The Shakespeare-Bacon controversy was first touched upon by J. C. Hart in _The Romance of Yachting_, issued in New York in 1848. Seven years later W. H. Smith came out with a work, _Was Bacon the Author of Shakespeare's Plays?_ In 1857 Delia Bacon wrote the _Philosophy of the Plays of Shakespeare Unfolded_. She created a great furore for a time in England but interest soon declined. In recent years the principal defender of the theory that Bacon wrote the plays of Shakespeare was Ignatius Donnelly of Minneapolis, who wrote two huge books in which he developed at tedious length what he claimed was a cipher or cryptogram that he had found in Shakespeare's plays, but he died before he cleared up the mystery or gave any adequate proofs. GREEK AND ROMAN CLASSICS The versions of Homer's _Iliad_ and _Odyssey_ are numerous but most readers who do not know Greek prefer the prose rendering of the _Iliad_ by Lang, Leaf and Myers and the prose version of the _Odyssey_ by Butcher and Lang. In language that is almost Biblical in its force and simplicity these scholars give far more of the spirit of the original Greek than any of the translators in verse. Chapman's Homer is known today only through the noble sonnet by Keats. It has fine passages but it is unreadable. Cowper's Homer in blank verse is also intolerably dull. The best blank verse translations are by Lord Derby, William Cullen Bryant and Christopher P. Cranch. For supplementary reading on Homer these works will be found valuable: Jebb, _Introduction to Homer_ (Glasgow, 1887); Matthew Arnold, _Lectures on Translating Homer_; Andrew Lang, _Homer and the Epic_ (London, 1893); Seymour, _Introduction to the Language and Verse of Homer_ (Boston, 1889); Professor J. P. Mahaffy's books on ancient Greece and Greek life will be found helpful. Virgil's _AEneid_ has been translated by many hands. Dryden produced a fair version and William Morris, Cranch, Conington and others have written excellent translations. Conington furnished a good translation in prose. Jowett's translation is the standard English version of Plato, while good sidelights on the author of the _Republic_ and _Phaedo_ may be gained from Emerson's essay on Plato in _Representative Men_ and from Walter Pater's _Plato and Platonism_. Professor A. J. Church's _The Story of the Iliad_ and _The Story of the AEneid_ while intended for the young will appeal to many mature readers.