The sweet embraces of a loving wife,

Laden with kisses, armed with thousand cupids,
Shall never clasp our necks.

And at i. 1, 75, the queen is found exhorting warlike Theseus to break off his marriage festivities in order to undertake an expedition in her behalf, urging that, if once Theseus is married, his bride will make him forget his promise, and

Our suit shall be neglected: when her arms,

Able to lock Jove from a synod, shall

By warranting moonlight corselet thee,

What wilt thou care. . . for what thou feelest not,
What thou feelest being able to make Mars

Spurn his drum.

Here the connection of ideas between an embracing corselet and a locked embrace seems to be worked out, and the two passages are still further brought into harmony by the relation which both bear to martial love.

There is at iii. 5, 40, of this play a translation from a Greek proverb, which was doubtless quoted at secondhand from the Adagia of Erasmus, to which, as will be seen, a large number of the Promus notes, as well as of the wise sayings in the plays, are traceable.

The proverb stands thus in Erasmus: Laterem lavas,' and is quoted apropos to vain or useless undertakings.1 In the play it is thus introduced:

4. Couns. We may go whistle: all the fat's in the fire.

As learned authors utter, washed a tile ;

We have been fatuus, and laboured vainly.

The Two Noble Kinsmen contains the two forms of morning and evening salutation, 'good-morrow' and good-night,' which are noted in folio 111, most probably for the first time; but of these there will be occasion here

Feruntur hinc confines aliquot apud Grecos parœmiæ, quibus operam inanem significamus veluti . . . Laterem lavas, id quod usurpat Terentius in Phormion, &c.'

after to speak. The introduction of these forms into the plays shows that it was written later than 1594, but there are points in connection with the Promus notes which give ground for believing that it was not much later, and not a trace is to be found in it of any of the French proverbs which are so frequent in the plays of the so-called 'third' and 'fourth' periods.

Finally, if there were no such notes extant as those which the Promus contains, there are in this play sufficient strongly-marked Baconianisms to satisfy us as to its origin. For instance, the reference to colours of good and evil (i. 2, 37); to Bacon's remedy for wounds by astringents, and to plaintain for a sore (i. 2, 61); the allusions to sickly appetite (i. 3, 39), and to satiety or surfeit (i. 1, 190; ii. 2, 86; iv. 3, 70); the various reflections on friendship (i. 3, 36; ii. 2, 190), on the uses of adversity and the nobility of patience (ii. 1, 36; ii. 2, 56, 72), on quarrels for mistresses (ii. 2, 90; iii. 3, 12, 15), on the shortness of life (v. 4, 28), its vanity (ii. 2, 102), on ripeness and season (i. 3, 91), on Death (v. 3, 12), on bitter sweets (v. 4, 47), on ministering to a mind diseased (iv. 3, 60); together with many small allusions to matters which were the subjects of Bacon's studies, but which, so far as a diligent inquiry has gone, are not to be found in other contemporary writers. The similes and antithetical forms of speech which are so frequent in the later prose works of Bacon and in the later plays, are entirely absent from this play.

The Two Noble Kinsmen was formerly attributed to Fletcher, or to Fletcher and Shakespeare together, and this conjunction of authorship is suspected in several of the plays, notably in Henry VIII. It is also a frequent answer to arguments drawn from the similarities which are noted between Bacon and Shakespeare to say that such things were common, or in the air,' and that instances of the same resemblances or coincidences may be adduced from Beaumont and Fletcher.

Those who press such arguments seem to forget that

the earliest date assigned to any work by either of these writers is 1607, whereas the conjectural dates affixed by the most recent critics to the plays of Shakespeare begin 'before 1591.'

Bacon wrote devices some years earlier even than this, and had exercised his pen as an author since 1579.

