noble frenzy of poetic inspiration he wrote his one poem--his only poem,
his darling--and laid him down and died:

Good friend for Iesus sake forbeare To digg the dust encloased heare:
Blest be ye man yt spares thes stones And curst be he yt moves my bones.

He was probably dead when he wrote it. Still, this is only conjecture.
We have only circumstantial evidence. Internal evidence.

Shall I set down the rest of the Conjectures which constitute the
giant Biography of William Shakespeare? It would strain the Unabridged
Dictionary to hold them. He is a brontosaur: nine bones and six hundred
barrels of plaster of Paris.

V

"We May Assume"

In the Assuming trade three separate and independent cults are
transacting business. Two of these cults are known as the Shakespearites
and the Baconians, and I am the other one--the Brontosaurian.

The Shakespearite knows that Shakespeare wrote Shakespeare's Works; the
Baconian knows that Francis Bacon wrote them; the Brontosaurian
doesn't really know which of them did it, but is quite composedly and
contentedly sure that Shakespeare DIDN'T, and strongly suspects that
Bacon DID. We all have to do a good deal of assuming, but I am fairly
certain that in every case I can call to mind the Baconian assumers
have come out ahead of the Shakespearites. Both parties handle the same
materials, but the Baconians seem to me to get much more reasonable and
rational and persuasive results out of them than is the case with the
Shakespearites. The Shakespearite conducts his assuming upon a definite
principle, an unchanging and immutable law: which is: 2 and 8 and 7 and
14, added together, make 165. I believe this to be an error. No matter,
you cannot get a habit-sodden Shakespearite to cipher-up his materials
upon any other basis. With the Baconian it is different. If you place
before him the above figures and set him to adding them up, he will
never in any case get more than 45 out of them, and in nine cases out of
ten he will get just the proper 31.

Let me try to illustrate the two systems in a simple and homely way
calculated to bring the idea within the grasp of the ignorant and
unintelligent. We will suppose a case: take a lap-bred, house-fed,
uneducated, inexperienced kitten; take a rugged old Tom that's scarred
from stem to rudder-post with the memorials of strenuous experience, and
is so cultured, so educated, so limitlessly erudite that one may say of
him "all cat-knowledge is