Everybody knows that Bacon, “for some time after his condemnation, expected to resume his ordinary functions as counsellor to Parliament, and adviser to the King”--_ergo_ Lucrece was Bacon’s prototype--in petticoats. Moreover, in the _Essays_, Bacon affixes to a meditative reflection in one of his philosophical propositions the phrase, “I cannot tell.” The same phrase, scarcely remarkable in itself, occurs several times in the Plays. Mr. Theobald devotes a whole chapter of his book to emphasising this remarkable coincidence. He advances pages of historical parallels, and he remarks, almost enthusiastically, that both Shakespeare and Bacon have dilated with pitiless logic on “the uselessness of hope.” [Illustration: ROBERT DUDLEY, EARL OF LEICESTER. From an original painting in the possession of The Marquis of Salisbury.] But Mr. Theobald is most amusing when he compares Bacon’s _Essay of Love_ with the treatment of Love in Shakespeare. We know Bacon’s opinion of love, as expressed in the _Essay_, and we find it difficult to reconcile it with the rhapsodies that we find in the Plays; we remember _Romeo and Juliet_, and the exquisite comment, “Imagine Juliet as the party, loved”--or, rather, we should do so, if Mr. Theobald was not at our elbow to explain the apparent contradiction in thought and term. Love, it would appear, has two sides. There is the “bosom” side, and the business side. Here we have a full and convincing explanation of the difference between the views of love as expressed in the _Essay_, and the Shakespearean application of the sentiment as displayed in his dramas. In the Plays, Bacon regarded love from the “bosom” point of view, while in the _Essay_, the “very brief, very aphoristic, very concentrated, never discoursive or rhetorical, but severely reflective and practical essay,” he was dealing with Juliet as a “business” detail--a contracting party, in short--“the party loved.” Nothing could be more convincing! It would almost lead us to entertain a greater admiration for Bacon than Spedding could hope for. He has not only voiced two such entirely contradictory views of love as we find in the _Essay_ of Bacon and the plays of Shakespeare, but he has, with the aid of Mr. Theobald, showed that, “curiously enough,” the two conflicting expressions are “significantly identical.” There is surely no need to proceed further. Mr. Theobald has proved his contention, and we must perforce accept his conclusions that Shakespeare, the arch-impostor, the champion literary fraud of all time, was “either entirely uneducated, or very imperfectly educated; that his Latin was small, his Greek less, and his pure English least of all; that such handwriting as his could never have figured on a University examination paper--this is the opinion, it will be observed, of an M.A., and a former editor of _The Bacon Journal_--that his whole life was too full of business, too much devoted to money to leave any