that all-pervading reason that informs them--one who is able to reclaim them, even now, 'cured and perfected in their limbs, and absolute in full numbers as he conceived them!'" Long before its appearance, as we shall proceed to narrate; and still longer before the world had well opened its eyes to the fact that a formidable anti-Shakespearean proposition had been asserted, its author had left the proposition itself leagues behind, and was well along on her route to the fountain-head of its inspiration. The problem she proposed to herself was not, "Did Bacon and others write the plays?" but "Why did Bacon and others write the plays under the name of William Shakespeare?" As the fruit of laborious study of the system and structure of the plays, she reached the answer--as she believed, and lived and died believing--hidden and embalmed in the masterpiece of them all, the tragedy of "Hamlet." "Hamlet," she maintained, was the master-key that unlocked the whole magnificent system. They were not plays, but chapters in a great Treatise--links in a great chain of philosophy--a new philosophy of politics and of life; and, just as the Lord Hamlet caused certain strolling players, with the set speech he put into their mouths, to "catch the conscience of the king," so had the greatest mind of all the golden age put into the mouths of the vagabond Shakespeare and his crew the truth which should, in the fullness of time, catch the conscience of the whole world. But why should these great minds have chosen to put their philosophy into enigmas and ciphers? Miss Bacon's answer was convincing: "It was the time when the cipher, in which one could {191}write 'omnia per omnia,' was in request; when even 'wheel ciphers' and 'doubles' were thought not unworthy of philosophic notice. It was a time, too, when the phonographic art was cultivated and put to other uses than at present, and when a nomme de plume was required for other purposes than to serve as the refuge of an author's modesty, or vanity, or caprice. It was a time when puns, and charades, and enigmas, and anagrams, and monograms, and ciphers, and puzzles were not mere sport and child's play; when they had need to be close and solvable only to those _who should_ solve them. It was a time when all the latent capacities of the English language were put in requisition, and it was flashing and crackling through all its length and breadth, with puns and quips and conceits and jokes and satires, and inlined with philosophic secrets that opened down into the bottom of a tomb, that opened into the Tower, that opened on the scaffold and the block." * This was the "Delia Bacon theory." This was the "madness" forever associated with her plaintive story, and _not_ the proposition that the author of the plays (whoever he might be--or they, if more than one) and William Shakespeare were persons--as distinctly two as were the noble Hamlet and the poor player who played "Gonzago" in the "Mousetrap" that day before the