386 A Century of Science 



pitch upon Bacon as the writer of " Twelfth Night " 

 or " Romeo and Juliet " is about as sensible as to 

 assert that " David Copperfield " must have been 

 written by Charles Darwin. After a familiar ac- 

 quaintance of more than forty years with Shake- 

 speare's works, of nearly forty years with Bacon's, 

 the two men impress me as simply antipodal one 

 to the other. A similar feeling was entertained 

 by the late Mr. Spedding, the biographer and edi- 

 tor of Bacon ; and no one has more happily hit off 

 the vagaries of the Baconizers than the foremost 

 Bacon scholar now living, Dr. Kuno Fischer, in his 

 recent address before the Shakespeare Society at 

 Weimar. 1 I used to wonder whether the Bacon- 

 Shakespeare people really knew anything about 

 Bacon, and, now that chance has led me to read 

 their books, I am quite sure they do not. To their 

 minds, his works are simply a storehouse of texts 

 which serve them for controversial missiles, very 

 much as scattered texts from the Bible used to 

 serve our uncritical grandfathers. 



Francis Bacon was one of the most interesting 

 persons of his time, and, as is often the case with 

 such many-sided characters, posterity has held vari- 

 ous opinions about him. On the one hand, his 

 fame has grown brighter with the years ; on the 



1 Fischer, Shakespeare und die Bacon Mythen, Heidelberg, 1895. 



