But why, being a great poet, should Bacon conceal the fact, and choose as a mask a man whom, on the hypothesis of his ignorance, every one that knew him must have detected as an impostor? Now, one great author did choose to conceal his identity, though he never shifted the burden of the ‘Waverley Novels’ on to Terry the actor. Bacon may, conceivably, have had Scott’s pleasure in secrecy, but Bacon selected a mask much more impossible (on the theory) than Terry would have been for Scott. Again, Sir Walter Scott took pains to make his identity certain, by an arrangement with Constable, and by preserving his manuscripts, and he finally confessed. Bacon never confessed, and no documentary traces of his authorship survive. Scott, writing anonymously, quoted his own poems in the novels, an obvious ‘blind.’ Bacon, less crafty, never (as far as we are aware) mentions Shakespeare. It is arguable, of course, that to write plays might seem dangerous to Bacon’s professional and social position. The reasons which might make a lawyer keep his dramatic works a secret could not apply to ‘Lucrece.’ A lawyer, of good birth, if he wrote plays at all, would certainly not vamp up old stock pieces. That was the work of a ‘Johannes Factotum,’ of a ‘Shakescene,’ as Greene says, of a man who occupied the same position in his theatrical company as Nicholas Nickleby did in that of Mr. Crummles. Nicholas had to bring in the vulgar pony, the Phenomenon, the buckets, and so forth. So, in early years, the author of the plays (Bacon, by the theory) had to work over old pieces. All this is the work of the hack of a playing company; it is not work to which a man in Bacon’s position could stoop. Why should he? What had he to gain by patching and vamping? Certainly not money, if the wealth of Shakespeare is a dark mystery to the Baconian theorists. We are asked to believe that Bacon, for the sake of some five or six pounds, toiled at refashioning old plays, and handed the fair manuscripts to Shakespeare, who passed them off, among the actors who knew him intimately, as his own. THEY detected no incongruity between the player who was their Johannes Factotum and the plays which he gave in to the manager. They seemed to be just the kind of work which Shakespeare would be likely to write. BE LIKELY TO WRITE, but ‘the father of the rest,’ Mr. Smith, believed that Shakespeare COULD NOT WRITE AT ALL.