“That honour must to earth’s final morn yet follow him, but al fame won from th’ authorshippe (supposed) of our plays must in good time--after our owne worke, putting away its vayling disguises, standeth forth as you (the decipherer) only know it--bee yeelded to us.” If Mr. Mallock reposes any confidence in his Bacon--according to Mrs. Gallup--he must at once withdraw his description of Shakespeare as a “notoriously ill-educated actor.” Bacon himself, in the foregoing, acknowledges that Will Shakespeare derived a well-won reputation and honours by acting in his dramas. At the same time Bacon is confident that the dramas will win for him, as author, “supremest, crowning, and unfading glory.” Here, almost at the outset of these cipher revelations, we are met by a passage, plausible in itself, but which, read in the light of our knowledge of Bacon’s doubts upon the permanency of the English language, calls for careful consideration. Bacon rested his fame upon his Latin writings. He wrote always for the appreciation of posterity. As he advanced in years, he appears, says Abbott, to have been more and more impressed with the hopelessness of any expectations of lasting fame or usefulness based upon English books. He believed implicitly that posterity would not preserve works written in the modern languages--“for these modern languages will at one time or other play the bank-rowtes (bankrupts) with books.” Of his Latin translation of the _Advancement of Learning_, he said, “It is a book I think will live, and be a citizen of the world, as English books will not,” and he predicted that the Latin volume of his _Essays_ would “last as long as books shall last.” So confident was he that his writings would achieve immortality, that he dedicated his _Advancement of Learning_ to the King, in order that the virtues and mental qualities of his Majesty might be handed down to succeeding ages in “some solid work, fixed memorial, and immortal monument.” Bacon’s pride in his work was monumental, his “grasp on futurity” was conceived in a spirit of “magnificent audacity;” every scrap of his writings was jealously preserved and robed in the time-resisting garments of a dead language. Is it conceivable in this magnificent egoist that he should have displayed such gross carelessness, such wanton unconcern in his plays that, but for the labours of a couple of actors in collecting and arranging them, they would have been utterly lost? It is simply incredible that Bacon should have based his anticipation of immortality upon plays which for years were tossed about the world in pirated and mutilated editions, and in many instances, until the issue of the first folio in 1623, existed only in the form of the actor’s prompt books. The sixteen plays, in quarto, which were in print in 1616, were published without the co-operation of the author. They were to win for their author unfading glory, yet he was at no pains to collect them.