A NEW LIGHT.

ON THE BACON—SHAKESPEARE CYPHER.

The Nineteenth Century and After.—London.

Of all the critical paradoxes that have ever been seriously advocated, few have been received with such general and derisive indifference as that which declares Bacon to have been the author of the dramas ascribed to Shakespeare, and which couples this declaration with another—more startling still—that these dramas are not dramas only, but are besides a series of writings in cypher, whose inner meaning bears no relation whatever to their ostensible meaning as dramas, but which consist of memoranda or memoirs concerning Bacon himself, and secrets of Queen Elizabeth. The mere theory that Bacon was the real author of the plays, though the mass of Shakespeare’s readers still set it down as an illusion, does not, indeed, contain anything essentially shocking to common sense. On the contrary, it is generally recognised that on purelyà priorigrounds there is less to shock common sense in the idea that those wonderful compositions were the work of a scholar, a philosopher, a statesman, and a profound man of the world, than there is in the idea that they were the work of a notoriously ill-educated actor, who seems to have found some difficulty in signing his own name. This latter idea, which is still generally accepted, has little evidence to support it beyond tradition, which is strong, and strong only, in the absence of evidence to the contrary; and were such evidence forthcoming, it would be impossible for the candid mind to reject it on the grounds that it pointed to any improbable conclusion.

But with regard to the theory of the cypher the case is different. This is generally rejected or neglected both by scholarsand the reading public, not on the ground that the evidence for it is insufficient, but on the ground that it is in itself so unlikely, so fantastic, so impossible that it is not worth a sane man’s while to consider the misguided ingenuities by which a few literary monomaniacs have endeavoured to make it plausible. How is it possible, the ordinary man asks, to believe that the finest and profoundest poetry in the world—that the verses which give us in music the love of Romeo and Juliet, the torture of Hamlet’s philosophy, the majestic calm of Prospero’s—was composed, or rather constructed, as an elaborate verbal puzzle, the object of which was to preserve for some future decipherer a collection of political and mainly personal information, which the author was too timid to confide himself to his contemporaries? We might just as well believe thatParadise Lostis in reality a kind ofPepys’ Diary, in which the poet has recorded for posterity the curtain-lectures of Mrs. Milton. Such is the argument which the ordinary man uses; and if he consents to consider the matter a little farther, and finds, as he will find, that the advocates of the cypher theory maintain that Bacon, in the Shakespearian plays, has hidden away not one cypher but six, his dismissal of their theory will be yet more curt and contemptuous. Of this attitude of mind I am able to speak with sympathy, for the excellent reason that it was till lately my own. A remarkable volume, however, known at present to surprisingly few readers, has been recently published, dealing with the subject before us—a volume which at first I glanced at with apathetic distrust, but which has caused me, when I read it carefully, to reconsider the question. The contents of this volume I shall here briefly summarise, leaving the reader to escape from its conclusions if he can. The volume is calledThe Bi-literal Cypher of Francis Bacon. It was first, I believe, printed privately, less than two years ago; and a small second edition was issued last year to the public. I will begin with describing its exact scope, which is limited. Of the six Baconian cyphers alleged to exist inShakespeare, this volume deals only with one; and it is with this one only that I shall ask the reader to concern himself.

The biliteral cypher possesses two remarkable characteristics, which it is desirable to mention at starting, because they at once dispose of all thoseà prioriobjections which suggest themselves, as we have just seen, against the cypher theory generally.In the first place this cypher, whether it exists in the Shakespearian plays or not, is demonstrably not the invention of any modern literary lunatic. It was invented by Bacon himself; and an elaborate account of it, together with examples of its use, is to be found, as will be shown presently, in one of his most celebrated works. In the second place—and this is a point which it is still more important to urge on theà priorisceptic—the biliteral cypher has nothing whatever to do with the composition or the wording of the works into which it is introduced. There might be a biliteral cypher inHamletfrom end to end, without any thought of a cypher having been present to the author when he was writing it. It is, in other words, altogether a matter of typography. It depends not on what the author writes, but on the manner in which he is printed. Accordingly, when what we may call the Baconian party informs the world that they have discovered a biliteral cypher, of which the author is Bacon, running through the plays of Shakespeare, they are really indulging in a gross inaccuracy of language, which does much to prevent a fair hearing being accorded to them. What they really mean is that this biliteral cypher runs not through the plays themselves, but through one particular edition of them—that is to say, the celebrated first folio. This edition, as every student knows, is remarkable for many extraordinary anomalies in its typography. Of these anomalies an explanation is now for the first time offered to us. They are presented to us—and it is claimed that they are thus explained completely—as part and parcel of the newly discovered typographical cypher. If we take these devices away the cypher disappears with them. If we resort, with the aid of the printer, to devices of the same kind, we could embody the cypher anew, and every sentence that Bacon committed to it, in any book we might choose to reprint, so far as its length permitted—inPickwick, inVanity Fair, in Tupper’sProverbial Philosophy, in theApocalypse of St. John, or in the advertisement-sheet of theTimes.

