^
w^^^-- ' y^^
y^.-
^ex^ ^
Cipy^ii^kT: 2^S3.cr 77Ms3:,yf. J)
Y
1 yft\r^
Ji^k-CfynyyCiy .-/Jo'^f/t.e-e^yl.-e^.'ty^.^ ,^.Ji^^ ^^t'Vcfy'i/'-^ '/o5S.
DELIA BACON
A BIOGRAPHICAL SKETCH
" What a wounded name,
Things standing thus unknown, shall live behind me !
If thou didst ever hold me in thy heart,
Absent thee from felicity awhile,
And in this harsh world draw thy breath in pain,
To tell my story."
BOSTON AND NEW YORK
HOUGHTON, MIFFLIN AND COMPANY
Copyright, 1888,
By THEODORE BACON.
All rights reserved.
The Riverside Press, Cambridge ••
Electrotyped and Printed by 11. 0. Houghton & Co.
AN ACKNOWLEDGMENT.
The letters written by the subject of this vol-
ume to Nathaniel Hawthorne were, at the cost of
diligent search, found by his daughter, Mrs. Rose
Hawthorne Lathrop, carefully preserved among
his papers, and were entrusted to me for the use
which has now been made of them. The over-
sight by which this helpful service failed to be
mentioned in a marginal note in the body of the
book is the less regretted that it has given occa-
sion for this more conspicuous acknowledgment,
that Hawthorne's patient kindness to one who
received so much from him was not exhausted in
his lifetime, but passed by inheritance to the gen-
eration that follows him.
THEODORE BACON.
Rochester, N. Y.,
November 17, 1888.
CONTENTS.
PAGB
An Acknowledgment , , iii
An Apology for this Book vii
I. Parentage and Birth 1
II. Babyhood and Childhood ; The School, and
the Beginning of the Long Warfare . 9
III. Early Essays in Letters 18
IV. The Instruction of Women . .' . . 23
V. A Sorrow that left its Shadow ... 32
VI. The Shakspere Drama : The Philosophy con-
tained in it, and the Authorship needed
FOR IT 35
VII. Counsel and Help from Emerson ... 47
VIII. The Journey to England .... 56
IX. At Work in England : London, St, Albans,
Hatfield ; The Friendship of the Carlyles ;
The Book ready for a Publisher ... 60
X. The " Putnam " Article : " William Shakspere
and his Plays : An Inquiry concerning them." 98
XI. Disappointment and Perseverance . . . 156
XII. News through Emerson 161
XIII. The Entrance of Ha\vthorne .... 164
XIV. Hawthorne's Visit 216
XV. Sickness akd Privation. The Flight to Strat-
ford, The Book to be Published at last . 235
XVI. The Refuge in Stratford. The Designs against
the Tomb. The Troubles and Patience of
Hawthorne 247
XVll. The Book Appears. Haavthorne's Preface . 284
XVIII. The Reception of the Book .... 296
XIX. The Strained Bow Breaks : " Last Scene of
All" 301
Index 319
This is the story of a life that was neither
splendid in achievement or adventure, nor success-
ful, nor happy. It began deep in a New World
wilderness, in the simplicity of a refined and hon-
ored poverty ; it continued for almost fifty years
of labor and sorrow, and ended amid clouds of
disappointment and distraction. Neither the sub-
ject of it, nor those to whom in her lifetime she
was very dear by ties of kindred, would easily
have consented that the world should know more
of her than could be learned from her gravestone :
that she was born, and died. Yet because she was
of rare intellectual force and acuteness, of abso-
lute sincerity and truthfulness, of self-annihilating
earnestness and devotion in whatever work she
entered upon ; and because the world is deter-
mined that it will speak of her as if it knew her,
supplying its lack of knowledge with conjecture
or with fable, I purpose to tell it something of
Delia Bacon : of what she was, from inheritance
and environment ; and what she did.
DELIA BACON.
I.
Of wheat ancestry she may have come, earlier
than the six generations through which it is easy
to trace her descent from an Enghsh colonist,
there is no reason to believe that she ever asked
or greatly cared. The whim which some have
been pleased to indulge, that her opinions may
have had their source in some fancy that she was
herself of common blood with the greatest Eng-
lishman who had borne her family name, is utterly
without substantial foundation. Even less, while
she lived, was known than can now be told of the
plain yet honorable race of which she was born ;
nor had any one pretended to trace for it a con-
nection with the great Norfolk family which had
become illustrious so shortly before the Puritan
exodus began. Except so far, therefore, as
knowledge of her descent through two centuries
of New England Puritans, and pride in such de-
scent, made her so strong a New Englander that
she brought to Elizabethan English thought and
literature a sympathy keener and warmer than
that of most Englishmen, and in making her such
2 DELIA BACON.
a New Englander gave direction to her studies and
imaginations, she received from her family name
neither prepossession nor suggestion. But as the
influences which made her, unconscious of them
as she was, were operating long before her birth,
something may properly be told of them.
Within twenty years after the first disastrous
venture at Plymouth, within fifteen after the
colony upon Massachusetts Bay was begun, there
was living at Dedham in that colony, in 1640,
one Michael Bacon. He was a man of more than
ordinary substance, and of such social dignity
as was implied by the rank, which he had held
before his migration, of captain of yeomanry.
From what part of the dominions of Charles I. he
had come, no one now seems able to tell. His
first name, which has not been a common one in
England, was repeated in several generations after
him, and might afford a clue to his English kin, if
it could be assumed to have been a family name
before him. Late researches, indeed, have dis-
closed the fact that the great Chancellor's half-
brother Edward had among his many children a
Michael, born in 1608; and for a moment it had
seemed possible that this younger son of a younger
son might have been the captain of yeomanry
seeking better fortune in the New World. But
when it was discovered that the Lord Keeper's
grandson Michael died while yet a child, even this
shadowy link of connection to a great family, a
DELTA BACON. 3
link of which Delia Bacon never so much as heard,
disappeared in the light of fact.
These Puritan Bacons seem to have prospered
and contented themselves for several generations
in Dedham, and Stoughton, which was a part of
Dedham, and Billerica, and Woburn, before they
were set in motion again by the westward impulse
of their Teuton, English, New England blood. In
1764, however, Joseph, great-great-grandson of
the first Michael, went into the wilderness, and in
the border town of Woodstock, which just in those
years was passing out of the jurisdiction of Massa-
chusetts into that of Connecticut, he married Abi-
gail Holmes. Though they lived a little while in
Stoughton, before 1771 they had fixed themselves
in Woodstock, among the original proprietors of
which the name of Holmes was found almost a
hundred years before. In that absolutely rural
community, containing in its population (presuma-
bly of from one to two thousand) no man, perhaps,
who was not a land-holder and a land-tiller, not
excepting its parish minister of the established
Congregational order, its physician, and possibly
a general trader and an artisan or two, there was,
nevertheless, strong and high thinking with plain
living. There, in 1761, was born (himself after-
ward a clergyman of distinction and an author of
merit) the father of Samuel Finley Breese Morse,
inventor and perfecter of the electric telegraph.
There, in 1763, was born (also to become, in due
4 DELIA BACON.
time, an eminent divine and author) the father of
OHver Wendell Holmes. And there, in 1771, was
born to Abigail Holmes (whose consanguinity to
those who have made her maiden name famous
was not too remote to be traceable) a son David,
the father of Delia Bacon.
It was an unsettled life, after all, into which this
child David was born. In several New England
towns his parents lived, a while in each, during
his childhood and youth ; not prosperous in busi-
ness, it seems, yet able to train their children with
such education of mind as well as of morals that
they need not shrink from any station into which
the simple democratic life of those communities
might bring them. An older son became a physi-
cian of great eminence. This one, becoming in-
flamed in the last years of the century with that
fire of self-devotion which forced from the mis-
sionary-apostle his cry of " Woe is me if I preach
not the Gospel ! " set himself to the work of study
for such service, that he might give himself espe-
cially to the instruction and civilization of the
Indians in the northwestern wilderness.
How this laborious training went on : with what
courage, when it was completed, this enthusiast
confronted the perils of a wilderness as remote in
those days, and almost as savage, as equatorial
Africa is now : with what fortitude and serenity he
suffered hardship in many forms until death took
him from weariness and disappointment long be-
DELIA BACON. 5
fore old age, it is not necessary now to speak.
The story is a beautiful and a moving one, but it
has been fully written by a competent filial hand.^
At the beginning of this century the interior of
America, from the Hudson River westward, was
almost an untried wilderness. There were, it is
true, the ancient Dutch settlements along the
Mohawk ; and some rich valleys of eastern New
York had received the first touches of colonization.
But beyond were unknown wilds, except that the
great lakes and rivers had been rudely mapped.
A hundred years before, indeed, the wise fore-
thought of French military statesmen had estab-
lished a trading post and fort on the strait be-
tween Lakes Huron and Erie, which was to be one
in the chain of strongholds from the St. LaAvrence
to the Gulf of Mexico by which English power on
this continent was to be restrained. That post,
now the splendid city of Detroit, in 1801 held a
motley population of a few hundred. But at
"Buffalo Creek" this young missionary, waiting
for days for a vessel to take him westward, found
nothing but an encampment of savages on the site
of the great city of Buffalo, which now numbers
almost a quarter of a million inhabitants.
There at Detroit, at the even remoter post of
Mackinac, upon the Maumee River, and else-
where, for five years the Connecticut evangelist
struggled in competition with the frontier rum-
^ Sketch of the Rev. David Bacon. By Leonard Bacon, D. D.,
LL. D. Boston : Consxresational Board of Publication. 1876.
6 DELIA BACON.
sellers for some effectual influence upon a wild
and violent race, with which communication was
enormously difficult from diversity of language.
With him he had taken his young wife, a delicate
girl of eighteen, whose refined and gentle dignity
in old age there are some who remember still.
Children had already come to them when, chang-
ing somewhat his earliest plan, but still devoted to
the spread of the religion of which he was a min-
ister, he determined, leaving the employment of
the Connecticut Missionary Society, to establish in
the Ohio woods a colony of New England men,
after the New England type.
From east to west, across the northern part of
what is now the State of Ohio, stretches the belt
of land which, included between the north and
south lines of the colony of Connecticut prolonged
westwardly, was within the terms of the original
ro}' al grant to that colony ; for that grant was lim-
ited on the west only by " the South Sea." The
sovereignty which by virtue of this grant was
asserted by the colony was, upon the establish-
ment of a national government, ceded to it by the
State ; but proprietary rights were reserved, and
the tract to which they attached was long after-
ward known indifferently as " New Connecticut,"
or the " Western Reserve." In this region, then
a dense and almost unbroken forest, the adventur-
ous missionary chose for his new enterprise a tract
of five miles square, some thirty miles south of
the point where now the great city of Cleveland
DELIA BACON. 7
looks out upon Lake Erie ; and there, having him-
self laid out with eminent skill and judgment the
roads and public places of the future community,
he built of logs the Httle cabin which was its first
house, and established in it his household.
In this town of Tallmadge, in the log cabin which
beo-an the town, was born to David and Alice Ba-
con, on the 2d of February, 1811, their fifth child.
Many years afterward the child recalled, and put
into words, her vague impressions of the scenes
which surrounded her infancy. She was speaking
of the forces which drove Sir Walter Ealeigh west-
ward, and made of him the pioneer of the New
World ; and especially of " the new power of the
religious Protestantism." " It was that too," she
says, " which would begin erelong to pierce the
great inland forest with its patient strength,
sprinkling it with bright spots of European cul-
ture, but culture already beginning to be modified
by the new exigencies, going deeper and deeper
with its little helpless household burthens that the
tomahawk and the scalping-knife must long en-
circle, going deeper and deeper always into its
old savage heart, and breaking it at last with
those soft rings of patient virtues and heroic faith
and love. It was that which was working still,
when in its fiercest heart, — in the valley of the
old Indian ' River of Beauty,' where the mission
hut had pursued the tomahawk, and the 'Great
Trail ' from the Northern lakes to the Southern
gulf went by the door, and wild Indian faces
8 DELIA BACON.
looked in on the young mother, and wolves howled
lullabies, the streets and squares of the town were
pencilled and the college was dotted on that trail,
and the wild old forest echoed with Sabbath
hymns and sweet old English nursery songs, and
the children of the New World awoke and found
a new world there, old as from everlasting;." ^
In the rural town of Mansfield in Connecticut,
where the father of this child had sojourned for a
while before departing upon his western mission,
there was among his friends a lawyer named
Salter. Student-at-law with him was also a friend
of the student of divinity, Thomas Scott Williams,
afterwards chief justice of Connecticut. Remov-
ing, soon afterward, to Hartford for the practice
of his profession, the future chief justice married
the daughter of one who had himself been chief
justice of the United States, Delia Ellsworth.
Remembering, in the wilderness, these friends
of his younger manhood, the missionary com-
bined their names in that of his child, and called
her Delia Salter. Almost to the close of her life
she continued to use both names thus given her
in baptism ; but when she began to contemplate
closely the publicity which she was to confront,
she seems — though it was never spoken of by her
— to have thought of a certain ludicrousness in
the sounds thus brought together, and then, for
the first time, she dropped out of use the second
name.
^ From A Study of the Life of Raleigh, unpublished.
II.
The enterprise which had been undertaken by
this frontier missionary, wise as it has been proved
by its results after not many years, in the estab-
lishment of an agricultural community unsur-
passed in America for comfort, prosperity, intelli-
gence, and moraUty, was, nevertheless, too great
for his unaided strength. Without capital of his
own, he had undertaken the purchase upon credit
of the broad tract of land upon which he had
traced the roads and allotted the farms of the
future colony. The sale of the farms to the Con-
necticut men, whose emigration he himself solicited,
was to enable him, he hoped, to meet the liabili-
ties he had incurred. But close upon his pur-
chase, in full peace with all nations, came the Em-
bargo which closed the ports of New England to
the world, and which was more ruinous to the
prosperity of New England than even the war
with Great Britain, which followed close upon it.
The plan which founded the town ended, so far as
the founder was concerned, in utter and heart-
breaking disappointment within a few months
after this little Delia was born. But the town
itself went on growing in numbers and wealth and
10 DELIA BACON.
beauty ; and it remembers and honors its founder.
The site of the cabin, which was its earliest house,
was marked by the townsmen in 1881 with a
great granite bowlder — an "erratic" block —
with an inscription upon its face that tells of the
gathering there of the First Church in Tallmadge,
'' in the house of Rev. David Bacon, January 22,
1809."
For almost a year of the little girl's babyhood,
her father had been in Connecticut, engaged in a
last endeavor to restore an undertaking already
ruined. When that, too, had failed, as his eldest
son has written, " with difficulty he obtained the
means of returning to his family, and of removing
them from the scene of so great a disappointment.
All that he had realized from those five years of
arduous labor was poverty, the alienation of some
old friends, the depression that follows a fatal
defeat, and the dishonor that waits on one who
cannot pay his debts. Broken in health, broken
in heart, yet sustained by an immovable confi-
dence in God, and by the hopes that reach into
eternity, he turned away from the field of hopes
that had so sadly perished, and bade his last fare-
well to Tallmadge and the Western Reserve." In
May, 1812, with his almost girlish wife and their
brood of little ones, of whom the oldest was but
ten, he began his slow journey of six hundred
miles throu£i:h the wilderness to his old home.
There, in Old Connecticut, for a little w^hile he
DELIA BACON. H
lingered, preaching and teaching : in Litchfield,
Prospect, Middletown; and at last he laid down
his weary life, in its forty-sixth year, in August,
1817.
It was a very helpless family that he left be-
hind him. By what management or magic this
young widow, absolutely without inheritance other
than the resolute and devout spirit which had
come through many generations of English Puri-
tans, contrived to feed and clothe her six children
and herself; to supply them all with the highest
education and culture which that simple commu-
nity afforded ; and to enable the two sons to pass
through Yale College and into learned professions,
no one now living can tell. It was, however, a
painful part of the process that it became neces-
sary to accept a home for this little Delia, six
years old, in the family of her namesake, Mrs.
Williams, in Hartford. Here, for several years,
she was cared for as a daughter of the house,
while yet she maintained, by all means of commu-
nication, frequent intercourse and warm affection
for those of her own blood from whom she was
parted for a while. There can be no doubt of the
calm and constant kindness of patronage which
the fatlierless child received here ; but its calm-
ness may have been somewhat stern and grim.
It was not long after Delia had thus found an
asylum in Hartford that a school for girls was
opened there which made no small mark upon the
12 DELIA BACON.
generation then coming on. It was that of Cath-
erine Beecher, whose father, Lyman Beecher, was
a minister of the Congregational churches which
were just then ceasing to be " by law established "
in Connecticut, and one whose fame for homiletic
and polemic power is far from extinct. Into this
school Delia entered as a pupil, and with her was
the teacher's sister, Harriet, a year her junior,
who was destined to attain extraordinary renown
and success in literature, not long before her
schoolmate's life of unsparing toil ended in disap-
pointment and failure. Through all her life, how-
ever, she retained the constant friendship of both
sisters, the teacher and the fellow-pupil. Nearly
thirty years afterward Catherine Beecher thus
described the child who now came under her
charge :
" If the writer were to make a list of the most
gifted minds she has ever met, male or female,
among the highest on the list would stand five
young maidens, that were then grouped around
the writer, in that dawning experience of a teach-
er's life. And never did a teacher watch the un-
foldings of intellect and moral life with more
interest and delight. Of this number, one was
the homeless daughter of that Western home mis-
sionary.
" Possessing an agreeable person, a pleasing and
intelhgent countenance, an eye of deep and ear-
nest expression, a melodious voice, a fervid imagi-
DELIA BACON. 13
nation, and the embryo of rare gifts of eloquence
in thought and expression, she was preeminently
one who would be pointed out as a genius ; and
one, too, so exuberant and unregulated as to de-
mand constant pruning and restraint. With this
was united that natu]:al delicacy and purity of
mind, which frequently not only protects the
young maiden from all coarseness and indecorum,
but, even to full womanhood, renders it impossible
for her even to conceive what impurity may be.
" In disposition she was sensitive, impulsive,
and transparent, possessing a keen longing for
approbation, a morbid sensibility to criticism or
blame, an honest truthfulness, and an entire free-
dom from all that could be called management or
art."
" In this period of her mental history, had her
future career been anticipated by the data of I»ier
natural endowments and probable circumstances,
it would have been predicted that her genius, her
confiding frankness, her interesting appearance,
her gifts of eloquence, and her sincere aspirations
after all that is good and pure, would make her
an object of attention, and probably of excessive
flattery. On the other hand, her keen sensibility
to blame or injustice, her transparency, sincerity,
and impulsiveness, the dangerous power of keen
and witty expression, and the want of the guid-
ance and protection of parents and home, would
make her an object of unjust depreciation
14 DELIA BACON.
The persons who were objects of her regard, and
to whom she confided her thoughts and feelings,
would almost inevitably become enthusiastic ad-
mirers, while those who in any way came into an-
tagonism w^ould be as decided in their dislike."
The sketch thus drawn by the clear-minded
teacher, strong and sharp as it is, needs yet some
filling up of its outlines. I cannot speak irrever-
ently of the terrors with which the prevalent reli-
gion of New England, from the beginning down to
very recent times, sought to persuade men to live
purely and think rightly. Half a century hence,
when it has been proved that better, stronger, and
truer men and women have been nurtured under
the relaxation of those old-time rigors than those
whom the seventeenth, the eighteenth, and the
first quarter of the nineteenth century in New
England produced, scorn and indignation at the
ancient Puritan errors will at least not be un-
timely. But even the most loyal New Englander
may doubt the wholesomeness of the exercises
of self-examination and introspection into which
devout parents and teachers guided their infant
charges. It touches close upon sacrilege to in-
vade the confidence of a 3'oung religious soul,
seeking for illumination under the menace of
eternal wretchedness ; but the woman whose story
is told cannot be known without knowledge of the
girl. There is extant a letter from her to her
brother, then a student of divinity, when she was
DELIA BACON. 15
a child of ten. It covers one side of a half sheet
of foolscap, yellow with age, and ruled with pen-
ciled lines. "Your sister," says this little child,
" has resisted the Holy Spirit and He has departed
from me. Avhat a deplorable state ! what a
dreadful situation ! When I think of it I tremble ;
bnt my fears are of short duration. Like Felix I
say, go thy way for this season ; but oh ! what
will become of me when I shall leave this vain
transitory world and rise before my God in judg-
ment ! Cease not to • pray for me ; I have neg-
lected the offers of salvation ; I have despised
my dear Redeemer ; but still there is mercy with
him who is able to save." (Sept. 29, 1821.)
From time to time appear, among her brother's
most sacredly treasured papers, letters showing
continual like struggles and miseries, with alter-
nating hope and despair, resulting at last, at some
time before her fifteenth birthday, in a formal
" profession of faith," in the First Church in Hart-
ford.
From the spring of 1826 the shelter and sup-
port which she had for years received in the Wil-
liams household were to be hers no longer. With
a very sad young heart she looked out upon the
world in which, at fifteen, she was to begin a life-
long struggle. At the close of February she
writes to her eldest brother, who, young as he
was, stood in a father's place to her : " I have but
nine weeks more to remain in my present home,"
and then, " I shall have no home in all the wide,
16 DELIA BACON.
wide world I can call ray own." " The future
seems very dark to me, and I cannot imagine
what I am to do. I know I am to depend upon
my own exertions for subsistence, and were there
any field for these exertions I would not fear.
But there seems to me none, and every way I
turn I am disappointed and perplexed." (Feb.
26, 1826.)
At last, after much inquiry in various direc-
tions for a place in which a school could be main-
tained (the only resource in those days for women
who would help themselves), after some small
work in a school in Hartford, this child, with a
sister but little older, began a school in the village
of Southington, Connecticut.
Almost at the beginning of 1827, when Delia
was not yet sixteen, the Southington enterprise
was begun. It seems to have been for girls of
ages up to the highest school limit ; yet here, and
in the other places where new experiments were
made, the head of the school was Delia, and her
elder sister was subordinate.
It would be profitless to reproduce from her
letters the assiduous toil, the continuous strug-
gle of pinching economy with dire poverty, in
which these years of girlhood were worn away.
In Southington, only the time from January to
September was needed to demonstrate the failure
of their project. At Perth Amboy, in New Jersey,
they had learned by May of the next year (1828)
that the sanguine hopes with which they had been
DELIA BACON. 17
attracted thither by the townspeople were unwar-
ranted, and they had fallen a little further into
debt than when they came. At Jamaica on Long
Island, twelve miles from New York, the prospect
set before them was still more glowing than be-
fore. Their undertaking was to be larger. Not
only were they to teach a greater number of
young ladies, but they were — these two girls —
to maintain a household of which some of the
scholars should be inmates.
The encouragement which inspired them in be-
ginning here, in May, 1828, was certainly substan-
tial. There was a refined and cultured society
there, which appreciated and welcomed the refine-
ment of the girl teachers. Especially did they
find support in the cordial friendliness of John
Alsop King, whose father, Rufus King, had been
one of the most eminent statesmen of the post-
revolutionary period, and who became himself
governor of New York in later years. But even
here, two years sufficed to prove their powers in-
adequate to their task ; and in the summer of
1830 an end came, in disappointment, exhaustion,
sickness, and hopeless insolvency, to this last at-
tempt. And in telling the fatal story to their
eldest brother, Leonard, who was all they had for
counselor, comforter, and helper, Delia begins by
saying : " Our letters must still be what they al-
ways have been, a tale of blasted hopes, realized
fears, and unlooked-for sorrows."
III.
There were no more daring enterprises in es-
tablishing and carrying on schools, with all the
responsibilities, cares, and hazards of proprietor-
ship. Here and there, however, Delia was able
now to maintain herself by teaching in the schools
of others. At Hartford once more, immediately
after the Jamaica disaster ; at Penn Yan, in West-
ern New York, after which she frankly declares,
"I will never live again in a place with such a
heathenish name, unless I go on a mission " (June
16, 1832) ; perhaps in the rural village of West
Bloomfield, not far from there, where at any rate
she was for many months with her married old-
est sister; and perhaps elsewhere. But during
these years she was getting into her mind notions
of better means of self-support than teaching
school.
In the thickest of the toil and trouble at Ja-
maica she had prepared for the press, if a pub-
lisher could be found, her first adventure in let-
ters. It was not strange that the history of the
Anglo-American Puritans should strongly hold the
attention of one who was so completely theirs
by descent and by sympathy; and the series of
DELIA BACON. 19
short stories which were to make her book was
founded upon incidents in their history. In the
spring of 1831 there was published in New Haven,
by A. H. Maltby, " Tales of the Puritans," a duo-
decimo of three hundred pages. The author's
name was not given, but such credit as belonged
to it was soon awarded to Delia Bacon. Nor was
it by any means without merit, especially, as she
herself said of it shortly afterward, " considering
it as written without experience, without knowl-
edge of the subjects of which it treated, with
scarcely a book to refer to beyond the works
made use of in school." (Dec. 12, 1831.) The
three stories contained in it were " The Regi-
cides," "A Fair Pilgrim," and " Castine," which
she had at first called " The Catholic." The first
was an adaptation, far from unskillful or uninter-
esting, of the romantic story of the three judges
of Charles I. who found shelter in New Haven,
and of the pursuit of them after the Restoration,
ingeniously defeated by sympathizing officials and
people. The next seems to have been suggested,
but little more, by the fate of the Lady Arbella
Johnson, daughter of the Earl of Lincoln, who
came to die in the wilderness, at Salem, in 1630;
and the subject of the last was the French settle-
ment of the Baron Castine upon the Penobscot,
late in the seventeenth century.
This experiment, attempted in the stress of
poverty and debt in the hope of retrieving the
20 DELIA BACON.
impending losses from the school, seems to have
achieved for her little more than the succes d'es-
time vi^hich was quite unquestionable. The credit,
indeed, which the girl got for it, in those days
when the girls were rare who saw themselves in
print, may have done little good in sharpening
the hunger for literary success which shrewd Cath-
erine Beecher had already discerned in her as a
child at school. " From her childhood," her oldest
brother wrote of her long afterward, " she has had
a passion for literature, and perhaps I should say
a longing, more or less distinct, for literary celeb-
rity." So it was not long before she was at work,
in the intervals of teaching here and there in
schools, or (this she liked much better) select
classes of young ladies in her own apartments,
upon a new venture based upon an incident of
American history. This was to have been a drama,
and at first ambition had inspired the hope, at
which indeed her Puritan soul was rather aghast,
that it might be acted upon the stage. Friendly
criticism, however, and especially, as her letters
show, that of her brother, convinced her, after she
had exhausted herself with labor upon it, that it
lacked essential dramatic qualities; and at last,
when she had rewritten and greatly altered it, the
form of dialogue being yet retained, it was pub-
lished in New York, late in 1839, by S. Colman.
Its title was " The Bride of Fort Edward : A Dra-
DELIA BACON. 21
matic Story." It was based upon the pathetic
story of Jane McCrea, a beautiful American girl
whose lover was a loyalist officer in Burgoyne's
army, just before its surrender at Saratoga. Cap-
tured by a party of Burgoyne's Indians, she prom-
ised them, in her terror, a large reward if they
would take her safely to the British camp. " It
was a fatal promise," says Irving. " Halting at a
spring, a quarrel arose among the savages, in-
flamed most probably with drink, as to whose
prize she was, and who was entitled to the re-
ward. The dispute became furious, and one, in
a paroxysm of rage, killed her on the spot. He
completed the savage act by bearing off her scalp
as a trophy." ^
This episode and its effect, which was certainly
very great, in stimulating the patriotic rage of the
revolutionary army, are the theme of the book.
The dialogue is mostly in prose, with passages
interspersed of blank verse, not always correct;
and it continues for almost two hundred pages of
rhapsody and apostrophe and curiously mistaken
familiar speech of common people. That partial
theatrical friends — her letters even mention Miss
Ellen Tree, one of the most famous of her day
— should ever have fancied that it contained so
much as the germ of an acting play, is inconceiv-
able when one reads it now ; and even the read-
^ Life of Washington, iii. 153.
22 DELIA BACON.
ing of it is far from being a recreation. It was
a failure, every way ; it brought debt instead of
money, and no renown ; but it did the great ser-
vice of ending, for a time, her attempts at liter-
ary work, and turning her back to study and in-
struction.
IV.
In all these years, beginning with a severe and
prolonged course of an epidemic fever at Jamaica
in 1828, the girl, maturing into womanhood, had
been waging a sharp though intermittent warfare
with ill-health. Sometimes, indeed, the high spir-
its and animation which seem to have been natural
to her indicated a vigorous physical state ; but
often there were intense, prolonged, and prostrat-
ino; headaches, or ao;onizino^ attacks of neuralo-ia.
Against this, however, she carried on with high
courage her struggle to be something and to ac-
complish something. She writes to her brother of
being " resolved to correct the defects of her early
education, so far as it is possible for earnest and
patient effort to accomplish it ; " and so of her
reading on vegetable physiology, on political econ-
omy, on the elements of ideology. (Dec. 12,
1831.) At another time she is renewing her
school acquaintance, such as it was, with Latin ;
and again, with little help from teachers, she is
trying to learn Greek.
But in the midst of it all — sickness, studying,
writing of stories and plays that cannot be played
— she carries on the work of instruction, from
24 DELIA BACON.
which alone, in those days, a woman could earn
her living, if she could not work with her hands.
This she did, not in the perfunctory fashion which
seems alone to have been known to the pedagogy
of the time, but in a Avay of her own devising.
She gathered about her, in her own apartments,
or in some larger room when her own proved in-
sufficient, young ladies whose school-days were
ended, and many, even, who were no longer
young. These she taught, in literature some-
times, but above all in history. One who seems
to have thought it a privilege to be her pupil has
written thus of her instruction :
" She imparted to them new ideas ; she system-
atized for them the knowledge already gained ;
she engaged them in discussion ; she taught them
to think. * What books do you use in Miss Ba-
con's class ? ' A question often asked and impos-
sible of answer. Her pupils had no books — only
a pencil and some paper. All they learned was
received from her lips. She sat before them, her
noble countenance lighted with enthusiasm, her
fair white hands now holding a book from which
she read an extract, now pressing for a moment
the thoughtful brow. She knew both how to
pour in knowledge and how to draw out thought.
