But if the Stratford grammar-school confined its teachings to the pages of the English bible alone, it worked wonders, for Bishop Wadsworth goes so far as to declare, that "take the entire range of English literature--put together our best authors, who have written on subjects not professedly religious, and we shall not find, I believe, in them all, printed so much evidence of the Bible being read and used, as in Shakespeare alone." * Yet William Shakespeare had little opportunity for self-education, except these two terms at Stratford school; he was a lad-of-all-work at the Bankside Theater, when a mere child. He was only fifty-two years old when he died. He was one of several partners in certain theatrical establishments in London, in the years when he must have put all this multitudinous learning, he had carried in his head so long, on paper. He was so active, industrious, and shrewd in those years, that he alone of the partners was able to retire with a fortune--to purchase lands and a grant of arms for his father (whence he himself might become an esquire by descent); and, in the years of leisure after his retirement, he wrote only three or four epitaphs, which no other graduate of Stratford school would probably have cared to claim. * Shakespeare's use of the Bible. By Charles Wadsworth, p. 345. London. Smith Elder & Co., 1880. It has only been within the last few years that hardy spirits--like Nathaniel Holmes--whose education has led them to look judicially backward from effects to causes--and whose experience had impressed {232}them with the idea that most effects come in natural procession from causes somewhere--were courageous enough to seek the solution of this mystery--not in what is called the "internal evidence" of the plays themselves, but in the circumstances and surroundings, that is to say, in the external evidence of their date and production. The Baconian theory is simply that, so far as the records of the Elizabethan period are accessible, there was but one man in England, at the date at which this Shakespearean literature appeared, who could have produced it. * The history of Bacon's life, his massive acquirements, his profound scholarship even as a child: his advantages of foreign travel, his ambitious acquaintance with the court: and, joined to all, his dire necessities and his successive retirements (the dates of which, when collated, coincide with the dates at which the plays--tallying in matter with the circumstantial surroundings of Bacon's life as, for example, Shylock appeared at about the time when Bacon was most helplessly in the toils of what he calls "the Lombardo"):--all this need not be recapitulated here. He was born and bred in the atmosphere of libraries. While William Shakespeare was poaching on Avon banks, the little Francis was impressed with the utter inadequacy of Aristotle's method to grapple with {233}modern needs, and meditating its superseding with labors of his own.