Which is a wonder, how his grace should glean it, Since his addiction was to courses vain, His companies unletter’d, rude, and shallow, His hours fill’d up with riots, banquets, sports AND NEVER NOTED IN HIM ANY STUDY, Any retirement, any sequestration, From open haunts and popularity. Yet, as the Archbishop remarks (with doubtful orthodoxy), ‘miracles are ceased.’ Shakespeare in these lines describes, as only he could describe it, the world’s wonder which he himself was. Or, if Bacon wrote the lines, then Bacon, unlike his advocates, was prepared to recognise the possible existence of such a thing as genius. Incredulity on this head could only arise in an age and in peoples where mediocrity is almost universal. It is a democratic form of disbelief. For the hypothesis, as we said, it is necessary to show that Bacon possessed poetic genius. The proof cannot possibly be found in his prose works. In the prose of Mr. Ruskin there are abundant examples of what many respectable minds regard as poetic qualities. But, if the question arose, ‘Was Mr. Ruskin the author of Tennyson’s poems?’ the answer could be settled, for once, by internal evidence. We have only to look at Mr. Ruskin’s published verses. These prove that a great writer of ‘poetical prose’ may be at the opposite pole from a poet. In the same way, we ask, what are Bacon’s acknowledged compositions in verse? Mr. Holmes is their admirer. In 1599 Bacon wrote in a letter, ‘Though I profess not to be a poet, I prepared a sonnet,’ to Queen Elizabeth. He PREPARED a sonnet! ‘Prepared’ is good. He also translated some of the Psalms into verse, a field in which success is not to be won. Mr. Holmes notes, in Psalm xc., a Shakespearean parallel. ‘We spend our years as a tale that is told.’ Bacon renders: As a tale told, which sometimes men attend, And sometimes not, our life steals to an end. In ‘King John,’ iii. 4, we read:-- Life is as tedious as a twice-told tale Vexing the dull ear of a drowsy man. Now, if we must detect a connection, Bacon might have read ‘King John’ in the Folio, for he versified the Psalms in 1625. But it is unnecessary to suppose a reminiscence. Again, in Psalm civ. Bacon has-- The greater navies look like walking woods.