I will now proceed to describe what the nature of the cypher is; and it shall first be introduced to the reader in the words of Bacon himself. In theDe Augmentis ScientiarumBacon writes thus:[7]

Let us come to Cyphars. Their kinds are many, as Cyphars simple, Cyphars intermixt with Nulloes, or Non-significant characters; Cyphars of double letters under one character; Wheele-cyphars, Kay-cyphars, Cyphars of Words, Others.... But that jealousies may be taken away, we will annexe one other invention, which, in truth, we devised in our own youth, when we were in Paris: and it is a thing which yet seemeth to us not worthy to be lost. It containeththe highest degree of Cypher, which is to signifyomnia per omnia, yet so as the writnginfoldingmay bear a quintuple relation to the writing infolded. No other condition or restriction whatsoever is required. It shall be performed thus. First, let all the letters of the alphabet, by transposition, be resolved into two letters onely; for the transposition of two letters by five placings will be sufficient for thirty-two differences, much more for twenty-four, which is the number of the alphabet. The example of such an alphabet is in this wise:AaaaaaIabaaaRbaaaaBaaaabKabaabSbaaabCaaabaLababaTbaabaDaaabbMababbVbaabbEaabaaNabbaaWbabaaFaababOabbabXbababGaabbaPabbbaYbabbaHaabbbQabbbbZbabbb... When you addresse yourself to write, resolve your inward infolded letter into this Bi-literarie Alphabet. Say the interior letter be 'Fuge.’Example of SolutionFUGEaababbaabbaabbaaabaaTogether with this you must have ready at hand a bi-formed Alphabet, which may represent all the letters of theCommon Alphabet, as well Capitall Letters as the Smaller Characters, ina double forme, as may fit every man’s occasion.{ababababababababababababAAaaBBbbCCccDDddEEeeFFff{abababababababababababababGGggHHhhIIiijjKKkkLLllMMmm{ababababababababababababNNnnOOooPPppQQqqRRrrSSss{abababababababababababababTTttVVvvuuWWwwXXxxYYyyZZzzNow to the interior letter which is bi-literate, you shall fit a bi-formed exterior letter, which shall answer the other, letter for letter, and afterwards set it downe. Let theexteriorexample be,Manere te volo, donec Venero.An Example of Accommodation.FUGEaabab. baabb. aabba. aabaaManeretevolodonecven[ero]

... When you addresse yourself to write, resolve your inward infolded letter into this Bi-literarie Alphabet. Say the interior letter be 'Fuge.’

Example of Solution

Together with this you must have ready at hand a bi-formed Alphabet, which may represent all the letters of theCommon Alphabet, as well Capitall Letters as the Smaller Characters, ina double forme, as may fit every man’s occasion.

Now to the interior letter which is bi-literate, you shall fit a bi-formed exterior letter, which shall answer the other, letter for letter, and afterwards set it downe. Let theexteriorexample be,Manere te volo, donec Venero.

An Example of Accommodation.

