wards split up into fagots; and again, se fagoter is to dress in a slovenly manner as we say, to look like a bundle of rags, and rags might be sold by the ell. Wonderful combinations of ideas are evolved from proverbial phrases. Boots have ever played an important part in modern languages; we speak of seven-leagued boots, a reminiscence of Tom Thumb and the Ogre; we talk of sock and buskin as synonyms of tragedy and comedy; graisser ses bottes is to prepare for a long journey, and, by extension of meaning, to die; and "to die in one's shoes" is a vulgar euphuism for being hanged.

To mind our p's and q's, again. Why must we be careful of those letters more than of others? Because in the olden days the host kept his customer's scores in chalk on the panels of the doors. P stood for pint, and Q for quart, and it behooved the guest to watch his score lest he should exceed his proper number of p's and q's. The printer, too, must needs be careful of the two letters, which in type are so very much alike. To suit, or to fit, to a T is a plain allusion to the carpenter's T, which is much used in mechanics and drawings.

There is an immense number of words and expressions which we use in daily conversation without reflecting on their original meaning, and of which the history is both instructive and amusing; but I will now only explain the French saying Chacun a sa marotte, equivalent to "Every man has his hobby." Hobby is a contraction of hobby-horse, the wooden creature on which a small boy rides round the nursery, or the animal which prances at fairs and village feasts. I have not gone into the derivation of hobby, but I would suggest that it may be au bois-wooden; or from abbey, because popular entertainments in the Middle Ages were chiefly provided by the regular clergy.

"Marotte" is literally the fool's bauble, and is a contraction of Marionette, which is, of course, a familiar form of Marie, the chief female figure in the old Mysteries; the little figure on the bauble is a baby or doll; the Scotch bawbee, or halfpenny, received that name because it was first struck to commemorate the birth of Mary, Queen of Scots; bawbee reminds us of the cognate poupée and the Italian bambino-p and b being interchangeable letters; even our doll may be only another form of poll and moll, both of which are diminutives of Mary. Again, we have the word puppet, an English form of poupée. The Italians have popazza for doll, and the North American Indians papoose for babe. One of the gravest pages of English history records how the Speaker's mace was stigmatized as "that bauble; " by implication that brutal phrase classed the Speaker Lenthall with the majority of mankind (see Carlyle).

The hobby, or marotte, of many profound thinkers is philology; therefore I need make no excuse for having endeavored to explain some of our small ignorances of words and expressions.-Cornhill Magazine.

SHAKESPEARE OR BACON?

my name

BACON, in his will, dated 19th December 1625, made an appeal to the charitable judgment of after times in these words-" For and memory I leave it to men's charitable speeches, and to foreign nations, and the next ages." He might well do so. The doubtful incidents of a shifty and in some particulars by no means exemplary life he might fairly suppose would be but little known to foreign nations and to men of future centuries. Time, to use his own words in a letter to Sir Humphrey May in 1625, would "have turned envy to pity;" and what was blameworthy in his life would, in any case, be judged lightly by posterity, in their gratitude for the treasures of profound observation and thought with which his name would be identified. He died a few months afterwards, on the 9th of April 1626.

No author probably ever set greater store than Bacon upon the produce of his brain, or was at more pains to see that it was neither mangled nor misrepresented by careless printing or editing. Neither is there the slightest reason to believe that he did not take good care -nay, on the contrary, that he was not at especial pains to ensurethat the world should be informed of everything he had written, which he deemed worthy to be preserved.*

Two years before Bacon made his will, the first or 1623 folio of Shakespeare's plays was published, with the following title page: "Mr. Willinm Shakespeare's Comedies, Histories, and Tragedies; Published according to the True Originall Copies. London: Printed by Isaac Jaggard and Ed. Blount. 1623." It was a portly volume of nearly a thousand pages, and must have taken many months, probably the best part of a year, to set up in types and get printed off. The printing of similar folios in those days was marked by anything but exemplary accuracy. But this volume abounds to such excess in typograpical flaws of every kind, that the only conclusion in regard to it which can be drawn is, that the printing was not superintended by any one competent to discharge the duty of the printing house "reader" of the present day, but was suffered to appear with "all the imperfections on its head," which distinguish "proof-sheets" as they issue from the hands of careless or illiterate compositors. Most clearly the proof-sheets had never been read by any man of literary skill, still

