In the foregoing pages, Bacon’s character, and the incidents in his life have, it may be objected, been dealt with in a harsh and unsympathetic manner. Yet the facts set down are matters of history, and I claim for the comments, and the conclusions derived therefrom, that they are neither misleading nor exaggerated. It has been my endeavour to show that, while all that we know of Bacon’s private life and his public career--the evidence of his deeds, his sentiments, his prose, and his verse--prove him to have been a man incapable of conceiving the poetry of the Plays, there is nothing in the life of Shakespeare, when freed of the miserable misrepresentations and baseless accusations introduced by his traducers, which makes it difficult for us to regard him as the rightful author. One thing we must recognise in the writer of the greatest poetry of all times--his genius. We cannot argue that Shakespeare had genius--and, therefore, he wrote the plays--but we may transpose the argument and declare that Shakespeare wrote the plays, and therefore he had genius. But, cries the Baconian, Bacon also possessed genius. The fact is incontrovertible. His genius inspired him to draw up the scheme of his _Magna Instauratio_, to write his _Essays_, to invent a new philosophy, and a most ingenious cipher, but it did not prevent him from composing some miserably poor verses or enable him to discern the singular absence of merit in his metrical effusions. There is not a single “literary” argument of the hundreds put forward in support of Bacon’s claims to the authorship of the Plays which has validity, or even plausibility, to recommend it. There is not a single argument of the hundreds that have been advanced to deprive Shakespeare of his mantle which can stand the test of investigation. Carlyle declared Bacon to be as incapable of writing _Hamlet_ as of making this planet. Spedding, who devoted thirty years of his life to the study of Bacon, emphatically asserts that, “if there were any reason for supposing that somebody else was the real author (of Shakespeare), I think I am in a condition to say that, whoever it was, it was not Bacon.” We know that Shakespeare put the plays on the stage, and acted in them, and that his intimate friends, his fellow actors, and the public, believed him to be the writer. We know, too, that Bacon had a distaste, if not a contempt, for the stage; that his lifelong complaint was his inability to secure time for his philosophic studies. To sum up in a sentence, it may be said that there is no reason to suppose that Bacon was the author of the Plays, while there is every reason to believe that he was not; and with respect to Shakespeare, there is no reason to believe he was not what he claimed to be, and there is tradition, the testimony of all who had the best means of knowing, to prove that he was.