From this short example Bacon then proceeds to a longer one. He takes an entire page from one of Cicero’s letters, and so prints it in italics from two founts, similar to those in the alphabet just given, that it infolds an interior letter from a Spartan general, 'Sent once in ascytale, or round cypher’d staffe.’ The quotation from Cicero it is unnecessary to give here. It is sufficient to say that, as printed by Bacon, the ordinary reader would detect nothing out of the common in it; but when once his eye is made alert by the knowledge that its characters are drawn from two different founts of type, he can, by the aid of the alphabets supplied by Bacon, easily decipher for himself the Spartan message infolded in it.

It is the above passage, occurring in Bacon’s own work, which has led to the alleged discovery set forth in the volume with which we are now dealing; and the history of the discovery, as we there find it, is curious. For a considerable time an American student, Dr. Owen, had been working at the elucidation of another cypher altogether, also alleged to be Bacon’s, and to exist in the Shakespearian plays. This is the word-cypher. With its details we need not here concern ourselves. It is enough to say that an American lady, Mrs. Gallup, was his assistant. The above passage from Bacon arrested her attention, and she became convinced that the Bi-literal Cypher had been described by its inventor with special ulterior purpose and might possibly be found co-existing in Shakespearian plays with the others. She was fortified in this idea by the well known and unexplained peculiarities in the printing of the first folio to which I have already alluded, and she claims that on examining this volume she found her suspicions correct. The result has been the book under review. After its publication Mrs. Gallup came to England, her sole object being to examine certain rare old books which could not be procured in America and find if possible the first inception of the cypher writings, and in this she claims to have been successful.[8]Before going farther I will direct the reader’s attention once again to the bi-literal cypher itself, and endeavor to make the nature of it clearer to him than it will probably have been made by Bacon’s own, somewhat clumsy, exposition of it.

In the first place it should be observed that Bacon’s own name for it—'bi-literal’—is essentially inaccurate and misleading. He means by the word 'bi-literal’ that the letters of his second alphabet are all formed out of two—that is to say, 'a’ and 'b,’ by arranging them variously in so many groups of five. But the letters 'a’ and 'b,’ when used for this purpose, are properly speaking not letters at all. They have no phonetic value, they are simply arbitrary signs. Their function would be fulfilled equally well or better by dots and dashes (. and —), or else by the longs and shorts (- and °) which are familiar to every schoolboy as symbols of prosodical quantity. The cypher is a cypher of two signs, not of two letters. It is, in fact, merely a species of Morse Code. Let the reader look back to the bi-literal code or alphabet, as formulated by Bacon himself; and, for an example, let him take four letters—a, b, e, and l—which I choose merely because several different words can be spelt with them. He will see that for 'a’ the symbol is five 'a’s (a a a a a), for 'b’ four 'a’s and a 'b’ (a a a a b), for 'e’ two 'a’s, a 'b’, and two 'a’s (a a b a a), and for 'l’ two consecutive 'a b’s and one 'a’ (a b a b a). Let him rid himself of these 'a’s and 'b’s, and substitute dots and dashes; let every 'b’ be a dash, and every 'a’ a dot. The result will be just the same, and his mind will most likely be clearer. His code signs for these four letters will be as follows: A.....; B....—; E..—..; L.—.—.Now let him write, in this code, 'ale,’ 'all,’ 'ball,’ 'bell,’ 'Abel.’ No exercise could be easier. 'Ale’ will be..... .—.—. ..—..; 'All’ will be..... .—.—. .—.—.; 'Ball’ will be....— ..... .—.—. .—.—.; 'Bell’ will be....— ..—.. .—.—. .—.—.; and 'Abel’ will be..... ....— ..—.. .—.—.Now we come to the next part of our problem. Having written 'ale,’ 'all,’ 'ball,’ 'bell,’ and 'Abel’ in dots and dashes—which constitutes, we will suppose, some message which we wish to convey—our next task is to hide this in a series of words with which, seemingly, our message shall have no connection. For the moment, instead of adopting the precise method of Bacon, let us take a much cruder one, which will be at once grasped by everybody. Let us make every capital letter signify a dot in our code, and every small letter a dash; and let us arrange the code symbols of our five words in a line, thus:

