Mr. Theobald is scarcely complimentary to Shakespeare’s champions in this controversy, but his language is positively libellous when he refers to Shakespeare himself. His personality is “small and insignificant;”--he is a “shrunken, sordid soul, fattening on beer, and coin, and finding sweetness and content in the _stercorarium_ of his Stratford homestead”--a “feeble, and funny, and most ridiculous mouse.” Mr. Theobald almost argues himself not a Baconian by his assertion that “no Baconian, so far as I know, seeks to help his cause by personal abuse, or intolerant and wrathful speech.” _Was Shakespeare the “Upstart Crow?”_ All that we can allege with any certainty about Shakespeare, between 1586 and 1602, is that he must have obtained employment at one or other of the only two theatres existing in London at that time (The Theatre, and The Curtain)--perhaps, as Malone has recorded, in the capacity of call-boy--that he became an actor, was employed in polishing up the stock-plays presented by the Company, and that _Love’s Labour’s Lost_ was produced in the Spring of 1591. Assuming that Shakespeare was the author of this play--assuming, that is to say, that Ben Jonson, John Heming, and Henry Condell were neither arrant fools, nor wilful perjurers--it is evident that the “insignificant,” “shrunken, sordid soul,” “this ridiculous mouse” had education, application, a natural taste for the stage; and what is more--and more than Mr. Theobald can comprehend--he had genius. Mr. Theobald does not arrive at any such conclusion. Apart altogether from Mrs. Gallup’s cipher revelations, he is convinced by another “flash of intuition” that Ben Jonson was a fellow conspirator with Bacon in the ridiculous plot of foisting Bacon’s plays upon the world as the work of Shakespeare, and that Heming and Condell were but the tools of the disgraced Lord Chancellor.