"It is passing strange that something like three centuries should have been allowed to elapse before the tailor's handiwork should have been appealed to in this particular manner. "The special point is that in what is known as the authentic portrait of William Shakespeare, which appears in the Celebrated first Folio edition, published in 1623, a remarkable sartorial puzzle is apparent. "The tunic, coat, or whatever the garment may have been called at the time, is so strangely illustrated that the right-hand side of the forepart is obviously the left-hand side of the back part; and so gives a harlequin appearance to the figure, which it is not unnatural to assume was intentional, and done with express object and purpose. "Anyhow, it is pretty safe to say that if a Referendum of the trade was taken on the question whether the two illustrations shown above [exactly as our illustration on page 2] represent the foreparts of the same garment, the polling would give an unanimous vote in the negative." Facing the title page of the 1623 first Folio of the plays, on which the stuffed and masked dummy appears, is the following description (of which I give a photo-facsimile), which, as it is signed B. I., is usually ascribed to Ben Jonson:--= `````To the Reader. ```This Figure, that thou here seest pur, ````It was for gentle Shackspeare cut; ```Wherein the Grauer had a strife ````with Nature, to out-doo the life: ```O, could he but haue drawne his wit ````As well in brasse, as he hath hit ```His face, the Print would then surpasse ````All, that was cuer writ in brasse. ```But, since he cannot, Reader, lookc ````Not on his Picture, but his Booke. `````B.I.= [Illustration: 0011] If my readers will count all the letters in the above, including the four v's, which are used instead of the two w's, they will find that there are 287 letters, a masonic number often repeated throughout the Folio. My book, "Bacon is Shakespeare," was published in 1910 (i.e., 287 years after 1623), and tells for the first time the true meaning of these lines. B. I. never calls the ridiculous dummy a portrait, but describes it as "the Figure," "put for" (i.e., instead of), and as "the Print," and as "his Picture," and he distinctly tells us to look not at his (ridiculous) Picture, but (only) at his Booke. It has always been a puzzle to students who read these verses why B. I. lavished such extravagant praise upon what looks so stiff and wooden a figure, about which Gainsborough, writing in 1768, says: "Damn the original picture of him... for I think a stupider face I never beheld except D... k's... it is impossible that such a mind and ray of heaven, could shine with such a face and pair of eyes."