····· | ·-·-· | ··-·· | ····· | ·-·-· | ·-·-·

····- | ····· | ·-·-· | ·-·-· | ····- | ··-··

·-·-· | ·-·-· | ····· | ····- | ··-·· | ·-·-·

We have here a series of ninety dots and dashes, and all we need now do is to take any sentence we please—any chance fragment, whether of prose or poetry—which contains not less than ninety letters, and ignoring the ordinary use of small letters and capitals, write it in such a way as to put a capital for every dot and a small letter for every dash. Let us take, for example, the first verses of Gray’s 'Elegy,’ and write it in this manner. What we shall get is as follows:

All the five words with which we started are here contained in our cypher; and the decipherer has only to perform the childishly simple task of putting a dot under each capital and a dash under each small letter, and he has them back again in the form given above. To illustrate the complete independence of what Bacon calls the 'infolding’ document from the 'infolded,’ let us set, one under the other, one of Gray’s lines, and some different sets of words altogether.

Every one of these lines, when resolved into dots and dashes, will be the same, and will read thus:

Bacon’s system differs from this merely in the fact that, instead of using the capitals and the small letters of one ordinary alphabet as the equivalents respectively of his 'a’s and 'b’s—that is to say, of his dots and dashes—he uses two italic alphabets, of capitals and small letters, complete; both the capitals and small letters of one meaning dots or 'a’s, and the capitals and smallletters of the other meaning dashes or 'b’s. Let us now proceed to adopt his system a little more nearly ourselves, diverging from it only in the fact that our two complete alphabets, instead of being two slightly different varieties of italics, shall consist, the one of italics and the other of ordinary type, the italics representing the 'a’s or dots, the ordinary letters the 'b’s or dashes; and we will, as preliminary examples, imagine two cases, parallel to that which is alleged to be Bacon’s own. The following lines are Byron’s, which I quote from memory; and they are printed in accordance with the principles just laid down:

SaintPeter sat at thecelestialgate;The keyswere rusty, and the lock was dull,Solittle trouble had been given of late.Not thattheplacebyany means wasfull,Butsince the GalliceraEighty-eightThe devils had ta'enalonger, strongerpull,And apullall together, asthey sayAtsea,whichdrewmostsouls the other way.Theangelsall were singing out of tune,And hoarsewithhaving little else todo,Exceptingtowindup the sunand moon,Andcurba runaway young sta[r or two, &c.]

SaintPeter sat at thecelestialgate;

The keyswere rusty, and the lock was dull,

Solittle trouble had been given of late.

Not thattheplacebyany means wasfull,

Butsince the GalliceraEighty-eight

The devils had ta'enalonger, strongerpull,

And apullall together, asthey say

Atsea,whichdrewmostsouls the other way.

Theangelsall were singing out of tune,And hoarsewithhaving little else todo,Exceptingtowindup the sunand moon,Andcurba runaway young sta[r or two, &c.]

Theangelsall were singing out of tune,

And hoarsewithhaving little else todo,

Exceptingtowindup the sunand moon,

Andcurba runaway young sta[r or two, &c.]

To this passage, before examining it, let us add some others from Milton, printed in the same manner; and let us imagine, for reasons which will appear presently, that we have an edition of Milton in which certain passages, and certain passages only—those which we shall quote being among them—are printed in these two characters, and are consequently at once distinguishable from the rest of the text.

Ofman'sfirstdisobedience, andthefruitOfthat forbiddentree, whose mortaltasteBrought deathinto theworld andall our woe,Withlossof Eden, tillonegreatermanRestoreus, andregain thoseblissful seats,SingHeavenly Muse.

Ofman'sfirstdisobedience, andthefruit

Ofthat forbiddentree, whose mortaltaste

Brought deathinto theworld andall our woe,

Withlossof Eden, tillonegreaterman

Restoreus, andregain thoseblissful seats,

SingHeavenly Muse.

*****

A littleonwardlendthy guiding handTo thesedark steps—a littlefartheron,For yonderbankhaschoice ofsun andshade.

A littleonwardlendthy guiding hand

To thesedark steps—a littlefartheron,

For yonderbankhaschoice ofsun andshade.

*****

Thesun tomeis darkAnd silentasthemoonWhen shedeserts the night,Hid inhervacantinterlunarcave.

Thesun tomeis dark

And silentasthemoon

When shedeserts the night,

Hid inhervacantinterlunarcave.

