Dr. N. H. Hudson, in his _Shakespeare: His Life, Art, and Character_, has on the Baconian theory four things to say:--1. Bacon’s requital of the Earl’s bounty (the Earl of Essex) was such a piece of ingratitude as I can hardly conceive the author of _King Lear_ to have been guilty of. 2. The author of Shakespeare’s plays, whatever he may have been, certainly was not a scholar. He had certainly something far better than learning, but he had not that. 3. Shakespeare never philosophises. Bacon never does anything else. 4. Bacon’s mind, great as it was, might have been cut out of Shakespeare’s without being missed. But if, in the absence of anything bearing an even remote resemblance to proof, we find ourselves compelled to make a synopsis of expert opinion on the subject, we shall find no man’s conclusions more deserving of respect and acceptance than those of the late James Spedding. Without intending to cast any reflection upon the critics and others who have plunged with ebullient enthusiasm into this controversy, it may not be out of place to point out that Spedding is head and shoulders above all disputants in knowledge, and second to none in critical ability. His knowledge of Shakespeare was intimate and profound, and he knew his Bacon more thoroughly than it has been the lot of any other man of letters to be known by his fellow man. He gave up his position in the Colonial Office, and declined the position of Under-Secretary of State, with £2,000 a year, in order to devote his whole time to the study of the life and works of Lord Bacon--a task which occupied him for nearly thirty years. Sir Henry Taylor, in a letter to a friend in 1861, wrote as follows:--“I have been reading Spedding’s _Life and Letters of Lord Bacon_ with profound interest and admiration--admiration not of the perfect style and penetrating judgment only, but also of the extraordinary labours bestowed upon the works by a lazy man; the labour of some twenty years, I believe, spent in rummaging among old records in all places they were to be found, and collating different copies of manuscripts written in the handwriting of the 16th century, and noting the minutest variations of one from another--an inexpressibly tedious kind of drudgery, and, what was, perhaps, still worse, searching far and wide, waiting, watching, peering, prying through long years for records which no industry could recover. I doubt whether there be any other example in literary history of so large an intellect as Spedding’s devoting itself, with so much self-sacrifice, to the illustration of one which was larger still, and doing so out of reverence, not so much for that largest intellect, as for the truth concerning it.” Sir Henry Taylor, in this passage, not only does justice to the diligence and genius of the author, but recognises the spirit in which the work was undertaken. Spedding spent thirty years in quest of the truth concerning this remarkable man,