grew there! To have based such a system on fancy, and unconsciously elaborated it for herself, was almost as wonderful as really to have found it in the plays... it certainly came from no inconsiderable depth somewhere." This was, so far as she herself put it on paper, Miss Delia Bacon's theory. It is to be carefully noticed, however, that it is a theory, not of a unitary but of a joint authorship. There is one passage in the "Putnam's Magazine" article (which at that time was announced by the publishers as the first of a series of papers, and was so intended by Miss Bacon) which points to Bacon as the supposed sole author of the plays. But, in the book which followed it, these plays are repeatedly assigned to a conclave or junta of Elizabethan courtiers and scholars, and such was the faith, we believe, in which Miss Bacon labored and died. The unitary theory, we believe not unfairly, may be assigned to Messrs. Smith and Holmes; the latter of whom, in the preface to his work, most distinctly {201}rejects Miss Bacon's "junta" authorship, and undertakes to maintain the proposition that Bacon, and Bacon alone, was the author of the whole canon of "Shakespeare." According to Judge Holmes, Bacon had reasons in plenty for concealing his authorship, and for "loving better to be a poet than to be accounted one." Not only his personal safety:--Dr. Heywood was already in the tower for having incensed the Queen by an unlucky pamphlet dedicated to Essex; and "not long after this," says Holmes, "and while Essex is under arrest, and Bacon in sundry interviews with the Queen, is still interceding in his behalf, her Majesty brings up against him this affair of Dr. Hoywood's book, and also, as it would seem, distinctly flings at Bacon himself about 'a matter which grew from him, but went after about in other's names (in fact no other than the play Richard II. we have to-day)." But the development of his plans made concealment particularly desirable. Political rivals were watching jealously his every utterance. He is known to be a "concealed poet," so he prepares a masque or two for the queen's own eye and audience; but he alone, according to Judge Holmes, writes "Shakespeare." "Had the plays (says Mr. Furness) come down to us anonymously--had the labor of discovering the author been imposed upon future generations, we could have found no one of that day but Francis Bacon to whom to assign the crown. In this case it would have been resting now upon his head by almost common consent." It is well that this essential difference between the "Delia Bacon" and the "Baconian" theories should be emphasized here. {202} PART V. THE BACONIAN THEORY. [Illustration: 9208]