Before I proceed to the obviously fair and conclusive test of applying the same numbers and the same method elsewhere, there are some reflections to be noted, which will occur spontaneously to almost every reader. In the first place, the cipher seems, like the man who claimed that he never borrowed the kettle, that he had returned it and that it was cracked when he borrowed it, to prove too much. If it led directly to important disclosures concerning the authorship of the plays or historical events of the time when they were written, and to these alone, it might lay claim to credibility. But this cipher, prepared by Bacon to prevent Shakespeare from stealing his laurels, requires the appropriation of page after page to describe minutely Shakespeare’s personal appearance. A glance at the sample printed will show how great the labor required to encase such a story, by mathematical rule, in the body of the plays. Yet this labor Bacon must have undergone, to tell the coming ages that “He,” Shakespeare, “is troubled with several dangerous diseases; he is subject to the gout in his great toe; and I hear moreover he hath fallen into a consumption.” The spectacle of Bacon, holding weary vigil to complete, at infinite labor, the cipher story, and devoting hours to the construction of a play in which the movement of the plot, the fate of the _personæ_ and the majesty of the dialogue should be unconsidered trifles, subordinated to the all-important infolded chronicle of the fact that Shakespeare had the gout in his great toe, is one for gods to weep at. Nor was this the limit of the Baconian genius. Complicated as is the work of reading this involved tale by the cipher’s help, it bears no comparison to the work of incorporating originally that story in the plays. To write the Donnelly memoirs first, and then so to write the dramas that each word of the one shall fit into its appropriate place in the other, by mathematical rule, would fall little short of miracle. From Archimedes to Olney, there has lived no man who would dare attempt this task. Admiration for Bacon the dramatist, is swallowed up in reverence for Bacon the mathematician, whose equal the world has never seen.