If we are to accept the Baconian opinion of Shakespeare it is difficult to understand how Bacon came to allow him to make a successful application on behalf of his father, John Shakespeare, to the College of Heralds for a grant of arms in 1597. Bacon was an aristocrat and a firm believer in his order. If he knew Shakespeare to be a notoriously ill-educated actor, a man little better than a vagabond, an impostor, a villain with “some humour,” whom Bacon employed as the original model for Sir John Falstaffe and Sir Toe-be--as Mr. Harold Bayley states--why did he not prevent his intimate friend, the Earl of Essex, the Earl of Southampton, and William Camden, the great scholar and antiquary, from being hoaxed by this impudent rogue, and prevent the Shakespeares from obtaining the desired grant? These three friends of Shakespeare certainly facilitated the proceedings. _Mr. Theobald’s Parallels and Mr. Bayley’s Conclusions._ When Mr. Theobald gets away from his biographical pabulum and plunges into the literary arguments for Bacon’s authorship of the plays, he has little that is original to reveal, but much that is new in the way of parallels and coincidences. In the first place, he takes it for granted that Shakespeare could not, by any possibility, have written the plays. He does not prove it, but--_cela va sans dire_. Then he proceeds, to the extent of some four hundred pages of matter, to demonstrate, by reference to the significant Baconian characteristics in the plays, and the still more significant parallels between the poetry of Shakespeare and the philosophy of Bacon, that Bacon must be the author of both. Bacon, for instance, appears to have had a “very curious habit” of striking himself on the breast when he wished to emphasise an argument. Brutus, Ophelia, Clarence’s little boy, and Claudio, are all represented as using a similar gesture. Some such lamentations as Bacon may be supposed to have uttered after his fall, are to be found in _King Lear_, and Lucrece’s self-condemnation of herself to death for an offence of which she is entirely innocent is, of course, inspired by Bacon’s behaviour in making a full and humble submission to the Lords in respect of offences which he never committed. The mere fact that _Lucrece_ was published in 1594, and that Bacon’s downfall did not take place until 1621, is a point of no moment--we can readily agree with Mr. Theobald that “there is a very curious reflection of Bacon’s character and temperament in the poem of _Lucrece_.” Lucrece absolves herself in the reflection, “The poison’d fountain clears itself again, And why not I from this compelled stain?”