connect them 

 together. The number of page 75 multiplied by 12, the 

 number of italics in the first column of another page, page 74, 

 gives tiOO; and the number of page 76, multiplied by 11, 

 the number of words in brackets in the first column of the 

 same page 76, gives 836. Now counting from the top of 

 the first column of page 74, omitting words in brackets, and 

 counting the hyphenated words no longer as two words but 

 as one, the 83Gtli word will be found to be the 304th word of 



four in Shakespeare on either side of the word we have lit upon — 

 one of them four times as far from it as the other. " Can this be 

 accidental?" Mr. Donnelly should have inquired. Are not the 

 chances thousands to one against the occurrence of so many twos 

 and fours in connection with the word "Bacon"? If any doubt 

 can remain on this point, it ought to vanish when we notice that 

 the numbers 8 and ?>2 are each multiples of four and powers of two, 

 these powers being also four less one and four plus one respectively . 

 One can go on with such drivel, however, indefinitely. 



