before that date has ever been discovered in contemporaneous literature. This is true of no other play in the Shakespearean canon. At the outset of our inquiry, then, we encounter a presumption that the 'Timon' of Shake-speare was a new drama, fresh from the hand of its author in 1623, or seven years after the death of the reputed poet at Stratford. Indeed, the character of the play itself seems to raise this presumption to the level of a probability, if not, in connection with other well-known facts, to that of a practical certainty. Timon was a citizen of Athens; at the beginning of his career, of large means, but so prodigal of expenditure for the good of others that he finally became bankrupt. His ruin was due to an excess of generosity, or to a fatal inappreciation of the value of money. At the slightest need of a friend or even of a servant his hand and purse were always ready to help. The consequence was, that falling at last into great pecuniary straits, and seeking in vain to supply his wants from those whom he had befriended, he became a misanthrope. Except in one particular, this is an exact portraiture of Francis Bacon, and one drawn at the exact time in his own life when he too encountered a like experience of ingratitude. Bacon was perhaps the most prodigal man that ever lived, more so even than was the younger Pitt, in both of whom indifference to money considerations amounted almost to a disease. Bacon kept his money in his library, in a chest to which his servants had free access and from which they were accustomed at pleasure to fill their pockets. On one occasion he gave to the man who brought him a buck as a present from the king £25, a gratuity equal in our time and in our money to $1500. Young men of good families flocked to his service, because they were sure not only of generous and kindly treatment while they were in it, but also of gratuitous and valuable preferments when they left. At his downfall, however, all his parasites forsook him. In vain he begged for help. His letters to Buckingham and the king on the subject of his pecuniary distresses are extremely pathetic. His experiences are precisely those of Timon in the play, though with one characteristic divergence, namely: under the rules of dramatization Timon becomes a misanthrope; Bacon's sweetness of disposition is retained to the last. Bacon falls from power in 1621; the play first becomes known in 1623. Coincidence number eighteen. XIX 'Henry VIII.' was also one of those dramas of Shakespeare, sixteen in number, that were printed for the first time in the folio of 1623. Possibly it was in existence in an earlier draft in 1613, for at the burning of the Globe Theatre on the afternoon of June 29 of that year, a play, described by a contemporary as "representing some principal pieces in the reign of Henry VIII." was in course of performance there, under the title of All is True.' Whether this be so or not, the drama, as we now have it, seems in some important particulars to have been suggested by the condition of things under King James in 1621. It treats of fallen greatness, of Queen Catharine, the divorced wife of Henry, and of Lord Chancellor Wolsey, who was degraded from his high office, stripped of the seals, and ordered to be imprisoned in the Tower. The argument for Bacon's authorship of this play may be rested in part on three points: 1. The author was indebted for some of his materials directly to Cavendish's 'Life of Wolsey,' which, though written in 1557, was not printed until 1641, or eighteen years after the appearance of the play. As Bacon was one of Wolsey's successors in office, he would naturally have had access to this manuscript, while a play actor would not. 2. It is practically certain that in 1622-23, Bacon was engaged upon a work pertaining to the reign of Henry VIII. He completed his history of Henry VII. in October, 1621. This was so much admired that Prince Charles immediately requested him to write also the history of Henry VIII. Bacon promised to do so. Accordingly, in January, 1623, he applied to the proper authorities for the loan of such documents as might be in the public archives relating to that monarch's reign. The application was formally granted. At this time, Bacon appears to have been actually at work in real or apparent fulfilment of his undertaking, for under date of February 10, Mr. Chamberlain writes: "Lord [Bacon] busies himself about books, and hath set out two lately, Historia Ventorum' and 'De Vita et Morte,' with promises of more. I have not seen either of them because I have not leisure; but if the life of Henry VIII., which they say he is about, might come out after his own manner, I should find time and means enough to read it." A few days later (February 21), Bacon himself writes to Buckingham, who had gone to Spain with Prince Charles, asking to be remembered to the Prince, "who, I hope ere long, will make me leave King Henry VIII. and set me on work in relation to his Highness's heroical adventures." The next reference to the subject is also in one of Bacon's own letters. Acknowledging the receipt of a communication from Toby Matthew, June 26, 1623, he says: "Since you say the Prince hath not forgot his commandment touching my history of Henry VIII., I may not forget my duty. But I find Sir Collier, who poured forth what he had in my other work, somewhat dainty of his materials in this." It appears, however, that notwithstanding all these repeated implications to the effect that he was engaged upon a history of Henry VIII., he was actually doing no such thing. He did, indeed, make a beginning; he gathered materials; he dictated one morning about two pages; and then he wrote to the prince, apologizing for not going on with the work and for dropping it altogether. But did he drop it? From whose pen came those wonderful panegyrics of Queen Elizabeth and King James that were printed six months afterward in the drama of Henry VIII.,' and that can be exactly paralleled in the Advancement of Learning' and the In felicem Memoriam Elizabetha? Those heart-breaking lamentations over fallen greatness, such as Bacon must have still been uttering in private over his own downfall in 1621? Those entrancing visions of peace and plenty, of honor and gladness for the English people, characteristic of one in whom forgiveness of injuries was a cardinal virtue, and love of mankind an absorbing passion? 3. Queen Catharine, the first wife of King Henry VIII., made her residence during the latter part of her life at Kimbolton in Huntingdonshire. The Duke of Manchester, to whom the place belongs, published in 1864 a valuable collection of papers, found in the castle and at Simancas in Spain, which show that of all the numerous and gifted persons who have written of that unfortunate princess, two, and two only, have correctly adjudged her character. These two, thus in singular agreement, are Francis Bacon and the author of the Shake-speare dramas. The Duke says: "So far as concerns all popular ideas of her, Catharine is a creature of the mist. Shakespeare and Bacon, the highest judges and firmest painters of character, have, it is true, described her, if only lightly and by the way, as a woman of flesh and blood; the flesh rather stubborn, the blood somewhat hot; as a lady who could curse her enemies and caress her friends; a princess full of natural graces, virtues, and infirmities. Had the portraits by Shakespeare and Bacon been painted in full, they would have been all that we could hope or wish. But they are only fragments of the whole; and the work of all minor hands is nothing, or worse than nothing. In these inferior pencillings, the woman is concealed beneath the veil of a nun. In place of a girl full of sun and life, eager to love and to be loved, enamoured of state and pomp, who liked a good dinner, a new gown, above all a young husband; one who had her quarrels, her debts, her feminine fibs, and her little deceptions, even with those who were most near and dear to her; a creature to be kissed and petted, to be adored, and chidden, and ill-used-all of which Catharine was in the flesh we find a cold, grim Lady Abbess, a creature too pious for the world in which her lot was cast, too pure for the husband who had been given to her. Such a conception is vague in outline and false in spirit. Catharine was every inch a woman before she became every inch a queen.' Court and Society, i. 5. This judgment is confirmed by high literary authority: "The whole story of the Queen, as now told from the ample Simancas text, is in perfect harmony with what Shakespeare and Bacon say of her."- The Athenæum, January 16, 1867. Lord Montagu of Kimbolton, first Earl of Manchester, was one of Bacon's dearest friends. Coincidence number nineteen. XX The Tempest' was published for the first time in the Folio edition of 1623; it was probably written in 1613. That the author intended it as a fitting close to his series of dramas appears from the following passage, in which Prospero, referring to certain exhibitions of his "potent art" given in the play, expresses his determination to exercise the art no longer : "I have bedimm'd The noontide sun, call'd forth the mutinous winds, |