But, of so startling a proposition, Miss Bacon confesses that the world would require something more than her own conviction. So she deliberately set out to _prove_, from the very crypt and silence of the grave itself, its truth. To St. Albans, whence the mysterious letters were dated, to the lonesome tomb at old Verulam and the vault in Stratford chancel, she proposed a pilgrimage--thence to probe the secret, and lay it open to a doubting world. Her friends regarded her theory as a delusion, and Miss Bacon as a monomaniac.... * "Putnam's Magazine," January, 1856. {195} "to her conversations on the subject, and peremptorily refused contributions to assist in her expedition. But, by her lectures, and the friend she enlisted in her project in New York City, she gathered together enough money to get to London." It was while in London, in abject poverty and friendlessness, that Thomas Carlyle, "upon whom she had called and whom she had impressed with respect for herself if not for her theory," says Hawthorne, advised Miss Bacon to put her thoughts upon paper first, before proceeding to the overt act of proof she contemplated--namely, the opening of William Shakespeare's grave. It was upon his advice that this most remarkable woman--sitting in bed in a garret to keep warm without a fire, without sufficient or wholesome food, "looking back," to use her own words, "on the joys and sorrows of a world in which I have no longer any place, like a departed spirit," and yet, doing "the world's work," and knowing "that I had a right to demand aid for it"--undertook to unfold out of the Shakespearean plays their hidden system of philosophy." Meanwhile, under a contract obtained for her by Mr. P. W. Emerson (though, it is presumed, more for temporary supply of funds than as rider to her great work), she furnished to "Putnam's Magazine" eighty pages of manuscript, which became the famous paper "William Shakespeare and his Plays," first announcing to the world the first anti-Shakespearean theory of which it had ever heard. ** * Mrs. Farrar. ** This was contracted to be the first of a series of papers, but the arrangement for some reason, probably because Miss Bacon found it necessary to devote herself to the work to which she was to give her life, fell through, and no successive papers appeared in the magazine. They put their Shakespeares out of sight when she approached, declined to listen{196}Under such circumstances, and with such surroundings, this heroic woman accomplished the first half of the work she had marked out for herself--the reading of the sealed book, the unfolding of the philosophy of the Shakespearean plays. Her book was written, printed, published, and--damned! *