In the year 1856 Lord Ellesmere, then President of the Shakspeare Society, received one day a little pamphlet bearing the at that time astounding title, “Was Lord Bacon the author of Shakspeare’s Plays?” The writer’s name was Smith. Mr. William Henry Smith, of 76 Harley Street, writer on Shakspeare, is the style he goes by in the Catalogue of the British Museum, to distinguish him from others of the name, whose works fill no less than eight volumes of that Catalogue, and have a special index all to themselves, thereby nobly confirming the truth of our Mr. Smith’s answer to some irreverent critics who had jested on his patronym, that it was “a name which some wise and many worthy men have borne—which though not unique, is perfectly genteel.” What Lord Ellesmere, either in his presidential or merely human capacity, thought of the pamphlet, we do not know; but Lord Palmerston (who had passed the threescore years then) is said to have declared himself convinced by it, though he is also said to have added that he cared not a jot who the author of the plays might have been provided he was an Englishman. By some of the critics poor Mr. Smith was very roughly handled, and what seems to have galled him most was an insinuation by Nathaniel Hawthorne (then at Liverpool as American Consul) that he had merely taken for his own the ideas of Miss Delia Bacon, whose book was not published till the year after Mr. Smith’s pamphlet, but of whose speculation some rumors had before that come “across the Atlantic wave.” This Mr. Smith (in his next publication, _Bacon and Shakspeare; an Inquiry touching Players, Playhouses, and Play-writers in the Days of Elizabeth_, 1857) most emphatically denied. He had never heard the name of Miss Bacon till he saw it in a review of his pamphlet: he could not for a long while find what or where she had written, and when he did so the alleged insinuation seemed to him too preposterous to be worth notice. Out of courtesy to Mr. Hawthorne, however, he made his denial public; Mr. Hawthorne returned the courtesy of acceptance, and so this part of the great Baconian controversy slept in peace. In 1866 appeared in New York, a book called _The Authorship of Shakspeare_, the work of a Mr. Nathaniel Holmes, which so enchanted Mr. Smith that he vowed “Providence had provided exactly the champion the cause required,” and that for him it remained only “to retire to the rear of this unexpected American contingent,” and to “make himself useful in the commissariat department.” This American book had, among its other striking merits, this unique one—of being such that no man could possibly quarrel with it. “If argument,” says Mr, Smith, “is ever to outweigh preconception and prejudice, the preponderance can only be in one direction”—perhaps the only judgment ever formulated by mortal man which it would be literally impossible to traverse. In this rearward position Mr. Smith modestly abode for eighteen years; but now—“now