The Bacon- Shakespeare Folly 389 



and Leibnitz simply shows that one has no real 

 knowledge of the work which such men have done. 



So much for Bacon himself. With regard to 

 him as possible author of the Shakespeare poems 

 and plays, it is difficult to imagine so learned 

 a scholar making the kind of mistakes that abound 

 in those writings. Bacon would hardly have in- 

 troduced clocks into the Rome of Julius Caesar ; 

 nor would he have made Hector quote Aristo- 

 tle, nor Hamlet study at the University of Wit- 

 tenberg, founded five hundred years after Hamlet's 

 time ; nor would he have put pistols into the age 

 of Henry IV., nor cannon into the age of King 

 John ; and we may be pretty sure that he would 

 not have made one of the characters in " King 

 Lear" talk about Turks and Bedlam. In this 

 severely realistic age of ours, writers are more 011 

 their guard against such anachronisms than they 

 were in Shakespeare's time ; in his works we can- 

 not call them serious blemishes, for they do not 

 affect the artistic character of the plays, but they 

 are certainly such mistakes as a scholar like Bacon 

 would not have committed. 



Deeper down lies the contrast involved in the 

 fact that Bacon was in a high degree a subjective 

 writer, from whom you are perpetually getting 

 revelations of his idiosyncrasies and moods, whereas 



