in the fact that in these pages at all events--the preface to the _Novum Organum_, printed in 1620, and in the Dedication of Spenser’s _Complaints_, printed in 1591--a bi-literal cipher exists, in both cases the work of Bacon; and if such a cipher really exists here, the probabilities are overwhelming that Mrs. Gallup is right, and that we shall find it existing in the first folio of Shakespeare also.” _Shakespeare and Bacon in Collaboration._ Bacon’s ciphers, which were, according to the evidence adduced from the bi-literal, six in number, grew one out of the other. Bacon evidently expected the bi-literal to be discovered first, for in this cipher he explains the word-cipher, in which his hidden, or “interiour” works are concealed. Dr. Owen discovered this word-cipher without the aid of the bi-literal, and by following its directions he has deciphered over a thousand pages of blank verse, comprising _Letters to the Decipherer_, _A Description of Queen Elizabeth_, a poem entitled _The Spanish Armada_, _An Account of Bacon’s Life in France_, and several plays. In the _Epistle to the Decipherer_, Bacon says, “For thirty-three years have we gone in travail, with these, the children of our wit,” and proceeds to adjure the unknown to “Sware by my sword never to speak of this That you have found while we do live;” and again-- “Sweare never to publish that we conceal under the names Of others our own till we are dead, Sweare never to reveal the secret cipher words That guide your steps from part to part, Nor how it is gathered, joined or put together, Till we be dead, so help you God!” The chief point to be noted about these cipher stories, biographies and plays is that they are built up of quotations from the works of all the authors whose writings Bacon claims to be his own. Dr. Owen asks us, in all seriousness, to believe that Bacon composed the plays of Shakespeare, Marlowe, Peel, and Greene, and the poems by Spenser, as they appear in the cipher translation, and that he subsequently “decomposed and composed them again” for circulation in his own day, under the names of the various authors who acted as his masques. “When deciphered and replaced in their original form,” Dr. Owen asserts, “they _mean something_ which they _do not_ in the plays.” Such a statement, as anyone can prove by turning to these curious deciphered books, is both fallacious and absurd. Let us see what these passages which _mean nothing_ in the plays mean in the cipher stories. The pledge which Hamlet imposes upon Horatio and Marcellus after the interview with the ghost is a serviceable case in point. Hamlet’s words are almost too familiar to need repeating: