Which--since thy flight from hence, hath-mourned like night And despaired day--but for thy volume's light--" they say, do not and can not, refer to William Shakespeare at all. For this was published in 1623, and William Shakespeare had been dead seven years. He could not "shine forth" again, except figuratively, in his volume, and this he already does by the publication of his works, and is admitted to do in the next line, where it is said that but for "thy volume's light" the stage would "mourn in night." The Baconians, who believe that Ben Jonson himself was the "Heminges and Condell" who edited the first folio, regarded this whole poem as a sop to Bacon, on Ben Jonson's part. ** Pp. 306-326. [Ill 0237] [Ill 0238] But even the conceiving of so unusual a state of affairs as a political philosopher and playwright contracting together to mutually plagiarize from each other's writ{239}ings would hardly account for the coincidence between the cottage scene (Act IV, Scene 3) in "A Winter's Tale," and Bacon's "Essay on Gardens," in which he maintained that "there ought to be gardens for all the months of the year; in which severally things of beauty may be in their season," which he proceeds to suggest: {240}Were we assured that the prose in the left-hand column was the poet's first rough notes for the exquisite poetry in the second, would there be any internal evidence for doubting it? And when it appears that "The Essay on Gardens" was not printed until 1625, nine years after William Shakespeare's death and burial, and two years after an edition of his alleged plays, rewritten and revised, had appeared (when so deliberate a "steal" would hardly be profitable), the exoteric evidence seems at least to command attention. A coincidence between a passage in "The Advancement of Learning" and in the play of "Troilus and Cressida," Act II., Scene 2 (which, we shall see later on, first appeared in print, advertised as the work of a novice, in 1609, thereafter, within a few months, to be reissued as by William Shakespeare *--who was not, at the date of that edition, either a novice or a first appearance), is worth pausing to tabulate: That the manager of a theater, in dressing up a play for the evening's audience (and _such_ an audience) should tuck in an allusion to Aristotle, to "catch the ** {241}ear of the groundlings" * Post, "The New Theory." ** It is to be noticed that no similarity of style in these opposed extracts is alleged or relied upon.