in an author to the creation of his brain, and the full owner of a MS. copy of any literary composition was entitled to reproduce it, or to treat it as he pleased, without reference to the author’s wishes. Thomas Thorpe, and the other pirates of the period, were always on the look-out for written copies of plays and poems for publication in this manner. All Shakespeare’s plays that appeared in print were issued without his authority, and, in several instances, against his expressed wish. How did Thorpe and his tribe obtain possession of the manuscripts of _King Lear_, _Henry V._, _Pericles_, _Hamlet_, _Titus Andronicus_, and the rest of the sixteen plays which were in print at the date of the author’s death? If we knew for certain that Shakespeare and Bacon were on terms of intimacy, it would be a justifiable conjecture to suppose that the latter might have had a hand in the business, but if the existence of the cipher in these pirated quartos is verified, we may be quite sure that Bacon was the publishers’ accessory in securing the MSS. for publication. It is, however, more difficult to satisfactorily explain the claim of Bacon to the authorship of the _Anatomy of Melancholy_. The first edition, in quarto form, was published in 1621; the cipher appears in the folio that was issued in 1628. In the preface to this edition, the author announces that he will make no more changes in his work: “I will not hereafter add, alter, or retract; I have done.” What do we gather from that, Mrs. Gallup may ask?--surely that Bacon felt his strength failing when he wrote those words; he certainly did not live to see the book through the press. But the fact remains that four more editions were published within Burton’s lifetime, each with successive alterations and additions. The final form of the book was the sixth edition (1651-52), printed from an annotated copy given just before Burton’s death to the publisher, Henry Cripps, who gained, Anthony à Wood tells us, great profits out of the book. This is one of the points upon which we shall hope to hear from Mrs. Gallup. In this 1628 folio of the _Anatomy of Melancholy_, Mrs. Gallup has deciphered some ninety pages of a partial translation of Homer’s _Iliad_. But on comparing this translation with that of Alexander Pope, written about a century later, it becomes clear that it is not taken from the original Greek of Homer, but is, in fact, a prose rendering of Pope’s version. But Mrs. Gallup in a letter to the _Times_, which appears as these pages are going through the press, declares that an examination of six different English translations of the _Iliad_, and one Latin, shows her such substantial accord that either of them could be called with equal justice a paraphrase of Pope, or that Pope had copied from the others. [Illustration: THE “WHEEL” (IMPROVISED FOR READY REFERENCE), USED BY Dr. OWEN IN DECIPHERING SIR FRANCIS BACON’S CIPHER WRITINGS.