"As to

* See what care he took of his writings in the next sentences of his will. that durable part of my memory, which consisteth in my works and writings, I desire my executors, and especially Sir John Constable and my very good friend Mr. Bosville, to take care that of all my writings, both of English and Latin, there may be books fair bound, and placed in the King's library, and in the library of the University of Cambridge, and in the library of Trinity College, where myself was bred, and in the library of the University of Oxonford, and in the library of my Lord of Canterbury, and in the library of Eaton."-Spedding's Life and Letters of Bacon.

less by any man capable of rectifying a blundered text. In this respect the book offers a marked contrast to the text of Bacon's Works, printed in his own time, which were revised and re-revised till they were brought up to a finished perfection.*

Down to the year 1856 the world was content to accept as truth the statement of the folio of 1623, that it contained the plays of Mr. William Shakespeare "according to the true original copies." To the two preceding centuries and a half the marvel of Shakespeare's genius had been more or less vividly apparent. His contemporaries had acknowledged it; and as the years went on, and under reverent study that marvel became more deeply felt, men were content to find the solution of it in the fact, that the birth of these masterpieces of dramatic writing was due-only in a higher degree-to the same heaven-sent inspiration to which great sculptors, painters, warriors, and statesmen owe their pre-eminence. They would not set a limit to "the gifts that God gives," or see anything more strange in the prodigality of power in observation, in feeling, in humor, in thought, and in expression, as shown by the son of the Stratford-on-Avon woolstapler, than, in the kindred manifestations of genius in men as lowly born, and as little favored in point of education as he, of which biographical records furnish countless instances. But in 1856, or thereabouts, a new light dawned upon certain people, to whom the ways of genius were a stumbling-block. The plays, they conceived, could not have been written by a man of lowly origin, of scanty education, a struggling actor, who had the prosaic virtue of looking carefully after his pounds, shillings, and pence; and who, moreover, was content to retire, in the fulness of his fame, with a moderate competence, to a small country town where he was born, and to leave his plays to shift for themselves with posterity, in seemingly perfect indifference whether they were printed or not printed, remembered or buried in oblivion. This virtue of modesty and carelessness of fame is so unlike the characteristic of "the mob of gentlemen who write with ease” in these days, it is so hard to be understood by people possessed by small literary ambitions, that it was natural it should be regarded by them as utterly incomprehensible. So they set themselves to look elsewhere for the true author. Shakespeare lived amid a crowd of great dramatic writers-Marlowe, Jonson, Decker, Lyly, Marston, Chapman, Beaumont and Fletcher, Middleton, and others. But we know their * So sensitive about accuracy and finish was Bacon, that he transcribed, altering as he wrote, his Novum Organum twelve, and his Advancement of Learning seven times. † For example: Giotto, a shepherd boy; Leonardo da Vinci, the illegitimate son of a common notary; Burns, the son of a small farmer; Keats, an apothecary's apprentice; Turner, a barber's son. The list may be extended indefinitely of men who, with all external odds against them, have triumphed far beyond those who had all these odds in their favor.

works; and to ascribe Othello, Macbeth, Romeo and Juliet, Julius Cæsar, King Lear, or the other great plays to any of them, would have been ridiculous.

Outside this circle, therefore, the search had to be made; but outside it there was no choice. Only Francis Bacon towered pre-eminently above his literary contemporaries. He, and he only, could have written the immortal dramas! And so the world was called upon to forego its old belief in the marvel that one man had written Shakespeare's plays, and to adopt a creed which made the marvel far greater than ever, adding these plays as it did to the other massive and voluminous acknowledged works of Francis, Lord Verulamenough, and more than enough, in themselves to have absorbed the leisure and exhausted the energies of the most vigorous intellect. The great jurist, statesman, philosopher and natural historian of his age was, according to this new doctrine, the greatest dramatist of any age!

