I am not--you will have perceived that I certainly am not--a
'Baconian.' So far as I have examined the evidence in the controversy,
I do not feel myself tempted to secede from the side on which (rightly,
inasmuch as it is the obviously authoritative side) every ignorant
person ranges himself. Even the hottest Baconian, filled with the
stubbornest conviction, will, I fancy, admit in confidence that the
utmost thing that could, at present, be said for his conclusions by a
judicial investigator is that they are 'not proven.' To be convinced of
a thing without being able to establish it is the surest recipe for
making oneself ridiculous. The Baconians have thus made themselves very
ridiculous; and that alone is reason enough for not wishing to join
them. And yet my heart is with them, and my voice urges them to carry
on the fight. It is a good fight, in my opinion, and I hope they will
win it.

I do not at all understand the furious resentment they rouse in the
bosoms of the majority. Mistaken they may be; but why yell them down as
knavish blasphemers? Our reverence, after all, is given not to an
Elizabethan named William Shakespeare, who was born at Stratford, and
married, and migrated to London, and became a second-rate actor, and
afterwards returned to Stratford, and made a will, and composed a few
lines of doggerel for the tombstone under which he was buried. Our
reverence is given to the writer of certain plays and sonnets. To that
second-rate actor, because we believe he wrote those plays and sonnets,
we give that reverence. But our belief is not such as we give to the
proposition that one and two make three. It is a belief that has to be
upheld by argument when it is assailed. When a man says to us that one
and two make four, we smile and are silent. But when he argues, point
by point, that in Bacon's life and writings there is nothing to show
that Bacon might not have written the plays and sonnets, and that there
is much to show that he did write them, and that in what we know about
Shakespeare there is little evidence that Shakespeare wrote those
works, and much evidence that he did not write them, then we pull
ourselves together, marshalling all our facts and all out literary
discernment, so as to convince our interlocutor of his error. But why
should we not do our task urbanely? The cyphers, certainly, are stupid
and tedious things, deserving no patience. But the more intelligent
Baconians spurn them as airily