*****

Yetoncemore,oh yelaurels,andoncemoreYe myrtlesbrown, andivyneversere,Icometopluck yourberries harshand crude,And with forcedfingersrudeShatter your leaves, &c., &c.

Yetoncemore,oh yelaurels,andoncemore

Ye myrtlesbrown, andivyneversere,

Icometopluck yourberries harshand crude,

And with forcedfingersrude

Shatter your leaves, &c., &c.

Now in the above passages, if we except only the fact that the dots and dashes of the cypher are represented in these by italics and ordinary letters, whereas Bacon employs two slightly different forms of italics, we have the biliteral cypher exemplified completely, though with extreme simplicity. But we have not this only. As the reader will see presently, we have exemplified in them also another of the claims now made for Bacon in relation to works published under another name. It may amuse some readers to extract the cypher in these passages for themselves. They will begin thus, putting dots under the italics and dashes under the ordinary letters:

SaintPeter sat at.

._... _._.. ._. ..

They will then divide these dots and dashes into groups of five, thus:._..., _._.., ._...; and on turning to Bacon’s code, already given, they will find that these three groups mean I. W. I. Pursuing this method, they will find that in the passage from Byron the following meaning is 'infolded:’

'I, William Wordsworth, am the author of the Byron poems. Don Juan contains my private prayers.’

In the passages from Milton, the 'infolded’ meaning is this:

'I, S. Pepys, in this and oth’r poems [Now to my Sams’n] hide my secret frailties [Now to Lycidas] lest my wife, poor fool, should know.’

The reader will see from these examples how easily, if it were not for the existence of copyright, any author might republish the works of any other, introducing a cypher into them, in which he claimed them as his own composition, and deposited in them any secrets which he wished both to record and hide. The passages taken from Milton illustrate certain farther points. The bi-literal cypher of Bacon exists, it is alleged, in the first folio of Shakespeare, in those parts only which are printed in italics, the end of one fragment of the secret writing often breaking off in the middle of a letter, which is completed at the beginning of another italic passage farther on, and sometimesin another play; and parentheses occur like those in our imagined cypher by Pepys, directing the decipherer where to look for the continuations.

The general character, then, of this biliteral cypher, and the manner in which it is alleged to have been inserted in one edition of the Shakespearian plays, must now be perfectly clear to even the most careless reader; and we may therefore pass on to another portion of our subject; for the claim of the Baconian theorists does not by any means end with what they declare they have proved with regard to the first folio of Shakespeare. They claim that the same cypher has been introduced by Bacon into early or first editions of a number of other works, some bearing his own name, and admittedly written by himself, others bearing the name of well known persons, his contemporaries. These include his ownAdvancement of Learning, 1605, hisNovum Organum, 1620, and hisHistory of Henry VII., 1622; theComplaints, 1591, and theColin Clout, 1595, published under the name of Spenser, and the edition of theFaerie Queen, 1596; certain editions of certain plays ascribed to the four dramatists, Peele, Greene, Marlowe, and Ben Jonson; and the edition published in 1628 ofThe Anatomy of Melancholy. Some of these works, in spite of the presence of the cypher in them, it is not even claimed that Bacon wrote himself. For example, so we are told, he expressly says in his cypher that he used certain plays of Ben Jonson, with Ben Jonson’s own permission, as a vehicle for his secret writing, having had, with the exception of a few short masques, no part in the composition of any of them. Bacon does claim, however, unless his cypher is altogether an illusion, that of many of the works into which the cypher was printed, he was himself the actual author—notablyThe Anatomy of Melancholy, and the whole of the plays called Shakespeare’s. On this latter point he insists over and over again, declaring that he borrowed Shakespeare’s name as a pseudonym, and describing him as being nothing more than the most accomplished actor of his time.