And there are few listeners, I think, who can give
keener and more critical attention than the former
members of Miss Bacon's class.
" In many of the Eastern cities " these historical
DELIA BACON. , 25
lectures " called out deep interest and enthusiasm.
Hundreds of the most cultivated flocked to hear
them. Graceful and intellectual in appearance,
eloquent in speech, marvelously wise, and full of
inspiration, she looked and spoke the very muse
of history. Of these lectures she wrote out noth-
ing — not even notes. All their wisdom came
fresh and living from the depth of her ready intel-
lect. And for that very reason there is now no
trace of what would he so valuable." ^
Since these pages are written only to tell those
who care to know what Delia Bacon was, it may
be well to adduce further the testimony of this
pupil.
" Delia Bacon was a woman of a genius rare and
incomparable. Wherever she went, there walked
a queen in the realm of mind. To converse with
her was to be carried captive. The most ordinary
topic became fascinating when she dealt with it,
for whatever subject she touched she invested
with her own wonderful wealth of thought, and
illustration, and association, and imagery, until all
else was forgotten in her magical converse.
" In personal appearance she was of middle stat-
ure, graceful, fair, and slight. Her habitual
black dress set off to advantage the radiant face,
whose fair complexion was that uncommon one
which can only be described as pale yet brilliant.
1 Article "Delia Bacon : " by Sydney E. Holmes [Mrs. Sarah E.
Hensliaw]: The Advance (Chicago), Dec. 26, 1867.
26 . DELIA BACON.
Intellect was stamped on every feature. Genius
looked from brow and eye. The hair was a pale
brown, gold tinted ^ — fit shading for such a coun-
tenance. The eye blue-gray, clear, shining, and
passing rapidly through all expressions, from the
swimming softness of tender sympathy to the
flash that revealed the inspiration within.
" Meeting her in a crowd, you glanced over and
thought — 'a graceful woman.' But your eye
unconsciously sought her again, and the second
time you felt rather than thought — ' a remark-
able woman.' * Who is that lady ? ' asked a
newly appointed college official, — ' that lady
whom I meet occasionally in the street.' He
went on to paint her. There was no mistaking
the description. ' That,' was the reply, ' is Miss
Bacon.' 'That Miss Bacon!' he exclaimed. *I
knew it was some one remarkable ! — I never saw
such an eye in my life ! and how young she is ! '
" No one could know and appreciate Delia Ba-
con, without placing her in his estimation among
the most highly endowed women whom he ever
saw or heard of. Was philosophy the subject of
her discourse ? She dealt with abstract truth as
but one woman does in generations. Weighing,
balancing, analyzing, and comparing, she knew all
systems, and had their resemblances and their
1 This detail is certainly erroneous. The hair was of a brown
which was nearer to black than is often found with blue or blue-gray
eyes. — T. B.
DELIA BACON. 27
differences clearly defined, distinctly remembered,
and ready at her call. Her mastery of the sub-
ject astonished you ; you were sure she had given
her chief time and thought to that alone.
" Was it history ? She was equally at home, and
showed an insight that illustrated her great intel-
lectual powers. Chronology, geography, narra-
tive — all its facts were familiar to her. Know-
ing what she knew of these, most people would
have considered themselves thoroughly versed in
historic lore. But history to her was not these —
these were to her only the beginning. They were
the husk, the rind, the outward covering of a
philosophy, which she delighted to educe for
duller minds to recognize. So with poetry and
art. By her own originality and genius, she set
forth each with new thoughts, or with old ones in
new combinations. And a deep veneration for
what is good, a clear recognition of God and his
providence, underlay all her teachings. This is
no high-sounding praise. Let those who knew
her best make answer." ^
For some years together — exactly when the
period began or ended it is hard to say — these
courses of instruction were given by her with great
approval. In New Haven, where her brother was
minister of the ancient " First Church," and was
also in official relation to Yale College, she had
certain marked advantages of acquaintance and
1 Article " Delia Bacon " : The Advance, uhi supra.
28 DELIA BACON.
introduction; and here her classes are said to have
numbered one hundred, while they included be-
yond doubt all that was most refined and culti-
vated in the society of that university town. In
Hartford, the home of her childhood, her success
was gratifying to her reasonable pride. In Bos-
ton, in Cambridge, and in New York and Brook-
lyn — these last, in 1852 and 1853, seeming to
end the list — she continued this congenial but ex-
hausting labor of oral instruction, and even found
the new sensation, in the last season of this period,
of earning money enough to make substantial pay-
ments upon the debts incurred in former years.
It was in Boston that she became acquainted
with one of those who have recorded in public the
impression she made. In " Recollections of Sev-
enty Years," ^ of which the first of several editions
appeared in 1865, Mrs. Eliza Farrar, who had
come to know her well before she died, devotes
her closing chapter to the story, so far as it had
been within her knowledge, "of a highly gifted
and noble-minded woman " (p. 331).
" The first lady whom I ever heard deliver a
public lecture was Miss Delia Bacon, who opened
her career in Boston, as teacher of history, by
giving a preliminary discourse, describing her
method, and urging upon her hearers the impor-
tance of the study.
1 Boston : Ticknor & Fields.
DELIA BACON. 29
" I had called on her that day for the first time,
and found her very nervous and anxious about
her first appearance in public. She interested me
at once, and I resolved to hear her speak. Her
person was tall and commanding, her finely shaped
head was well set on her shoulders, her face was
handsome and full of expression, and she moved
with grace and dignity. The hall in which she
spoke was so crowded that I could not get a seat,
but she spoke so well that I felt no fatigue from
standing. She was at first a little embarrassed,
but soon became so engaged in recommending the
study of history to all present, that she ceased to
think of herself, and then she became eloquent.
" Her course of oral lessons, or lectures, on his-
tory interested her class of ladies so much that she
was induced to repeat them, and I heard several
who attended them speak in the highest terms of
them. She not only spoke, but read well, and
when on the subject of Roman history, she de-
lighted her audience by giving them with great
effect some of Macaulay's Lays.^
"I persuaded her to give her lessons in Cam-
bridge, and she had a very appreciative class as-
sembled in the large parlor of the Brattle House.
She spoke without notes, entirely from her well-
stored memory ; and she would so group her facts
as to present to us historical pictures calculated to
1 It should be remembered that the " Lays " had then but just
appeared, and were not yet commonplaces. — T. B.
30 DELIA BACON.
make a lasting impression. She was so much ad-
mired and liked in Cambridge, that a lady there
invited her to spend the winter with her as her
guest, and I gave her the use of my parlor for
another course of lectures. In these she brought
down her history to the time of the birth of
Christ, and I can never forget how clear she
made it to us that the world was only then made
fit for the advent of Jesus. She ended with a fine
climax that was quite thrilling.
" In her Cambridge course she had maps, charts,
models, pictures, and everything she needed to
illustrate her subject. This added much to her
pleasure and ours. All who saw her then must
remember how handsome she was, and how grace-
fully she used her wand in pointing to the illustra-
tions of her subject. I used to be reminded by her
of Raphael's sibyls, and she often spoke like an
oracle.
" She and a few of her class would often stay
after the lesson and take tea with me, and then
she would talk delightfully for the rest of the
evening. It was very inconsiderate in us to allow
her to do so, and when her course ended she was
half dead with fatigue" (pp. 319-321).
The instruction, however, which for almost a
decade of years she was thus giving by oral dis-
course and conversation to classes of ladies, while
general history was perhaps oftenest its subject,
DELIA BACON. 31
was by no means restricted to the history of events.
She taught, in like manner, with high enthusiasm
and with great acceptance, the history of hterature
and the arts, and the history and principles of criti-
cism. More and more, indeed, through all this
period of exhausting toil for self-support, under
the burden of sickness and penury and debt, her
interest and her inclination were turning toward
pure literature and literary criticism ; so that
when, in 1852, her historical lectures in Boston
and Cambridge were ended for the season, she
seems to have hoped that they would never be, as
in fact they never were, resumed.
V.
This was not a normal or healthful life for a
girl and woman of an exquisitely sensitive nervous
organization, of fine intellectual powers, of strong
affections. With the warmest instinct of domestic
love for the family into which she had been born,
and in which privation and hardship and separa-
tion had only strengthened the mutual attachment
of its members, she yet had never known a home,
except the stern and conscientious hospitality
which sheltered her for the few years before she
became fifteen. With a keen sense of admiration,
and with personal attractions so marked, that
although she did not seem conscious she could not
have been ignorant of them, her girlhood was
grimly shut out from even the temperate social
joys that Connecticut Puritanism allowed. Out of
such social life, had not the necessity that was laid
upon her forbidden it to her, there might have
come in her womanhood the home which she was
never to know, and the ties and the occupations
which would have turned the current of her life
into a placid, serene, and undistinguished domes-
ticity. But there was no room in her crowded
life for the passages that lead to marriage. Such
DELIA BACON. 33
addresses as had been openly paid to her she was
observed to receive with amusement rather than
seriously, and then to decline. Afterward, indeed,
when she was mature in age, she underwent a
most cruel ordeal, and suffered a grievous and
humiliating disappointment. So keen was the
exasperation, and so deep the humiliation to which
her highly sensitive and already overwrought
nature was subjected in the face of a wide and
critical circle of acquaintance, that it would not
have been strange if the new strain had broken
it down completely. Exquisitely sensitive as she
was, however, she was no less proud and brave ;
and if from the sharp and prolonged distress of the
years 1846 and 1847 her mind did in fact undergo
some permanent harm that took open effect in
later years, there was little sign of it then. Sus-
tained by the womanly pride that was born in her,
and by the religious principle in which she had
been so diligently trained, she was able to write,
not long afterward, to her brother from Ohio, al-
most from the very spot where she was born in a
missionary's cabin : " I begin to look upon the
world, and its toil and strife, somewhat as those
do who have left it forever. Objects which once
seemed very large to me appear now, in the men-
tal perspective which this distance creates, absurd-
ly little. ... In that calm of heart and soul to
which God by his providence and by his grace has
at length conducted me, I can afford to wait until
* the lying lips are put to silence.' "
34 DELIA BACON.
More than ever before was the tender and
watchful care of those to whom she was especially
bound by ties of nature or affection centred upon
her during these years of suffering and of threat-
ened prostration, and the years that closely fol-
lowed them. Cheered though they were, how-
ever, by her courage and fortitude, there were
those among them who began already to discern
upon her, even if they sounded no note of warn-
ing, the approaching shadow of a dark and dread-
ful cloud.
VI.
Stu£)Ying and teaching for many years not
merely the history of events, but the history and
criticism of literature, it is not strange that the
strongly English mind of this New England woman
became gradually fixed upon the greatest work of
English letters, the drama of the Elizabethan and
Jacobean age. So complete, indeed, was the spell
of fascination under which she fell in the study
especially of the plays which bear the name of
Shakspere, that after the beginning of 1853 she
could no longer endure the burden of her histori-
cal lessons, in which she seemed to have achieved
a permanent success, sure to bring her, if only she
should continue them, prosperity and credit.
To whom it first occurred to doubt the title of
William Shakspere to the authorship of the plays
commonly bearing his name is a question which
will not be much discussed in this sketch.
Certainly no dispute of authorship was rife in
his lifetime. A good reason for this was that there
was no assertion of authorship by any one. It is
true, that as early as 1589, when Shakspere was
twenty-five years old, he had become a play-actor,
and one of the sixteen owners of the Blackfriars
36 DELIA BACON.
play-house. It is even guessed that as early as
that, one of the plays which were afterward called
his had been performed, in that house or else-
where ; although it is hardly surmised that any
one of them was printed earlier than 1694. And
inasmuch as the general agreement seems to be
that half of all that go commonly by his name, in-
cluding many of the noblest, were never printed
at all while he lived, or until seven years after his
death, since there was no assertion of authorship,
contention could hardly arise against it.
Nor was it until very long after an author was
first openly nominated for these plays in the publi-
cation of the folio edition of 1623, that either liter-
ary or historical criticism could easily turn itself
to a discussion of the claim, if any one had thought
of suggesting such a discussion. It might, indeed,
be said that for a century afterward neither liter-
ary nor historical criticism existed in England ;
and there were other reasons why the intellectual
activity of England concerned itself little, for
many years, with the plays of Elizabeth's time or
their authors. When the folio of Heminge and
Condell appeared, the great political struggle of
the seventeenth century, to prepare the way for
which the acted plays had already done so much,
was on the point of passing from its first stage of
discussion and lawful agitation into open and revo-
lutionary outbreak. Two years after, the death of
James I. and the accession of his son gave new
DELIA BACON. 37
intensity to the conflict already engaged ; and
from that time onward to half of England a play,
a play-house, or a play-writer was sinful ; while
for all England there was graver work than read-
ing plays or speculating upon their authorship.
Then, when the anti-Puritan reaction came with
the Restoration, the dramas of a past generation
had little chance of a hearing in competition with
the witty abominations of Congreve and Wycher-
ley ; and the stiffening classicism of the time of
Anne and the Georges afforded little tolerance for
" Fancy's child," by whatever name he might be
called, if he warbled to it only " his native wood-
notes wild."
And yet it is not altogether untrue to say that
the authorship of the Shakspere drama has always
been in controversy. From the beginning until
now, w^hile almost all men were agreed that Shak-
spere wrote plays, it was hard to find two who
agreed what plays he wrote. The folio of 1623
contained thirty-six plays. Of these, eighteen were
then for the first time printed. Yet, while the
aim of the editors is to present a complete collec-
tion of his plays, they wholly disregard at least
seventeen which during the author's lifetime had
been published under his name, without any dis-
avowal by him so far as is known. Upon these
last therefore, at all events, men's opinions differed
in Shakspere's time and afterwards. They differed,
also, upon the play of " Pericles," which the folio
38 DELIA BACON.
omitted as not his; but which modern editors
judge to be his, either partly or wholly. Then
the wisest critics of to-day, with the keenest sensi-
tiveness for Shakspere's name, do not fear to dis-
cuss, as though they were not laying profane
hands on the ark of the covenant, the question
whether one and another of the Shakspere plays
are really his: as the three parts of "King Henry
VI." ; as "Pericles"; as " Titus Andronicus " ; so
that one critic has been able to satisfy himself that
but five can be rightly called his, and that all
others are falsely or mistakenly imputed to him.
While there was hardly a play of them all to
the authorship of which Shakspere's title had not
been at some time either wholly ignored or sharply
questioned; while there were many more plays
which in his lifetime or for sixty years afterward
were openly imputed to him, so that the authentic
canon of the Shakspere drama has always been, is
now, and perhaps ever will be the subject of fierce
contention ; yet none of the critics went so far as
to sum up the several disputations of all the critics
by maintaining that all were right, at least in part,
and that the play-actor wrote none of them.
Many readers, indeed, from the time when criti-
cism began a century and a half ago, found them-
selves confronted with difficulties elsewhere un-
known. The personality of this dramatist glowed
through his w^ork with a force and brightness
found nowhere else in literature. It seemed, in-
DELIA BACON. 39
deed, a multiplied personality. There was in it
not only marvelous insight, but exquisite cultiva-
tion and refinement, profound learning, and a
practical knowledge of men, of the world, and of
affairs such as all men were apt to say had never
before been joined in any one man. When Cole-
ridge called him the " myriad-minded," he simply
put into a felicitous phrase what all men had loYig
been thinking. Many, indeed, had declared their
wonder that any one mind could produce creations
so diverse in character as "Julius Caesar" and
" The Merry Wives of Windsor," as " The Comedy
of Errors" and " Macbeth." In general, however,
a single student would content himself with a
demonstration which, alone, might have served to
solve the difficulty found by every one, but which,
when involved with like demonstrations by others,
only multiplied perplexity. To prove from the
plays that their author must have been a lawyer,
as Lord Campbell did, was far from difficult, and
would have been very helpful if the demonstration
had stood alone. True, there was no historical
record of Shakspere's ever having seen a law-book,
a court-room, or a lawyer's chambers ; and there
was some trouble in imagining how the play-actor
and theatre-manager, who was writing immortal
dramas before he was thirty, and died, after volu-
minous authorship, at fifty-two, could have ac-
quired what Lord Campbell calls " the familiar,
profound, and accurate knowledge he displayed of
40 DELIA BACON.
juridical principles and practice." It was only
making a wonder more wonderful, however ; and
the new wonder was established by demonstration,
and by the authority of a great lawyer's name.
But when the eminent Dr. Bucknill, not contro-
verting the argument of Lord Campbell, proved
as clearly that Shakspere " had paid an amount of
attention to subjects of medical interest scarcely if
at all inferior to that which has served as the
basis" of the proposition that he "had devoted
seven good years of his life to the practice of law,"
he hindered rather than helped to understand the
real life of the dramatist. So when another proves
that in the few years before the play- writing began
the poet, so well versed w^as he in warfare, must
have served a campaign or two in the Low Coun-
tries ; another, that he must have been a Roman
Catholic in religion, while another shows him to
have been necessarily a Puritan ; another, that his
prodigious wealth of allusions to and phrases from
the then untranslated Greek and Latin authors
proves his broad and deep erudition ; the under-
standing consents to one demonstration after an-
other, but may possibly be staggered if called to
accept them all together. It might well be that
weak souls, invited to believe so much of one man,
sought refuge and repose in refusing to believe
even what would not otherwise have overtaxed
credulity.
There were other things, besides, that had
DELIA BACON. 41
seemed strange in the relations of this man to these
plays. No word or hint seems ever to have
escaped him to show that he cared for, or even
owned, the miraculous offspring which had fallen
from him. There is no word or syllable in all the
world to indicate that the man whose multi-
farious learning is the wonder of the third century
after him ever owned a book, or ever saw one,
although he brought together and left behind him
a fair estate. Nor is there to be found in all the
world, of this profuse and voluminous author, of
this bosom-friend of poets and printers and actors,
so much as the scratch of a pen on paper, except
the three signatures upon his Will, wherein, by an
interlineation which shows that he had at first
overlooked the wife of his boyhood, he leaves her
his " second-best bed." Yet of his less famous
contemporaries there are autograph manuscripts
in abundance. Even of his forerunners by cen-
turies there are extant writings infinitely more
plenty than the scanty subscriptions to a legal in-
strument. Petrarch died two centuries and a half,
Dante three centuries, before him ; yet the manu-
scripts of both abound, while of him who was
greater than either, and was almost of our own
time, there is nothing but the mean and sordid
Will to show that he ever put pen to paper.
But while the difficulty of fixing the canon of
the Shakspere text had long been such as to in-
volve the authorship of every part of the text in
42 DELIA BACON.
more or less doubt ; while all men had wondered
that so little should be known of the actual man
Shakspere, and that what little was known should
be so far remote from any ideal one could form of
the author bearing the name : so that Coleridge
should exclaim : " Are we to have miracles in
sport ? Does God choose idiots by whom to con-
vey divine truths to men ? " and Emerson : " I
cannot marry this fact to his verse. Other admi-
rable men have led lives in some sort of keeping
with their thought ; but this man, in wide con-
trast;" yet avowed disbelief went commonly no
further. Once, it is true, there was a public asser-
tion that Shakspere's alleged authorship was im-
possible. In 1848 there was published by the
Harpers, in New York, a light and chatty account
of a voyage to Spain, entitled " The Romance of
Yachting," by Joseph C. Hart. The incidents of
the voyage are interspersed with discussions alto-
gether foreign to it ; and upon a trivial pretext
the authorship of the plays is considered, with no
small acuteness and vigor, upon the pages from
208 to 243. It is summarized, however, in a few
of the earlier sentences : " He was not the mate
of the literary characters of the day, and none
knew it better than himself. It is a, fraud upon
the world to thrust his surreptitious fame upon
us. He had none that was worthy of being trans-
mitted. The inquiry will be, who were the able
literary men who wrote the dramas imputed to him f
DELIA BACON. 43
The plays themselves, or rather a small portion
of them, will live as long as English literature is
regarded worth pursuit. The authorship of the
plays is no otherwise material to us than as a
matter of curiosity, and to enable us to render
exact justice ; but they should not be assigned to
Shakspere alone, if at all."
If there be any merit, therefore, in having been
the first to doubt this authorship, it cannot be
awarded to Delia Bacon. There is no reason, how-
ever, to believe that the speculations which have
just been quoted ever came to her knowledge.
The ideas, or fancies, which soon after this pos-
sessed her, were, as she profoundly believed, her
own discovery — indeed, she would rather have
said, a revelation direct to her.
Revelation, discovery, or fancy, however, —
whatever it was, an utterly subordinate part of it
all, though an essential part, was that which con-
cerned merely the authorship of the plays. If
they were indeed, as they had been commonly re-
ceived, a casual collection of stage-plays, knocked
together by a money-making play-actor, play-
wright, and theatre-manager for the money there
was in them and to be got out of them, it was a
trivial question by what name the playwright
should be called ; it should not tax credulity to
"marry this fact to his verse," however fine the
verse might be, if they were nothing more than
verse. But to her, studying the plays with a keen-
44 DELIA BACON.
ness of natural insight and a burning intensity
which have not often been appHed to them, much
more than splendid poesy began to gleam within
them. Finding in them a higher philosophy, even,
than in the "Advancement of Learning," a broader
statesmanship, a profounder jurisprudence, and,
above all, a bolder courage than in all the avowed
writings of the great Chancellor, she only obeyed
the teachings of that Inductive System which he
had expounded, in seeking an adequate authorship
for so magnificent a creation. But that all these
things were in the plays — this was the main fact
that concerned her ; this was what she cared to
discover first for herself, and then to communicate
to the world. If indeed she found them there, it
could not but follow, as the night the day, that
some better paternity must be admitted for the
plays than that of Lord Leicester's groom.
Nor was it enough for her to discover bits and
gleams of philosophy and political science in the
plays, however frequent or brilHant. To her
eager inquiry they came to be revealed at last,
not as fortuitously collected though mutually unre-
lated plays, but as an entire dramatic system, in
which the New Philosophy was to be inculcated in
unsuspicious minds, under the vehement despotism
of the last Tudor and the dull pedantic oppression
of the first Stuart. If the plays were really such
a system of philosophic teaching, not only was it
difficult to accept the competency for it of the
DELIA BACON. 45
Stratford poacher and London horse-boy; it was
hardly less trying to credulity to impute so vast
an enterprise, added to all the gigantic intellec-
tual labors which he avowed, even to the greatest
Englishman of his age. She judged, therefore,
that as there had been collaboration before and
since in literary work, so here the most brilliant
and philosophic minds of the Elizabethan Court
cooperated in the work which was too great for
one, and consented together, for their common
safety, to the imputation of their united work to
the theatre-manager who brought out the plays,
and whose property they were because they had
been given to him.
Keasons why these courtiers and politicians —
Bacon, Kaleigh, Spenser, and whatever others
made up the illustrious coterie — should not have
wished to acknowledge the work of which they
might well have boasted, were not far to seek. It
comported ill with dignity of rank and place to be
known as a writer of plays : but to be known to
such a queen as Elizabeth, or to such a king as
James, as author of such plays as " Coriolanus "
or " Julius CaBsar " — the eager ambition of Ba-
con would have been quenched by it long before
the day when his office was wanted for Williams ;
upon Raleigh, living for fifteen years under his
unexecuted death sentence, the headsman's axe
would have fallen earlier than it did.
But while Delia Bacon thoroughly believed that
46 DELIA BACON.
such a worthy coterie, and not the unworthy
player, produced the EHzabethan drama, and hid
in it the philosophy which it would have been fatal
to publish openly ; and while she was no less sure
that in some cryptic form there was truth involved
in these works which was yet to be surrendered to
faithful and intelligent study, it is scant justice to
her memory to say, that, as the mere authorship of
the plays was to her but a small part of the truth
concerning them, so she never devoted herself to
whims or fancies about capital letters, or irregular
pagination, or acrostics, or anagrams, as conceal-
ing yet expressing the great philosophy which the
plays inclosed. Her mind, it now appears, was
already overwrought; before many months it
gave way completely ; but its unsoundness, when-
ever it may have begun, never assumed that form.
VIL
It is not easy — and perhaps it is not important
— to determine just when disbelief in the accepted
authorship of the Shakspere plajs established itself
absolutely in her mind. Certainly in 1852, while
she was delivering her instruction in Cambridge
with singular success, she had startled some of
those who knew her best by her audacious utter-
ances on the subject. To Mrs. Professor Farrar,
whose reminiscences have been already quoted,^
she then expressed a desire to visit England, not,
it seems, for historical study, but, as Mrs. Farrar
remembers, " to obtain proof of the truth of her
theory that Shakspere did not write the plays at-
tributed to him." The intimations thus thrown
out met, indeed, only with compassionate discour-
agement there. The two or three ladies who alone
seem to have heard them were wholly without
sympathy for them, and regarding them even as
indications that might in time become monomania,
sedulously avoided all speech with her upon the
subject thereafter.
In the same year, 1852, however, she entered
upon an acquaintance and correspondence which
1 Supra, pp. 28-30.
48 DELIA BACON.
acted far otherwise upon her fancy and her pur-
poses and hopes than the chilHng avoidance of the
subject by the two or tliree ladies of Cambridge,
friends and admirers though they were. Just by
what formaUty of introduction she first communi-
cated with Ralph Waldo Emerson does not appear ;
but Cambridge was not far from Concord, even
upon the map ; and it was still nearer in spirit, at
least in those days. The letter with which she
opened correspondence, if it existed, would be her
earliest writing on the subject. It must have been
just before the 12th of June, 1852 ; but as in Au-
gust she asks him to return it to her, speaking of it
as a " voluminous note," it is not among her other
letters to Emerson.^ The answer to it, however,
was certainly not such as to silence or repel her.
Concord, 12 June, 1852.
My dear Miss Bacon", — Your letter was duly
received, and its contents deserved better leisure
and apprehension than I have at once been able to
command. The only alternative w^as to let it wait
a little, for a good hour. And now I write, only
that I may assure you it has been received and
is appreciated. In the office to which you have
in the contingency appointed me, of critic, I am
^I beg leave to acknowledge Uie courtesy of Mr. Emerson's family,
and of his literary executor, Mr. J. Elliot Cabot, in delivering to me
all Miss Bacon's letters to him, neatly folded and docketed by his
own hand, and in formally acquiescing in the publication of all his
letters to her, after inspection of copies of them. — T. B.
DELIA BACON. 49
deeply gratified to observe the power of state-
ment and the adequateness to the problem, which
this sketch of your argument evinces. Indeed, I
value these fine weapons far above any special use
they may be put to. And you will have need of
enchanted instruments, nay, alchemy itself, to
melt into one identity these two reputations (shall
I call them ?) the poet and the statesman, both
hitherto solid historical figures. If the cipher ap-
prove itself so real and consonant to you, it will to
all, and is not only material but indispensable to
your peace. And it would seem best that so radi-
cal a revolution should be proclaimed with great
compression in the declaration, and the real
grounds pretty rapidly set forth, a good ground
in each chapter, and preliminary generalities quite
omitted. For there is an immense presumption
against us which is to be annihilated by battery as
fast as possible. And now for the execution of
the design. If you will send me your first chap-
ter, I will at once make my endeavor to put it
into the best channel I can find, " Blackwood " or
" Fraser " I think the best. But this, taking it for
granted that you decide on trying your fortune
in a magazine first, — which, I suppose, is fame,
rather than fortune. On most accounts, the eligi-
ble way is, as I think, the hook or brochure, pub-
lished simultaneously in England and here. I am
not without good hope of accepting your kind in-
vitation to visit you in Cambridge, though I very
50 DELIA BACON.
rarely get so far from home, where I am detained
by a truly ridiculous complication of cobwebs.
With great respect, yours faithfully,
R. W. Emerson.
Miss Bacon.
P. S. What is the allusion in the " Literary
World " of last week to criticism on Shakespeare ?
Does it touch us, or some other ?
What the " theory " was which had been set
forth in the missing first letter can be determined
only inferentially. But though it would seem
from an expression in the foregoing letter to have
emphasized especially the supposed relation of
Bacon to the plays, it is fair to beUeve that her
theory was here, as everywhere in her writing
and speaking afterwards, a theory of plural author-
ship, so far as mere authorship was concerned.
This is her next letter, so far as appears, to Emer-
son :
Cambridge, August 4 [1852].
Dear Sir, — Confirmations of my theory, which
I did not expect to find on this side of the water,
have turned up since my last communication to
you, in the course of my researches in the libra-
ries here and in Boston. But I am going to leave
Cambridge in a few days, and if it is not too much
trouble, I wish you would be so kind as to inclose
to me, by the next mail, my voluminous note to
you on this subject. I think it is possible that I
DELIA BACON. 51
may be able to make some use of it, while I am
quite sure of its being good for nothing to you.
Very truly yours, Delia S. Bacon.
Mr. R. W. Emerson.
But while she was forming such new and help-
ful friendships as this one, kindly tolerant, if not
more, of her great idea, she was finding, as she
thought, foes of her own household. A letter to
her oldest brother, dated that same month, makes
it plain that she had broached her theory to him
also; that his grave, cool judgment had refused to
entertain it, and that frankly and with force, as
his nature was, he had so declared, dissuading her
from cherishing it, as a delirious fancy. But his
remonstrances had only the effect to estrange her,
for the few remaining years of her life, from that
relative who had always been her most helpful,
judicious, and affectionate friend.
From the village of Cuba, in Western New
York, where she was visiting a sister, she wrote to
Emerson, September 30, 1852 :
"It is certainly very extraordinary that the
generous expressions of sympathy and interest
which your last two letters contain should remain
so long unacknowledged, and that, too, when I
have all the time been so deeply sensible of the
kindness which dictated them. ... I know very
well what a presuming step it was to intrude
52 DELIA BACON.
these speculations upon such time as yours, and
what an embarrassing responsibility it was to
throw upon one so preoccupied. For I suppose
that no previous familiarity with the Shakespeare
writings would qualify one to decide this question
satisfactorily without much revision and scrutiny,
not only of these works themselves, but of all that
appertains to the subject. I think most persons
in these circumstances would have dismissed the
question without much consideration ; and I do not
believe there is any one else in the world who
could have met it, under all the disadvantages
which attended its introduction to you, as you
have done, — with such brave decision, — with
such generous discrimination. ... I have been
constantly wishing and intending to adopt your
suggestion in reference to a summary statement
on the subject, but since the arrival of this last
quite unexpected proof of your regard I have not
been well enough to accomplish even this.
