We cannot conclude without offering to Mr. Smith, in all humility, a little theory of our own, vague as yet and unsubstantial, but worth, we do venture to think, his consideration or the consideration of anybody who is in want of a theory to sport with. This is, that these plays, or at any rate a considerable number of them, were really and truly written by Walter Raleigh. We have not as yet had time to examine this theory very closely, or (like Mr. Smith with his) to find very much evidence in support of it. But of what we have done in that direction we freely make him a present. The following plays were all produced after the year 1603, the year when Raleigh was sent to the Tower for his alleged share in the Cobham plot:—_Othello_, _Measure for Measure_, _Lear_, _Pericles_, _Antony and Cleopatra_, _Macbeth_, _Cymbeline_, _Winter’s Tale_, _Tempest_, _Henry VIII._, _Taming of the Shrew_. It has been allowed on Mr. Smith’s side that Bacon, amid all his variety of business, both public and private, must have been very hard put to it to find the mere time to write the plays. No man of that age could have had at that time so much leisure on his hands as Raleigh. But that is not all. In the ninth chapter of his _Instructions to his Son_, on the inconveniences arising from the immoderate use of wine, is a passage which might almost be described as a paraphrase of Cassio’s famous discourse on the same subject. Nor is this all. Raleigh had been in the Tower before, in 1592, on a rather delicate matter, in which Mistress Throckmorton, afterward Lady Raleigh, had a share. The injustice of his second imprisonment would naturally recall the first to his mind, equally or still more unjust as he probably thought. To the second he would hardly dare to allude; but what was more likely than that he should find a sort of melancholy pleasure in recalling the first? Now, if Mr. Smith will turn to the second scene of the first act of _Measure for Measure_ (first acted in December 1604, and written therefore in the first year of Raleigh’s imprisonment), he will find an allusion to the unfortunate cause of his first disgrace obvious to the dullest comprehension. The apparently no less obvious allusion in _Twelfth Night_ to Cole’s brutality at Raleigh’s trial cannot, unfortunately, stand, as we know for certain from John Manningham’s Diary that the comedy was played in the Middle Temple Hall in the previous year. But from such evidence as we have given (and, did time and space serve we could add to it) we think a very good case could be made out for Raleigh, and we commend the making of it to Mr. Smith, who seems to have plenty of time to spare on such matters. At any rate if he will not have Shakspeare for the author of these plays, he must really now begin to think of getting some other Simon Pure than Bacon, if within a quarter of a century and more he has been able to find no better warranty for his theory than that he has given us. But we must