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r his youngish kinsman's philanthropy, and "vast speculative ends" (how MODERN it all is!), and the rest of it? But just because Bacon, at thirty-one, IS so extremely "green," going to "take all knowledge for his province (if some one will only subsidise him, and endow his research), I conceive that he was in earnest about his reformation of science. Surely no Baconian will deny it! Being so deeply in earnest, taking his "study and meditation" so hard, I cannot see him as the author of Venus and Adonis, and whatever plays of the period,--say, Love's Labour's Lost, The Two Gentlemen of Verona, Henry VI,
Part I,--are attributed to
him, about this time, by Baconians. Of course my view is merely personal or "subjective." The Baconians' view is also "subjective." I regard Bacon, in 1591, and later, as intellectually preoccupied by his vast speculative aims:- what he says that he desires to do, in science, is what he DID, as far as he was able. His other desires, his personal advancement, money, a share in the conduct of affairs, he also hotly pursued, not much to his own or the public profit. There seems to be no room left, no inclination left, for competition in their own line with Marlowe, Greene, Nash, and half a dozen other professed playwrights: no room for plays done under the absurd pseudonym of an ignorant actor.
You see these things as the Baconians do, or as I do. Argument is unavailing. I take Bacon to have been sincere in his effusive letter to Cecil. Not so the Baconians; he concealed, they think, a vast LITERARY aim. They must take his alternative--to be "some sorry bookmaker, OR a pioneer in that mine of truth," as meaning that he would either be the literary hack of a company of players, OR the founder of a regenerating philosophy. But, at that date, playwrights could not well be called "bookmakers," for the owners of the plays did their best to keep them from appearing as printed books. If Bacon by "bookma