" I had intended to remain here in this rude
little town, which you never heard of before I
suppose, until I had quite finished the statement I
had before commenced, for I have a sister here,
whose home, be it where it will, is always mine.
But I find I cannot persist in this resolution, for
it would be merely suicidal. This study is so very
absorbing, and it consigns me to such complete
solitude, that I find all my progress in it is made
at a most ruinous expense to my life and health ;
DELIA BACON. 53
while those which I pursue with my classes have
just the contrary effect upon me. Indeed but for
this resource I think I should have died long ago.
I cannot tell you with what reluctance I relinquish
it again. My only consolation is that I cannot
help it. The choice is not mine. I am not dis-
couraged, but sometimes I think if I can only
succeed in committing the work effectually to
stronger hands it is all I ought to think of.
" In the course of my researches last summer I
found, quite unexpectedly, a very clear historical
basis for the conclusions which my Shakspere
study had forced upon me. I found, too, the most
astounding corroborations, to the minutest partic-
ulars, of new versions of contemporary events,
which I had rejected in the cipher, on account of
their disagreement with what I supposed to be
well authenticated historic fact. Be assured,
dear sir, there is no possibility of a doubt as to the
main points of my theory. What was wrong in it
came from my attempts to patch over, and recon-
cile with what I knew before, things which seemed
to me impossible. Whether I live to accomplish
it, or not, a little investigation in the right direc-
tion will demonstrate that these marvelous phenom-
ena, so unlike all other human works, are after
all not wholly miraculous — not of the air merely.
Properly traced, according to that law of investi-
gation which requires causes for effects, they will
prove the index to a piece of history which glis-
64 DELIA BACON.
tens out even now very plainly from the contem-
porary historical documents, though it has not yet
found its way into the story constructed from
them. . . . Most gratefully yours,
Delia S. Bacon."
At the close of the following November she be-
gan, at the Stuyvesant Institute in New York, a
course of historical instruction — " lessons, rather
than lectures " — to ladies. A copy of the printed
prospectus, with commendations from Washington
Irving and George Bancroft among others, is
found carefully indorsed and preserved among
Emerson's papers. This was followed, upon
most flattering solicitation, by a similar course of
evening lessons at the same place, on " The Ori-
gin of the Oriental Element in our Civilization " ;
and to this, gentlemen, as well as ladies, were
admitted. Upon like invitation from Brooklyn
a series of lessons began there, " at Professor
Gray's Lecture Room, 90 Montague Place," Feb-
ruary 17, 1853 ; and when this ended, her life
among men and women was closed.
In the midst of this, however, there are signs
that she is intent upon the work to which she was
prepared to dedicate what remained to her of life
and strength. Among the warmest and most ad-
miring of the friends she had made at Boston and
Cambridge was Miss Elizabeth P. Peabody, whose
sister was the wife of Nathaniel Hawthorne. It is
DELIA BACON. 55
to her that the following note, which soon found
its way to the subject of it, was addressed.
Concord, 26 March, 1853.
Deae Miss Peabody, — I send you a letter for
Mr. Putnam, which, if you like, you shall send, if
you dislike, and want another, you shall burn, and
tell me so. I talked with Hawthorne who did not
seem to think that he was the person ; but if Miss
Bacon would really come to Concord, and board
with Mrs. Adams, as, I doubt not, is practicable,
we would make him listen, and she should make
him believe. With my kindest salutations and
respects to Miss Bacon, your ever obliged servt.
R. W. Emeesgis'.
At the end of this letter Mr. Emerson adds :
" I can really think of nothing that could give
such eclat to a magazine as this brilliant paradox."
VIII.
If there were none of her own blood to receive
with favor the strange notions which she had now
begun to avow, there was elsewhere no lack of
sympathy, encouragement, and aid. To Mrs. Farrar
she had already intimated her strong desire to pros-
ecute in England researches in support of her
hypothesis which would be impossible elsewhere.
The help, indispensable for this purpose, which her
own family neither could nor, to her strong resent-
ment, would afford was offered during her last
season of instruction in New York by a gentleman
of large wealth and high standing in every way,
whose name, however, was long unknown to her
relatives, Mr. Charles Butler.
On the 2d of April, 1853, she announced to her
brother, in a letter of not unkindly tone, her ex-
pectation of " going to England as soon as I can
get myself ready," but with no intimation of her
purpose in going, or of the source of her means for
going. " All that I can say is that the money I
appropriate to that object could not be honorably
appropriated to any other. I have ample means
placed at my disposal, and shall go so supported as
to be able to command whatever attention I may
DELIA BACON. 57
need. ... I cannot tell how long I shall be absent ;
perhaps five or six months. My plans do not reach
beyond England at present."
Emerson's letter to Mr. Putnam the publisher,
over which he had given Miss Peabody such broad
discretion, she had evidently " liked " and " sent."
For on the 14th of April Delia Bacon wrote to
Emerson from Brooklyn : " Your letter to Mr. Put-
nam was all that I could have desired. It was in-
deed most truly kind. I cannot be satisfied with-
out attempting to thank you for it, but I do not
know how to do it adequately. I can only hope
that you will find your generous interest in the
subject justified by the result." And then she
shows him how his letter to Mr. Putnam, and Mr.
Putnam's proposal induced by it, — a proposal, in-
deed, which she had felt obliged to decline, — had
so impressed a friend that he had resolved to
provide her with the means for her journey.
Emerson's answer and the letter of farewell that
followed her to the steamer are these :
Concord, 13 April, 1853.
My dear Miss Bacon, — I was cordially grati-
fied by the good news your note contained, that
you were going forward with your studies, and
really decided to prosecute them in England ; and
I was not a little flattered by being made however
accidentally and insignificantly a party to the
transaction. I am glad also that you will trust me
58 DELIA BACON.
farther with insights of your results. By all means,
let it be so ! And, by all means do you go forward
to the speediest comjDletion ! Now let me not fail
of my communication. I grieve very often —
seldom so much as now — at the disheartening
infirmities and invalidity of my wife, which makes
it most part of the time quite out of question to
invite any worthy mortal to visit my house. I do
not know that I can come to New York, — and
yet I am not sure but I shall make the time to do
so, if there is no other way. But, if you are coming
to Boston or Cambridge before your departure,
have the goodness to apprise me now of the fact,
and when, and where. In assured hope and with
constant respect, Yours,
R. W. Emerson.
Miss Bacon.
Concord, 12 May, 1853.
My dear Miss Bacon, — I wrote to Sumner,
but have as yet no answer. Perhaps he has
directed his answer, as I suggested, to Mr. Butler.
I enclose a letter to Mr. Martineau, to whom, if
you have good opportunity, I think I would frankly
open the general design of your inquiries ; but you
will judge best on seeing him. I send a letter
also for Carlyle, to find Spedding. I think I will
write myself again to Carlyle, as I shall need, per-
haps, in a few days. I enclose a letter to John
Chapman. Perhaps you will find his house a good
DELIA BACON. 59
home for you, in London. I took rooms and board
there, and was well accommodated.
I have not yet written, for want of time and a
little mountain to get over to write to him, — to
Helps. Leave me your London address, and I
will yet write. Mrs. Emerson is mortified at her
heedlessness in putting you to sleep in a chamber
certain to be disturbed by too- early-rising washers
in the night. She never remembered it would be
so, nor thought of it till next day. But Fare well
and fare gloriously ! With best hope,
R. W. Emerson.
Miss Bacon.
On the 14th of May, 1853, she sailed from New
York in the steamer " Pacific," and arrived in Liv-
erpool on the Queen's birthday, the 24th.
IX.
England must have been a very strange land
to the lonely woman who then first touched its
shore. In almost five years which she afterwards
passed there she did but little to enlarge her
acquaintance. Of the letters of introduction which
she bore, some are found unused among her
papers : as one to Arthur Helps, from Emerson ;
one to Sir Henry Ellis, principal Librarian of the
British Museum ; one (from Edward Everett) to
Mr. A. Panizzi, chief of the Printed Book Depart-
ment. But she was not long, after going at once
to London, in beginning, by the help of one of
Emerson's letters, the friendship with Carlyle and
his wife, which was to bring her much kindness and
comfort in her solitude. This seems to be an
answer to the letter of introduction :
5 Gt. Cheyne Row, Chelsea, 8 June, 1853.
My dear Madam, — Will you kindly dispense
with the ceremony of being called on (by sickly
people, in this hot weather), and come to us on
Friday evening to tea at 7. I will try to secure
Mr. Spedding at the same time ; and we will delib-
erate what is to be done in your Shakspere afiair.
DELIA BACON. 61
A river steamer will bring you within a gunshot
of us. You pronounce " Chainie " Row ; and get
out at Cadogan Pier, which is your first landing
place in Chelsea. Except Mrs. C. and the
chance of Spedding, there will be nobody here.
Yours very sincerely,
T. Caklyle.
And this followed it at no long interval :
Chelsea, 14 June, 1853.
My dear Madam, — Mr. Collier, it seems, does
not habitually reside in Town at present ; but
comes from time to time. If you forward the
inclosed Note to him, merely adjoining your own
card with your address on it, I am given to expect
he will appoint some day to call on you, and have
some talk about the Shakspere affair. I do not
know Mr. Collier ; the writer of that Note is John
Forster (Editor of the "Examiner," &c., &c.), a
friend of his and mine.
Richard Monckton Milnes, of whom you may
have heard, wishes to see your Paper on Shak-
spere which is now in my hands ; if you give me
permission, I will send it to him ; not otherwise.
My Wife reports the finding of a beautiful
Pockethandkerchief which was left by you here ;
she keeps it safe against your return to us, — not
a distant date, as we hope. Any day at 3 p. m.,
(or most days), I am to be found here ; my wife,
62 DELIA BACON.
on fine days, is not certain, I apprehend, after 1
p. M. ; and very generally in the evenings we
are quietly at home. Believe me, Dear Madam,
Yours very sincerely,
T. Carlyle.
Some account of the visit invited by Carlyle's
letter of June 8, and referred to in that of the
14th, is given with familiar confidence to her sis-
ter, under date of several weeks later.
" My visit to Mr. Carlyle was very rich. I wish
you could have heard him laugh. Once or twice
I thought he would have taken the roof of the
house oft". At first they were perfectly stunned —
he and the gentleman he had invited to meet me.
They turned black in the face at my presumption.
* Do you mean to say,' so and so, said Mr. Carlyle,
with his strong emphasis ; and I said that I did ;
and they both looked at me with staring eyes,
speechless for want of words in which to convey
their sense of my audacity. At length Mr. Car-
lyle came down on me with such a volley. I did
not mind it the least. I told him he did not know
what was in the Plays if he said that, and no one
could know who believed that that booby wrote
them. It was then that he began to shriek. You
could have heard him a mile. I told him too that
I should not think of questioning his authority in
such a case if it were not with me a matter of
DELIA BACON. 63
knowledge. I did not advance it as an opinion.
They began to be a little moved with my coolness
at length, and before the meeting was over they
agreed to hold themselves in a state of readiness
to receive what I had to say on the subject. I
left my introductory statement with him. In the
course of two or three days he wrote to me to ask
permission to show my paper to Mr. Monckton
Milnes, who had expressed a wish to see it, invit-
ing me to come there again very soon. He told
me I had left a beautiful handkerchief there which
Mrs. Carlyle would keep till I came. He also
enclosed to me a letter of introduction to Mr. Col-
lier, which he had taken the pains to obtain for
me from another literary gentleman. I have not
yet sent it. That was five weeks ago."
[Carltle to D. B.]
Chelsea, 12 August, 1853.
My dear Madam, — Here is the Panizzi letter,
which I did not shew to Milnes, as quite superflu-
ous in his actual state of knowledge about you ;
and will now return to avoid risks of losing it.
I yesterday delivered your Paper to Parker the
Publisher of " Fraser's Magazine," — with such a
testimony about it as you desired ; name, country,
sex, all is left dark ; and Parker's free judgment
of the MSS., " Fit for ' Fraser,' or not fit ? " is the
one thing he is requested to deliberate upon, and
then pronounce to us. You, of course, shall
64 DELIA BACON.
hear of it the instant it arrives here ; which ought
to be in some two or three weeks ; probably
early next month, for I think the September No.
must be already made up and in the Printer's
hands. We will not anticipate his verdict ; he is a
clever little fellow {our " clever," and yours too, I
believe) ; and his voice will in some considerable
degree represent for us that of the " reading
public " of England.
On Wednesday I forgot to say that the printed
Harley MSS. Catalogue, which I spoke of your
buying, lies for consultation on its table in the
Museum; and that you can examine it to all
lengths, either as a preliminary or as a final meas-
ure. If you can find in that mass of English
records (the main collection that exists) any docu-
ment tending to confirm your Shakspere theory,
it will be worth all the reasoning in the world, and
will certainly surprise all men.
Finally come and see us, whenever it is not dis-
agreeable, — without misgiving, in spite of nerves !
Almost every evening we are both of us at home
(tea at 7) ; and at 3 any day I am visible here.
Believe me, Dear Madam,
Yours very sincerely, T. Caelyle.
The impression made by this lonely stranger on
Carlyle is not to be learned from his letters to her
alone. In September of this year he wrote thus
to her introducer, Emerson : '' As for Miss Bacon,
DELIA BACON. 65
we find her, with her modest shy dignity, with her
soUd character and strange enterprise, a real ac-
quisition ; and hope we shall now see more of her,
now that she has come nearer to us to lodge. I
have not in my life seen anything so tragically
quixotic as her Shakspere enterprise ; alas, alas,
there can be nothing but sorrow, toil, and utter
disappointment in it for her! I do cheerfully
what I can, — which is far more than she asks of
me (for I have not seen a prouder silent soul) ; but
there is not the least possibility of truth in the
notion she has taken up ; and the hope of ever
proving it, or finding the least document that
countenances it, is equal to that of vanquishing
the windmills by stroke of lance. I am often truly
sorry about the poor lady ; but she troubles
nobody with her difficulties, with her theories ; she
must try the matter to the end, and charitable
souls must further her so far." ^
There is little among her papers to show where
she was living during this year, 1853, except that
it was in London, and in lodgings to which the
friendly guidance of George Peabody had directed
her. She changed them indeed, as this next letter
shows ; and, with the almost fierce pride which was
innate to her, was so far from presuming upon the
affectionate hospitality which the Carlyles were
urging upon her, that she did not even tell them
of her removals.
^ Correspondence of Carlyle and Emerson, vol. ii. 228-9.
66 DELIA BACON.
The Grange, Alresford, Hants,
(The Lord Ashburton's), 10 December, 1853.
Dear Miss Bacon, — We are here since Mon-
day, on a visit, and are not to be in Chelsea again
till Christmas pass.
Some days before leaving, I received from Par-
ker a Parcel, with which his man appeared to have
tried first at your old Chelsea lodging ; my ad-
dress had then been put upon the cover ; it con-
tained your MS. and an open letter to Miss Bacon,
full of the due civility, admiring, regretting, &c.,
and in fine returning the offered Paper. As you
say, he might have decided sooner ! I found that
the smallest urging on my part would have made
him insert the Piece ; but this you had prohibited ;
nor do I know that it was any way desirable ; at
any rate, here now is his decision, and with him
we have done. Not knowing your new address,
I locked the Parcel into a safe place ; and there,
were Christmas over, it will lie awaiting your con-
venience, and can be sent at any time.
I am sorry to hear from my wife of your head-
aches and distresses in that solitary place ; I hope
you will appear again some morning soon after
our return, and shew Chelsea that those were but
temporary clouds. Pray be not so shy of us !
We cannot much help you, indeed ; but there is
no want of will, were a possibility offered.
Believe me always,
Yours sincerely, T. Carlyle.
DELIA BACON. 67
On the last day of November, 1853, she took
lodgings at St. Albans, attracted, no doubt, by its
association with the great Chancellor, to whom it
gave a title and a tomb. It was during her stay
there that she sought through Sir Edward Bulwer
Lytton, as a note from him indicates, an introduc-
tion to Lord Yerulam. As the bearer of that title
was then not a Bacon but a Grimston, there
would seem to have been little help from him to
be hoped for. Carlyle's friendly mindfulness of
her and his keen apprehension of the methods by
which she was evolving and maintaining her hy-
pothesis appear from a letter of his to Emerson,
April 8, 1854 : " Miss Bacon has fled away to St.
Albans (the Great Bacon's place) five or six
months ago ; and is there working out her Shak-
spere Problem, from the depths of her own mind,
disdainful apparently, or desperate and careless,
of all evidence from Museums or Archives ; I have
not had an answer from her since before Christ-
mas, and have now lost her address. Poor Lady !
I sometimes silently wish she were safe home
again ; for truly there can no madder enterprise
than her present one be well figured." ^
This prolongation of her stay abroad was be-
yond her own original reckoning, or that of her
friends. At midsummer her generous patron put
at her disposal a sum ample to pay what she owed
and to bring her home. But her work was not
1 Correspondence, etc., vol. ii. 240, 241.
68 DELIA BACON.
done. At the end of September she wrote from
St. Albans to Emerson that her work was prosper-
ing, and telling how she managed to stay. " I am
enabled to stay here so long, in consequence of
having reduced my expenses as soon as I resolved
upon this course. The money that I brought
with me, which was supposed to be only enough
for the first summer, was spun out by this process
till the close of the second ; and now that I have
begun to encroach upon the very ample sum al-
lotted for my return, I am more prudent than
ever. But I do not know that there will be any
need of it for that purpose, and I am living here
as economically as I could in America ; and as I
think only of finishing my work, and have no
other future, and this is enough and more than
enough for that purpose, I do not see why I
should spend so large a sum merely for the sake
of being; in America. Not that it is not the best
country in the world, — but ' there 's livers out of
it,' and I don't forget that I heard Margaret Ful-
ler's friends conclude among themselves that the
storm which dashed her on its rocks, and pre-
vented the chance of her landing among them,
was a merciful dispensation of Providence. I
have some beloved friends there, but my life was
finished some time ago in every other respect but
this, and as this is the world's work and not mine
that I am doing, I suppose the expense of it will
have to be paid in some way.
DELIA BACON. 69
" So I do not trouble myself about it, and am as
happy as the day is long, and only wish I lived in
Herschel or Jupiter or some of those larger worlds,
where it would not be time to go to bed just as
one gets fairly awake, and begins to be in earnest
a little. I have lived here nearly a year, and
have not spoken to one of the natives yet, except
by accident, but I have not felt my solitude. It
has been a year of sunshine with me ; the harvest
of many years of toil and weeping. I cannot tell
you what pleasures I have had here. This poor
perturbed spirit, that had left its work undone,
and would not leave me alone till it had brought
me here, seems satisfied at last. My work has
ceased to be burdensome to me ; I find in it a rest
such as no one else can ever know, I think, except
in heaven. But that is not saying that the world
will be pleased with it. I hope it will not disap-
point the expectation of those who have made
themselves responsible for it, in any manner ; and,
above all, I hope that you will like it, and will
have no occasion to regret the noble concern you
have taken in it.
" It has been a great and constant help to me
to have two such friends as yourself and Carlyle
interested in it. Carlyle is as good and kind as
he can be. He is very much troubled about my
being here so long alone."
At the time this was written she was aarain,
after an interval, putting herself in communica-
70 DELIA BACON.
tion with the Carlyles, as the following letter
shows.
Chelsea, 4 October, 1854.
Dear Miss Bacon, — We are very glad to hear
of you again, and that you are doing well, and
getting that wild jungle of sticks victoriously tied
into fagots. That is a right success, due to all
faithful workers, and which nobody can deprive
one of.
My wife cannot by any means recollect the
least particular of Mrs. Spring's address at Hamp-
stead, though she was once there, and saw the
place with her eyes. However, she assures me it
would have done nothing for your present enter-
prise ; it was a place let (i<?ifurnished with servants)
as a whole house ; was very dear, and also (as is
thought) very dirty, — not at all like what you
require. Other lodgings, no doubt, are abundant
in Hampstead, especially at this season of the
year; but neither of us here knows specially of
any, nor can Jane bethink her just at once of any
person whom she could confidently consult on the
matter. — I myself do, at this moment, call to mind
a certain Mrs. Dr. Wilkinson, an accomplished
American lady withal, and wife of an accom-
plished and truly superior man, who lives in that
neighborhood, not quite in Hampstead, but on this
side of it, — to whom I would offer you an intro-
duction if you went towards that region. Hamp-
stead is very airy, and has still a set of silent
DELIA BACON. 71
country walks, though the Bricklayer is fearfully
busy there too in these last years ; you could have
no real difficulty in getting a cleanly, honest, and
tolerable lodging there ; the worst fault I know is
that of the water ; very hard, all of it, from the
chalk ; which fault, however, applies only to the
Hill, or Old Village, as I suppose ? Nay, indeed
there is no pure water to be had in this big Baby-
lon itself, for all its wealth and faculty ; the Queen
herself has to drink dirty water (as I often think)
when she favors us with her company, — so ex-
tremely wise a set of " successful men " are we
hitherto in these parts. Of lodgings about
Chelsea, or indeed, in all quarters urban and sub-
urban, Jane thinks there can be no doubt of ample
choice on every hand ; and she will very gladly
give help whenever you embark on such a search.
Her notion, in which I entirely agree, is at pres-
ent. That whenever you decide on a removal you
are simply to leave your things all packed at St.
Albans, and come off at once to the vacant room I
told you of as waiting to welcome you here, —
therefrom to institute whatever search your fancy
and judgment point to, under the favourablest
auspices. This really is the wisest, and also the
easiest; confess that it is, you of little faith,
and do it. 1 was just going out (by appoint-
ment) yesterday when your letter came ; could
not write till now.
Yours very truly, dear Miss B.,
T. Carlyle.
72 DELIA BACON.
The letter without date which follows seems to
have been written at the holiday season of 1854-5.
Dear Miss Bacon, — I would go, with all the
pleasure in life, to answer your letter in person,
but the news that you are laid up ^^ finds me in the
same " (as the maidservants write). I have been
having a bad cold, off and on, for the last two
months ; and gone on trying to put it down par
vive force till finally it put down me. These last
two weeks I have been confined to my room, and
sometimes to bed. 1 am getting better now
however, and hope to be what is called " about "
again next week.
We have not been out of town this season. Mr.
C. is dreadfully busy with his " Frederick," who I
beg into wish had never been born. He, Mr.
C, is never out but for a hurried walk after dark ;
he declined the usual Christmas visit to the Ash-
burtons. I was to have gone, however, this very
day — to the Grange — on my own basis for a
month — but the meeting of Parliament has been
the means under Providence of putting off the
party till the 19th of this month — otherwise I
must have given it up altogether. We shall see
how the world looks by the 19th — but in any
case I hope to see you here or there before then.
Yours truly,
Saturday. JaNE CaRLYLE.
5 Cheyne Row.
DELIA BACON. 73
These were busy days with her. If nothing
else showed it, the paucity of her letters during
these many months would. Until late in the fol-
lowing March, this next is the only one which
appears, either to her or from her.
Concord, Mass., November 20, 1854.
My deak Miss Bacoj^, — I am heartily grieved
— but it is past help — at my silence and delays.
There can be no forgiveness for it. I have had
both your letters, and made ineffectual attempts
to answer both. I was very happy to read the
good news, which both contained, of your studies
and enjoyments. And I heard collaterally from
Carlyle, of his goodwill and respect. The state-
ments in your last letter especially engage my
interest, and it seems most honorable and most
useful, — that which you say, that you can live
and study in England for no more than it would
cost in America, and that the supplies for one
summer can be spun out to serve for two. I can
hardly refrain from publishing the fact in the
newspapers, for the benefit of all scholars. That
your readings prosper, and that you confirm your-
self in your conviction, is also good news ; for,
though I think your hypothesis more incredible
than the improbable traditions (and unexplained)
it would supplant, yet you cannot maintain any
side without shedding light on the first of all
literary problems. Carlyle, too, I found, with
74 DELIA BACON.
decided interest and respect, had no faith in the
paradox. I went to Phillips & Sampson the last
time I was in town to engage their interest in the
book. They considered it a promising enterprise,
but could not think of it for themselves, and the
better the book should be they said the worse for
them. For they have several " firstrate " books,
as they call them, now in press, or just out of
press, and are afraid of a good book as likely to
damage these ! do not wish to stand in their own
light, or overlay their own children. I went to
Ticknor & Fields, but with no better success.
They are afraid, if I understand it, of a literary
book, and answer steadily, "anytime hut now,^'
as if now nothing but Russia, Australia, and
Romance would have any attraction. These two
are the best here, and 1 hesitate a little about the
next step; yet shall take another. If you are
sure of the book, you may easily be sure of a pub-
lisher. I beg you will write me once more (not-
withstanding my ill deserts) that it is ready, or
that it will soon be, and when and how large it will
be. I think of applying to Mr. J. C. Derby, of
New York, of whom I hear much good. I meant
to print my own tardy MSS. speculations on Eng-
land in this month, but I doubt and delay. I am
however extremely busy. With all congratula-
tion and good hope,
R. W. Emerson.
DELIA BACON, 75
For eleven months, until the begmning of No-
vember, 1854, she remained at St. Albans, pursu-
ing her work with exhausting eagerness. For
the next month she was at Hatfield, redolent of
Elizabethan memories, ten miles beyond St. Al-
bans ; and thence, at the beginning of December,
she returned to London, "driven here," as she
wrote to her sister, " by the terrible discomforts of
those wretched country houses in winter." At
Hatfield, she says (writing January 12, 1855), " I
found it was uniformly colder in my room than it
was out of doors in the daytime. The thermom-
eter could not have been at all above 50. My
hands and feet were aching and stiff with the
cold, but since I have been here I have hardly
known what the sensation was."
" Carlyle has been here to see me, though I am
miles from him, to invite me to his house. I was
out when he came, but he left word with the ser-
vant, and there was no alternative but for me to
go, and it was very very pleasant I went at five
o'clock and stayed to dinner and tea, till eleven,
and Carlyle spent all the time with us, though he
is extremely busy now, finishing his ' Life of Fred-
eric ' the Second, and refuses all invitations. I
have real cosy pleasant times when I go there, but
I am most heartily glad I have no other acquaint-
ances here ; they would torment me to death."
Then, after some account of the manner in
which she had been working, she proceeds : " If
76 DELIA BACON.
I had known, perhaps, when I was in America,
how it would be exactly, and that I should have
this book to write first of all, I might have felt
tempted to stay with you and try to do it. But I
don't think I could ever have written it there. I
think the mere fact of my being here has had a
great deal to do with my success. I have done
what it seemed utterly impossible for me to do at
home, — what I tried in vain to do there. My
summer at Cambridge was wasted in vain efforts.
I knew not how to relieve myself of this great
responsibility. Think, if you can, what it is to feel
that I am delivering myself from it at last, that
here in this land of my fathers God has at last
given me the utterance that I have all my life
lacked, and that this great secret, in which the
welfare of mankind is concerned, will not perish
with me for want of the means of telling it. To
go on with it, calmly and patiently, to work away
at it, day after day, and year after year, as if it were
the merest piece of ordinary drudgery, and without
sympathy or counsel, that is what I have had to
do, and what I thought I never could do at first.
I would have given anything to have had you
with me at times ; indeed, there have been mo-
ments when I have felt that I could not endure it
to the end. For you know what kind of health I
had to undertake it with."
" On the 16th of this month I shall begin on my
last hundred dollars, not without some misgiv-
DELIA BACON. 77
ings ; and if I were sure of being able to get into
any spot where I should not lose in thne more than
I should gain in the difference of price I would go
at once to cheaper lodgings. But every change
costs me so much time I am afraid to stir."
The letter which follows is to Emerson; and,
like the one from which these last quotations are
made, is dated at " 12 Spring St., Sussex Gardens,
Hyde Park, London, March" [24, 1855]. It
covers eight pages in her fine, compact, yet very
legible handwriting, and gives a full account of
what she has been doing and what she hopes to do.
" The volume," she says, " which was to have been
finished in December, was merely a history of the
great work I have undertaken to interpret. But
it was a history which contained the key of that
interpretation. The particular application of it,
in the exposition of the plays, was reserved for a
future volume. I intended to have the history in
one book, and the criticism in another." She pro-
ceeds to tell how " criticism " had grown and over-
mastered her ; how especially " Coriolanus " had
thrust himself into her work in spite of her; but
also how, although her historical work was thus
diminished in proportion, the criticisms " serve to
put the discovery on the most solid ground, and
leave no room for any doubt in any mind. They
put it where it is henceforth independent of further
historical corroboration."
Then, having thus justified to Emerson what
78 DELIA BACON'.
Carlyle had already written to him of her seem-
ing disdain " of all evidence from Museums or
Archives," she proceeds to discuss arrangements
with publishers in the two countries. As for
America, Emerson had undertaken the burden of
managing for her, so that the discussion was prop-
erly full and detailed. " I cannot satisfy myself,"
she says, " as to the title. I wish you would help
me a little. I send you my last attempt." [It is
on a separate leaf :
(Age.)
" Francis Bacon and his (Stage.)
or.
The New Philosophy.
Including also the History of Sir Walter Ra-
leigh and his connection with ' the Globe ' The-
atre, together with a brief account of Shakspere
the Player.
" All the world's a stage."]
"If I should call it ^ The New Magic' as I
should like to, the work would sustain the title, but
it might seem fanciful to one who has not read it,
or read the ' Advancement of Learning,' and I wish
to avoid any appearance of that kind."
It was upon reading this letter that Emerson, on
the 17th of April, 1855, wrote thus to Carljde : ^
" Miss Bacon sends me word, again and again, of
your goodness. Against hope and sight she must
be making a remarkable book. I have a letter
^ Correspondence, vol. ii. 244.