Who has the merit of being first in the field with this astounding discovery is not very clear. In September 1856, a Mr. William Henry Smith propounded it in a letter to Lord Ellesmere, sometime President of the then Shakespeare Society, which, as the copy before us bears, was modestly printed for private circulation. Mr. Smith has really little else to say for his theory, beyond his own personal impression that Shakespeare, by birth, education, and pursuits, was not the kind of man to write the plays; while Bacon had "all the necessary qualifications-a mind well stored by study and enlarged by travel, with a comprehensive knowledge of nature, men, and books." But if Bacon wrote the plays, why did he not say so? Mr. Smith's answer to this very pregnant question was, that to have been known to write plays, or to have business relations with actors, would have been ruinous to Bacon's prospects at the Bar and in Parliament; and that, being driven into the avocation of dramatist by the necessity of eking out his income, he got Shakespeare to lend his name as a blind to the real authorship! Such a thing as the irrepressible impulse of dramatic genius to find expression in its only possible medium is not even suggested by Mr. Smith as among Bacon's motives. He claims for him, indeed, "great dramatic talent," on the strength of the very trumpery masques and pageants in which Bacon is known to have had a share, and of some vague record, that "he could assume the most different characters, and speak the language proper to each with a facility which was perfectly natural "-a gift which might have produced a Charles Matthews, senior, and is by no means an uncommon one, as we can testify from our own limited experience, but which would go but a little way towards the invention of a single scene of even the weakest of the Shakespearian plays.

Strangely enough, Mr. Smith, unable apparently to foresee to what his argument led, founded on the first folio in proof of his assumption. Bacon," he writes, "was disgraced in 1621, and immediately set himself to collect and revise his literary works." "Immediately is rather a strong assertion, but he no doubt very soon busied himself in literary and scientific work. He finished his Life of Henry VII., and set to work upon the completion and translation into Latin of his Advancement of Learning, which appeared in October 1623 as De Augmentis Scientiarum. In the same year he published his History of the Winds and his Treatise on Death and Life. At this time, as his correspondence proves, he was busy with anything but poetry or playbooks. In March 1622 he offered to draw up a digest of the law, a long-cherished project of his, and showed the greatest anxiety to get again into active political life. He was, moreover, in wretched health, but at the same time intent on making progress with his Instauratio Magna, with all the eagerness of a man who feared that his life would be cut short before he could accomplish the chief object of his ambition. All his occupations during 1622-23, during which the first folio was at press, are thus fully accounted for. "But," continues Mr. Smith, "in 1623 a folio of thirty-six plays (including some, and excluding others, which had always been reputed Shakespeare's) was published." And then, he asks, in the triumphant emphasis of italics, "Who but the author himself could have exercised this power of discrimination?" As if the researches of Shakespearian students had not demonstrated to a certainty, that one of the chief defects of the folio was the absence of this very "power of discrimination," which, if duly exercised, would, besides giving us a sound text, have shown which of these plays were all Shakespeare's, and which had only been worked up, upon the slight or clumsy fabric of some inferior hand.

It is characteristic of the inexact and illogical kind of mind, which had persuaded itself of the soundness of a theory rested on such trivial data, that Mr. Smith accepted without verification the "remarkable words," as he calls them, to be found in Bacon's will. "My name and memory I leave to foreign nations; and to my own countrymen, after some time be passed over," language which, it may be presumed, in the light of the use which has since been made of it, was held by Mr. Smith to point to some revelation of great work done by Bacon, which should be divulged to the world, "after some time had passed over." Unluckily for this theory the words in italics do not exist in the will. Nevertheless, followers in Mr. Smith's wake have found them so convenient for their theory, that they repeat the misquotation, and ignore the actual words of the will quoted in the first sentence of this paper.

*As to how Bacon was occupied in 1622, see his letter to the Bishop of Winchester, (Spedding's Life and Works of Bacon) and his letter to Father Redemptor Baranzano.