I say this, let me repeat, on the supposition that the cypher is not altogether an illusion. Before considering whether this supposition is correct, let us accept it for the moment as being so, and see what are the conclusions which it forces on us. Of the four hundred and fifty pages of which Mrs. Gallup’s volume,The Bi-literal Cypher of Francis Bacon, consists, about three hundred and fifty are occupied with what purport to be secret writings of Bacon’s, deciphered letter by letter, from the passages printed in italics, in certain specified editions of certain works, some published under other names, some admittedly his own. Of these three hundred and fifty pages of secret writings, about fifteen have been extracted from Spenser, Greene, Peele, and Marlowe, and twenty-three from Ben Jonson; about a hundred and twenty-five from writings admittedly his own, such as theNovum OrganumandThe New Atlantis, more than ninety from Burton, and more than fifty from the first folio of Shakespeare. Much more, however, it is averred, remains to be deciphered still.

And now let us ask what, continuing to suppose them genuine, these secret writings contain, and why the author wrote them in such a way. Described generally, they are a species of diary, comparable to that of Pepys, also written in cypher—a diary to which the author confides thoughts and hopes and feelings too intimate to be revealed to contemporaries, and secrets the mere hinting of which would have placed his life in danger. Of these it is enough for our present purpose to mention a few.

Bacon declares in his cypher over and over again that he was not what he appeared to be. He was not, as the world supposed, the son of Sir Nicholas Bacon, but the son of the Queen of England by a private marriage with Leicester—her eldest son and rightful heir to the throne. He was ignorant of the fact till he reached his sixteenth year, when he heard the story hinted by one of the ladies of the Court. The Queen, in a fit of anger, admitted to him that it was true, the marriage having taken place secretly in the Tower of London, when the Queen, before her accession, and Leicester were both confined there. For political reasons it was necessary to keep this a profound secret, and the child was confided to Anne and Nicholas Bacon, to be brought up as their own and educated as a private person, the Queen being determined never, under any circumstances, to acknowledge him. To reveal the truth himself would, he believed, be to forfeit his life; and hence, smarting under an obstinate sense of wrong, he confided his history to the keeping of elaborate cyphers, trusting that future students would unravelthem for a future age. The moment the Queen found that the boy had discovered his parentage he was sent to France under the care of Sir Amyas Paulet, and did not come back to England till the death of his foster-father. When in France he conceived an absorbing and romantic passion for Marguerite, wife of Henry of Navarre, who returned or pretended to return it. Expectations were rife at the time that she and her husband were to be divorced; and Sir Amyas Paulet attempted to arrange with Queen Elizabeth that, should the divorce take place, Marguerite and Bacon should be married. The divorce, however, was not obtained, nor would Queen Elizabeth listen to the proposal. This early romance made a profound impression on Bacon, and he wrote, long afterwards,Romeo and Julietin commemoration of it.

Another part of the story which he tells is this. He was not, he says, the Queen’s only child by Leicester. He had a brother, and this brother was Essex; and of all the incidents of his life with regard to which he is most anxious to set forth the truth and with regard to which he fears that his memory is most likely to be wronged, those connected with his conduct towards his unfortunate brother stand foremost.

That he does not venture openly to give even a hint of the truth with regard to this matter, or his parentage and rightful position, he declares with an almost wearisome and not very dignified persistence; and he is, he says, driven to hide himself in tortuous cyphers, which will keep him safe as a coney hiding in a valley of rocks.

On the contents of the biliteral cypher, considered under their more general aspect, we need not dwell longer. Enough has been said to show that, if it be a genuine document, the author had intelligible reasons for embodying it in this singular form. What mainly concerns us here is its purely literary significance, especially as regards the authorship of the so-called plays of Shakespeare. The mere fact that this biliteral Baconian cypher is incorporated in the first collected edition of these plays does not in itself prove, as we have seen already, that Bacon was the author ofKing JohnandRomeo and Juliet, any more than it proves that he was the author ofThe Fox, which, though the same cypher occurs in it, is admitted to be Ben Jonson’s. The only evidence as to this point with which the biliteral cyphersupplies us consists not in its existence in an edition of Shakespeare’s plays, but solely in the assertions which it contains that Bacon did actually write them, coupled with further statements relating to other cyphers—the word-cypher more particularly, also alleged to be contained in them. So far as concerns the biliteral cypher itself, the mere assertions as to authorship which Bacon makes by means of it have as much or as little value as they would have had had he made them openly. Their value depends on the value we are inclined to attach to his word, coupled with the probabilities of the case as estimated by the critic and the historian. The word-cypher, however, stands on a different footing. It depends on the text itself, not on the manner in which the text is printed; and the author of this cypher must necessarily have been the author of the plays. Now the biliteral cypher contains, if it really be a genuine document, elaborate instructions as to the word-cypher, and directions as to the method of unravelling it. That such instructions should be given if the word-cypher is a mere illusion, we need hardly say is incredible. Hence, according to all rules of common sense, our belief in the former carries with it a belief in the latter; and a belief in the latter—the word-cypher—also carries with it the further belief that Bacon actually was the author of the Shakespearian plays.