DELIA BACON. 79
from her, a few days ago, written in perfect assur-
ance of success! "
Nor does any other letter appear before this
next one from Carlyle with its enclosure.
Chelsea, 7 June, 1855.
Deak Miss Bacox, — I am very glad you have
got done with your Book, and are secure of an
American Publisher on reasonable terms. These
are two great points ; and we ought to be very
thankful for these.
As to an English Publisher, in the present pos-
ture of affairs, — at least as to getting any pecuni-
ary profit out of an English Publisher, — I confess
I foresee difficulty, and (in my bilious mood) am
not without misgivings. This too, however, is
part of the problem ; this too you must resolutely
attempt, and solve to the extent possible.
Of our Publishers here Longman & Co. (Pater-
noster Row) are probably the richest; perfectly
respectable men, who publish a great many Books,
but have not to my knowledge excelled their con-
temporaries in detecting genius in MSS. Murray
(Albemarle Street) is also a great Publisher, son
of the Murray you used to hear of ; I find him
often connected with scientific, didactic " Serials,"
as they are called ; Travellers' Handbooks, rail-
way reading, and the like. Chapman (Chapman &
Hall, 193 Piccadilly), he and Parker are the only
two Publishers I have even a slight acquaintance
80 DELIA BACON.
with, who seem likely for you. — On the whole,
all, or very nearly all, our English Publishers will,
if they undertake, behave with perfect (shop-
keeper) accuracy to you in fulfilment of their bar-
gain ; but beyond the high shopkeeper spirit I do
not know any of them that rises very decisively.
I have, in late years, had less and less to do with
any and all of them ; they will believe that Paper
that I have written by way of testimony — or at
least believe it better than they would most men's
writing (knowing the nature of the beast, that he
does not lie if he can help it) ; but that is really
pretty much all I can do ; that and Emerson's
letter (with some /ormaZ Note of Introduction by
anybody acquainted with a Publisher) will pretty
much put the man in possession of the case, and
enable him to decide with his eyes open ; which is
all we can reasonably want of the poor man. As
to the formal "Notes of Introduction," except in
the cases of Parker and Chapman, it seems to be
probable you are acquainted with persons who can
do that more appropriately than I, — though cer-
tainly I too can do it, after a sort, and will cheer-
fully if you find it needful.
In conclusion, I will wish you well through this
final unpleasant part of the business ; and shall be
very anxious to hear how you get along in it.
1 have been sunk in bottomless " vortexes of Prus-
sian dust " these many months, my very senses al-
most choked out of me with that and other mani-
DELIA BACON. 81
fold confusions, — bodily health too in general by
no means above par. Hardly once have I been in
any direction as far as your street, — and never
once there (as is too plain ! ) though my wife has
been often urging. She is in distress about an
umbrella of yours which was left here ; I could
hnYefoimd your street and house with the eye, but
the name of it I could not communicate to the most
urgent Helpmate, having forgotten the name !
The sooner you come down, through the fine
Summer weather, and see my wife and self again,
it will be the better, on several accounts. Except
Sunday she is not certain to be at home after 1
p. M. ; but in the evening almost always, or before
that time in the early day. — Believe me always,
Dear Miss Bacon, Yours sincerely,
T. Caelyle.
[^Enclostire.2
Miss Delia Bacon, an American lady, of much
worth and earnestness of mind, has devoted a great
deal of serious study to Shakspere ; and believes
herself to have made a singular and important dis-
covery in regard to the history or origin of his
works. To perfect this discovery, she came over
to England about two years ago, introduced and
recommended by some of the best people in Amer-
ica; and here she has been ever since, working
in the most earnest unwearied manner to demon-
strate her idea as to Shakspere's works ; and has
now completed, after much care and labour, what
she had to say on that subject.
82 DELIA BACON.
An American Publisher has engaged the volume
for America ; and Miss B., whose residence gives
her copyright here, wishes to find a Publisher for
England.
I have not myself examined or seen Miss B.'s
present MS. ; but I can freely bear witness in gen-
eral that she writes in a clear, elegant, ingenious
and highly readable manner ; that she is a per-
son of definite ideas, of conscientious veracity in
thought as well as word, and that probably no
Book written among us during these two years
has been more seriously elaborated, and in all ways
made the best of, than this of hers.
T. Carltle.
5 Gt. Cheyne Row, Chelsea, 7 June, 1855.
Soon after this there begin to come in the re-
turns from the attempts now made to find a pub-
lisher. In June, a note from John Murray ; in
July, one from J. W. Parker ; in August, from G.
P. Putnam of New York, and from Phillips &
Sampson of Boston. These last make definite pro-
posals to publish ; but all the rest, with courteous
but sufficient excuses, decline. The two from the
American publishers were forwarded by Emerson
with his letter which follows :
Concord, August 5, 1855.
My dear Miss Bacon, — I give you joy on the
good news you send me of the ending of your
DELIA BACON. 83
work. "What if it is only the beginning of another,
it is also the pledge of power to do it. I hope and
trust it is good news for us and all people also.
And to this end I sent your two letters at once to
both the Publishers, and enclose to you Mr, Put-
nam's reply, which, indeed, I anticipated, as know-
ing he had been long embarrassed in his trade,
though retaining, I am told, the respect of his
community.
In the shortness of the time we have to act in,
I think it best also to send you Phillips & Samp-
son's letter ; of which, otherwise, I should only
send you a summary. I failed to see them, though
I went to their compting-room. If you go on
with them, you had better preserve their letter.
They may seem to you timid, but they are as
brave as their experience will allow them to be.
Such is the advertising system under which they
live, and the giving away of copies to every news-
paper, that it costs them $150, I think they
showed me, — before a single copy is sold, — for
that expense alone. And they have been losers
by many books.
You will see that P. & S. object to the title. I
do not know but I put it in their heads. I think
you can easily give the book a simpler name,
simply descriptive, the plainer the better, with or
without a motto, and let that not be italicized, as,
the "Authorship of the Shakspere Plays," or the
like. I who do not know the book cannot tell the
title, — but wish it to be of stone.
84 DELIA BACON.
I am just running up to a country college to
read a discourse to the Alumni, and therefore
hasten to put these two notes together, lest they
lose a steamer, and so cut short my billet. The
best hap which ever awaits truth await you ! And
let me hear and convey your decisions to these
men. Yours faithfully,
K. W. Emerson.
Miss D. S. Bacon.
It is of little importance that among the men
of letters with whom she entered into communica-
tion was George Grote, the historian of Greece.
Why it should have been thought that his studies
or fancies would incline him to consider her specu-
lations cannot now be known ; it is only certain
that this letter from his wife is all that came of
the communication. But it would hardly be right
to withhold so stately and sonorous a piece of
rhetoric as the answer of Mrs. Grote. One is not
a little puzzled to understand that a lady who thus
uttered the simplest facts in the most solemn way
should have been an intimate friend and corre-
spondent of Sydney Smith ; who nevertheless is
said to have permitted himself the freedom to
remark, as he first saw her entering a drawing-
room crowned with a startling scarlet turban, that
he now received a new impression of the meaning
of the word Grotesque. The handwriting of the
letter is as masculine as its style.
DELIA BACON. 85
London, 5 August, 1855.
Madam, — On reaching London late yesterday
evening from Lincolnshire (where Mr. Grote and
I have been all the week on business), I found
your letter and enclosures, which I make it a duty
to acknowledge without delay.
I gather from the contents of the letters that
you desire some counsel and assistance in regard
to securing a reputable Publisher for the work
which has so long engaged your time and talents
— and in this view I should be happy to concur,
with Mr. Grote, in rendering such aid as we could
furnish towards that desirable object. My own
personal arrangements are, however, for this week
incompatible with any London business. Intend-
ing to stop one or two nights only in town on
passing through to my country residence (about 24
miles distant in the County of Buckinghamshire),
1 have made engagements to receive friends at
the latter place for a few days. So that, for the
next 10 days it will be out of my power to invite
you to meet me at our town residence. But
should your affair require speedy agency, Mr.
Grote will have much pleasure in seeing you on
any forenoon between now and Friday next, before
2 o'clock, and will endeavor to assist you with
his experience and discernment towards obtaining
the purpose in view.
My presence in town will be needed for a day
or two, about the 20th August, to arrange for
86 DELIA BACON.
workmen coming in on the 25th to paint the in-
terior apartments, and if you could do me the
honor to propose a day about that period, it will
be my study to meet it, with every inclination to
serve a lady whose talents and personal merit
entitle her to the good offices of such of her own
sex, as well as of the other, who value literary
tastes and instructed industry in woman. I have
the honor to be, Madam,
Your obedient humble servant,
H. Grote.
In September comes another declination, this
time from Chapman & Hall, and without the cour-
teous expressions of sympathy with which every
other publisher was kind enough to soften the
pain of rejection. These gentlemen alone put
themselves on high moral ground. "As they can-
not confess themselves converts to her views, they
feel that it would not become them to be the in-
struments for opening an attack upon one of the
most sacred beliefs of the nation and indeed of all
nations." They would, however, " be much pleased
if they could wish her success in her bold and novel
undertaking"."
All this delay and disappointment meant far
more to her than pride abased or ambition dis-
couraged ; more even than sorrow that a great
discovery was thus withheld from a waiting world.
Trusting to the returns which her work, into which
DELIA BACON. 87
her soul and life had been thrown, was to bring
her, she had gone on consuming, though with hard
self-denying frugality, the little fund given to bring
her home, and she was now at an end of that.
Late in October she wrote, from the same lodgings
in Spring Street, a very long letter to Emerson,
which was not completed until the first of Novem-
ber. On that day she wrote also a short one to
her brother in New Haven. In the two years and
a half of her absence she seems, in her strong sense
of the wrong his want of sympathy with her great
discovery had done her, to have seldom commu-
nicated with him. Even now, while the letter
showed that she retained the absolute confidence
in him which was one of the earliest sentiments of
her Kfe, and even had not lost the affection of a
sister, her pride restrained the faintest intimation
of the nature of her work, which was nevertheless
so well known to him that his disapproval of it had
deeply estranged her from him. With it she sent
him, under seal, the letter to Emerson and a packet
of manuscript beside. " You must excuse," she
says, " the liberty I take in sending this packet to
your care. My living depends on my getting an
early answer to it, and I should have to delay it
unless I took just this course." She speaks of the
finished manuscript in her hands " on a subject
calculated to interest the American public very
deeply," and of the hopes she had had of receiving
something for its publication either in a magazine
88 DELIA BACON.
or as a book. " The first thing now is to provide
for my immediate living, for the delay here has
been disastrous to me in that respect. My posi-
tion is better now than it ever has been before,
because my work is now done instead of being to
do. I have found the leisure which I never could
find before for it, and I am glad I have used it as
I have, let the consequences to me personally be
what they may. And serious enough they are,
for I do not now know how I am possibly to live,
until I can get an answer to this. Unless the let-
ter I have been depending on " [from Putnam the
publisher, who she hoped would print one maga-
zine article] " should arrive very soon, I shall be
entirely at the end of my credit, as well as means."
" I have sealed the pacquet, because I do not wish
you to have any responsibility for the work — for
reasons which you will understand by and by ; —
it is better that you should not see a word of it in
MS." — "I am sending my work in parcels as fast
as I can copy it. But there is enough here to
decide the question of its acceptance with Putnam,
and if I can live to get a return from this the
trouble will be over."
To Emerson, however, she recounts the alarm
which fluttered the English publishers upon the
mere suggestion to them of her subject, and pro-
ceeds : " Perhaps the American publishers may
be frightened too, and follow suit, and I may have
to bury my work, and bide my time, as my betters
have done.
DELIA BACON. 89
" These articles I enclose with this are properly
the first three chapters of my work, or the first
four rather, including the one I have already sent ;
but on account of their length I have concluded to
subdivide them. I propose now to send it in par-
cels, as fast as I can copy it, till I get it all over.
But if you read it, there is one point to which I
beg leave to direct your attention beforehand.
When I began to write it, I did not expect to be
able to prove the discovery with it. I depended
on further evidence for that. But I thought a
book might be made of it as it stood then which
would command some attention, and perhaps give
me the means which I lacked of bringing the
research to its proper conclusion ; and that which
makes now the whole of the first book was writ-
ten simply with that view and intention. I illus-
trated my assertion with quotations from the Plays,
which were freely interwoven with the story. But
in copying I expanded the quotations and com-
ments into regular criticisms, and took them out
of the place to which they belonged, and made a
separate book of them ; and it was when I began
to do that, that the confidence I have since so
freely expressed to you took possession of me. It
did not, and does not, seem to me possible that any
rational person, who will take the trouble to look
at that part of the work, could differ from me as
to the conclusion. . . . But as for that part of the
work which I am now sending you, I have no such
90 DELIA BACON.
confidence. My only object there was to get the
discovery fairly down on paper, to define it, to say
what it is, not to prove it ; and what little demon-
stration there was in it has been taken out. And
I ask your attention to this point beforehand,
because you will be disappointed if you expect to
find there that ground of certainty of which I have
spoken."
" As to that recent article in ' Fraser ' on the
Minor Poems, I can only regard it as a case of ju-
dicial blindness and hardening of the sensibilities
on the part of the Editor. If that Article which
I sent to you some three or four weeks ago has
reached its destination, and is likely to get pub-
lished, I shall be glad to have a few quotations
from Mr. Fraser's last inserted in it, and it is per-
fectly disgraceful to me to have omitted one point
which he kindly brings out for me there, and I
wish you would insert it somewhere if you can. I
mean the consummation of that life which the
author of the article in question claims as the true
English type, frankly confessing that it is on that
very account that the English cling to it so fondly,
— the fact that the Poet fell a victim to this
national characteristic at last, for his poetry was
so successful, and his good things came in upon
him so fast, in his retirement at Stratford, and so
much beyond his individual faculty of appropriat-
ing them, that he sank under it and died of over-
eating ; actually perished by the judgment of God,
DELIA BACON. 91
in an attempt to get the worth of his poetry, in
the only shape in which he could appreciate it;
and it is on account of the very quality which
finally assumes this consummate form in him, that
his memory is embalmed in the grateful recollec-
tions of his countrymen. So this Fraser man says,
outright. It is not his poetry that they admire, it
is his character. Anacreon died of a grape-stone.
We have not the particulars here, but I suppose it
was roast beef probably or plum pudding which
put an end to this god of the English idolatry in
the midst of his career, and prevented our having
any more Macbeths or Lears or Tempests."
" I do not know where I shall be by the time
your answer to this arrives, and if the work were
all in your hands, I should not so much care. I can
only ask you to direct to me here — perhaps you
have already written in reply to my last, — I hope
so ; for a letter on which I have been very much
depending has not come for some reason or other,
and as the month of November is at hand, I may
be in need of all the encouragement which the
case admits of, and the cheer which your good
words have always given me. It would be very
foolish to expect to have anything like this with-
out paying for it, and so long as the demand does
not involve impossibilities, I hope to be able to
meet it. There's something gained at any rate,
and if that is once secured it is not possible for
one life to pay too dearly for it."
92 DELIA BACON.
Then follows some discussion of other means
than magazines — weekly editions of the New York
dailies — for getting some of her manuscript be-
fore the public, and some compensation for it, —
" and that would enable me to retain my connec-
tion with this planet, perhaps, till the work is fin-
ished, — if that should seem on the whole desir-
able. However, there is the Atlantic Ocean to fall
back upon, in the last resort,^ and the Providential
scheme is not without its provisions for that class
of persons that the land refuses to tolerate, — peo-
ple who were not expected, and for whom there is
in two hemispheres no place. I have been doing
the very best thing I could, the most honorable, —
the only honorable thing I could. And after a
deliberate survey of the ground, I have decided
to let things take their course. I am not going to
abase myself because I have done my duty. I am
not afraid to die in the w^ay of it ; when the road
comes fairly to an end, I shall stop. I will make
no further concession to the nonsense of this
world. It has nothing to give me. Permission to
finish my work is all I want of it."
Before the answer to this letter reached her she
must have received news of the relief which was
to come from the publication of the first part of
her work. Joyful as the respite must have been
to her, with such joy as rewards the heroic endur-
* There seems to be a reproduction here of her grim allusion to
Margaret Fuller in an earlier letter (supra, p. 68).
DELIA BACON. 93
ance of a beleaguered garrison in extremity when
the siege is raised, this was nevertheless the first
and the last return, beyond the consciousness of
faithful sacrifice, from the work to which she gave
her life. The letter now given must only have
confirmed to her the news which one from the
magazine publishers had already brought.
Concord, 3 December, 1855.
Dear Miss Bacon", — I have only a few minutes,
and perhaps no intelligence for you, and yet can-
not let another steamer go in silence. I received
your first chapter and read it, and sent it immedi-
ately to Putnam, with all the Imprimatur I could
add. I did not write you, for I have been un-
comfortably, nay ridiculously, busy with printing,
writing, and a correspondence of absurd extent,
which my practice of lecturing creates. I delayed
your letter day by day, until now comes your sec-
ond parcel, and enclosed letter, giving so much to
think of — really so much to think of, that I
heartily wish the right man were here to think
and counsel. Immediately on its arrival, comes at
last a letter from Putnam's editor, signing himself
Dix Edwards,^ saying, that he did duly receive the
First Chapter, will print it at last as leading article
on 1 January, and wishes Miss Bacon will follow it
up, in their Monthly, as fast as she can. Mean-
^ Messrs. Dix & Edwards were publishers (not editors) of the
magazine.
94 DELIA BACON.
time, I hoped that you would yet decide to print
by Phillips & Sampson, and make the book at
once. I ought to have explained to you, whilst
their statement was fresh in my mind, that you
are not holden to them by publishing by them
any longer than you please. At the end of the
first, or of the second, or whatever edition, you
can take your copyright to a new publisher. Still,
there is reason for holding on by them, namely,
that they say they spend a great deal of money
on each of their books before any remuneration
comes. Also, they reply to your feeling of the in-
justice of receiving only a tenth part of the price
of the book to yourself, that they receive still less,
unless and until the book is very successful ; for it
costs no more to produce a book that sells fifty
thousand copies than the one that sells one thou-
sand.
Now you leave me, in your last letter, quite too
much liberty. You have not said what I shall do.
I am going to the Mississippi, as soon as, or before,
my little book is out ; and am to read lectures in
that country for six weeks perhaps, — through dire
necessity, and not from any desire to that work.
You must choose, then, whether to print the Book
by P. & S., as the only offer in that form we have ;
or, in Articles by Putnam. I much prefer the first
mode. If I had my freedom, I should go to Boston
or New York and read your letters and chapters to
good men, and found a new Shakespeare Society
DELIA BACON. 95
to print the Book, and install the Author. But
the mud of the Mississippi forbids ; and though you
suggest several good journals, &c., which ought to
exist here for us, they do not yet exist. The first
chapter was excellent. So is the second. These
are all that I have read. I have the other two,
and, when I leave home, shall leave my wife
charged to obey exactly the instructions you shall
send, in case they arrive before my return, which
perhaps will not be till 1 February. Still, what
you write will be sent to me in the West. I have
not time for another line, and only write this that
I may not be heinously negligent where your
genius and the high Fate that seem to accompany
you have right to demand instant service. I shall
strive to find a breathing time to say so much to
your friends. Respectfully and gratefully,
R. W. Emerson.
Miss D. S. Bacon.
Before this relief, however, small as it was,
could be expected, her extremity was already ab-
solute. On the 20th of December an evidently
hasty note, written both to her brother and a sis-
ter, attests it. She writes asking for special care
about her copyright, for which her solicitude has
now a pathetic look, and proceeds : " Money from
some quarter I must have immediatel}^ A little
delay will make the difference between life and
death to me, unless for the sake of my work I
96 DELTA BACON.
should conclude to apply to the American minis-
ter ; nothing else would induce me to do it. I am
clearly of the opinion that this work is that which
is wanting, and I humbly hope that I may live to
see it issued safely, but I do not expect the laws
of nature to be altered on my account, though
they do indeed seem to have been well-nigh mirac-
ulously controlled, for I have lived for months in
the lions' den, and thus far God has shut his
mouth. . . . The morning of the longest night,
and it is a very long one, is at hand."
It was on the 20th of November that dawn be-
gan to gleam in the west, in the following letter
from Messrs. Dix & Edwards :
10 Park Place, New York, Nov. 20, 1855.
Madame : We beg to say that the chapter of
your inquiry into the authorship of Shakespeare's
plays, with which we were favored through Mr.
Emerson, will appear in the January number of
"Putnam's Monthly," when it will be paid for at
the rate of our most valued contributors, five dol-
lars a page. We shall take the liberty to express
in a note to this article the hope that the series
may be continued in our pages, and we trust it
may suit your convenience to forward a second
chapter without any delay, in order that it may
appear in the February number.
Moreover, should you have made no other
arrangements, we shall be happy to treat with you
DELIA BACON. 97
for the publication of the whole after so much of
it as you may desire shall have appeared in a
serial form.
In the number for January, 1856, " Putnam's
Monthly" began its seventh half-yearly volume.
It was then the chief American magazine of the
lighter literature; for the "Atlantic Monthly,"
which replaced it, did not begin until the follow-
ing year. The opening article of the January
number was that which follows.
X.
WILLIAM SHAKESPEARE AND HIS PLAYS : AN IN-
QUIPtY CONCERNING THEM.^
How can we undertake to account for the liter-
ary miracles of antiquity, while this great myth
of the modern ages still lies at our own door un-
questioned ?
This vast, magical, unexplained phenomenon,
which our own times have produced under our
own eyes, appears to be, indeed, the only thing
which our modern rationalism is not to be per-
mitted to meddle with. For here the critics
themselves still veil their faces, filliug the air with
mystic utterances which seem to say, that to this
shrine at least, for the footstep of the common
reason and the common sense, there is yet no ad-
mittance. But how can they instruct us to take
^ In commencing the publication of these bold, original, and most
ingenious and interesting speculations upon the real authorship of
Shakespeare's plays, it is proper for the editor of Putnam's Monthly,
in disclaiming all responsibility for their startling view of the ques-
tion, to say that they are the result of long and conscientious inves-
tigation on the part of the learned and eloquent scholar, their author ;
and that the editor has reason to hope that they will be continued
through some future numbers of the Magazine. \_Editorial Note."]
DELIA BACON. 99
off here the sandals which they themselves have
taught us to wear into the inmost sekos of the
most ancient sanctities ?
The Shakespeake Dkama, — its import, its limi-
tations, its object and sources, its beginning and
end, — for the modern critic, that is surely now the
question.
What, indeed, should we know of the origin of
the Homeric poems ? Twenty-five hundred years
ago, when those mystic characters, which the
learned Phenician and Egyptian had brought in
vain to the singing Greek of the Heroic Ages, be-
gan, in the new modifications of national life which
the later admixtures of foreign elements created,
at length to be put to their true uses, that song of
the nation, even in its latest form, was already old
on the lips of the learned, and its origin a tra-
dition. All the history of that wonderful individu-
ality wherein the inspirations of so many ages were
at last united, — the circumstance, the vicissitude,
the poetic life, that had framed that dazzling mir-
ror of old time, and wrought in it those depths of
clearness, — all had gone before the art of writing
and memories had found its way into Greece, or
even the faculty of perceiving the actual had
begun to be developed there.
And yet are the scholars of our time content to
leave this matter here where they find it ? With
these poetic remains in their hands, the monu-
ments of a genius whose date is ante-historical, are
100 DELIA BACON.
they content to know of their origin only what
Alexander and Plato could know, what Solon and
Pisistratus were fain to content themselves with,
what the Homerids themselves received of him as
their ancestral patron ?
No: with these works in their hands to-day,
reasoning from them alone, with no collateral aids,
with scarce an extant monument of the age from
which they come to us, they are not afraid to fly
in the face of all antiquity with their conclusions.
Have they not settled among them already the
old dispute of the contending cities, the old dispute
of the contending ages, too, for the honor of this
poet's birth ? Do they not take him to pieces be-
fore our eyes, this venerable Homer ; and tell us
how many old forgotten poets' ashes went to his
formation, and trace in him the mosaic scenes
which eluded the scrutiny of the age of Pericles ?
Even Mr. Grote will tell us now, just where the
Iliad " cuts me " the fiery Achilles " cranking in ; "
and what could hinder the learned Schlegel, years
ago, from setting his chair in the midst of the
Delian choirs, confronting the confounded children
of Ion with his definitions of the term Homeros,
and demonstrating, from the Leipsic Iliad in his
hand, that the poet's contemporaries had, in fact,
named him Homer the Seer, not Homer the Blind
One?
The criticism of our age found this whole ques-
tion where the art of writing found it two thou-
DELIA BACON. 101
sand five hundred years ago ; but because the Io-
nian cities, and Solon, and Pisistratus might be pre-
sumed beforehand to know at least as much about
it as they, or because the opinions of twenty-five
centuries in such a case might seem to be entitled
to some reverence, did the critics leave it there ?
Two hundred and fifty years ago, our poet —
our Homer — was alive in the world. Two cen-
turies and a half ago, when the art of letters was
already millenniums old in Europe, when the art of
printing had already been in use a century and a
half, in the midst of a contemporary historical illu-
mination which has its equal nowhere in history,
those works were issued that have given our Eng-
lish life and language their imperishable claim in
the earth, that have made the name in which they
come to us a word by itself in the human speech ;
and to this hour we know of their origin hardly
so much as we knew of the origin of the Homeric
epics when the present discussions in regard to
them commenced, 7iot so much — not a hundredth
part so much — as we now know of Pharaohs who
reigned in the valley of the Nile ages before the
invasion of the Hyksos.
But with these products of the national life in
our hands, with all the contemporary light on their
implied conditions which such an age as that of
Elizabeth can furnish, are we going to be able to
sit still much longer, in a period of historical
inquiry and criticism like this, under the gross
102 DELIA BACON.
impossibilities which the still accepted theory on
this subject involves ?
The age which has put back old Homer's eyes
safe in his head again, after he had gone without
them well-nigh three thousand years; the age
which has found, and labeled, and sent to the mu-
seum, the skull in which the pyramid of Cheops
was designed, and the lions which '' the mighty
hunter before the Lord " ordered for his new pal-
ace on the Tigris some millenniums earlier ; the age
in which we have abjured our faith in Romulus
and Remus, — is surely one in which we may be
permitted to ask this question.
Shall this crowning literary product of that great
epoch wherein these new ages have their begin-
ning, vividly arrayed in its choicest refinements ;
flashing everywhere on the surface with its cost-
liest wit ; crowded everywhere with its subtlest
scholasticisms ; betraying on every page its broad-
est, freshest range of experience, its most varied
culture, its profoundest insight, its boldest grasp
of comprehension, — shall this crowning result of
so many preceding ages of growth and culture,
with its essential and now palpable connection
with the new scientific movement of the time from
which it issues, be able to conceal from us much
longer its history ? Shall we be able to accept
in explanation of it, much longer, the story of the
Stratford poacher ?
The popular and traditional theory of the origin
DELIA BACON. 103
of these works was received and transmitted after
the extraordinary circumstances which led to its
first imposition had ceased to exist, because, in
fact, no one had any motive for taking the trouble
to call it in question. The common disposition to
receive in good faith a statement of this kind,
however extraordinary ; the natural, intellectual
preference of the affirmative proposition at hand,
as the explanation of a given phenomenon, when
the negative or the doubt compels one to launch
out for himself in search of new positions, — this
alone might serve to account for this result, at a
time when criticism as yet was not ; when the
predominant mental habit, on all ordinary ques-
tions, was still that of passive acceptance, and the
most extraordinary excitements, on questions of
the most momentous interest, could only rouse
the public mind to assume temporarily any other
attitude.
And the impression which these works produced,
even in their first imperfect mode of exhibition,
was already so profound and extraordinary as to
give to all the circumstances of their attributed
origin a blaze of notoriety tending to enhance this
positive force in the tradition. Propounded as a
fact, not as a theory, its very boldness — its start-
ling improbability — was made at once to contribute
to its strength ; covering beforehand the whole
ground of attack. The wonderful origin of these
works was, from the first, the predominant point
104 DELIA BACON.
in the impression they made, — the prominent mar-
vel in those marvels around which all the new
wonders that the later criticism evolved still con-
tinued to arrange themselves.
For the discoveries of this criticism had yet no
tendency to suggest any new belief on this point.
In the face of all that new appreciation of the
works themselves which was involved in them,
the story of that wondrous origin could still main-
tain its footing ; through all the ramifications of
this criticism, it still grew and inwound itself, not
without vital limitation, however, to the criticism
thus entangled. But these new discoveries in-
volved, for a time, conclusions altogether in keep-
ing with the tradition.
This new force in literature, for which books
contained no precedent; this new manifestation
of creative energy, with its self-sustained vitali-
ties ; with its inexhaustible prodigality, mocking
nature herself ; with its new grasp of the whole
circuit of human aims and activities, — this force, so
unlike anything that scholasticism or art had ever
before produced, though it came in fact with the
sweep of all the ages, moved with all their slow
accumulation, could not account for itself to those
critics as anything but a new and mystic mani-
festation of nature, — a new upwelling of the
occult vital forces underlying our phenomenal
existence ; invading the historic order with one
capricious leap, laughing at history, telling the
DELIA BACON. 105
laboring ages that their sweat and blood had been
in vain.
And the tradition at hand was entirely in har-
mony with this conception. For to this super-
human genius, bringing with it its own laws and
intuitions from some outlying region of life not
subject to our natural conditions, and not to be
included in our " philosophy," the differences be-
tween man and man, natural or acquired, would,
of course, seem trivial. What could any culture,
or any merely natural endowment, accomplish that
would furnish the required explanation of this
result? And, by way of defining itself as an
agency wholly supernal, was it not, in fact, neces-
sary that it should select as its organ one in whom
the natural conditions of the highest intellectual
manifestations were obviously, even grossly, want-
ing ?