When, therefore, passages and expressions are met with in the works of Beaumont and Fletcher which repeat or call to mind similar passages in Shakespeare, it should be remembered that the evidence strongly favours the belief that Beaumont (to whom the more cultivated and graceful diction of the joint compositions is attributed) derived such expressions from his superior and senior, Bacon; and this belief is strengthened by the assurance which we possess of Beaumont's intimacy with and admiration of Bacon, to whom he dedicates one of his Masques in these terms:

The Masque of the Inner Temple and Gray's Inn,

Presented before his Majesty, &c... . . in the Banquetting House at Whitehall on Saturday, Feb. 20th, 1612. DEDICATION

To the worthy Sir Francis Bacon, His Majesty's Solicitor-General, and the grave and learned Bench of the anciently-allied houses of Gray's Inn and the Inner Temple, the Inner Temple and Gray's Inn.

You that have spared no time nor travel in the setting forth, ordering, and furnishing of this Masque (being the first fruits of honour, in this kind, which these two societies have offered to his Majesty) will not think much now to look back upon the effects of your own care and work; for that whereof the success was then doubtful is now happily performed .. And you, Sir Francis Bacon, especially, as you did then by your countenance and loving affection advance it, so let your good word grace it and defend it, which is able to add a charm to the greatest and least matters.

Since the preceding pages were written, the author has been reluctantly forced to swell the bulk of this volume by adding a list of the authors and works which

have been examined in connection with the present subject. These works have been examined specially with a view to ascertaining whether or not the literature of the fifteenth, sixteenth, and seventeenth centuries contains all or any of the turns of expression, similes, proverbs, morning and evening salutations, quotations, &c., which are entered in Bacon's Promus. The works consist of plays, poems, tales, tracts, dialogues, letters, sermons, and treatises.

The necessity for appending this list arises out of the fact, that almost every critic to whom these pages have been submitted has assumed that the writer has not studied the works of writers previous to and contemporaneous with Bacon. It is asserted over and over again that the classical quotations, the Bible texts, the proverbs, figures of speech, turns of expression, and so forth, which were set down by Bacon and used by Shakespeare, were common property'; that no doubt they were 'Elizabethan'-that the age in which these things first appeared was one of great and sudden progress; that such thoughts were in the air,' that the same things would be found in all the great writers of the same period; in short, that the germs of thought which had been floating about now fell upon fertile soil, and brought forth abundantly, and in proportion to the productiveness of the soil on which they happened to fall.

If this were really the case, if indeed it could be shown that others besides Shakespeare made use of the expressions, quotations, and other particulars which Bacon notes, it is improbable that any attempt would have been made to lay before the public a book which could only have claimed to exhibit some curious coincidences between the minds of two great men: the main object of the present book would have been missed.

But indeed it is a mistake to suppose that the subjects of Bacon's notes were common, or popular, or Elizabethan. The greatest pains were taken, as soon as the Promus was deciphered and its contents mastered, to ascertain

whether or not, or in what particulars, the subjects of the notes were used or alluded to by any author excepting Shakespeare. Bacon himself (as Mr. Spedding has said, and as has already been remarked in the preceding pages of this book) did not use them in his acknowledged works.' Who, then, were the authors, and which the works, wherein we may perceive instances of the use of these 'common,' popular,' or 'Elizabethan' sayings and expressions?

It is hoped that the following lists may be considered a sufficient answer to this question. Probably some errors and omissions may be discovered, since it was not the original intention of the author to publish them, and the reading which they record was done at various libraries, from many editions, and at odd times. It is therefore hardly possible that the catalogue and notes should be absolutely complete and free from mistakes. Still, they must be approximately correct, for the same pains have been bestowed upon them, and the same method pursued with them, as that which was found satisfactory in a similar search through Shakespeare.

With students who have not entered upon this kind of investigation there is a natural, and perhaps inevitable, tendency to suppose that although the arguments in favour of coincidences of knowledge and opinion are strong so far as they go, yet that there is something beyond a great somewhere '-wherein, if only you would search, you would be sure to find traces of the same knowledge, the same opinions, the same use of language. It is very difficult, perhaps impossible, to answer this vague objection, yet it is hoped that a list of the works which have been read with a view to the subject, will assist students of this class to form a just idea of the ground which has been explored, or rather, it may be said, of the mines which have been worked; for the plays and poems of authors whose evidence is of chief importance

'The chief exceptions to this rule have been noted at p. 2.

G