We must not judge a man’s whole intellectual character, and declare him to be incapable of poetry, on the score of a few legal papers about matters of business. Apparently Shakspere helped that Elizabethan Mr. Micawber, his father, out of a pecuniary slough of despond, in which the ex-High Bailiff of the town was floundering,—pursued by the distraint of one of the friendly family of Quiney—Adrian Quiney. They were neighbours and made a common dunghill in Henley Street. {171a} I do not, like Mr. Greenwood, see anything “at all out of the way” in the circumstance “that a man should be writing _Hamlet_, and at the same time bringing actions for petty sums lent on loan at some unspecified interest.” {171b} Nor do I see anything at all out of the way in Bacon’s prosecution of his friend and benefactor, Essex (1601), while Bacon was writing _Hamlet_. Indeed, Shakspere’s case is the less “out of the way” of the two. He wanted his loan to be repaid, and told his lawyer to bring an action. Bacon wanted to keep his head (of inestimable value) on his shoulders; or to keep his body out of the Tower; or he merely, as he declares, wanted to do his duty as a lawyer of the Crown. In any case, Bacon was in a tragic position almost unexampled; and was at once overwhelmed by work, and, one must suppose, by acute distress of mind, in the case of Essex. He must have felt this the more keenly, if, as some Baconians vow, _he wrote the Sonnets to Essex_. Whether he were writing his _Hamlet_ when engaged in Essex’s case (1601), or any other of his dramatic masterpieces, even this astonishing man must have been sorely bestead to combine so many branches of business.