With this theory of it, no one need find it strange
that it should pass in its selection those grand old
cities where Learning sat enthroned with all her
time-honored array of means and appliances for
the development of mental resource, — where the
genius of England had hitherto been accomplished
for all its triumphs, — and that it should pass the
lofty centres of church and state, and the crowded
haunts of professional life, where the mental activ-
ities of the time were gathered to its conflicts;
where, in hourly collision, each strong individu-
ality was printing itself upon a thousand others,
106 DELIA BACON.
and taking in turn from all their impress ; where,
in the thick-coming change of that " time-better-
ing age," in its crowding multiplicities, and varie-
ties, and oppositions, life grew warm, and in the
old the new was stirring, and in the many the
one ; where wit, and philosophy, and fancy, and
humor, in the thickest onsets of the hour, were
learning to veil in courtly phrase, in double and
triple meanings, in crowding complexities of con-
ceits and unimagined subtleties of form, the free-
doms that the time had nurtured ; where genius
flashed up from all her hidden sources, and the
soul of the age — " the mind reflecting ages past"
— was collecting itself, and ready even then to
leap forth, *' not for an age, but for all time."
And, indeed, was it not fitting that this new in-
spiration which was to reveal the latent forces of
Nature and her scorn of conditions, — fastening
her contempt for all time upon the pride of human
culture at its height, — was it not fitting that it
should select this moment of all others, and this
locality, that it might pass by that very centre of
historical influences which the court of Elizabeth
then made, — that it might involve in its perpetual
eclipse that immortal group of heroes, and states-
men, and scholars, and wits, and poets, with its
enthroned king of thought, taking all the past for
his inheritance, and claimins; the minds of men in
all futurity as the scene and limit of his dominion ?
Yes, even he — he whose thought would grasp the
DELIA BACON. 107
whole, and keep his grasp on it perpetual — speaks
to us still out of that cloud of mockery that fell
upon him when " Great Nature " passed him by
— even him — with his immortal longings, with
his world-wide aims, with his new mastery of her
secrets, too, and his new sovereignty over her,
to drop her crown of immortality, lit with the
finest essence of that which makes his own page
immortal, on the brow of the pet horse-boy at
Blackf riars, — the wit and good fellow of the Lon-
don link-holders, the menial attache and eltve of
the play-house, the future actor, and joint pro-
prietor, of the New Theatre on the Bankside.
Who quarrels with this movement ? Who does
not find it fitting and pleasant enough ? Let the
" thrice three muses " go into mourning as deep as
they will for this desertion, — as desertion it was —
for we all know that to the last hour of his life
this fellow cared never a farthing for them, but
only for his gains at their hands ; let Learning
hide as she best may her baffled head in this dis-
grace, — who cares ? Who does not rather laugh
with great creating Nature in her triumph ?
At least, who would be willing to admit, for a
moment, that there was one in all that contempo-
rary circle of accomplished scholars, and men of
vast and varied genius, capable of writing these
plays ; and who feels the least difficulty in suppos-
ing that " this player here," as Hamlet terms him,
— the whole force of that outburst of scorn inef-
108 DELIA BACON.
fable bearing on the word, and on that which it
represented to him, — who doubts that this player
is most abundantly and superabundantly compe-
tent to it ?
Now that the deer-stealing fire has gone out of
him, now that this youthful impulse has been
taught its conventional social limits, sobered into
the mild, sagacious, witty " Mr. Shakespeare of the
Globe," distinguished for the successful manage-
ment of his own fortunes, for his upright dealings
with his neighbors, too, and *' his facetious grace
in writing," patronized by men of rank, who in-
clude his theatre among their instrumentalities for
affecting the popular mind, and whose relations to
him are, in fact, identical with those which Hamlet
sustains to the players of his piece, what is to
hinder this Mr. Shakespeare — the man who keeps
the theatre on the Bankside — from working him-
self into a frenzy when he likes, and scribbling out
unconsciously Lears, and Macbeths, and Hamlets,
merely as the necessary dialogue to the spectacles
he professionally exhibits ; ay, and what is to hin-
der his boiling his kettle with the manuscripts,
too, when he has done with them, if he chooses ?
What it would be madness to suppose the most
magnificently endowed men of that wondrous age
could accomplish — its real men, those who have
left their lives in it, woven in its web throughout
— what it would be madness to suppose these men,
w^ho are but men, and known as such, could ac-
DELIA BACON. 109
complish, this Mr. Shakespeare, actor and manager,
of whom no one knows anything else, shall be able
to do for you in " the twinkling of an eye," with-
out so much as knowing it, and there shall be no
words about it !
And are not the obscurities that involve his life,
so impenetrably in fact, the true Shakespearean
element ? In the boundless sea of negation which
surrounds that play-house centre, surely he can
unroll himself to any length, or gather himself into
any shape or attitude, which the criticism in hand
may call for. There is nothing to bring up against
him, with one's theories. For, here in this day-
light of our modern criticism, in its noontide glare,
has he not contrived to hide himself in the pro-
foundest depths of that stuff that myths are made
of? Who shall come in competition with him
here ? Who shall dive into the bottom of that sea
to pluck his drowned honors from him ?
Take, one by one, the splendid men of this
Elizabethan age, and set them down with a Ham-
let to write, and you will say beforehand, such an
one cannot do it, nor such an one, — nor he, with
that profoundest insight and determination of his
which taught him to put physical nature to the
question that he might wring from her her se-
crets; but humanity, human nature, of course,
had none worth noting for him ; — oh no ; he, with
his infinite wit and invention, with his worlds of
covert humor, with his driest prose, pressed, burst-
110 DELIA BACON.
ing with Shakespearean beauty, he could not do it,
nor he, with his Shakespearean acquaintance with
life, with his Shakespearean knowledge of men
under all the differing social conditions, at home
and abroad, by land and by sea, with his world-
wide experiences of nature and fortune, with the
rush and outbreak of his fiery mind kindling and
darting through all his time ; he, with his Shake-
spearean grace and freedom, with his versatile and
profound acquirements, with his large, genial, gen-
erous, prodigal, Shakespearean soul that would
comprehend all, and ally itself with all, he could
not do it ; neither of these men, nor both of them
together, nor all the wits of the age together : —
but this Mr. Shakespeare of the Globe, this mild,
respectable, obliging man, this " Johannes Facto-
tum " (as a contemporary calls him, laughing at
the idea of his undertaking "a blank verse"), is
there any difficulty here ? Oh no ! None in the
world : for, in the impenetrable obscurity of that
illimitable green-room of his, "by the mass, he
is anything, and he can do anything, and that
roundly too."
Is it wonderful ? And is not that what we like
in it ? Would you make a man of him ? With
this miraculous inspiration of his, would you ask
anything else of him ? Do you not see that you
touch the Shakespearean essence, with a question
as to motives, and possibilities? Would he be
Shakespeare still, if he should permit you to ham-
DELIA BACON. Ill
per him with conditions ? What is t-he meaning
of that word, then ? And will you not leave him
to us ? Shall we have no Shakespeare ? Have
we not scholars enough, and wits enough, and
men, of every other kind of genius, enough, — but
have we many Shakespeares ? — that you should
wish to run this one through with your questions,
this one, great, glorious, infinite impossibility, that
has had us in its arms, all our lives from the begin-
ning ? If you dissolve him, do you not dissolve us
with him ? If you take him to pieces, do you not
undo us, also ?
Ah, surely we did not need this master spirit of
our race to tell us that there is that in the foun-
dation of this human soul, " that loves to appre-
hend more than cool reason ever comprehends,"
nay, that there is an infinity in it, that finds her
ordinances too straight, that will leap from them
when it can, and shake the head at her. And have
we not all lived once in regions full of people that
were never compelled to give an account of them-
selves in any of these matters ? And when, pre-
cisely, did we pass that charmed line, beyond
which these phantoms cannot come ? When was
the word definitively spoken which told us that the
childhood of the race was done, or that its grown-
up children were to have henceforth no conjurers ?
Who yet has heard the crowing of that cock, " at
whose warning, whether in earth or air, the ex-
travagant and erring spirit hies to his confine " ?
112 DELIA BACON.
The nuts, indeed, are all cracked long ago, whence
of old the fairy princess, in her coach and six,
drove out so freely with all her regal retinue, to
crown the hero's fortunes ; and the rusty lamp,
that once filled the dim hut of poverty with East-
ern splendors, has lost its capabilities. But when
our youth robbed us of these, had it not marvels
and impossibilities of its own to replace them with,
yet more magical ? and surely, manhood itself, the
soberest maturity, cannot yet be without these
substitutes ; and it is nature's own voice and out-
cry that we hear whenever one of them is taken
from us.
Let him alone ! We have lecturers enough and
professors enough already. Let him alone ! We
will keep this one mighty conjurer still, even in
the place where men most do congregate, and no-
body shall stir a hair on his impossible old head, or
trouble him with a question. He shall stand there
still, pulling interminable splendors out of places
they never could have been in ; that is the charm
of it ; he shall stand there rubbing those few sickly
play-house manuscripts of his, or a few, old, musty
play-house novels, and wringing from them the
very wine of all our life, showering from their
greasy folds the gems and gold of all the ages !
He shall stand there, spreading, in the twinkling of
an eye, for a single night in a dirty theatre, " to
complete a purchase that he has a mind to," the
feasts of the immortal gods; and before our lips
DELIA BACON. 113
can, by any chance, have reached even the edge of
those cups, that open down into infinity, when the
show has served his purpose, he shall whisk it all
away again, and leave no wreck behind, except by
accident ; and none shall remonstrate, or say to
him, '• wherefore ? " He shall stand there still, for
us all — the magician; nature's one, complete, in-
contestable, gorgeous triumph over the impossibil-
ities of reason.
For the primary Shakespearean condition in-
volves at present, not merely the accidental ab-
sence of those external means of intellectual en-
largement and perfection, whereby the long arts
of the ages are made to bring to the individual
mind their last results, multiplying its single forces
with the life of all ; — but it requires also the ab-
sence of all personal intellectual tastes, aims, and
pursuits ; it requires that this man shall be below
all other men, in his sordid incapacity for appre-
ciating intellectual values ; it requires that he shall
be able, not merely to witness the performance of
these plays, not merely to hear them and read
them for himself, but to compose them ; it requires
him to be able to compose the "Tempest," and
"Othello," and "Macbeth," without suspecting
that there is anything of permanent interest in
them — anything that will outlast the spectacle of
the hour.
The art of writing had been already in use
twenty -five centuries in Europe, and a Shake-
114 DELIA BACON.
speare, one would think, might have been able to
form some conception of its value and applica-
tions ; the art of printing had been in use on the
continent a century and a half, and it was already
dartino; throucjh every civilized corner of it. and
through England, too, no uncertain intimations
of its historic purport — intimations significant
enough " to make bold power look pale " already
— and one would think a Shakespeare might have
understood its message. But no ! This very
spokesman of the new era it ushers in, trusted with
this legacy of the new-born times ; this man, whom
we all so look up to, and reverence, with that in-
alienable treasure of ours in his hands, which even
Ben Jonson knew was not for him, " nor for an
age — but for all time," why this Jack Cade that
he is must needs take us back three thousand years
with it, and land us at the gates of Ilium ! The
arts of humanity and history, as they stood when
Troy was burned, must save this treasure for us,
and be our means of access to it ! He will leave
this work of his, into which the ends of the world
have come to be inwrought for all the future, he
will leave it where Homer left his, on the lips of
the mouthing " rhapsodists ! "
Apparently, indeed, he will be careful to teach
these " robustious, periwig-pated fellows " their
proper relations to him. He will industriously in-
struct them how to pronounce his dialogue, so as
to give the immediate effect intended j controlling
DELIA BACON. 115
even the gesticulations, insisting on the stops, rul-
ing out utterly the town-crier's emphasis; and,
above all, protesting, with a true author's jealousy,
against interpolation or any meddling with his
text. Indeed, the directions to the players, which
he puts into the mouth of Hamlet — involving, as
they do, not merely the nice sensibility of the ar-
tist, and his nervous, instinctive, aesthetic acquaint-
ance with his art, but a thorough scientific knowl-
edge of its principles — these directions would
have led us to infer that he would, at least, know
enough of the value of his own works to avail
himself of the printing-press for their preserva-
tion, and not only that, they would have led us to
expect from him a most exquisitely careful revi-
sion of his proofs. But how is it ? He destroys,
we are given to understand, the manuscripts of
his unpublished plays, and we owe to accident, and
to no care of his whatever, his works as they have
come to us. Did ever the human mind debase it-
self to the possibility of receiving such nonsense
as this, on any subject, before ? ^
He had those manuscripts ! He had those origi-
nals which publishers and scholars would give mil-
^ Though the editors of the first folio profess to have access to
these very papers, and boast of being able to bring out an absolutely
faultless edition, to take the place of those stolen and surreptitious
copies then in circulation, the edition which is actually produced, in
connection with this announcement, is itself found to be full of ver-
bal errors, and is supposed, by later editors, to have been derived
from no better source than its predecessors.
116 DELIA BACON.
lions now to purchase a glimpse of ; he had the
original Hamlet, with its last finish ; he had the
original Lear, with his own final readings ; he had
them all — all, pointed, emphasized, directed, as
they came from the gods ; he had them all, all fin-
ished as the critic of "Hamlet" and "Midsummer
Night's Dream " must have finished them ; and he
left us to wear out our youth, and squander our
lifetime, in poring over and setting right the old,
garbled copies of the play-house ! He had those
manuscripts, and the printing-press had been at its
work a hundred years when he was born, but he
was not ashamed to leave the best wits and schol-
ars of all succeeding ages, with Pope and Johnson
at their head, to exhaust their ingenuity, and sour
their dispositions, and to waste their golden hours,
year after year, in groping after and guessing out
his hidden meanings !
He had those manuscripts ! In the name of
that sovereign reason, whose name he dares to take
upon his lips so often, what did he do with them ?
Did he wantonly destroy them ? No ! Ah, no !
he did not care enous-h for them to take that trou-
ble. No, he did not do that! That would not
have been in keeping with the character of this
most respectable impersonation of the Genius of
the British Isle, as it stands set up for us at pres-
ent to worship. Some worthy, domestic, private,
economic use, doubtless, they were put to. For,
is not he a private, economical, practical man —
DELIA BACON. 117
this Shakespeare of ours — with no stuff and non-
sense about him — a plain, true-blooded English-
man, who minds his own business, and leaves other
people to take care of theirs ? Is not this our
Shakespeare ? Is it not the boast of England,
that he is just that, and nothing else ? " What did
he do with them ? " He gave them to his cook,
or Dr. Hale put up potions for his patients in
them, or Judith, poor Judith, — who signified her
relationship to the author of " Lear " and the
" Tempest," and her right to the glory of the
name he left her, by the very extraordinary kind
of " mark " which she affixes to legal instruments,
— poor Judith may have curled her hair to the
day of her death with them, without dreaming of
any harm. " What did he do with them ? " And
whose business is it ? Were n't they his own ? If
he chose to burn them up, or put them to some
private use, had not he a perfect right to do it ?
No ! Traitor and miscreant ! No ! What did
you do with them ? You have skulked this ques-
tion long enough. You will have to account for
them. You will have to tell us what you did with
them. The awakening ages will put you on the
stand, and you will not leave it until you answer
the question, " What did you do with them ? "
And yet, do not the critics dare to boast to us,
that he did compose these works for his own pri-
vate, particular ends only ? Do they not tell us,
as if it were a thing to be proud of, and " a thing
118 DELIA BACON.
to thank God on," with uplifted eyes, and speech-
less admiration points, that he did " die, and leave
the world no copy " ? But who is it that insists
so much, so strangely, so repetitiously, upon the
wrong to humanity, the fraud done to nature, when
the individual fails to render in his account to time
of all that nature gives him? Who is it that
writes, obscurely indeed, so many sonnets, only to
ring the changes on this very subject, singing out,
point by point, not the Platonic theory, but his
own fresh and beautiful study of great nature's
law, and his own new and scientific doctrine of
conservation and advancement ? And who is it
that writes, unconsciously no doubt, and without
its ever occurring to him that it was going to be
printed, or to be read by any one,
^'■Thyself and thy belongings
Are not thine own so proper, as to waste
Thyself upon thy virtues, them on thee " ?
For here is the preacher of another doctrine,
which puts the good that is private and particular
w^here the sovereignty that is in nature puts it : —
" Heaven doth with us, as we with torches do ;
Not light them for themselves. For if our virtues
Did not go forth of us, 'twere all alike
As if we had them not. Spirits are not finely touched
But to fine issues ; nor nature never lends
The smallest scruple of her excellence,
But, like a thrifty goddess, she determines
Herself the glory of a creditor,
Both thanks and use."
Truly the man who writes in this style, with
DELIA BACON. 119
such poetic iteration, might put in Hamlet's plea,
when his critics accuse him of unconsciousness : —
" Bring me to the test
And I the matter will re-word ; which madness
Would gambol from."
What infirmity of blindness is it, then, that we
charge upon this " god of our idolatry " ? And
what new race of Calibans are we, that we should
be called upon to worship this monstrous incon-
gruity — this Trinculo — this impersonated moral
worthlessness ? Oh, stupidity past finding out !
"The myriad-minded one," the light of far-olf futu-
rities was in him, and he knew it not ! While the
word was on his lips, and he reasoned of it, he
heeded it not ! He, at whose feet all men else are
proud to sit, came to him, and found no reverence.
The treasure for us all was put into his hands, and
— he did not waste it — he did not keep it laid up
in a napkin, he did not dig in the earth, and hide
his Lord's money ; no, he used it ! he used it for
his own despicable and sordid ends, " to complete
purchases that he had a mind to," and he left us
to gather up " the arts and fragments " as best we
may. And they dare to tell us this of him, and
men believe it, and to this hour his bones are
canonized, to this hour his tomb is a shrine, where
the genius of the cool, sagacious, clear-thoughted
Northern Isle is worshipped, under the form of a
mad, unconscious, intellectual possession — a do-
tard inspiration, incapable of its own designs, want-
120 DELIA BACON.
ing in the essential attribute of all mental power
— self-cogfnition.
And yet, who would be willing to spare, now,
one point in that time-honored, incongruous whole ?
Who would be willing to dispense with the least of
those contradictions, which have become, in the
progressive development of our appreciation of
these works, so inextricably knit together, and
thereby inwrought, as it were, into our inmost
life ? Who can, in fact, fairly convince himself,
now, that deer-stealing and link-holding, and the
name of an obscure family in Stratford — common
enough there, though it means what it does to us —
and bad, or indifferent performances, at a Surrey
theatre, are not really, after all, essential prelimi-
naries and concomitants to the composition of a
" Romeo and Juliet," or a " Midsummer Night's
Dream," or a " Twelfth Night " ? And what
Shakespeare critic, at least, could persuade him-
self, now, that any other motive than the purchase
of the Globe theatre, and that capital messuage or
tenement in Stratford, called the New Place, with
the appurtenances thereof, and the lands adjoin-
ing, and the house in Henley Street, could by any
possibility have originated such works as these ?
And what fool would undertake to prove, now,
that the fact of the deer-stealing, or any other
point in the traditionary statement, may admit of
question ? Certainly, if we are to have an histor-
ical or traditionary Shakespeare of any kind, out
DELIA BACON. 121
of our present materials, it becomes us to protest,
with the utmost severity, against the least med-
dling therewith. If they are not sufficiently mea-
gre already — if the two or three historical points
we have, or seem to have, and the miserable scraps
and fragments of gossip which the painful explo-
rations of two centuries have, at length, succeeded
in rescuing from the oblivion to which this man's
time consigned him ^ — if these points are to be en-
croached upon, and impaired by criticism, we may
as well throw up the question altogether. In the
name of all that is tangible, leave us what there
is of affirmation here. Surely we have negations
enough already. If he did not steal the deer, will
you tell us what one mortal thing he did do ? He
wrote the plays. But, did the man who wrote the
plays do nothing else ? Are there not some fore-
gone conclusions in them ? — some intimations, and
round ones, too, that he who wrote them, be he
who he may, has had experiences of some sort ?
Do such things as these, that the plays are full of,
begin in the fingers' ends ? Can you find them
in an ink-horn ? Can you sharpen them out of a
goose-quill ? Has your Shakespeare wit and in-
vention enough for that ?
But the man was a player, and the manager of
a play-house, and these are phiys that he writes.
^ Constituting, when well put together, precisely that historic trail
which an old, defunct, indifferent, fourth-rate play-actor naturally
leaves behind him, for the benefit of any antiquary who may find
occasion to conduct an exploration for it.
122 DELIA BACON.
And what kind of play is it that you find m
them — and what is the theatre — and who are
the actors ? Has this man's Hfe been all play ?
Has there been no earnest in it ? — no acting in
his own name ? Had he no part of his own in
time, then ? Has he dealt evermore with second-
hand reports, unreal shadows, and mockeries of
things? Has there been no personal grapple with
realities, here ? Ah, let him have that one living
opposite. Leave him that single shot " heard
round the world." Did not ^schylus fight at Sal-
amis ? Did not Scipio teach Terence how to mar-
shal his men and wing his words ? (A contempo-
rary and confidant of Shakespeare's thinks, from
internal evidence, that the patron WTote the plays,
in this case, altogether.) And was not Socrates as
brave at Potidaea and Delium as he was in the mar-
ket-place ; and did not Caesar, the author, kill his
millions ? But this giant wrestler and warrior of
ours, with the essence of all the battles of all ages
in his nerves — with the blood of a new Adam
bubbling in his veins — he cannot be permitted to
leap out of those everlasting buskins of his, long
enoutrh to have a brush with this one live deer,
but the critics must have out their spectacles, and
be down upon him with their objections.
And what honest man would want a Shake-
speare at this hour of the day that was not writ-
ten by that same irregular, lawless, wild, reckless,
facetious, law-despising, art-despising genius of a
DELIA BACON. 123
" Will " that did steal the deer ? Is not this the
Shakespeare we have had on our shelves with our
bibles and prayer-books, since our great-grandsires'
times ? The next step will be to call in question
Moses in the bulrushes, and Pharaoh's daughter.
And what is to become, too, under this supposi-
tion, of that exquisite specimen of the player's
merciless wit, and " facetious grace in writing,"
which attracted the attention of his contemporaries,
and left such keen impressions on the minds of his
fellow-townsmen ? What is to become, in this
case, of the famous lampoon on Sir Thomas Lucy,
nailed up on the park gate, rivaling in Shakespear-
ean grace and sharpness another Attic morceau
from the same source — the impromptu on " John-
a-Combe " ? These remains of the poet, which we
find accredited to him in his native village, " with
likelihood of truth enough," among those who
best knew him, have certainly cost the commenta-
tors too much trouble to be lightly relinquished ;
and, unquestionably, they do bear on the face of
them most unmistakable symptoms of the player's
wit and the Stratford origin.
No ! no ! We cannot spare the deer-stealing.
As the case now stands, this one, rich, sparkling
point in the tradition can by no means be dis-
pensed with. Take this away, and what becomes
of our traditional Shakespeare ? He goes ! The
whole fabric tumbles to pieces, or settles at once
into a hopeless stolidity. But for the mercurial
124 DELIA BACON.
lightning, which this youthful reminiscence im-
parts to him — this single indication of a sup-
pressed tendency to an heroic life — how could
that heavy, retired country gentleman, late man-
ager of the Globe and the Blackfriars theatres, be
made to float at any convenient distance above the
earth, in the laboring conceptions of the artists
whose business it is to present his apotheosis to
us ? Enlarge the vacant platitudes of that fore-
head as you will ; pile up the artificial brains in
the frontispiece to any height which the credulity
of an awe-struck public will hesitate to pronounce
idiotic ; huddle the allegorical shapes about him as
thickly as you will ; and yet, but for the twinkle
which this single reminiscence leaves, this one soli-
tary " proof of liberty," " the flash and outbreak
of a fiery mind of general assault," how could the
old player and showman be made to sit the bird of
Jove, so comfortably as he does, on his way to the
waiting Olympus?
But, after all, it is not this old actor of Eliza-
beth's time who exhibited these plays at his thea-
tre in the way of his trade, and cared for them
precisely as a tradesman would ; cared for them as
he would have cared for tin kettles, or earthen
pans and pots, if they had been in his line, in-
stead ; it is not this old tradesman ; it is not this
old showman and hawker of plays ; it is not this
old lackey, whose hand is on all our heart-strings,
whose name is, of mortal names, the most awe-
inspiring.
DELIA BACON. 125
The Shakespeare of Elizabeth and James, who
exhibited at his theatre as plays, among many oth-
ers surpassing them in immediate theatrical success,
the wonderful works which bore his name — works
which were only half printed, and that surrepti-
tiously, and in detached portions during his life-
time, which, seven years after his death, were first
collected and published by authority in his name,
accompanied, according to the custom of the day,
with eulogistic verses from surviving brother poets
— this yet living theatrical Shakespeare is a very
different one from the Shakespeare of our mod-
ern criticism ; — the Shakespeare brought out, at
length, by more than two centuries of readings
and the best scholarly investigation of modern
times, from between the two lids of that wondrous
folio.
The faintly limned outlines of the nucleus which
that name once included are all gone long ago,
dissolved in the splendors, dilated into the infini-
ties which this modern Shakespeare dwells in. It
is Shakespeare the author that we now know only,
the author of these worlds of profoundest art,
these thought-crowded worlds, which modern read-
ing discovers in these printed plays of his. It is
the posthumous Shakespeare of the posthumous
volume that we now know only. No, not even
that; it is only the work itself that we now
know by that name — the phenomenon and not
its beginning. For, with each new study of the
126 DELTA BACON.
printed page, further and further behind it, deeper
and deeper into regions where no man so much as
undertakes to follow it, retreats the power, which
is for us all already, as truly as if we had confessed
it to ourselves, the unknown, the unnamed.
What does this old player's name, in fact, stand
for with us now ? Inwrought not into all our lit-
erature merely, but into all the life of our modern
time, his unlearned utterances our deepest lore,
which " we are toiling all our lives to find," his
mystic page, the page where each one sees his own
life inscribed, point by point, deepening and deep-
ening with each new experience from the cradle
to the grave ; what is he to us now ? Is he the
teacher of our players only ? AVhat theatres hold
now his school ? What actors' names stand now
enrolled in its illustrious lists? Do not all our
modern works incorporate his lore into their es-
sence, are they not glittering on their surface
everywhere, with ever new, unmissed jewels from
his mines ? Which of our statesmen, our heroes,
our divines, our poets, our philosophers, has not
learned of him ; and in which of all their diver-
gent and multiplying pursuits and experiences do
they fail to find him still with them, still before
them ?
The name which has stood to us from the begin-
ning, for all this — which has been inwrought into
it, which concentrates it in its unity — cannot now
be touched. It has lost its original significance.
DELIA BACON. 127
It means this, and this only to us. It has drunk
in the essence of all this power, and light, and
beauty, and identified itself with it. Never, per-
haps, can it well mean anything else to us.
You cannot christen a world anew, though the
name that was given to it at the font prove an
usurper's. With all that we now know of that he-
roic scholar, from whose scientific dream the New
World was made to emerge at last, in the face of
the mockeries of his time, with all that apprecia-
tion of his work which the Old World and the
New alike bestow upon it, we cannot yet separate
the name of his rival from his hard-earned tri-
umph. What name is it that has drunk into its
melody, forever, all the music of that hope and
promise, which the young continent of Columbus
still whispers — in spite of old European evils
planted there — still whispers in the troubled
earth ? Whose name is it that stretches its golden
letters now, from ocean to ocean, from Arctic to
Antarctic, whose name now enrings the millions
that are born, and live, and die, knowing no world
but the world of that patient scholar's dream —
no reality but the reality of his chimera ?
What matters it ? Who cares ? " What 's in a
name ? " Is there any voice from that hero's own
tomb to rebuke this wrono; ? No. He did not
toil, and struggle, and suffer, and keep his manly
heart from breaking, to the end that those mil-
lions might be called by his name. Ah, little know
128 DELTA bacon:
they, who thus judge of works like his, what roots
such growths must spread, what broad, sweet cur-
rents they must reach and drink from. If the mil-
lions are blessed there, if, through the heat and
burden of his weary day, man shall at length at-
tain, though only after many an erring experience
and fierce rebuke, in that new world, to some
height of learning, to some scientific place of peace
and rest, where worlds are in harmony, and men
are as one, he will say, in God's name. Amen !
For, on the heights of endurance and self-renun-
ciation, where the divine is possible with men, we
have one name.
What have we to do with this poor peasant's
name, then, so hallowed in all our hearts, now,
with household memories, that we should seek to
tear it from the countless fastenings which time
has given it ? This name, chosen at least of for-
tune, if not of nature, for the place it occupies,
dignified with all that she can lend it, — illustrious
with her most lavish favoritism, — has she not
chosen to encircle it with honors which make poor
those that she saves for her kings and heroes ?
Let it stand, then, and not by grace of fortune
only, but by consent of one who could afford to
leave it such a legacy. For he was one whom giv-
ing did not impoverish ; he had wealth enough of
his own and to spare, and honors that he could not
part with.
" Once," but in no poet's garb, once, through
DELIA BACON. 129
the thickest of this " working - clay world," he
trod for himself, with bleeding feet, " the ways
of glory" here, " and sounded all the depths and
shoals of honor," and, from the wrecks of lost
'^ ambition," found to the last " the way to rise
in " : —
" By that sin fell the angels ; bow can man, then,
The image of his Maker, hope to win by 't ?
Love thyself last : cherish those hearts that hate thee ;
Still in thy right hand carry gentle peace.
To silence envious tongues. Be just, and fear not :
Let all the ends thou aini'st at, be thy country's,
Thy God's and truth's ; then, if thou fall'st, thou fall'st
A blessed martyr ! "
Let the name stand, then, where the poet has
himself left it. If he — if he himself did not
scruple to forego his fairest honors, and leave his
immortality in a peasant's weed ; if he himself
could cansent to bind his own princely brows in it,
though it might be for ages, why e'en let him
wear it, then, as his own proudest honor. To all
time let the philosophy be preached in it, which
found " in a name " the heroic height whence its
one great tenet could be uttered with such an em-
phasis, philosophy — " not harsh and crabbed as
dull fools suppose, but musical as is Apollo's lute,"
roaming here at last in worlds of her own shaping ;
more rich and varied, and more intense than na-
ture's own ; where all things " echo the name of
Prospero " ; where, " beside the groves, the foun-
tains, every region near seems all one mutual
130 DELIA BACON.
cry " ; where even young love's own youngest
melodies, from moon-lit balconies, warble its argu-
ment. Let it stand, then. Leave to it its strange
honors — its unbought immortality. Let it stand,
at least, till all those who have eaten in their youth
of the magic tables spread in it, shall have died in
the wilderness. Let it stand while it will, only let
its true significance be recognized.