Whether such be the case or no, it is not my purpose to inquire. All that at this moment I am anxious to impress upon the reader is the fact that, in taking their stand on this new alleged discovery—this discovery of a cypher heretofore not dreamed of—a typographical cypher depending on the use of two printer’s alphabets, nearly alike but yet ascertainably different, the Baconians have shifted this controversy to wholly novel ground. The word-cypher is a cypher which, even those who believe in it admit, requires for its interpretation a certain amount of conjecture; but the biliteral cypher, if it exists at all, can be proved to exist, or, in the opposite case, it can be proved to be a mere hallucination, by the aid of a magnifying-glass applied to certain printed pages. There is no occasion here for any abstruse literary reasoning. There is no occasion for any literary reasoning at all. Either certain editions of the various books in question—the first folio of Shakespeare being the most important and the most famous of them—are, in so far as theitalicised portions of them are concerned, systematically printed in letters from two different founts of type, or they are not. If, as is absolutely indisputable, two different founts are used, the letters from these founts are used in such a manner that, when separated into groups of five, and expressed as dots and dashes, each of these groups will denote a single letter, in accordance with the code set forth by Bacon himself; or else they will not do this, or will do so only by accident, most of the groups having no meaning whatsoever. And lastly, if these groups do assume a consecutive meaning, and actually give us a series of single letters, the letters will form words and intelligible sentences, or they will not. The whole case is one for simple ocular demonstration.

To make this demonstration conclusive in the eyes of the world generally would, no doubt, demand some time and labour. The question is, are there sufficientprimâ faciegrounds for supposing that possibly the Baconian theory is true, to make it worth while for sceptics to undertake the inquiry? For my own part, unhesitatingly I venture to say that there are. In the first place, this cypher, as no one can deny, was familiar to Bacon, who claims to have himself invented it. He has himself admittedly supplied us with our specimen page of it, a passage from Cicero, reproduced by Mrs. Gallup in photographic facsimile, together with a companion page, in which Bacon has placed side by side the two alphabets employed, so that the differences between their respective letters may be more easily realised. Thus the biliteral cypher exists in one page of Bacon’s works at all events. There is nothing, therefore, fantastic in the idea that it may exist elsewhere. The only possibility of any doubt with regard to the question is due altogether to a purely physical circumstance. The types employed in printing the specimen passage from Cicero were designedly made of such a size, and the differences between the two alphabets were accentuated in such a manner, that the ordinary eye could readily learn to distinguish the letters that stand for dashes from those that stand for dots. Even here, however, the differences are for the most part so small and delicate that, in order to perceive them, we must scrutinise the page attentively; and an hour of such attention may elapse before we cease to be puzzled. But in the first folio of Shakespeare, as in most of the other volumes in which itis contended that the same type occurs, the type is much smaller. Although even the naked eye can be soon trained to perceive that in many cases the letters belong to different founts, yet these differences are of so minute a kind that in other cases they elude the eye without the aid of a magnifying-glass; and even with the aid of a magnifying-glass—I say this from experience—the eye of the amateur, at all events, remains doubtful, and unable to assign the letters to this alphabet or to that. The majority of educated persons, therefore, in the present state of the controversy, if they give to the italicised passages of the first Shakespearian folio and the other books in question only so much time and attention as may be expected from interested amateurs, may reasonably, if not rightly, entertain the opinion that the larger part of the differences alleged to exist between the italic letters employed are entirely imaginary, since their eyes are unable to detect them; that the supposed cypher is altogether a delusion, and has been read into the texts, not out of them, by Mrs. Gallup and her coadjutors.

