But greater than any other conceivable interest is the association of the great Francis Bacon, Lord Verulam, Viscount St. Albans, with Gorhambury and St. Michael’s. Bacon, who in his sixty-five years of life studied law, and rose to be Lord Chancellor, was a sufficiently remarkable man. Not only was he a successful lawyer and a diligent courtier, a philosopher, and the industrious author of essays, historical works, and the _Advancement of Learning_, but wrote all the plays attributed to Shakespeare, Greene, and Christopher Marlowe, as we are asked by ingenious latter-day discoverers of cryptograms to believe. Nay, not only so, but a rival Columbus on the stormy sea of cryptogamic discovery has even found that Francis was not the son of Nicholas Bacon, but the unacknowledged offspring of Queen Elizabeth and the Earl of Leicester! This is startling, and lends an altogether novel interest to the statue of Bacon in the church, and the ruins of old Gorhambury House in the park. “Thus he sat,” runs the inscription beneath the statue, seated in philosophic abstraction in an arm-chair, and truly he looks wise enough for anything; but it was not serious wisdom alone that went towards the construction of Shakespeare’s plays. XVIII Leaving the city of St. Alban, the river Ver is crossed at Prae House, and continues companionable as far as Redbourne, where it disappears in another direction, in deference to the rise on which Redbourne is built. That old coaching village is a veritable jewel of quaintness in the Queen Anne and Georgian sort. Red-brick houses of those reigns, and wayside hostelries with elaborate signs of wrought iron that seem to await the coming of the coaches again, are the chief of Redbourne’s architectural features. Very conspicuous, although but the sign of a humble beer-house, is the pictorial sign of the “Mad Tom.” Painted on a large circular plate of copper, it hangs out from the frontage, displaying a different picture on each of its two sides:—the first showing “Mad Tom in Bedlam,” the second, “Mad Tom at Liberty.” A very old sign, it represents one of those pauper lunatics who, in other ages, were confined in Bethlem Hospital, and who, when sufficiently recovered to be released, were provided with “briefs,” or licences to beg a livelihood. These “Mad Toms,” as they were called, were once familiar figures upon the roads. [Illustration: MAD TOM IN BEDLAM] In the first picture, Tom is seen in a barred cell, madly clutching his hair: fetters load his arms and legs, and a loaf (a stale one, no doubt) stands on a bracket, and looks anything but appetising. The second scene shows him, gaily attired in white stockings and blue knee-breeches, with a gorgeous red coat and a still more gorgeous turban, walking the road and blowing a trumpet.