For, the falsity involved in it, as it now stands,
has become too gross to be endured any further.
The common sense cannot any longer receive it
without self-abnegation ; and the relations of this
question, on all sides, are now too grave and mo-
mentous to admit of any further postponement
of it.
In judging of this question, we must take into
account the fact that, at the time when these
works were issued, all those characteristic organi-
zations of the modern ages, for the diffusion of in-
tellectual and moral influences, which now every-
where cross and recross with electric fibre the
hitherto impassable social barriers, were as yet
unimagined. The inventions and institutions, in
which these had their origin, were then but begin-
ning their work. To-day, there is no scholastic
seclusion so profound that the allied voice and ac-
tion of this mighty living age may not perpetu-
ally penetrate it. To-day, the work-shop has be-
come clairvoyant. The plough and the loom are in
magnetic communication with the loftiest social
DELIA BACON. 131
centres. The last results of the most exquisite
culture of the world, in all its departments, are
within reach of the lowest haunt, where latent
genius and refinement await their summons ; and
there is no " smallest scruple of nature's excel-
lence " that may not be searched out and kindled.
The Englishman who but reads " The Times,"
to-day, puts himself into a connection with his
age, and attains thereby a means of enlargement
of character and elevation of thought and aims,
which in the age of Elizabeth was only possible
to men occupying the highest official and social
position.
It is necessary, too, to remember that the ques-
tion here is not a question of lyric inspiration,
merely ; neither is it a question of dramatic gen-
ius, merely. Why, even the poor player, that
Hamlet quotes so admiringly, '' but in a dream of
passion," his soul rapt and subdued with images of
tenderness and beauty, " tears in his eyes, the color
in his cheeks," even he, with his fine sensibihties,
his rhythmical ear, with his living conceits, if nature
has but done her part towards it, may compose
you a lyric that you would bind up with " High-
land Mary," or " Sir Patrick Spens," for immor-
tality. And even this poor tinker, profane and
wicked as he is, and coarse and unfurnished for
the poet's mission as he seems, when once the in-
finities of religion, with their divine ideals, shall
penetrate to the deep, sweet sources of his yet
132 DELIA bacon:
undreamed of genius, and arouse the latent soul
in him, with their terrific struggles and divine tri-
umphs, even he, from the coarse, meagre mate-
rials which his external experience furnishes to
him, shall be able to compose a drama, full of im-
mortal vigor and freshness, where all men shall
hear the rushing of wings — the tread from other
spheres — in their life's battle; where all men
shall be able to catch voices and harpings not of
this shore. But the question is not here of a Bun-
yan or a Burns. And it is not a Bloomfield that
we have in hand here. The question is not
whether nature shall be able to compose thesCf
without putting into requisition the selectest in-
strumentalities of the ages. It is a question dif-
ferent in kind ; how different, in the present stage
of our appreciation of the works involved in it,
cannot be made manifest.
It is impossible, indeed, to present any parallel
to the case in question. For if we suppose a poor
actor, or the manager of a theatre, or a printer,
unlearned except by the accident of his trade, to
begin now to issue out of his brain, in the way of
his trade, wholly bent on that, and wholly indif-
ferent to any other result, and unconscious of any
other, a body of literature, so high above anything
that we now possess, in any or in all departments ;
so far exhausting the excellency of all as to con-
stitute, by universal consent, the literature of this
time ; comprehending its entire scope ; based on its
DELIA BACON. 133
subtlest analysis ; pronouncing everywhere its final
word, — even such a supposition would not begin
to meet the absurdity of the case in question.
If the prince of showmen in our day, in that
stately oriental retreat of his in Connecticut, ri-
valing even the New Place at Stratford in literary
conveniences, should begin now to conceive of
something of this sort, as his crowning specula-
tion, and should determine to undertake its execu-
tion in person, who would dare to question his
ability ? ^ Certainly no one would have any right
to criticise, now, the motive conceded, or to put
in suspicion its efficiency for the proposed result.
Why, this man could not conduct his business a
day, he could not even hunt through the journals
for his own puffs and advertisements, without com-
ing by accident in contact with means of moral
and intellectual enlargement and stimulus, which
could never have found their way, in any form, to
Elizabeth's player. The railway, the magnetic
telegraph, the steamship, the steam-press with its
journals, its magazines, its reviews, and its cheap
literature of all kinds, the public library, the book-
club, the popular lecture, the lyceum, the volun-
tary association of every kind — these are all but
a part of that magnificent apparatus and means
of culture which society is now putting in requisi-
^ It should be stated, perhaps, that the above was written two or
three years since, and that no reference to Mr. Barnum's recent ad-
dition to the literature of the ajre was intended.
134 DELIA BACON.
tion in that great school of hers, wherein the uni-
versal man, rescued from infinite self -degradations,
is now at last beginning his culture. And yet all
these social instrumentalities combined cannot,
even now, so supply the deficiencies in the case
supposed as to make the supposition any other
than a violent one, to say the least of it.
The material which nature must have contrib-
uted to the Shakespearean result could, indeed,
hardly have remained inert, under any superin-
cumbent w*eio;ht of social disadvantao;es. But the
very first indication of its presence, under such
conditions, would have been a struggle with those
disadvantages. First of all, it would force its
way upward, through them, to its natural ele-
ment ; first of all, it would make its way into the
light, and possess itself of all its weapons — not
spend itself in mad movements in the dark, with-
out them. Look over the history of all the known
English poets and authors of every kind, back
even to the days of the Anglo-Saxon Adhelm, and
Caedmon, and, no matter how humble the position
in which they are born, how many will you find
among them that have failed to possess themselves
ultimately of the highest literary culture of the
age they lived in ? How many, until you come to
this same Shakespeare ?
Well, then, if the Genius of the British Isle turns
us out such men as those from her universities ;
but when she would make her Shakespeare retreat
DELIA BACON. 135
into a green-room, and send him forth from that,
furnished as we find him, pull down, we say, pull
down those gray old towers, for the wisdom of the
Great Alfred has been laughed to scorn ; undo his
illustrious monument to its last Anglo-Saxon stone,
and, " by our lady, build — theatres ! " If not Ju-
liet only, but her author, and Hamlet's author,
too, and Lear's, and Macbeth's can be made with-
out " philosophy," we are for Romeo's verdict,
" Hang up philosophy." If such works as these,
and Julius CaBsar, and Coriolanus, and Antony,
and Henry V, and Henry VIII, — if the " Mid-
summer Night's Dream," and the '' Merchant of
Venice," and the "Twelfth Night," — if Beatrice,
and Benedict, and Rosalind, and Jaques, and lago,
and Othello, and all their immortal company, — if
these works, and all that we find in them, can
be got out of " Plutarch's Lives," and " Holin-
shed," and a few old ballads and novels, — in the
name of all that is honest, give us these, and
let us go about our business; and henceforth
let him that can be convicted '' of traitorously cor-
rupting the youth of this realm, by erecting a
grammar-school," be consigned to his victims for
mercy. " Long live Lord Mortimer ! " " Down
with the paper-mills ! " " Throw learning to the
dogs ! we '11 none of it ! "
But we are not, as yet, in a position to estimate
the graver bearings of this question. For the
reverence which the common theory has hitherto
136 DELIA BACON.
claimed from us, as a well authenticated historical
fact, depending apparently, indeed, on the most un-
impeachable external evidence for its support, has
operated, as it was intended to operate in the first
instance, to prevent all that kind of reading and
study of the plays which would have made its
gross absurdity apparent. In accordance with this
original intention, to this hour it has constituted a
barrier to the understanding of their true mean-
ing, which no industry or perseverance could sur-
mount ; to this hour it has served to prevent, ap-
parently, so much as a suspicion of their true
source, and ultimate intention.
But let this theory, and the pre-judgment it
involves, be set aside, even by an hypothesis,
only long enough to permit us once to see, for
ourselves, what these works do in fact contain,
and no amount of historical evidence which can
be produced, no art, no argument, will suffice to
restore it to its present position. But it is not as
an hypothesis, it is not as a theory, that the truth
here indicated will be developed hereafter. It
will come on other grounds. It will ask no favors.
Condemned to refer the orio-in of these works
to the vulgar, illiterate man who kept the theatre
where they were first exhibited, a person of the
most ordinary character and aims, compelled to
regard them as the result merely of an extraordi-
nary talent for pecuniary speculation in this man,
how could we, how could any one, dare to see what
DELIA BACON. 137
is really in them ? With this theory overhanging
them, though we threw our most artistic lights
upon it, and kept it out of sight when we could,
what painful contradictory mental states, what un-
acknowledged internal misgivings were yet in-
volved in our best judgments of them? How many
passages were we compelled to read " tripphigly,"
with the " mind's eye," as the players were first
taught to pronounce them on the tongue ; and if,
in spite of all our slurring, the inner depths would
open to us, if anything which this theory could
not account for, would notwithstanding obtrude
itself upon us, we endeavored to believe that it
must be the reflection of our own better learning,
and so, half lying to ourselves, making a wretched
compromise with our own mental integrity, we
still hurried on.
Condemned to look for the author of Hamlet
himself — the subtle Hamlet of the university, the
courtly Hamlet, " the glass of fashion and the
mould of form " — in that dirty, doggish group of
players, who come into the scene summoned like a
pack of hounds to his service, the very tone of his
courtesy to them, with its princely condescension,
with its arduous familiarity, only serving to make
the great, impassable social gulf between them the
more evident, — compelled to look in that igno-
minious group, with its faithful portraiture of the
players of that time (taken from the life by one
who had had dealings with them), for the princely
138 DELIA BACON.
scholar himself in his author, how could we under-
stand him — the enigmatical Hamlet, with the
thought of ages in his foregone conclusions ?
With such an origin, how could we see the sub-
tlest skill of the university, not in Hamlet and Ho-
ratio only, but in the work itself, incorporated in
its essence, pervading its execution ? With such
an origin as this, how was it possible to note, not
in this play only, but in all the Shakespeare drama,
what otherwise we could not have failed to ob-
serve, the tone of the highest Elizabethan breed-
ing, the very loftiest tone of that peculiar courtly
culture, which was then, and but just then, attain-
ing its height, in the competitions among men of
the highest social rank, and among the most bril-
liant wits and men of genius of the age, for the
favor of the learned, accomplished, sagacious, wit-
loving maiden queen ; — a culture which required
not the best acquisitions of the university merely,
but acquaintance with life, practical knowledge of
affairs, foreign travel and accomplishments, and,
above all, the last refinements of the highest Pa-
risian breeding. For " your courtier " must be, in
fact, " your picked man of countries." He must,
indeed, " get his behavior everywhere." He must
be, in fact and literally, the man of " the world."
But for this prepossession, in that daring treat-
ment of court-life which this single play of Ham-
let involves, in the entire freedom with which its
conventionalities are handled, how could we have
DELIA BACON. 139
failed to recognize the touch of one habitually
practiced in its refinements ? How could we have
failed to recognize, not in this play only, but in all
these plays, the poet whose habits and perceptions
have been moulded in the atmosphere of these
subtle social influences ? He cannot shake off this
influence when he- will. He carries the court per-
fume with him, unconsciously, wherever he goes,
among mobs of artisans that will not " keep their
teeth clean" ; into the ranks of " greasy citizens"
and " rude mechanicals " ; into country feasts and
merry-makings ; among " pretty low-born lasses,"
''^ the queens of curds and cheese," and into the
heart of that forest, " where there is no clock."
He looks into Arden and into Eastcheap from the
court standpoint, not from these into the court,
and he is as much a prince with Poins and Bar-
dolph as he is when he enters and throws open to
us, without awe, without consciousness, the most
delicate mysteries of the royal presence.
Compelled to refer the origin of these works to
the sordid play-house, who could teach us to dis-
tinguish between the ranting, unnatural stuff and
bombast which its genuine competitions elicited,
in their mercenary appeals to the passions of their
audience, ministering to the most vicious tastes,
depraving the public conscience, and lowering the
common standard of decency, getting up " scenes
to tear a cat in," — " out-Herod ing Herod," and
going regularly into professional fits about Hecuba
140 DELIA BACON.
and Priam and other Trojans, — who could teach
us to distinguish between the tone of this origi-
nal, genuine, play-house fustian, and that of the
"dozen or sixteen lines" which Hamlet will at
first, for some earnest purpose of his own, with
the consent and privity of one of the players,
cause to be inserted in it ? Nay, thus blinded, we
shall not, perhaps, be able to distinguish from this
foundation that magnificent whole with which,
from such beginnings, this author will, perhaps,
ultimately replace his worthless originals alto-
gether ; that whole in which we shall see, one day,
not the burning Ilium, not the old Danish court
of the tenth century, but the yet living, illustrious
Elizabethan age, with all its momentous interests
still at stake, with its yet palpitating hopes and
fears, with its newborn energies, bound but uncon-
querable, already heaving, and muttering through
all their undertone ; that magnificent Avhole, where
we shall see, one day, " the very abstract and brief
chronicle of the time," the " very body of the age,
its form and pressure," under any costume of time
and country, or under the drapery of any fiction,
however absurd or monstrous, which this author
shall find already popularized to his hands, and
available for his purposes. Hard, indeed, was the
time, ill bestead was the spirit of the immemorial
English freedom, when the genius of works such
as these was compelled to stoop to such a scene
to find its instruments.
DELIA BACON. 141
How could we understand from such a source,
while that wretched player was still crying it for
his own worthless ends, this majestic exhibition of
our common human life from the highest intellec-
tual and social standpoint of that wondrous age,
letting in, on all the fripperies and affectations,
the arrogance and pretension of that illustrious
centre of social life, the new philosophic beam,
and sealing up in it, for all time, " all the uses
and customs" of the world that then was? Ar-
rested with that transparent petrifaction, in all the
rushing life of the moment, and set, henceforth,
on the table of philosophic halls for scientific il-
lustration ; its gaudy butterflies impaled upon the
wing, in their perpetual gold ; its microscopic in-
sects, " spacious in the possession of land and dirt,"
transfixed in all the swell and flutter of the mo-
ment ; its fantastic apes, unrobed for inextinguish-
able mortal laughter and celestial tears, still play-
ing, all unconsciously, their solemn pageants
through ; how could the showman explain all this to
us — how could the player tell us what it meant?
How could the player's mercenary motive and
the player's range of learning and experiment give
us the key to this new application of the human
reason to the human life, from the new vantage-
ground of thought, but just then rescued from the
past, and built up painfully from all its wreck ?
How could we understand, from such a source,
this new, and strange, and persevering application
142 DELIA BACON.
of thought to life, not merely to society and to
her laws, but to nature, too ; pursuing her to her
last retreats, and holding everywhere its mirror
up to her, reflecting the whole boundary of her
limitations ; laying bare, in its cold, clear, pure
depths, in all their unpolite, undraped scientific
reality, the actualities which society, as it is, can
only veil, and the evils which society, as it is, can
only hide and palliate ?
In vain the shrieking queen remonstrates, for it
is the impersonated reason whose clutch is on her,
and it says, you go not hence till you have seen
the inmost part of you. But does all this tell on
the thousand pounds ? Is the ghost's word good
for that ?
No wonder that Hamlet refused to speak, or to
be commanded to any utterance of harmony, let
the critics listen and entreat as they would, while
this illiterate performer, who knew no touch of
all that divine music of his, from its lowest note
to the top of his key, was still sounding him and
fretting him. We shall take another key and
another interpreter with us when we begin to un-
derstand a work which comprehends in its design
all our human aims and activities, and tracks them
to their beginnings and ends ; which demands the
ultimate, scientific perpetual reason in all our life
— a work which dares to defer the punishment of
the crime that society visits with her most dreaded
penalties, till all the principles of the human ac-
DELIA BACON. 143
tivity have been collected ; till all the human con-
ditions have been explored ; till the only universal
rational human principle is found — a work which
dares to defer the punishment of the crime that
society condemns, till its principle has been tracked
through the crime which she tolerates ; through
the crime which she sanctions ; through the crime
which she crowns with all her honors.
We are. indeed, by no means insensible to the
difference betw^een this Shakespeare drama, and
that on which it is based, and that which surrounds
it. We do, indeed, already pronounce that differ-
ence, and not faintly, in our word Shalces'peare ; for
that is wdiat the word now means with us, though
we received it with no such significance. Its his-
torical development is but the next step in our
progress.
Yes, there were men in England then, who had
heard somewhat of those masters of the olden
time, hight ^schylus and Sophocles — men who
had heard of Euripides too, and next, Aristopha-
nes — men who had heard of Terence, and not of
Terence only, but of his patrons — men who had
heard of Plato, too, and of his master. There
were men in England, in those days, who knew
well enough what kind of an instrumentality the
drama had been in its original institution, and with
what voices it had then spoken ; who knew, also,
its permanent relations to the popular mind, and
its capability for adaptation to new social exigen-
144 DELIA BACON.
cies; men, quick enough to perceive, and ready
enough to appreciate to the utmost, the facihties
which this great organ of the wisdom of antiquity-
offered for effectual communication between the
loftiest mind, at the height of its culture, and that
mind of the world in which this, impelled by no
law of its own ordaining, seeks ever its own self-
completion and perpetuity.
And where had this mighty instrument of popu-
lar sway, this mechanism for moving and mould-
ing the multitude, its first origin, but among men
initiated in the profoundest religious and philo-
sophic mysteries of their time, among men exer-
cised in the control and administration of public
affairs ; men clothed even with imperial sway, the
joint administrators of the government of Athens,
when Athens sat on the summit of her power, the
crowned mistress of the seas, the imperial ruler of
" a thousand cities."
Yes, Theseus, and Solon, and Cleisthenes, and
Pythagoras, must be its antecedents there ; it
could not be produced there, till all Athena had
been for ages in Athens, till Athena had been for
ages in all : till three centuries of Olympiads had
poured the Grecian life-blood through it, from By-
zantium to Sicily ; it could not be produced there,
till the life of the state was in each true Athenian
nerve, till each true Athenian's nerve was in the
growing state ; it could not begin to be produced
there, till new religious inspirations from the east
DELIA BACON. 145
had reached, with their foreign stimulus, the
deeper sources of the national life, till the secret
philosophic tenet of the inner temple had over-
flowed, with new gold, the ancient myth, and kin-
dled with new fires the hearts of the nation's
leaders. The gay summits of Homer's ^' ever-
young" Olympus must be reached and overlaid
anew from the earth's central mysteries ; the Dio-
nysian procession must enter the temple ; the road
to it must cross ^galeos ; the Pnyx must empty
its benches into it ; Piraeus must crowd its stran-
gers' seat with her many costumes, before ^schy-
lus or Sophocles could find an audience to com-
mand all their genius. Nay, Zeno and Anaxago-
ras must send their pupils thither, and Socrates
must come in, and the most illustrious scholars of
the Olympian cities, from Abdera to Leontium,
must be found there, before all the latent re-
sources of the Grecian drama could be unfolded.
And there were men in England, in the age of
Elizabeth, who had mastered the Greek and Ro-
man history, and not only that, but the history of
their own institutions — men who knew precisely
what kind of crisis in human history that was
which they were born to occupy. And they had
seen the indigenous English drama struggling up,
through the earnest, but childish, exhibitions of
the cathedral — through " Miracles," and "Mys-
teries," and " Moralities," to be arrested, in its yet
undeveloped vigor, with the unfit and unyielding
146 DELIA BACON.
forms of the finished Grecian art ; and when, too,
by the combined effect of institutions otherwise at
variance, all that had, till then, made its life, was
suddenly abstracted from it. The royal ordinances
which excluded it, henceforth, from all that vital
range of topics which the censorship of a capricious
and timorous despotism might include among the
interdicted questions of church and state, found it
already expelled from the religious sanctuaries —
in which not the drama only, but all that which
we call art, par excellence, has its birth and nur-
ture. And that was the crisis in which the pul-
pit began to open its new drain upon it, having
only a vicious play-house, where once the indefi-
nite priestly authority had summoned all the soul
to its spectacles, and the long-drawn aisle, and
fretted vault, had lent to them their sheltering
sanctities; where once, as of old, the Athenian
temple had pressed its scene into the heart of the
Athenian hill — the holy hill — and opened its
subterranean communication with Eleusis, while its
centre was the altar on which the gods themselves
threw incense.
And yet, there was a moment in the history of
the national genius, when, roused to its utmost —
stimulated to its best capability of ingenuity and
invention — it found itself constrained to stoop at
its height, even to the threshold of this same de-
graded play-house. There were men in England,
who knew what latent capacities that debased in-
DELIA BACON. 147
strument of genius yet contained within it — who
knew that in the master's hand it might yet be
made to yield, even then, and under those condi-
tions, better music than any which those old Greek
sons of song had known how to wake in it.
These men knew well enough the proper rela-
tion between the essence of the drama and its
form. " Considering poetry in respect to the verse,
and not to the argument," says one, " though men
in learned languages may tie themselves to ancient
measures ; yet, in modern languages, it seems to
me as free to make new measures as to make new
dances; and, in these things, the sense is a better
judge than the art." Surely, a Schlegel himself
could not give us a truer Shakespearean rule than
that. Indeed, if we can but catch them when the
wind is south-southwest — these grave and oracu-
lar Elizabethan wits — we shall find them putting
two and two together, now and then, and drawing
inferences, and making distinctions which would
have much surprised their " uncle-fathers " and
" aunt-mothers " at the time, if they had but noted
them. But, as they themselves tell us, " in regard
to the rawness and unskillfulness of the hands
through which they pass, the greatest matters are
sometimes carried in the weakest ciphers." Even
over their own names, and in those learned tonsrues
of theirs, if we can but once find their stops,
and the skill to command them to any utterance
of harmony, they will discourse to us, in spite of
the disjointed times, the most eloquent music.
148 DELIA BACON.
For, although they had, indeed, the happiness
to pursue their studies under the direct personal
supervision of those two matchless scholars, " Eliza
and our James," whose influence in the world of
letters was then so signally felt, they, neverthe-
less, evidently ventured to dip into antiquity a
little on their own account, and that, apparently,
without feeling called upon to render in a per-
fectly unambiguous report in full of all that they
found there, for the benefit of their illustrious pa-
trons, to whom, of course, their literary labors are
dedicated. There seemed, indeed, to be no occa-
sion for unpegging the basket on the house's top,
and trying conclusions in any so summary man-
ner.
These men distinctly postpone, not their per-
sonal reputation only, but the interpretation of
their avowed works, to freer ages. There were
sparrows abroad then. The tempest was already
" singing in the wind," for an ear fine enough to
catch it ; but only invisible Ariels could dare " to
play" then ^^ on pipe and tabor" (stage direction).
*' Thought is free," but only base Trinculos and
low-born Stephanos could dare to whisper to it.
" That is the tune of our catch, played by the pic-
ture of — Nobody."
Yes, there was one moment in that nation's his-
tory, wherein the costume, the fable, the scenic ef-
fect, and all the attractive and diverting appliances
and concomitants of the stage, even the degrada-
DELIA BACON. 149
tion into which it had fallen, its known subser-
viency to the passions of the audience, its habit of
creating a spectacle merely, all combined to fur-
nish to men, in whom the genius of the nation had
attained its highest form, freer instrumentalities
than the book, the pamphlet, the public document,
the parliament, or the pulpit, when all alike were
subject to an oppressive and despotic censorship,
when all alike were forbidden to meddle with their
own proper questions, when cruel maimings and
tortures old and new, life-long imprisonment, and
death itself, awaited, not a violation of these re-
strictions merely, but a suspicion of an intention,
or even wish, to violate them — penalties which
England's noblest men suffered, on suspicion only.
There was one moment in that history, in which
the ancient drama had, in new forms, its old
power ; when, stamped and blazoned on its surface
everywhere with the badges of servitude, it had
yet leaping within the indomitable heart of its an-
cient freedom, the spirit of the immemorial Euro-
pean liberties, which Magna Charta had only rec-
ognized, and more than that, the freedom of the
new ages that were then beginning, " the freedom
of the chainless mind." There was one moment
in which all the elements of the national genius,
that are now separated and incorporated in insti-
tutions as wide apart, at least, as earth and heaven,
were held together, and that in their first vigor,
pressed from without into their old Greek conjunc-
150 DELIA BACON.
tion. That moment there was; it is chronicled;
we have one word for it; we call it — Shakespeare!
Has the time come at last, or has it not yet
come, in which this message of the new time can
be laid open to us ? This message from the lips of
one endowed so wondrously, with skill to utter it ;
endowed, not with the sj^eaker's melodious tones
and subduing harmonies only, but with the teach-
er s divinely glowing heart, with the ambition that
seeks its own in all, with the love that is sweeter
than the tongues of men and angels. Are we, or
are we not, his legatees ? Surely this new sum-
ming up of all the real questions of our common
life, from such an elevation in it, this new philoso-
phy of all men's business and desires, cannot be
without its perpetual vital uses. For, in all the
points on which the demonstration rests, these dia-
grams from the dissolving views of the past are
still included in the problems of the present.
And if, in this new and more earnest research
into the true ends and meanings of this greatest
of our teachers, the poor player who was willing
enough to assume the responsibility of these works,
while they were still plays — theatrical exhibitions
only, and quite in his line for the time ; who might,
indeed, be glad enough to do it for the sake of the
princely patronage that henceforth encompassed his
fortunes, even to the granting of a thousand pounds
at a time, if that were needed to complete his
purchase — if this good man, sufficiently perplexed
DELIA BACON. 151
already with the developments which the modern
criticism has by degrees already laid at his door,
does here positively refuse to go any further with
us on this road, why e'en let us shake hands with
him and part, he as his business and desire shall
point him ; " for every man hath business and desire
such as it is," and not without a grateful recollec-
tion of the good service he has rendered us.
The publisher of these plays let his name go
down still and to all posterity on the cover of it.
They were his plays. He brought them out — he
and his firm. They took tlie scholar's text, that
dull black and white, that mere ink and paper, and
made of it a living, speaking, many-colored, glit-
tering reality, which even the groundlings of that
time could appreciate, in some sort. What was
Hamlet to them, without his " inky cloak " and his
" forest of feathers " and his " razed shoes " and
" the roses" on them ? And they came out of this
man's bag — he was the owner of the " wardrobe "
and of the other "stage properties." He was the
owner of the manuscripts ; and if he came hon-
estly by them, whose business was it to inquire
any further, then ? If there was no one who chose,
just then, to claim the authorship of them, whose
else should they be ? Was not the actor himself
a poet, and a very facetious one, too ? Witness
the remains of him, the incontestable poetical re-
mains of him, which have come down to us. What
if his ill-natured contemporaries, whose poetic glo-
152 DELIA BACON.
ries he was eclipsing forever with those new plays
of his, did assail him on his weak points, and call
him, in the face of his time, '^ a Johannes Facto-
tum,''' and held up to public ridicule his particular
style of acting, plainly intimating that it was
chargeable with that very fault which the prince
of Denmark directs his tragedians to omit — did
not the blundering editor of that piece of offen-
sive criticism get a decisive hint from some quar-
ter, that he might better have withheld it ; and
was it not humbly retracted and hushed up di-
rectly ? Some of the earlier anonymous plays,
which were included in the collection published,
after this player's decease, as the plays of William
Shakespeare, are, indeed, known to have been pro-
duced anonymously at other theatres, and by com-
panies with which this actor had never any con-
nection ; but the poet's company and the player's
were, as it seems, two different things ; and that is
a fact which the criticism and history of these
plays, as it stands at present, already exhibits.
Several of the plays which form the nucleus of the
Shakespeare drama had already been brought out,
before the Stratford actor was yet in a position to
assume that relation to it which proved so advan-
tageous to his fortunes. Such a nucleus of the
Shakespeare drama there was already, when the
name which this actor bore, with such orthograph-
ical variations as the purpose required, began to
be assumed as the name and device of that new
DELIA BACON. 153
sovereignty of genius which was then first rising
and kindhng behind its cloud, and dimming and
overflowing with its greater glory all the less, and
gilding all it shone on. The machinery of these
theatrical establishments offered, indeed, the most
natural and e:ffective, as well as, at that time, on
other accounts, the most convenient mode of exhi-
bition for that particular class of subjects which
the genius of this particular poet naturally inclined
him to meddle with. He had the most profoundly
philosophical reasons for preferring that mode of
exhibiting his poems, as will be seen hereafter.
And, when we have once learned to recognize
the actor's true relations to the works which have
given to his name its anomalous significance, we
shall be prepared, perhaps, to accept, at last, this
great offer of aid in our readings of these works,
which has been lying here now two hundred and
thirty years, unnoticed ; then, and not till then,
we shall be able to avail ourselves, at last, of the
aid of those " friends of his," to whom, two hun-
dred and thirty years ago, " knowing that his wit
could no more lie hid than it could be lost," the
editors of the first printed collection of these w^orks
venture to refer us ; " those other friends of his,
whom if we need, can be our guides ; and, if we
need them not, we are able to lead ourselves and
others, and such readers they wish him."
If we had accepted either of these two condi-
tions — if we had found ourselves with those who
154 DELIA BACON.
need this offered guidance, or with those who need
it not — if we had but gone far enough in our
readinofs of these works to feel the want of that
aid, from exterior sources, which is here proffered
us — there would not have been presented to the
world, at this hour, the spectacle — the stupen-
dous spectacle — of a nation referring the origin of
its drama — a drama more noble, and learned, and
subtle than the Greek — to the invention — the
accidental, unconscious invention — of a stupid,
ignorant, illiterate, third-rate play-actor.
