Another famous fraud of a wholly different kind was that of J. P. Collier. The great services which this man has rendered to the world of scholarship make {212} all men reluctant to pass too severe censure on his conduct; but it is only fair that the public should be warned against deception. He pretended to have found a folio copy of the plays corrected and revised on the margin in the handwriting of a contemporary of Shakespeare. Some of these revisions were actual improvements on the carelessly printed text; but it is now known that they were forgeries. Similar changes were made by him in other important documents, and were for some time accepted as genuine. +The Bacon Controversy+.--During the latter part of the nineteenth century, the contention was started that Shakespeare was merely an obscure actor who never wrote a line, and that the Shakespearean plays were actually written by his great contemporary, Francis Bacon, who was pleased to let these products of his own genius appear under the name of another man. This delusion is usually considered as beginning with an article by Miss Delia Bacon in _Putnam's Monthly_ (January, 1856), although the idea had been twice suggested during the eight years preceding. The Baconian arguments fall into four groups. First, they argue that there is no proof to establish the identity of Shakespeare, the actor, with the author of the plays. This is untrue. We have more than one reference by his contemporaries, identifying the actor with the poet, some so strong that the Baconians themselves can explain them away only by assuming that the writer is speaking in irony or that he willfully deceives the public. By assumptions like that, any one could prove anything. The second point of the Baconians is that a man of {213} Shakespeare's limited education could not have written plays replete with so many kinds of learning. This argument is weak at both ends. It assumes as true that Shakespeare had a limited education and that his plays are full of knowledge learned from books rather than from life. The first of these points rests on vague tradition only, and the second is still a debatable question. But even if we admit these two points, what then? Shakespeare was twenty-nine years old and had probably lived in London for five or six years when the first book from his hand appeared in its present form. Any man capable of writing _Hamlet_ could educate himself during several years in the heart of a great city. Thirdly, a certain lady found in Bacon's writings a large number of expressions which seemed to her to resemble similar phrases in Shakespeare. Except to the mind of an ardent Baconian many of these show no likeness whatever. Most of those which do show any likeness were proverbial or stock expressions which can be found in other writers.