On the other hand, the fact that the amateur finds himself, after weeks of study, still completely bewildered in his attempt to allocate the various letters to two different founts of type, in such a way as to elicit a sentence or even a word in groups of dots and dashes, according to the Baconian code, must not be taken too hastily as a proof that the alleged cypher is imaginary. Mrs. Gallup has done much, though not so much as she might have done, to enable her readers to settle this point for themselves. She has reproduced in facsimile from the original editions Bacon’s preface to theNovum Organum, 1620; and the Epistle Dedicatory of the so-called Spenser’sComplaints, 1591, in both of which it is contended that the Baconian cypher occurs. She gives similar facsimiles also of the Epistle Dedicatory, and the Commendatory Verses prefixed to the first folio of Shakespeare. She gives also an enlarged diagram of the different forms of italics used by Bacon in the printing of theNovum Organum; and of his preface to that work, and of the Epistle Dedicatory of Spenser’sComplaints, she gives the cypher meaning extracted letter by letter, each italic being thus allocated to its own alleged fount. Is this allocation merely fanciful or not?

I have studied for some weeks Mrs. Gallup’s facsimilies myself, and I give my experience, purely as that of an amateur,for what it is worth. When I examined the facsimiles first I could make nothing out of them; and of those from the first folio I can make very little still. All the letters seemed too much alike to allow of my separating them systematically into two founts of type. Differences which I thought I had discovered at one moment altogether vanished the next, and gave place to others, which soon, in their turn, escaped me. But with regard to the facsimiles from theNovum Organumand Spenser’sComplaintsthe case was otherwise, and for a very simple reason. In the facsimiles from the folio the type is extremely small, the original page having been reduced so as to accommodate it to an octavo volume. But in the Bacon and Spenser facsimiles the type is of the size of the original. It is comparatively large, and a study of it is proportionately easier. In these pages I was very soon able to distinguish the different founts to which several of the letters belong. I could presently do the same with regard to several letters more; and at last I was more or less master of two-thirds of the alphabet in such a way that I was able, with some confidence, to translate them, when in one form into a dot, and when in another form into a dash. I have tried this experiment with a large number of passages, and, comparing my interpretations with that of Mrs. Gallup herself, I have found that it coincides with hers, sometimes in four cases out of seven, and not infrequently in five. Many of the letters still continued to baffle me; but with regard to some I found myself always right; and the dots or dashes into which I had resolved these have invariably coincided with the requirements of the cypher, as Mrs. Gallup interprets it. It appears to me to be almost inconceivable that multiplied coincidences such as these can be the work of chance, or that they can originate otherwise than in the fact that in these pages at all events—the preface to theNovum Organum, printed in 1620, and in the Dedication of Spenser’sComplaints, printed in 1591—a biliteral cypher exists, in both cases the work of Bacon; and if such a cypher really exists here, the probabilities are overwhelming that Mrs. Gallup is right, and that we shall find it existing in the first folio of Shakespeare also.

It is unfortunate that Mrs. Gallup, whilst giving us the facsimiles already mentioned, has not given us any from the Shakespearian plays themselves, together with specimens of the cypherin them, interpreted letter by letter. I doubt, however, if such facsimiles would be conclusive if the page of the original folio were reduced to the size of an octavo. The process which ought to be adopted is one entirely the reverse of this. Passages from the first folio should be given not in a reduced but in an enlarged facsimile, so that the letters should, if possible, be something like half an inch high. Copies, moreover, of the letters, in all the forms in which they occur, should be arranged side by side in alphabets, according to the founts to which they belong; and a very few passages, if enlarged and illustrated thus, would be sufficient to show whether the admitted peculiarities of the type are merely accidental, as has vaguely been assumed hitherto, or are really the vehicle of an elaborately arranged cypher.

In order to show the reader that Bacon’s biliteral cypher can easily be printed in such a way that the inexperienced eye would wholly fail to detect it, and the uninstructed critic would reject its existence as a myth, I subjoin a passage taken from Bacon’s own chapter on cyphers:

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