If we had, indeed, but applied to these works
the commonest rules of historical investigation and
criticism, we might, ere this, have been led to in-
quire, on our own account, whether " this player
here," who brought them out, might not possibly,
in an age like that, like the player in Hamlet, have
had some friend, or " friends," w^ho could, " an' if
they would," or " an' if they might," explain his
miracle to us, and the secret of his " poor cell."
If we had accepted this suggestion, the true
Shakespeare would not have been now to seek.
In the circle of that patronage with which this
player's fortunes brought him in contact, in that
illustrious company of wits and poets, we need not
have been at a loss to find the philosopher who
writes, in his prose as well, and over his own name
also,
•' In Nature's Infinite Book of Secrecy,
A little I can read ; " —
DELIA BACON. 155
we should have found one, at least, furnished for
that last and ripest proof of learning which the
drama, in the unmiraculous order of the human
development, must constitute ; that proof of it in
which philosophy returns from history, from its
noblest fields, and from her last analysis, with the
secret and material of the creative synthesis — with
the secret and material of art. With this direction,
we should have been able to identify, ere this, the
Philosopher who is only the Poet in disguise — the
Philosopher who calls himself the New Magician —
the Poet who was toiling and plotting to fill the
Globe with his Arts, and to make our common,
every-day human life poetical — who would have
all our life, and not a part of it, learned, artistic,
beautiful, religious.
We should have found, ere this, one, with learn-
ing broad enough, and deep enough, and subtle
enough, and comprehensive enough, one with no-
bility of aim and philosophic and poetic genius
enough, to be able to claim his own, his own im-
mortal progeny — undwarfed, unblinded, unde-
prived of one ray or dimple of that all-pervading
reason that informs them ; one who is able to re-
claim them, even now, " cured and perfect of their
limbs, and absolute in their numbers, as he con-
ceived them."
XI.
There are those who can remember how pub-
lic attention was startled, thirty-two years ago, by
this unquestionably bold and brilliant paper. The
success which it made, however, was all that ever
befell its author from her presentation of these
ideas, either in the way of public approval or of
the means of living. Even the publishers' pur-
pose, expressed in their letter to her, and an-
nounced to the public, to continue a series of like
papers, was destined to fail.
Negotiating from over sea, and through Emer-
son as an intermediary, she had, without knowing
it, fallen into embarrassing complications with dif-
ferent publishers. The Boston house of Phillips,
Sampson & Co. had expressly agreed in August to
publish the entire book when completed. Dix &
Edwards, in New York, had undertaken to print
the first paper in their magazine, had asked for
more, and had declared their desire to treat for
the publication of the whole.
From London, therefore, she now sought to ad-
just her relations to these two, which had been
complicated by the circumstance that the Boston
house communicated only with Emerson, and the
New York house with the author directly. Writ-
DELTA BACON. 157
ing now on the 20th of December to Dix & Ed-
wards, she expresses much regret that the exposi-
tion of her views must proceed so slowly through
a monthly periodical, and says moreover : " The
first five or six articles, which make the first part
of the work (four of which I have now sent), are
those which I should least rely on for its accept-
ance." It is not, therefore, to be wondered at,
that they answered her that a reading of her sec-
ond, third, and fourth articles, received from Mr.
Emerson, " convinces us that Mr. Emerson is right
as to the publication of the work. It should de-
cidedly appear in a complete book, and not in a
magazine." These articles " are so general in
their nature, and apparently make so little prog-
ress in the demonstration of the main proposition,
that if given separately they would weaken rather
than increase the interest in the subject. Indeed,
after having put the second article in type for our
February number, we have withheld it for that
reason." ^' If, however, you could furnish for our
magazine some of the more advanced chapters
without their being injured by being taken out of
their proper connection with the others, it would
be not only advantageous to us and you, but ser-
viceable to the reception of the work when it
comes to be published." But as for making such
publication themselves, since Phillips & Sampson
had already proposed for it, they preferred not to
interfere, and would write to Emerson accordingly.
158 DELIA BACON.
This, then, was the end to her of all immediate
hope ; and upon hope alone, it seems, had she
been for months sustained. There was of course
still the distant expectation — the certainty rather
— of ample means when once the book itself
should be before the world. But how should that
be managed, when civil declination was the very
best that any publisher had been persuaded to
give ? And how, even, should she meanwhile '•' re-
tain her connection with this planet," which she
cared to do only that the work might be done ?
She had even brought herself, as she had written
to her brother might be possible, to " apply to
the American minister." That official was later
in the same year chosen President of the United
States, and was very near to being their last Pres-
ident. A dignified note, signed " James Bu-
chanan," informs her that he will do himself the
pleasure of calling upon her; but she could not
bring herself, when he called, to tell him of her
need. To her old friends in Cambridge, however,
she had now, after years of silence, told the story
of her late experience with an unreserve which
she had found impossible with the cold and grave
stranger who made an official call upon her. Late
in December she wrote to them ; and her letter
recrossed the ocean to Mrs. Professor Farrar, at
Pau in the Pyrenees. She seems to have asked
for nothing ; nor did she need to ; but instant
relief came to her without the asking ; and, still
DELIA BACON. 159
better, evidences of the strong affection wliich it
had always been her fortune to command. What
she wrote in reply is partly preserved in Mrs. Far-
rar's " Recollections."
" She lived [at St. Albans] a year, and then
came to London, all alone and unknown, to seek a
home there. She thus describes her search after
lodgings : ' On a dark December day, about one
o'clock, I came into this metropolis, intending,
with the aid of Providence, to select, between that
and nightfall, a residence in it. I had copied
from the " Times" several advertisements of lodg-
ing-houses, but none of them suited me. The cab-
driver, perceiving what I was in search of, began
to make suggestions of his own, and finding that
he was a man equal to the emergency, and know-
ing that his acquaintance with the subject was
larger than mine, I put the business into his
hands. I told him to stop at the first good house
which he thought would suit me, and he brought
me to this door, where I have been ever since.
Any one who thinks this is not equal to Elijah
and his raven, and Daniel in the lions' den, does
not know what it is for a lady, and a stranger, to
live for a year in London, without any money to
speak of, maintaining all the time the position of a
lady, and a distinguished lady too ; and above all,
such a one cannot be acquainted with the nature
of cab-drivers and lodging-house keepers in gen-
eral. The one with whom I lodge has behaved to
160 DELIA BACON.
me like an absolute gentleman. No one could
have shown more courtesy and delicacy. For six
months at a time he has never sent me a bill;
before this I had always paid him weekly, and I
believe that is customary. When, after waiting
six months, I sent him ten pounds, and he knew
that it was all I had, he wrote a note to me, which
I preserve as a curiosity, to say that he would en-
tirely prefer that I shoukl keep it. I have lived
upon this man's confidence in me for a year, and
this comparatively pleasant and comfortable home
is one that I owe to the judgment and taste of a
cab-driver. . . . Your ten pounds was brought me
two or three hours after your letter came, and I
sent it immediately to Mr. Walker, and now I am
entirely relieved of that most painful feeling of
the impropriety of depending upon him in this
way, which it has required all my faith and phi-
losophy to endure, because he can now very well
wait for the rest, and perceive that the postpone-
ment is not an indefinite one. Your letter has
warmed my heart, and that was what had suffered
most. I would have frozen into a Niobe before I
would have asked any help for myself, and would
sell gingerbread and apples at the corner of a
street for the rest of my days before I could stoop,
for myself, to such humiliations as I have borne
in behalf of my work, which was the world's
work, and I knew that I had a right to demand
aid for it.'"'
1 Mrs. Farrar'a Recollections of Seventy Years, pp. 323-325.
XII.
In this extremity of hers she did not seek re-
course for help to those of her own flesh and blood
in her native country. They were very few ; and
none of them could have helped her much, from
their narrow means, and under their own heavy
burdens. Besides, the eldest brother, to whom she
had looked as to the head of her family, had given
her deep offense by his strong disapproval of the
purpose for which she had crossed the ocean.
Late in April, therefore, her brother had written
to Emerson for news of her, since her relatives
were " without any recent intelligence of her."
Between these two men there must have been
as utter a want of sympathy as can be imagined
in the case of two New Englanders of like age, of
like descent and education, of like professional
and intellectual habits, and of strong intellectual
powers. There was hardly so much as personal
acquaintance even, though each was well known
in some sense to the other. But there was no
want of tender appreciativeness on Emerson's
part of the natural solicitude of the brother, either
in this first response or in the answers which he
sent to later inquiries during the short remainder
of her life.
162 DELIA BACON.
CoNCOKD, 25 April, 1856.
Deak Sir, — I received your note last night.
I am sorry to say that I have not had any letter
directly from Miss Bacon since last December.
Her publishers have a letter dated 28 February
last. Her address at her last writing was still 12
Spring Street, Hyde Park Gardens, London. I had
no ri^ht to expect a letter after December, as I
had told her that I was going to Illinois, about
Christmas, to be absent six weeks or more ; and
she accordingly wrote directly to Dix & Edwards
of " Putnam's Magazine." I have regretted much
my tasks and preoccupations that forbade my
keeping up an active correspondence with her,
and reproached myself lately with omissions, which
after a few weeks I am hoping to repair : and I
hear with the more concern that you have no
recent news of her. Her letters are full of con-
fidence and devotion to her task — heroic devotion
to it — and repeated expressions of indifference as
to what becomes of herself, if only she accom-
plishes her task. Her latest letters had also some
sad allusions, I thought, to disappointment in not
receiving expected letters, and some misgivings as
to her means for remaining in England to prose-
cute her studies. Her arrangements for publica-
tion had not turned out to my wish. I advised
her not to print in Putnam, but to publish her
results in a book ; and I communicated to her a
proposition from Phillips, Sampson & Co., which,
DELIA BACON. 163
well-explained, was fair and even generous. But
she decided to print in Putnam ; and the editors,
after the first article was printed, refused to print
the following ones, and assigned their reasons.
This refusal left me in no proper plight to carry
the book to Phillips & Sampson again, after it was
thus used and rejected.
I have not written to her, as indeed I have laid
my whole correspondence on the shelf until cer-
tain imperative tasks of my own are ended, which
should soon be. Meantime, I shall await with
great interest your news from her, and shall be
entirely at your service to obtain information re-
specting her address, etc., if she has changed her
place. — With great respect,
R. W. Emerson.
Rev. Dr. Bacox.
XIII.
If Delia Bacon had been herself a dramatic
poet she could not have brought more faithfully
into action, in this dull tragedy which her life
was, the Horatian precept which forbids the in-
tervention of a God into the plot until the fit
occasion. That occasion had now come.
Nathaniel Hawthorne was at this time consul
for the United States at Liverpool. Years before,
he had written " The Scarlet Letter " and " The
House of the Seven Gables," and had become
famous. In that same village of Concord, which
was already renowned through Emerson, he had
settled down for the secluded life of a man of let-
ters, when, in 1853, his warm friend President
Pierce bestowed upon him this place, so attractive
by the great income which then belonged to it
that he could not refuse it. At the very time,
almost, that Delia Bacon was sailing for England,
Hawthorne went to assume his new and not con-
genial duties. To him and to his wife she was
personally unknown, although she had no warmer
or more sympathetic friend than Miss Elizabeth
Peabody, tbe sister of Mrs. Hawthorne. And to
him, when all other help and hope seemed to have
DELIA BACON. 165
failed, she addressed herself at last, on the 8th of
May, 1856, from her London lodgings, in a letter,
of which this is only a part :
a
Dear Mr. Hawthorne, — I take the liberty
of addressing myself to you without an introduc-
tion, because you are the only one I know of in
this hemisphere able to appreciate the position in
which I find myself at this moment, and I know of
no one else here at present fully qualified to judge
of the claims of a work which is not hemispherical,
but the work of men whose sign was ' Hercules
and his load too.' . . .
"Of course it is not pleasant to me to bring this
subject to the attention of strangers, as I liave
been and still am compelled to, for it seems like
a personal intrusion, and like asking a personal
favor ; and though I know well myself what
grounds I have for claiming all the aid I need,
it is not every kind of mind to which I can
make them apparent, perhaps, in the course of a
brief interview. Certainly there is no kind of
honest thing I would not rather do than to ask aid
on its behalf from those who are not able to ap-
preciate it in its present form ; but this also has
been laid upon me. I tried long to get the means
of doing it all by myself, without asking any one's
leave or help. But I did not succeed in it. I lost
years in the endeavor ; and it would never have
been done at all if some of my friends had not
166 DELIA BACON.
generously come to my aid. Mr. Emerson is the
one who has from first to last stood by me, and
has never in any instance failed to render me the
assistance I sought of him. And I am greatly in-
debted to Miss Peabody for her most generous
and active interest in the subject, though it is
now a long time since I have had any communi-
cation with her in reference to it.
" If it were anything in the world but what
it is, — a science, — a science that the world is
waiting for, I could not do and suffer what I have
done and suffered on its behalf. I ought not to
hesitate at all to ask for all the help I need in it,
for it is a work which the Providence of this
world has imposed on me, and I have cast into its
treasury not only all the living that I had, such as
it was, but my life also. . . .
" For I want some literary counsel, and such as
no Englishman of letters is able to give me. Mr.
Carlyle has been a most cordial personal friend to
me, but there are reasons why I could not ask this
help from him, which would become apparent to
you if you should look at the work at all. Before
I knew that you were coming to England, and
when I had not yet found the means of coming
myself, I had wished to communicate my discov-
ery to you, and Mr. Emerson had promised me an
opportunity of doing so ; but I concluded that
your duties here would be so engrossing that it
would be impossible for you to think about it.
DELIA BACON. 167
But now that it is certain beyond all possibility of
a doubt, now that there is no shadow of a shade of
uncertainty in regard to it, I feel that I should be
wanting to my position if I allowed the dread I
have of annoying you and intruding on that
leisure which is so precious to you now, to pre-
vent me from taking any step which might pos-
sibly tend to effect my object.
" The work admits of publication in separate
portions. What I want is to begin to publish
immediately a part of it, enough to secure the dis-
covery. I suppose there is hardly a doubt that
some American publisher might be found to take
the plates on those terms, for Phillips & Samp-
son offered last July to advance forty pounds on
the first edition, and all the extra expense of this
arrangement is by this proposal to be subtracted
from my share of the profits. But I should not
dare to begin without some advice. I would not
be willing to print any part of it till some friendly
eye had overlooked it, if there were no other
reason for delay. It is not hard reading. Would
you be willing to take a part of it, a part which
you could read in an evening or so, and tell me
whether it would pay for the cost of the plates or
no? For that is the question. If you should
give your consent to it, I think I would send you
to begin with the very least popular part of it,
which contains the 'Art of Tradition,' which was
not only invented, but employed for the Advance-
168 DELIA BACON.
ment of Learning ; because this includes inciden-
tally the whole science which had to be brought
out then in a popular form, in order to answer
the purpose of its founders. It is a science which
naturally requires that form however, and which
could not be adequately exhibited in any other.
But this part contains that scientific abstract of it,
which is the key to the popular theatrical exhi-
bition, and which enables the scholar to compre-
hend at a glance the whole scope of this discovery.
" And then afterwards, if you were not offended
with that, I should like to send you one of those
Plays unfolded, in which, by means of the Baco-
nian Rhetoric or illustrated delivery of sciences, the
Baconian Logic is applied to the delicate subject of
the Cure of the Commonweal in the reis-n of James
the First, or one in which it is applied to the most
important social questions, which are as much in
need of scientific treatment now as they were at
the time when they were first included under the
science of nature in general by its founders. And
perhaps in the end you would be willing to glance
over at your leisure the part which makes the In-
troduction to the common reader, which contains a
new view of the Life of Sir Walter Raleigh, whose
place in the World's History it is our business to
define. I depend on .a series of Articles I have
sent to ' Putnam's,' written in a very different style,
in which I have undertaken to send the old Player
about his business, to make way for this graver
DELIA BACON. 169
performance, and I think if those should be pub-
Hshed, you will find that the boards are cleared
and ready for my new actors. That I have just
written, but this part which I wish you to look at
has been ready and waiting here for nearly a year ;
but the Atlantic Ocean and the English nation
were too mighty for me, and besides I had to wait
I suppose till this great war^ was done. I hope
you will understand that I do not speak with any
assurance of my own part in this work. All my
confidence is grounded on the indestructible value
of the discovery. I was not a writer when I
began, I despaired of ever being able to write it ;
I had to keep my secret for many years, because I
did not know how to tell it. I came to this coun-
try in the hope of escaping from that burthen. I
expected to find here, all ready to my hands, what
would make it unnecessary for me to enter upon
this task. What I expected to find here, I know
to be here now, and the means I need for possess-
ing myself of this support are very simple now.
. . . You see this is a piece of history made by
Poets, and great men, the most magnificent mas-
terly kind of men, and all those miserable little
humdrum people, who think there can't be any-
thing true but the sordid kind of prose and matter
of fact that they are capable of, are going to be
put to confusion with it forever, and they seem to
have an instinctive perception of it.
" And now, sir, you will begin to perceive, per-
^ The Crimean War.
170 DELIA BACON.
haps, why it is that I address myself particularly
to yourself in this emergency. ... I am deter-
mined it shall not be my fault if this thing is lost
to us, and there is nothing else I have left untried,
I believe, in my attempts to save it."
This was certainly an alarming appeal to come
from an utter stranger to a man of shrinking
sensitiveness, overburdened with distasteful official
duties, with his full share of private anxieties, with
his own literary work hampered and retarded by
want of time and by private and public cares. It
was an appeal which, upon his responding to it,
brought him heavy burdens of many kinds, which
indeed he could not have failed to foresee. It
would not have been hard for him, had he been as
fully endowed with insight as the wise people who
have always found the sayings of Delia Bacon to
be the palpable vagaries of a disordered mind, to
dismiss her and her " work" with a discouraging
word or two, and thus to save himself much care
and toil and loss in many ways. It is no more
than justice to her that men should know what
Hawthorne thought of her. But to Hawthorne
himself there is nothino; in all his life or in all that
he wrote more honorable than the noble generos-
ity, the unwearying patience, the exquisite consid-
erateness and delicacy, with which for two years
he gave unstinted help, even of that material sort
which she would not ask for, to this lonely coun-
DELIA BACON. 171
try woman. He never saw her — so he has told
the world — but once ; and these letters will show
how, in the approach of that mental disorder which
her intense labors and anxieties were surely bring-
ing on, she returned what seemed ingratitude, and
almost outrage, for his patient and tender counsel
and aid. If, indeed, there were no other reason
for telling her melancholy story, the illumination
which it casts upon the figure, already become
romantic, of Hawthorne would justify it.
These are the first of the many letters which
make up the correspondence.
[Hawthorne to D. B,]
Liverpool, May 12, 1856.
Deak Miss Bacon, — ■ It was quite unnecessary
to send me these introductory letters (which I re-
enclose) for I have long entertained a high respect
for your character, and an interest in your object,
so far as I understood it. To be sure, I know very
little about it, not having seen the articles in
" Putnam," nor heard anything but some vague
talk from Miss Peabody, three years ago. Neither
do I think myself a very fit person to comprehend
the matter, nor to advise you in it ; especially
now, when I am bothered and bored, and harassed
and torn in pieces, by a thousand items of daily
business, and benumbed as to that part of my mind
to which your work would appeal, and depressed
by domestic anxieties. I say this, however, by
172 DELIA BACON.
no means to excuse myself from the endeavor to
be of service to you in any and every manner, but
only to suggest reasons why I shall probably be
useless as a critic and a judge. If you really think
that I can promote ^^our object, tell me definitely
how, and try me ; and if I can say a true word to
yourself about the work, it shall certainly be said;
or if I can aid, personally, or through any connec-
tions in London, in bringing the book before the
public, it shall be done.
I would not be understood, my dear Miss Bacon,
as professing to have faith in the correctness of
your views. In fact, I know far too little of them
to have any right to form an opinion : and as to
the case of the "old Player" (whom you grieve
my heart by speaking of so contemptuously) you
will have to rend him out of me by the roots, and
by main force, if at all. But I feel that you have
done a thing that ought to be reverenced, in de-
voting yourself so entirely to this object, whatever
it be, and whether right or wrong ; and that, by
so doing, you have acquired some of the privileges
of an inspired person and a prophetess — and that
the world is bound to hear you, if for nothing else,
yet because you are so sure of your own mission.
I gather from your note to Mr. Emerson that
you are apprehensive of being anticipated by a
work announced for publication in London. I
have not seen this announcement ; but I would
stake my life that you will not find your views
DELIA BACON. 173
trenched upon in the least; although (having
made your idea so obvious to yours^elf ) it is natural
that you should suppose it as clear as sunshine to
any other mind.
I know that you will not take any offense from
the frankness with which I write. It is impossible
for me to pay anj^ compliments, or to speak any-
thing but the plainest truth (according to my own
views), in dealing with the noble earnestness of
your character.
Believe me, very sincerely,
and most respectfully yours,
Nath' Hawthorne.
P. S. If I had known that you were still in
England, I should have tried to meet ^'ou before
now ; but I thought you had long ago returned to
America. I shall probably be in London in the
course of next month, when Mrs. Hawthorne
(whose health is very delicate) will be on her
return from Madeira. If your affairs make it
desirable, you can bid me come to you then.
N. H.
Your letter to Mr. Emerson was in season for
the steamer, and has gone by it. N. H.
12 Spring St., Sussex Gardens, Hyde Park,
May 18, 1856.
Dear Mr. Hawthorne, — I thank you for your
manful and whole-souled response to my applica-
tion for help in my work, and I am not sorry that
174 DELIA BACON.
I wrote to you, if it were only for the sake of this
return. You have quieted my apprehension a
little in regard to the book I referred to in my note
to Mr. Emerson, although I cannot say that my
mind is altogether at rest on that subject. That
view which you take of it I understand and appre-
ciate, but still I do not quite like the title of it.
And that was the immediate occasion of my writ-
ing to you. For though I was aware of your being
on this side of the Atlantic, and have often wished
that it were possible to communicate with you in
regard to my work, I knew how much time a Con-
sul w^ould be likely to have for a business of this
kind, and I had not the conscience to ask you to
interest yourself in it.
But the discovery of " the Philosophy of Shake-
speare " is the real discovery which I pretend to
have made, and the other part is of no conse-
quence except as it is connected with that ; and it
was the necessity of getting my work out before
this subject came to be discussed here which im-
pressed me so strongly as to induce me to write
to you. And in the interval between the writing
of the note to Mr. Emerson and the conclusion
to inclose rt to yourself, I saw an intimation in
another quarter that something is going to be done
in that department, and that the time for it has
come. The Article in the last " Edinburgh Re-
view " on the Collier controversy contains an inti-
mation that that sort of criticism has had its day
DELIA BACON. 175
here, and that the period for an entirely different
kind is now beginning.
I should be very glad to be able to get my book
printed here, and to put in circulation as many
copies as are necessary to effect a legal publication
and no more. I do not care to have any atten-
tion directed to it in this country at present. It
is not adapted to this hemisphere, and it is better
that it should come out in America as an American
work entirely. That opinion is however the result
of my study of the subject since I came. There
has been as yet I believe but one Article of it pub-
lished in " Putnam's Magazine," and that is one
that was written three years ago. But I have just
been sending three or four more which I do rely on
for introducing the subject properly to the atten-
tion of those whom it concerns, and I have con-
cluded to wait now till I hear from those, or until
I receive an answer from Mr. Emerson, instead of
resorting to any such desperate measures as those
which I felt myself capable of when I wrote to you
before. Still I should be very glad to avail myself
of the kind interest you have expressed in my
work as a work merely, to ask you to look over
quite at your leisure a part of it which contains
the doctrine of the work, that you may see what it
is, and whether you approve of it or not, without
feeling called upon to express any opinion, or to
assume any responsibility in regard to it, which
your want of time to consider the subject suffi-
176 DELIA BACON.
ciently, or the requirements of your public position,
may make it unsuitable or inconvenient for you to
assume. It is not as if I were asking you to judge
of an original work of my own. It does not de-
pend on my powers of composition for its claims,
though it does perhaps for its chance of an imme-
diate recognition of those claims. But I am giving
you an idea that it is something much more formi-
dable than it is. This book of mine does not re-
quire study, though the books to which it is related
do. The utmost that I ask for mine is a perusal. I
am proposing to send you indeed the very driest
part of it, and the one on which I do not rely for
an impression with the public generally. But it is
all out of that new fountain of philosophy, which is
life itself condensed and intensified, — abstracted
and cleared and recomposed in forms much more
to the purpose than the spontaneous combinations.
The truth is, I should be very glad to have it
read, and you are the only person this side of the
Atlantic whom I could ask to do it, and I would
not urge it upon you, knowing as I do how serious
your preoccupations are, if I did not know that you
would find it at least an easy task, and for the
sake of the good it promises, I hope a pleasant
one. If I do send it to you you must take your
own time for it, for since I have decided not to
attempt to publish it till I am warranted in doing
so by what I hear from America, there is no im-
mediate urgency.
DELIA BACON. 177
I hope I may have the honor and pleasure of
seeing both yourself and Mrs. Hawthorne when
you come to London, though I have conversed so
long with spirits that the idea of seeing any one
in the body is quite appalling to my imagination.
I am truly sorry to hear that Mrs. Hawthorne's
state of health is a source of anxiety to you, and
that she has been compelled to seek another climate
on that account. Permit me to express my sincere
hopes that she may return to you quite well.
Though I have never seen her I have heard of her
from those who know her well.
Very gratefully yours,
Delia Bacon.
P. S. I am sorry to have hurt your feelings
with my profane allusions to the Earl of Leicester's
groom, a witty fellow enough in his way. But
long familiarity with the facts has produced a
hopeless obduracy in my mind on that point.
The person that you love and reverence is not
touched by my proceeding. I have not hurt a hair
of his head. He is the one I am at work for. If
anybody boasts of love and reverence, to him I
might produce my case, and say with St. Paul ^ /
more.' But I do not, of course, expect you to
adopt my views until you find yourself compelled
to do so, neither do I wish you to give the faintest
countenance to them till you know fully what they
are and their grounds. And this part of the book
178 DELIA BACON.
that I propose to send to you does not suffice to
put you in possession of the case entirely, and it
would not be proper to expect from you any
avowal of opinion in regard to the question of
the work based on that alone. D. B.
[Hawthorne to D. B.]
Liverpool, May 16, 1856.
Dear Miss Bacon, — I am ready to receive the
manuscript, as soon as you please to send it.
I have been looking at the Shakspeare article,
in the Edinburgh Review, and I do not see that it
suggests anything more than a different system
from that heretofore in use for amending the text.
Sincerely yours,
Nath' Hawthorne.
[D. B. TO Hawthorne.]
12 Spring St., Sussex Gardens, Hyde Park,
May 24 [1856].
Dear Mr. Hawthorne, — I most thankfully
avail myself of your kind permission to send you
my manuscript, — a favor which, under the cir-
cumstances, I do fully appreciate, and on account
of the gravity of the questions involved in the
work, and the feebleness of the agency employed
in it, I shall have to bespeak your utmost patience.
This is only a part, and a small part, of my book,
and it was never meant to be read by itself. The
articles sent to the Magazine were addressed to
that violent presupposition which this discovery
DELIA BACON. 179
has to encounter at the first step, and I have no
hesitation in saying that that part of the case
which is produced in those articles disposes of the
present theory of the authorship of these works.
I do not claim anything more for it. But in the
hook, I relied on the historical part of the work,
which precedes this, and on the Interpretation of
the Plays, which follows it, to interest the general
reader, while in this I am obliged to presuppose
the attention of a class of readers specially quali-
fied to consider a question of this kind, and who
would be best prepared to weigh the kind of evi-
dence which is produced here.
You will see that the mere question of the
authorship of the Vlays is a secondary question in
this inquiry. I found this system of philosophy in
the Plays. They were my study for many years,
and I worked it all out of them without knowing
that it was that part of the great philosophic sys-
tem which was brought out in that age, which
naturally required this particular form of exhibi-
tion, and which could not then be produced in any
other, — and moreover that part of it which could
not then be claimed by its authors in any form. I
had read the " Advancement of Learning " more
than once, but I had read it as a book that it was
incumbent on me to read, and my only business
was to see in it what the critics had told me I was
to find there, so that my knowledge of the author
and his aims really remained second-handed. I
180 DELIA BACON.
went to the reading of it with the common impres-
sion in regard to the aim of this philosophy, and in
regard to the personal character of the author, then
freshened up by Mr. Macaulay's vivid exhibition
of both into a sentiment of absolute detestation,
and though I saw some things there which very
much surprised me, for I was then studying Ham-
let, and I could not conceal from myself the fact
that in one or two places this man did seem to be
in his secret, and that it was not the man that
Macaulay described at all, but one of a very differ-
ent range of comprehension and doctrine, and
though I never did get those glimpses of him quite
out of my mind, I could not think of resisting such
an authority, and suffered myself to be over-
whelmed with the weight of it, — at least I did not
pursue the inquiry any further. But my impres-
sion of the character of the man was so strong that
I made a personal thing of it, and there was no
man, dead or alive, that really on the whole gave
me so much cause of offense with his contradic-
tions. He appeared to be such a standing disgrace
to genius and learning, that I had not the heart
to ask anybody to study anything. And that was
the state of my mind exactly when in my study of
the Plays, after having worked my way at last to
the inmost of those inner readings, which you will
find referred to here, I found mvself directed to
that source for further information in regard to
the plan of these works, and particularly for " the
DELIA BACON. 181
table " of them, and I found the authorship of them
ckiimed by this man, and his associates, of whom I
then knew nothing ; I had always supposed that
he was alone in his enterprise, and as to the per-
sons named, and particularly as to his chief partner
in his literary undertakings, my knowledge of him
then would have led me to think of anything
sooner than the possibility of such a thing. But
the subsequent investigation shows that that read-
ing was correct. He was associated with this man,
though the fact of an association was the fact
which was most guarded from observation. There
was much use for what Lord Bacon calls " color,"
in those times, and the exigency found or produced
persons of great artistic gifts in the management
of it. I did not intend to trouble you with this
preface, but as I have not even the introductory
article which has been published to send to you,
and as I have concluded to keep back the historical
part of the work, because I think it admits of being
very much improved, it is proper perhaps to say
as much as this by way of introduction, since I
have to put my work to so severe a test as to ask
you to begin in the middle of it with your criti-
cism. And as Mr. Emerson has carefully read the
" Advancement of Learning " since I brought the
subject to his attention, for the sake of one sen-
tence in this letter of his I take leave to inclose it
to 3^0 u ; as the subject is so very new, I thought
you might like to see that opinion, and Mr. Emer-
182 DELIA BACON.
son does not object to its being used in that man-
ner. I had a long conversation with Mr. Grote on
the subject last summer. It was impossible for
him to enter on the investigation of the question,
for he was then occupied with his twelfth volume,
and was wholly unprepared to express an opinion
on the subject; he spoke of the immense presup-
position to be encountered, but he said distinctly
he could not say it was not so, and Avhen I gave
him an account of the way in which I had arrived
at it, he said, and that was at the close of the con-
versation, that he was certainly inclined to respect
an opinion based on such, an inquiry.
