All Bacon’s confessions, if true, prove him to have been a bastard, but this logical and inevitable conclusion he repeatedly denies. He claims his mother’s name, and for his father, a nobleman whose wife was living at the time of his bigamous marriage with Elizabeth. If the marriage was valid, why were Leicester and the Queen re-married at the house of Lord P., and in what year did the second ceremony take place? But although anti-Baconians maintain that Bacon was not a fool, and therefore could not have seriously advanced such claims; that if he had done so he would have made a more plausible story of his wrongs; that he was not a dunce, and therefore could not have written the “maudlin and illiterate drivel” attributed to him by Mrs. Gallup, it is still inconceivable that this cipher story is a gigantic fraud. Mr. Andrew Lang, who makes no doubt that Mrs. Gallup has honourably carried out her immense task of deciphering, has arrived at the conclusion that Bacon was obviously mad. _Bacon, the Author of all Elizabethan-Jacobean Literature._ But interesting as it is to find in Bacon yet another and hitherto an unsuspected pretender to the throne of England, his pretensions to the authorship of Shakespeare’s plays is a feature of even more dazzling interest. His reasons for denying the authorship while he lived have hitherto demanded a great deal of speculative explanation. The general theory of the Baconites is that Bacon concealed his authorship of the plays because such writing was held in low esteem, or as Mr. Sinnett puts it, Bacon “shrank from compromising his social reputation by any open connection with the despised vocation of the playwright.” The difficulty of accepting this assumption has hitherto been found in the fact that there was no reason why Bacon should have confined himself to the writing of plays. In the case of Shakespeare, it was quite understandable, for he was an actor, and the stage was his livelihood. Bacon, on the other hand, had no love for the theatre; he looked upon play-acting as a toy, and masques as things unworthy of serious observations. The tone of his comments is contemptuous, and his criticism discloses a lack of knowledge and interest in the subject. Why should this man, who regarded the stage with ill-concealed repugnance, have written plays which he was ashamed to own, while all imaginative literature was open to him. The stigma which it is erroneously alleged was attached to play-writing was not associated with poetry; if the playwright was under a ban, the poet was on the pedestal. There must have been a more tangible reason for Bacon’s concealment, but we have had to wait for Mrs. Gallup’s book to disclose it. Bacon’s object in writing was to unfold the secrets of his birth and to ventilate his wrongs; he chose plays as his medium because, like Mr. George Bernard Shaw, he found blank verse easier to write than prose. He employed the pseudonyms of Greene and Peele, and the pen name