370 A Century of Science 



ship? Reasoning after the manner of the Delia- 

 Baconians, we may safely say that he could not 

 possibly have accumulated the learning which is 

 shown in his plays : therefore he could not have 

 written those plays; therefore Lord Bacon must 

 have written them ! There are daring soarers in 

 the empyrean who do not shrink from this conclu- 

 sion ; a doctor in Michigan, named Owen, has pub- 

 lished a pamphlet to prove, among other things, 

 that Bacon was the author of the plays which were 

 performed and printed as Jonson's. 



To return to Shakespeare. Somewhere about 

 1585, when he was one-and-twenty, he went to 

 London, leaving his wife and three young children 

 at Stratford. His father had lost money, and the 

 fortunes of the family were at the lowest ebb. In 

 London we lose sight of Shakespeare for a while, 

 just as we lose sight of Jonson, until literary works 

 appear. The work first published is " Venus and 

 Adonis," one of the most exquisite pieces of dic- 

 tion in the English language. It was dedicated to 

 Henry, Earl of Southampton, by William Shake- 

 speare, whose authorship of the poem is asserted as 

 distinctly as the title-page of " David Copperfield " 

 proclaims that novel to be by Charles Dickens, yet 

 some precious critics assure us that Shakespeare 

 "could not" have written the poem, and never 



