** Id. Delia Bacon was born in New Haven, in 1811, and early devoted herself to literature, writing two works "The Tales of the Puritans" and "The Bride of Fort Edward." She soon, however, abandoned miscellaneous writing and adopted the profession of a student and teacher of history, and began her career as a lecturer on history in the city of Boston. Her method was original with herself. She had models, charts, maps, and pictures to illustrate her subject; and we are told by Mrs. Farrar ("Recollections of Seventy Years," Boston, Ticknor & Fields, 1866) that, being of a commanding presence and elegant delivery, she was successful and attracted large audiences. Mrs. Farrar says, "She looked like one of Dante's sibyls, and spoke like an angel." The original manu{193}scripts of the plays she did not expect to find there. These she believed the ignorant Shakespeare to have scattered, after the blotless copies for the players had been taken; to have devoted to domestic purposes, or to have never concerned himself about farther. This was the gravamen of the charge she brought against "Lord Leicester's groom," the co-manager, late of Stratford, and this the vandalism for which she never could forgive him. "This fellow," she cried, "never cared a farthing for them, but only for his gains at their hands.... What is to hinder his boiling his kettle with the manuscripts... after he had done with them? He had those manuscripts--the original Hamlet, with its last finish;... the original Lear, with his own fine readings... he had them all--pointed, emphasized, corrected, as they came from the gods! And he has left us to wear out our youth and squander our life in poring over and setting right the old garbled copies of the play-house!... For is he not a private, economical, practical man, this Shakespeare of ours, with no stuff and nonsense about him; a plain, true-blooded Englishman, who minds his own {194}business, and leaves others to take care of theirs?... What did he do with them? He gave them to his cook, or Dr. Hall put up potions in them, or Judith--poor Judith, who signified her relation to the author of Lear and the Tempest, and her right to the glory of the name he left her, by the very extraordinary kind of 'mark' which she affixed to legal instruments--poor Judith may have curled her hair with them to the day of her death.... What did you do with them? You have skulked this question long enough; you will have to account for them! The awakening ages will put you on the stand, and you will not leave it until you answer the question, what did you do with them?" * This chain of dramas, so blindly perpetuated by William Shakespeare, became, through Miss Bacon's unlocking process, a great system of political philosophy, dictated by the thoughtful Bacon and his compeers, and locked up for the nineteenth century, against the blindness of the centuries between.