The first folio was printed from the acting versions in use by the company with which Shakespeare had been associated, and the editorial duties were undertaken by two of Shakespeare’s friends and fellow actors, whose motives rather than their literary fitness for the task call for commendation. It was dedicated to two noblemen, with whom, so far as we know, Bacon had no social or political intercourse. [Illustration] Mr. Theobald considers that Bacon’s “confident assurance of holding a lasting place in literature,” his anticipation of immortality, could only have been advanced by the man who voiced the same conviction in the Shakespeare _Sonnets_. The deduction is based on arbitrary conjecture, and a limited acquaintance with the literary conceits of the time. But Shakespeare claimed as his medium of immortality the language which Bacon predicted could not endure. “So long as men can breathe, or eyes can see-- So long lives this, and this gives life to Thee,” wrote Shakespeare. This was English, the purest and the sweetest that tongue ever uttered, and Bacon was dressing his thoughts in Latin that they might outlive the language which Shakespeare wrote. Ronsard and Desportes, in France, and in England, Drayton, Daniel, and, indeed, all the Elizabethan poets, had made the topic a commonplace. In his _Apologie for Poetrie_, Sir Philip Sidney wrote that it was the custom of poets “to tell you that they will make you immortal by their verses,” and both Shakespeare and Bacon adopted the current conceit when they referred to the “eternising” faculty of their literary effusions. It is not claimed by, or for, Bacon that he was the author of Drayton’s _Idea_ or Daniel’s _Delia_, but if Mr. Theobald’s style of reasoning is to be taken at his own valuation, the master of Gorhambury, and none other, was responsible for the poetic output of both these singers. _Bacon’s “Sterne and Tragicle History.”_