“The future world poet was twenty-four years old when the Spanish Armada was harried down the English channel by the little ships of Drake and Frobisher. He had already come up to London, and perhaps he heard the guns. Anyhow, all England knew that the pope had by formal decree turned over their country to be a vassal of Spain; they knew that King Philip was preparing against them the most powerful fleet in history. They waited, in just such an agony of suspense as we knew during the long struggle in France. And just as Æschylus was inspired by the battle of Marathon to write Greek patriotic propaganda, so Shakespeare was inspired by the defeat of the Armada to write English patriotic propaganda. Now, in weighing the value of that propaganda, we have to judge the society in which Shakespeare lived, the balance of democratic and aristocratic forces, of progress and reaction it contained. We can’t do that without a theory of political evolution--” “I’ll tell you what you do,” says Mrs. Ogi. “You start in and tell us some facts about Shakespeare’s plays, and what’s in them, and work in your theory of political evolution as you go along. Then, as I go along, I’ll take a pencil and mark most of it out!” CHAPTER XXXIV PHOSPHORESCENCE AND DECAY A few months ago I had the pleasure of spending twenty-four hours with a Chicago millionaire who specializes in knowing all there is to know on the subject of ciphers. During the war he gave our army practically all its information on this subject; so precious was his knowledge that, for fear the enemy might get him, he was kept for a year and a half locked up in the fire-proof, bomb-proof, burglar-proof and bullet-proof vault where his books and manuscripts are preserved. Sitting in this vault, the owner showed me the greatest collection of Bacon and Shakespeare first editions in America. For several hours he pointed out the ciphers in these editions, and coming home on the train I read the narrative which is hidden in these ciphers, the secret life of Francis Bacon, Lord Verulam, wherein he claims to have been a natural son of Queen Elizabeth, and the author of most of the plays attributed to William Shakespeare. It seems strange that one has to learn about these things in French; but so it stands, in a series of articles by General Cartier, published in the “Mercure de France,” September, 1922.