No fact has been found incompatible with Bacon’s authorship of the “Sonnets.” The following line might seem to indicate a writer past the age of 29: “Although she knows my days are past the best.” But in 1599, when Shakspere was only 35, this very verse was published as his in the “Passionate Pilgrim,” where Sonnet 138 appears as number one. [27] But again, we have a letter written in 1592 by Bacon to his uncle, Lord Treasurer Burleigh, in which he says: “I wax somewhat ancient; one and thirty years is a great deal of sand in the hour-glass.” At the age of 31 he thinks himself “somewhat ancient” two years earlier he apprehends that forty winters will entirely deface the youthful Earl’s beauty; and to the lovely young widow he says: “My days are past the best.” This misconception therefore, whether pretended or real, becomes a strong proof of Bacon’s authorship. It has been boldly alleged by some that Bacon was no poet. Such, however, was not the judgment of his biographer, the late James Spedding. Before he could have heard it claimed that Shakspere did not write the plays he said that Bacon might have taken the highest rank as a poet. And that judgment was based upon the versification of a few Psalms by the old man on a sick bed. Since 1867 the substantial proofs of Bacon’s secret authorship have been adduced. Aside from innumerable parallels in the works of Bacon and Shakspere there is much external evidence. For example: We know that Bacon wrote Sonnets to Queen Elizabeth and excused himself by saying: “I profess not to be a poet.” We know that he composed Masques anonymously before Shakspere’s name appeared as a play writer, and that those Masques were essentially poetical compositions, in the nature of plays, and sometimes contained verses in rhyme equal in merit to the average of Shakspere’s. [28] In one of those Masques a speaker is made to say: “The monuments of wit survive the monuments of power; the verses of the poet endure without a syllable lost, while states and empires pass many periods.” Two years later, in 1596, the composer of that speech, writing to Sir Fulke Greville on his studies, said: “For poets I can commend none, being resolved to be ever a stranger to them.” Greville (1554-1628) was a poet, and wrote the life of Sir Philip Sidney. In 1603 Bacon wrote a private letter to the poet John Davies, begging him to speak a good word for the writer to the incoming King James I., and closing with these words: “So, desiring you to be good to _concealed poets_, I continue.” Bacon’s most intimate friend, Toby Matthew, in a letter with cancelled date, but as late as 1605, acknowledged the receipt of some work by Bacon, and added this postscript: “I will not return you weight for weight, but _Measure for Measure_.” “Mesur for Mesur,” by “Shaxberd,” was played before King James, at Whitehall, December 26, 1604.