retending sentence is distorted into conclusive
evidence that Bacon wrote works of commanding excellence under another's
name, and among them probably Shakespeare's plays. According to the only
sane interpretation of Matthew's words, his 'most prodigious wit' was
some Englishman named Bacon whom he met abroad--probably a pseudonymous
Jesuit like most of Matthew's friends. (The real surname of Father
Thomas Southwell, who was a learned Jesuit domiciled chiefly in the Low
Countries, was Bacon. He was born in 1592 at Sculthorpe, near
Walsingham, Norfolk, being son of Thomas Bacon of that place, and he died
at Watten in 1637.)

Chief exponents. Its vogue in America.

Joseph C. Hart (U.S. Consul at Santa Cruz, _d._ 1855), in his 'Romance of
Yachting' (1848), first raised doubts of Shakespeare's authorship. There
followed in a like temper 'Who wrote Shakespeare?' in 'Chambers's
Journal,' August 7, 1852, and an article by Miss Delia Bacon in 'Putnams'
Monthly,' January, 1856. On the latter was based 'The Philosophy of the
Plays of Shakespeare unfolded by Delia Bacon,' with a neutral preface by
Nathaniel Hawthorne, London and Boston, 1857. Miss Delia Bacon, who was
the first to spread abroad a spirit of scepticism respecting the
established facts of Shakespeare's career, died insane on September 2,
1859. {372} Mr. William Henry Smith, a resident in London, seems first
to have suggested the Baconian hypothesis in 'Was Lord Bacon the author
of Shakespeare's plays?--a letter to Lord Ellesmere' (1856), which was
republished as 'Bacon and Shakespeare' (1857). The most learned exponent
of this strange theory was Nathaniel Holmes, an American lawyer, who
published at New York in 1866 'The Authorship of the Plays attributed to
Shakespeare,' a monument of misapplied ingenuity (4th edit. 1886, 2
vols.) Bacon's 'Promus of Formularies and Elegancies,' a commonplace
book in Bacon's handwriting in the British Museum (London, 1883), was
first edited by Mrs. Henry Pott, a voluminous advocate of the Baconian
theory; it contained many words and phrases common to the works of Bacon
and Shakespeare, and Mrs. Pott pressed the argument from parallelisms of
expression to its extremest limits. The Baconian theory has found its
widest acceptance in America. There it achieved its wildest
manifestation in the book called 'The Great Cryptogram: Francis Bacon's
Cypher in the so-called Shakespeare Plays' (Chicago and London, 1887, 2
vols.),