18 



♦ KNOWLEDGE ♦ 



[November 1, 1887. 



page 75, and is the amazingly significant word " found " ! 

 Beginning from the top of page 75, and counting onward in 

 the same way, the 836th word is " out." But counting 

 from the same points, taking in the words in brackets, and 

 counting each hvplienated word separately, we find the same 

 two words, " found " and " out," each as the 900th instead 

 of the 83()th word in its respective count ! 



On attaining this result, about as interesting as the dis- 

 covery that the number of words in one of the books of the 

 " Iliad " or " Odyssey " chances to be a perfect square, Mr. 

 Donnelly exclaims : " Can any man believe that this is the 

 result of accident 1 It could not occur l)v chance one time 

 in a hundred millions. The man who can believe this is 

 the result of chance would, to use one of Bacon's compari- 

 sons, ' believe that one could scatter the letters of the 

 alphabet on the ground, and they would accidentally arrange 

 themselves into Homer's Iliad.' " It must be admitted, 

 however, that the error into which Mr. Donnelly foils as to 

 coincidences of the sort is a common one. " What strange 

 hands were dealt us," someone will say at whist ; "I wonder 

 what the chances were that those particular hands would be 

 dealt : millions to one against, I should imagine ! " The 

 answer is that the odds were more than six hundred and 

 thirty-five thousand millions to one against those exact 

 hands, but that the question of chance is not affected. 

 Every set of hands at whist might he regarded as a mar- 

 vellous coincidence if we viewed the matter in that way. 

 The real question is. What is the probability that in a given 

 set of hands odd coincidences may be found, if we look care- 

 fully for them 1 and the answer is, that nearly always you 

 can find such coincidences if you look for them with suf- 

 ficient patience. And so it is with such counting of pages, 

 italics, brackets, words, hyphens, &c., as Mr. Donnelly has 

 fruitlessly undertaken. You are bound to find hundreds of 

 siich coincidences as he notes for marvels. 



But we must notice also the str.ange reasoning by which 

 Mr. Donnelly has persuaded himself that the text of the 

 folio has been altered — " twisted," as he sa3's, " to conform 

 to the requirements of a mathematical cipher "■ — -though 

 Bacon was weak indeed in mathematics. Mr. Donnelly 

 notes the appearance of italicised words, hyphenated words, 

 and words in parentheses, which he insists on calling 

 brackets, and represents as brackets when (pioting. He 

 does not seem aware of the fact that when the folio was 

 printed it was the custom to italicise all pro])ei' names as 

 they are italicised in the folio, to hyphenate all connected 

 words, such as "lean-on," "get-over," " find-out," &c., and 

 to use parentheses to inclose words presenting an interjected 

 expression or thought, which in modern printing would 

 ordy be inclosed between commas. (I prefer this old usage 

 myself.) 



To show how ready Mr. Donnelly is to imagine peculiari- 

 ties where in reality all is in order, I note that he regards 

 the lines 



" You are too {jreat to be (by me) gainsaid," 

 and 



•' I cannot think (my Lord) your son is dead," 



as printed in an unusual and unnatural fashion ; and he 

 asserts that in the first part of " Henry IV," such phra.ses 

 are not so printed. Yet had he but turned for comparison 

 to the most striking of all these passages in the first part of 

 " Henry IV." which relate to the Percy plot, he would have 

 found the lines 



" This bald, unioynted Chat of his (my Lord) 

 Made me to answer indirectly (as I said)," 



precisely matching the cases which he deems so strange. It 

 would lie impossible to convince Mr. Donnelly that lines 

 which he quotes as strange, coutoi'ted, confused, &c., are 

 perfectly natural and especially Shakespearean ; for he mani- 



festly has not the slightest germ of the faculty which enables 

 the critic to recognise at once the touch of Shakes|ieare's 

 hand. He finds such expressions as " the dole of blows," 

 walking '• o'er perils on an edge" (compare "on the unstead- 

 fast footing of a spear "), and so forth, altogether unnatural. 

 He cannot even understand so simple a passage as — 



" The lives of all your lovicf;' complices 

 Leane-on your health, the which, if you give o'er 

 To stormy passion, must perforce decaj' ; " 



asking gravely how lives can decay, when Shakespeare 

 clearly speaks of Northumberland's health decaying. But 

 the greatest absurdity of all, in this connection, is Mr. 

 Donnelly's elaborate mystification in regard to the lines 



" Or what hath this bold enterprise bring forth, 

 More than this being which was like to be / " 



Of course, " bring " is a misprint for " brought " : the folio 

 is far from being so carefully printeil that that need astonish 

 us. But Mr. Donnelly says the line '• more than this being 

 which was like to be," reads like an extract from Mark 

 Twain's recent essay on " English as She is Taught." Yet, 

 even as Mr. Donnelly misquotes the line, it should perplex 

 no one. " What," asks Morton. " hath this bold enterprise 

 brought forth, more than this comlition of affairs which was 

 likely in any case to have come to pass 1 " It should be 

 noticed, by the way, that iu the folio the line runs — 

 " More then that Being, which was like to be ? " 



" Then " is equivalent to " than," and " that " slightly alters 

 the sen.-e ; but the point to be noticed chiefiy is that the 

 cajiital " B" marks the word " Being" as a noun (condition, 

 state of affairs), and not the participle for which Mr, 

 Donnelly has manifestly taken it. The comma, also, after 

 Being, makes the sense obvious. The meaning of the 

 passage should be clear, however, without this evidence 

 from the folio itself. 



With a lively imagination for the suggestion of im- 

 possibly ingenious cipher systems, and complete freedom 

 from such restraints as Shakespearean scholarship would 

 impose, Mr. Donnelly may read almost anything in the folio 

 edition of Shakespeare. He can make his own history of 

 Bacon's secret Shakespearean life, and find every item of it 

 in the plays as printed in that edition. I have little doubt 

 that in this w.ay he has found already, to his own satisfac- 

 tion, what wo\dd be most surprising if really regarded as 

 the work of Bacon. The first sentence lie ]iublicly claimed 

 to have read would of itself astound any one who had made 

 any acquaintance with Elizabethan literature. It begins, '* I 

 was in the greatest fear that they would say that the 

 image," &c. He might almost as reasonably have made 

 Bacon say, " It was too awfully awful to think that they 

 would say that," etc. Not a sentence published between the 

 years 1.550 and 1050, or even until later than 1750, re- 

 sembles in structure the sentence attributed by Mr. Donnelly 

 to Bacon, a master of the tersest stj'le of which the English 

 language is capable. Mr. Donnelly's marvellous first-fruit 

 was not only a sentence of purely nineteenth-century 

 English, but a very clumsy example even of that. 



Finally, Mr. Donnelly pretends to wonder that English- 

 men should be wroth with him for striving (as he puts it) 

 to pass tiie fame duo to the author of the plays from one 

 celebrated Englishman to another. The pretence is twofold. 

 No Englishman that I have ever heard of, and no American 

 of English descent (to whom Shakespeare's fame must be as 

 dear as to the native-born Englishman, since birthplace is 

 the merest accident), has ever viewed the Baconian theory 

 of Shakespeare's plays with an}' feeling resembling wrath. 

 A foolish fancy like that theory may provoke a smile, but 

 certainly no anger ; and our amusement can only be in- 

 tensified by such an amazingly absurd extension of the 