I owe you an apology for sending you such a
patched and scratched and ill-looking manuscript.
I am very much ashamed of it, but 1 cannot help
it, for I am not strong, and it tires me very much
to write, and it was as much as ever I could do to
make it as good as it is. I looked at the Article in
the " Review," to which I referred, in great haste,
at the London Library, and when I was afraid of
losing the object for which I went there, by stop-
ping to do so, and I had no opportunity to look at
it afterwards to correct my mistake. I suppose it
was because my mind was preoccupied with that
idea ; you must not take it for a specimen of my
usual reading. I do not expect j^ou to pronounce
an opinion in regard to the question of the work,
but by the time you have read it through, and I
wish you would do it at your leisure, you will
DELIA BACON. 183
see, perhaps, why I wished to have it read, and
why I feel at Hberty to call for help in getting it
published.
Very gratefully and truly yours,
Delia Bacoj^^.
[Hawthobne to D. B.]
Liverpool, May 26, 1856.
Dear Miss BACOisr, — I have just received the
manuscript, and will read it diligently and care-
fully, and (so far as depends on myself) with a
disposition to receive the truth of the matter.
Very sincerely yours,
Nath' Hawthorne.
[Hawthorne to D. B.]
Liverpool, Jane 21, '56.
Dear Miss BACoisr, — You will have thought
me inexcusably dilatory for not sooner writing to
you ; but I have been absent from Liverpool a
great part of the time — Mrs. Hawthorne having
recently arrived at Southampton. I shall establish
her near London early in July, and will then hope
to meet you personally.
Meanwhile, though I have not had time to read
the whole of your manuscript, I cannot refrain
from saying that I think the work an admirable
one. You seem to me to have read Bacon and
Montaigne more profoundly than anybody else has
read them. It is very long (it was in my early
youth, indeed) since I used to read and re-read
184 DELIA BACON.
Montaigne ; and in order to do any justice to your
views I ought to re-peruse him now — and Bacon,
also — and Shakspeare too. I cannot say, at pres-
ent, that I adopt your theory, if I rightly compre-
hend it as partially developed in this portion of
your work. We find thoughts in all great writers
(and even in small ones) that strike their roots far
beneath the surface, and intertwine themselves
with the roots of other writers' thoughts ; so that
when we pull up one, we stir the whole, and yet
those writers have had no conscious society with
one another. I express this very shabbily : but
you will think it for nie better than I can say it.
But this has nothing to do with the depth and
excellence of your work, and its worthiness to
come before the world. If I can contribute in any
way to this good end, I shall esteem myself happy.
I am not particularly well off pecuniarily, but can
do somewhat in that way, and perhaps in other
ways. When I see you (or sooner, if you like) we
can talk of this.
In haste, sincerely yours,
Nath' Hawthorne.
[D. B. TO Hawthorne.]
12 Spring St., Sussex Gardens,
H. Park, June 22, '56.
Deae Mr. Hawthokne, — That little piece of
my work which you have in your hands does not
furnish you with the means of coming to any satis-
DELIA BACON. 185
factory conclasion in regard to it. I wished you
to see in outline the comprehension of it, and I
was afraid of burthening you by putting the whole
in your hands, for it is a formidable undertaking
to read a work in manuscript, I know, under the
most favorable circumstances. But before you say
anything about it, even to yourself, I do most ear-
nestly entreat that you will find time to look over
this tragedy of " Lear," which I send to you " un-
folded." I am writing another chapter to bring it
down to the present time, and I think of publish-
ing it by itself, as a Tract, though I do not propose
to ask the Tract Society to publish it for me. I
wished very much to send with this also " Coriola-
nus," which contains the application of the same
method of inquiry and the same art of delivery to
the question of the Cure of the Commonweal. If
you will read these three Tragedies which make the
third part of my work, you will be able to judge
then of the claim which I make for it, that it con-
tains, however unworthily set forth, the Discovery
of the Modern Science, the buried Discovery which
the necessities of this time have cried to Heaven
for, and not in vain. I see my way much more
clearly now than when I wrote these criticisms.
They have been finished more than a year, waiting
their time. The chapter I am writing now is of
more serious import than anything contained in
them at present. I do not know whether I can get
them published while I live. But if I can finish
186 DELIA bacon:
the work acceptably to the power that has im-
posed it on me, and leave it in safe hands, — and
for myself personally, if I can avoid the dishonor
which the failure in the contracts I have relied on
seems likely to involve me in here, at this distance
from all my friends, that is all that I ask from God
or man in reference to it ; at least, that is all I
think of for the present.
[Then follows an account, covering many pages
of her close manuscript, of the perplexities which
had come about her from the cross-purposes and
misunderstandings with American publishers, and
especially from the refusal of the magazine publish-
ers to accomplish their declared purpose, and what
she had considered their formal engagement, to
print and pay for successive articles, one of which
indeed they had even put completely into type. To
repeat the story would indeed illustrate, as hardly
anything else could, the gentle patience of her
correspondent, who bore with all her excited com-
plaints, though it was not difficult to discern in
them the approach of those disturbances which
before many months were to become declared in-
sanity ; not shrinking, meanwhile, from the vari-
ous burdens which were offered to his shoulders.
She tells how, in utter extremity, she had resorted
to General Campbell, the consul in London, who
was also a stranger to her ; how he had " ad-
vanced " her twenty pounds, to be repaid from the
proceeds of her successive articles; and how her
DELIA BACON. 187
brother had a few days before sent her ten pounds,
which she had immediately enclosed to Mr. Camp-
bell. She asks of Hawthorne, however, absolutely
nothing but this :]
The way in which you can help me will be to
certify that you have read my book and that it is
entitled to a publication. If you can say that, it
will go far towards making it successful, — and
you have said it already. I would not ask you to
say it here, but to Mr. Emerson, or to the Ameri-
can publishers. It has had to depend on my own
certificate of its merits entirely hitherto. Your
word with the American public would secure it a
reading. There is going to be another kind of
demonstration. I want this published first. I
know it is a good book because I have tried it.
1 have read it and been strengthened and made
better by it repeatedly. But the publishers, I sup-
pose, would think that that was not the very best
testimony in the world, and though Mr. Emerson
has been willing to confide in my word for it, I
don't doubt he would be very glad to know your
opinion of it.
But not to make a book of this, in reference to
these immediate difficulties, if you see any way in
which you can help me I know you will. General
Campbell is entirely a stranger to me ; I had not
even an introduction to him. Mr. Buchanan told
me he would give me one, but I suppose he forgot
to do it. Of course you know if it should come
188 DELIA BACON.
to the worst I have friends who would not suffer
me to be indebted to the Consul, though I hope
not to have to trouble them, and if those men will
send me the money they owe me there will be no
trouble at all.
I am heartily glad to hear that Mrs. Hawthorne
has safely returned. As for myself I am unfit to
see any one. I have given up this world entirely,
and if I had my choice, I don't know as I should
ever see anyone again while I live. Mr. Campbell
has been here to see me three or four times about
this business, and I would much rather have given
him twenty pounds every time he came than to
have seen him, if it had been convenient. And
he came out of the purest charity. Still, if you
are kind enough to look after me when you come,
I shall take it as a very disinterested act of hu-
manity, and will try to look through the grates of
my cell to see you.
[Hawthorne to D. B.]
Liverpool, June 25, 1856.
Dear Miss Bacon, — I have just received your
last package, and will read it as soon as I can get
time, and as nearly as possible in such state of
mind as you recommend.
Surely I can say most strenuously that it ought
to be published.
As regards your friends, let me say frankly that
you shall not suffer from any difficultieSj within my
DELIA BACON. 189
power to obviate. And I will write to a friend in
New York, who used to be connected with the
magazine, to see those people and get them to pay
what is due you. As regards the £10 due General
Campbell, I will speak to him about it, and make
myself responsible ; so that there need be no deli-
cacy about letting it stand for the present.
I can entirely sympathize with you in your re-
luctance ; none better than I. To tell you the
truth, though I see people by scores, every day, I
still shrink from any interview of which I am fore-
warned ; and so, if we can arrange all these mat-
ters just as well without meeting, I shall not in-
trude upon you. But I question whether we can.
I leave Liverpool for Southampton on Friday,
and shall bring Mrs. Hawthorne to the neighbor-
hood of London on the first of July.
Truly yours,
Nath' Hawthorne.
P. S. I enclose (as, for aught I know, you may
have immediate occasion for it) a ten pound note.
If you acknowledge the receipt before to-morrow,
please to address me here : if afterwards, to the
care of Bennoch, Twentyman & Co., 77 Wood
Street, Cheapside, London. N. H.
More details of her embarrassments with the
American publishers come with the grateful ac-
knowledgment, next day, of Hawthorne's unso-
190 DELTA BACON.
licited and " thoughtful kindness/* which had
brought to her a rehef evidently not easy fully to
express ; and then she adverts thus to the visit
which she hoped for, yet with a certain dread :
" When you come to establish Mrs. Hawthorne
here, or whenever you find it convenient to do
so, I hope you will call upon me. The reason I
shrink from seeing any one now is, that I used to
be somebody, and whenever I meet a stranger I
am troubled with a dim reminiscence of the fact,
whereas now I am nothing but this work, and don't
wish to be. I would rather be this than anything
else. I have lived for three years as much alone
with God and the dead as if I had been a departed
spirit. And I don't wish to return to the world. I
shrink with horror from the thought of it. This
is an abnormal state, you see, but I am perfectly
harmless, and if you will let me know when you
are coming I will put on one of the dresses I used
to wear the last time I made my appearance in the
world, and try to look as much like a survivor as
the circumstances will permit.
'* Truly yours,
"Delia Bacon."
At some time after the writing of this, and be-
fore the next letter to Hawthorne was written,
there came upon her, in the following letter from
Emerson, a blow which would have been enough
to break down a mind of less original strength than
DELIA BACON. 191
hers, after the body which enclosed it had been so
enfeebled by toil and privation and disappoint-
ment. For many months she had subsisted upon
the hopcj which amounted to an assurance, of some
return from the successive packets of manuscript
sent to Emerson for the magazine, prepared in-
deed with exhausting midnight labor, upon some-
thing like an express requisition for it. It was
grievous enough to learn now that all hope of
publication in America, either in serial or in book
form, had definitively failed. With that came also
the news of the heedless loss of the manuscript
itself, into which, even if it had no other value,
she had poured such a flood of her own life, as
almost to have exhausted its source.
This is the letter that told the story :
Concord, 23 June, 1856.
My dear Miss Bacon, — I am heartily sorry
that after so long a space I should not be able to
send you some good news. But this time none at
all, and indeed much worse than no good news,
namely, the most vexatious. There is nothing for
it but the kind of earnest that many serious draw-
backs and disasters give to the brave and well-
deserving, of new and better turns that must be-
fall. On my going west in December I left the
three (?) MSS. chapters with my wife. Putnam
already had the first. As I had dissuaded the
printing in the magazine, they were not to have
192 DELIA BACON.
the rest without your express advice. They
printed the first, and then sent to my brother
W. E., in New York, demanding the rest to go on
at once. He sent to my wife for it, and she sup-
posing that this was the contingency I had told
her of sent the three (?) chapters. After reading
them, they refused to go on, and returned them
to W. E. Lately, on receiving your letter of May,
I received soon afterwards what MSS. you sent in
May to Dix & Edwards from them, with word that
they did not find them suited to their purpose.
Then I WTote to W. E. to restore the three (?)
chapters. He wrote me back that he was pained
to say that they were lost. Just before my letter
came, he had given them to Sophy Ripley, who was
coming home to Concord via Springfield, to bring
to me. Miss Ripley had been on a visit at his
house in Staten Island for a day or two ; her trunk
was in New York city. She took the sealed parcel
in her hands, and came down to the Staten Island
ferry with my brother in his carriage, one and a
half miles, and just before reaching the boat per-
ceived that she had not the parcel. W. E. was
needed at his office in New York ; he sent back the
driver instantly from the boat to find the parcel,
informed the collector at the boat office, and ad-
vertised it, with a reward, at once ; the chances
seemed all for recovering it at once, but it has
never appeared ! Sophy Ripley has returned
home, and dared not come to see me until her
DELIA BACON. 193
mother Mrs. Ripley had come to tell me her con-
sternation. They inquire first of all if you have a
duplicate ? of which I am not sure. I assure you,
all the parties to this misfortune are very misera-
ble at present. I wish I could relieve this disaster
with some better face of the whole affair. "But it
does not yet show its best side. I could not carry
the MSS. if I had them thus far complete to Phil-
lips & Sampson (or to another publisher) and ask
as favorable terms as they had offered me at first,
for the eclat, and what publishers would esteem
the promise of the work, was seriously diminished
by Putnam's publishing and then rejecting. That
is a damage which one would say can only be prop-
erly met and overcome by publishing the book at
your own risk, in its mature form.
I have now been trying to read the papers sent
to me by Dix & Edwards, and which they decline
to print. It is very difficult for me to read them,
so small and crowded is the writing, and so much
interlined and corrected. My eyes are very failing
servants in these days, and with glasses I do not
much help them. I have set my daughter and
my wife also to help me, and at last I have mainly
surmounted the difficulty. I hesitate a little to
say that I think the magazine men judged rightly
in asking still another form. The moment your
proposition is stated that Shakspeare was only a
player, whom certain superior person or persons
could use, and did use, as a mouthpiece for their
194 DELIA BACON.
poetry it is perfectly understood. It does not need
to be stated twice. The proposition is immensely
improbable, and against the single testimony of
Ben Jonson, " For I loved the man, and do honor
his memory on this side idolatry as much as any,"
cannot stand. Ben Jonson must be answered, first.
Of course w^e instantly require your proofs. But
instead of hastening to these, you expatiate on the
absurdity of the accepted biography. Perfectly
right to say once, but not necessary to say twice,
and unpardonable after telling us that you have
proof that this is not the man, and we are waiting
for that proof, to say it thrice. There is great in-
cidental worth in these expatiatings ; but it is all
at disadvantage because we have been summoned
to hear an extraordinary aimouncement of facts,
and are impatient of any episodes. I am sure you
cannot be aware how voluminously you have
cuffed and pounded the poor pretender, and then
again, and still again, and no end. I think too
(but this I say with less assurance) that you lean
much harder than they can bear on many passages
you cite from the plays, as if they contained very
pointed allusions which admitted of only one
application.
Once more, I am a little shocked by the signa-
ture " Discoverer of the Authorship of Shaks-
peare's Plays," which should not be used one mo-
ment in advance. Yes, and welcome, and forever-
more, wear the crow^n, from the instant your fact
DELIA BACON. 195
is made to appear, not before. Certain great mer-
its which appeared in your first papers mark these
last also, — a healthy perception, and natural rec-
titude, which give immense advantage in criticism,
where they are so rare. The account of English-
men, and what is servile in them, and the prophetic
American relations of this poetry, struck me much,
and your steadfast loyalty to cause and effect, in
mental history.
What practically should be or can be done, I
cannot see to-day. There is no publisher, because
there is not yet the ready book. If you are to
be anticipated, I think you should write a short
letter announcing exactly your propositions, the
points you are prepared to prove, send it to Fraser,
or any other English journal, though it were the
lowest that will print it ; print it also in '^ Put-
nam," or the "Tribune," or the ^^ Crayon," here;
and then publish your book containing the full
exposition, whenever you can have it ready. I
have been a much worse agent lately than you
might have found me earlier, — though never a
good one, — but worse now through many causes
wear}^ to tell of, — perhaps another year will set
me on my feet again, and then !
With entire respect,
Yours,
R. W. Emerson.
Miss Bacon.
196 DELIA BACON.
Perhaps it was Hawthorne's good fortune which
kept him unwell at Blackheath in the days when
this distress was fresh upon his correspondent, and
saved thus his tender and sympathetic soul from
the direct communication of her grief. It came to
him in writing, however, soon enough, and with
more than sufficient amplitude, following close
upon this note inviting it, but hardly, it may be
surmised, inviting all that came.
[Hawthorne to D. B.]
Blackheath, July 17, '56.
Deae Miss Bacon, — I very much regret that
I cannot call on you to-day, according to agree-
ment ; but I am not well, and do not feel it safe
to venture out.
I have seen General Campbell, and made myself
responsible for the balance of the debt.
I must go to Liverpool on Monday, to remain
there about a week — perhaps ten days. In the
interim, I shall be glad if you will write me, and
tell me what you would like to have done in ref-
erence to the publication of the work. I cannot
but think that it may be effected on terms advan-
tageous to yourself. I think I had better write to
Emerson, by next steamer, and get him to see
what arrangements can be made.
As soon as I return from Liverpool, I will call.
Sincerely yours,
Nath' Hawthorne.
DELIA BACON. 1D7
[D. B. TO Hawthorne.]
12 Spring St., Sussex Gardens,
H. Park, July.
Dear Mr. Hawthorne, — I was very much dis-
appointed at not seeing you on Saturday, and if I
had known how to have addressed you in time
would have entreated you not to return to Liver-
pool without giving me an opportunity of speak-
ing to you.
For your assurance in regard to my work,
strengthened as it is with the approbation of the
lady to whom you give so illustrious a title, I
could not properly thank you by word of mouth
or pen, and so I will not attempt it. I believe you
two are the first readers of those last papers.
They have been out of my hands once. But they
were returned to me with an accidental proof that
they had not been read. The first was perhaps
looked into a little at another place where it
went by itself as it went to you. You shall have
all the details as to what has been done. But I do
not think that the book has had any trial at all.
The theory as announced beforehand is as you will
readily believe not a pleasant one to the conserva-
tive mind here, and the publishers who cater for
that are so frightened at the suggestion, that they
hush it up as quick as possible, and try to forget
that it has ever been mentioned to them. But
the more I think of it the more I am disposed to
make another effort to get it published here, as
198 DELIA BACON.
the articles for the Magazine written after I aban-
doned that idea are not published and I can keep
them back now if I choose. . . .
I have had a letter from Mr. Emerson since I
wrote you last, but it is the least pleasant one I
have received from him. He appears to be dis-
heartened at the course the thing has taken there,
which it need not have taken if there had been
anybody there to act for me, and I do not think
that he likes the work as well as he expected to,
and I ought not to be surprised at that, for if I
had known what it was myself I should not have
taken it to him any more than I would have taken
it to my brother, who is a Doctor of Divinity. It
would have been equally improper for me to do
so. And perhaps it is just as well, since the mo-
tion proceeds from himself, that he should let it
go now. " Transcendentalism " is the fatal word
which I hear pronounced (by people who are not
perhaps quite clear as to what that definition
covers) w^ien our two principal philosophers are
named. But there is nothing, and there never has
been anything in this world since time began, so
antagonistic to that very thing which the people
mean when they use that word as this philosophy,
and it is not right to cast on it beforehand, while
it has no name of its own, that shadow. The
truth which that so-called philosophy of theirs
contains is here also comprehended in this, but it
is here in its place. I went to those two men with
DELTA BACON. 199
it, because they professed philosophy, and though
I knew tliat my discovery contradicted in the most
direct manner their own pubUshed views on this
particular question of the Plays, I thought them
magnanimous enough to disregard that fact en-
tirely, and I found them so. But it is another
thing to ask them to let me bring the world up to
a summit of knowledge which I have accidentally
discovered here, already built, with the road all
open up to the very top, from which their domain
is all overlooked, and the whole zig-zag of its
boundary defined. They are men of genius, but
they lack the genius of the new logic, which is
only the stronger expression of the genius of the
Moderns, and the world reproves them for it.
Carlyle treated me with an extraordinary personal
kindness, and so did his wife, and it is my own
fault that I have not continued my acquaintance
with them, but Mr. Emerson is a flio;ht hitj-her than
that. He has mastered an intellectual heig;:ht, from
which he looks down on the human sensibilities.
He has the advantage of me in that respect. I
cannot write to a man as I would to a gale of wind
exactly, and though I know what his theory is,
and that he talks of the ethical principle as he
does of a good ear in music, after all I am taken
a little by surprise, when he comes to give me a
direct practical vindication of his views. He never
pretended to any personal kindness for me, the
idea of my work has always stood on its own
200 DELIA BACON.
merits with him entirely, and the way in which he
disposes of that, and me, and my worldly affairs
in his last letter is, as they say in the West, " a
caution," He begins by giving me the very pretty
piece of information that tliree very important
chapters of the work are lost, tumbled out of a
carriage months ago, when some lady was carrying
them in her hand, and never heard of since, and
for that he does express a strong sense of human
regret, as they were lost after they were returned
to his brother's custody by those Magazine men.
But I don't consider the persons who lost them in
the least to blame. After they were taken out of
his hands, the Publishers of the Magazine were re-
sponsible to me for them, and had no right to send
them on that journey. And this reminds me to
beg 3'ou to be more than usually careful, for T
have no duplicates of these papers that I send to
you, and that was the reason that I would not send
them across the water, and now that I am re-
minded of the dangers of the land by this acci-
dent, I know you will forgive me for this caution.
For there seems to be a special antagonism at work
here. These are not the first of my papers that
have been destroyed. Before I came here, I wrote
something on the subject which was received with
great approbation. Mr. Emerson said in writing
that he had " seen nothing in the United States in
the way of literary criticism which he thought so
good," but a black waiter finding it one day in his
DELIA BACON. 201
department and looking it over from his stand-
point, could see nothing in it to the purpose, and
threw it into the fire. And that was when it was
in my own keeping.
I have had a letter from the sister, who is my
chief earthly reliance now. She thinks that my
work has failed I believe, poor child, and she
knows that I object to receiving aid from my
brother, though she does not fully know ichy. . . .
She says she wishes she could send me immedi-
ately a hundred pounds, but she cannot except on
one condition, but that her husband and my brother
will immediately send whatever I require for my
bills here, and my journey home, if I will promise
to come as soon as I have received it. And she
requires in the most urgent manner that I shall
send her that answer by the next steamer. I
would die here before I would give her any such
promise, but I have put in this otherwise imperti-
nent passage, that you may see exactly what my
position is at this moment. My friends think that
I am wasting my life here to no purpose. And
they think from the account T gave to my sister of
my present difficulties that they have now an op-
portunity of speaking with authority and compel-
ling me to come home. But I will open a "cent
shop " in my House of Seven Gables first. There
is not anything which is honest that I will not do
rather than put the Atlantic Ocean between me
and what I came to find. I would infinitely rather
202 DELTA BACON.
never go back than do that. It is a moral im-
possibility. I could no more do it than I could kill
myself. It gives me a sense of suffocation to try
to think of it. It would be an impossible crime.
I am sure that my Friar Francis, if I can find his
cell, will be able to give me some better advice
than that. . . .
So you see my case is given up by that Physi-
cian. I called you in for a consultation. But he
had pronounced on it before you came, and had
gone, so that alters your position a little. I have
been all these three years writing to somebody
that was not there to get my letters, and the fact
is I begin to think that the person I wish to speak
to so much is not anywhere except in my own
mind, and in these books, or I should have been
apt to think that, if the hand that brought that
letter had not had yours in it of the 10th. Don't
tell me that you were not inspired to write that,
for I know you were. I could not have got through
with that letter of Mr. Emerson's if yours had had
any shade less of goodness in it. It took Mrs.
Hawthorne's word of assurance and all to help me
through it. As it was it made me very ill, and I
have not recovered from it. . . .
I have thought it right to tell you all this, be-
cause I have a feeling that the facts make the best
basis after all for any proceeding. But I begin to
think if I had a little more of the art in which
these men whose school I am in were such adepts,
DELIA BACON. 203
I should manage this affair of theirs rather better.
All this is calculated to annoy and discourage you,
but n\y feeling is that your judgments are not
very easily biased by extraneous influences. But
perhaps we are none of us altogether independent
of them. I don't know as I could have been true
to my own work, if it had come back to me as it
came to Mr. Emerson in the first place, with the
brand of that rejection on it. And the badness of
the manuscript and the weakness of his eyes and
the vexatious loss of those papers, and the whole
series of untoward circumstances, and the feehng
that the eclat of the work was lost, helped I have
no doubt a little in the summing up of the ques-
tion. Besides he has never seen the book, he has
only my word for it that there is one, and he has
evidently made up his mind that I am laboring
under an hallucination in respect to its existence.
He has seen only the outside of the preliminary
chapters — one of them he says he read and ap-
proved. Under these circumstances I don't con-
sider his decision a final one. I think too he may
have felt unconsciously perhaps the antagonism of
this philosophy, of which there has been no hint
before in what I have written, and of 'which I am
not the author. He censures the boldness of my
claims, and evidently prefers to have the evidence
in the form of direct historical testimony, and says
that Ben Jonson must be answered first, whereas
he won't be answered till there is no occasion to
204 DELIA BACON.
answer him. I know all about Ben Jonson. He
has two patrons besides " Shakspeare." One was
Raleigh, the other was Bacon. The author of these
Plays and Poems was his Patron. It would not
have been strang;e if he had loved and honored
his memory on this side idolatry as much as any.
But Lord Bacon was a man of art, and he was
much in the habit of writing letters for other peo-
ple, in which he could say some things to the pur-
pose which he could not say as well over his own
name. The fact that he was not too scrupulous to
employ such arts was betrayed on the trial of Es-
sex. That was not the only time that Mr. Anthony
Bacon's name was used to accomplish Mr. Francis
Bacon's ends. It was very much used I find.
There was a great deal of correspondence that
went on in that person's name, which might not
have prospered^ so well in the name of his brother.
And it was not dialogues on the stage only that
the myriad-minded resorted to, to accomplish his
ends. Letters written in the names of various in-
dividuals, which were not published at the time,
but reserved for future publication, because they
related to recent matters of state, fictitious letters,
form a very important part of this author's works,
to which he takes great pains to refer those who
care to know more about him.
As to what is to be done, please to look over —
read as well as you can in this poor form, making
due allowance for it, — this play of " The Consul-
DELIA BACON. 205
ship." It is Lord Bacon's as much as " The Scar-
let Letter" is yours. No, I will not say that.
These plays passed through the hands of more
persons than one. But the Chancellor claims this
one. I have seen what he says about it. My in-
terpretation is approved. Do not read it thinking
there is no other proof, but merely to see, whether,
as it stands there with those other parts of the
work that you have, and some preliminary state-
ments, it will make a book that can perhaps be
published here. If that feat can be accomplished,
there will be no difficulty about the other side.
What I wish to know is whether you think it
would be possible to get it published here without
waiting for that further confirmation that I speak
of, which I speak of as assuredly as anything
which has been subjected to the contingency of a
trust can be spoken of. If you could give me a
title to it, and write a few lines of Introduction, I
think you could make it successful. I would like
to have it published without my name, and I would
like to have you introduce it to the public, saying
just what you are willing to say to the public about
it, and no more. Just keep the position that you
have already taken in reference to it. Merely say
that it is a book that has claims of its own, and is
entitled to be read. Give to the anonymous author
the authorship of this new Baconian philosophy
and the invention of this new Shakspeare, if you
choose. If it is an invention, I insist upon it, it is
206 DELIA BACON.
a very fine one, but it would be dishonest in me to
take the credit of it. Suppose I was dead and you
had this Romance in your hands, the boldest one
that was ever invented, what would you do with
it? (Call it a Romance if you choose, till I can
prove it.) You find it given over, — perishing by
inches, for want of a printer, for want of a reader,
three chapters of it given to the winds by those to
whom I sent it to read and to print. If you can
save it, and any good comes of it, the world will
owe it to you. You have done more for it already
in the weeks that you have had it, with all the
cares of your Consulship upon you, and those par-
ticular urgent cares which your arrangements for
Mrs. Hawthorne's residence here devolved upon
you, than others have done in years. You have
done what nobody else has done for it before.
You have read it, as much of it as you had to read.
The chapters I took so much pains to send to
America, for the purpose of having them read?
have not been read yet by any one who knew
enough to know what the letters stood for, and
never will be now. They were sent on the 1st of
November, and when they were inquired for in
June, the news was that they were lost. Mr. Emer-
son talks about " the ready book." It is well it
was not ready for the kind of fate that awaited
those avant couriers of it. Mr. Emerson is no
more to blame for the loss of those papers than I
am, but I should have been glad if somebody could
DELIA BACON. 207
have read them before they were destroyed besides
that goose of an editor, who can say what he likes
about them now, imcontradicted. The reason I
did not send any more was, there was nobody
there to take them. I sent many appeals out in
the name of that which is most commanding with
men ; but one had gone to his farm, and another
to his merchandise, and another had married a wife
and could not come. But you had married one,
happily, who was able to come with you. I know
how much I owe to that " better self " of yours,
who ought to be very good to deserve that title.
I am thankful that there was one there who was
ready to help, instead of hindering you, not in your
toil through the manuscripts only, but in your
detection of what was worth saving under that
disguise. I don't like to see people, or I would go
and see her. My personal history is concluded ;
there has been enough of it and to spare. I have
had my share of the good things of this life, and
I have been ready to go this some time. I only
wait to finish this work. Mr. Emerson talks about
my " wearing the crown," he says, " yes, wear it
and welcome and forevermore, from the instant
your fact is made to appear ; " but he recommends
that I should not put it on prematurely. He was
quarreling with my assuming the title of a Discov-
erer in those anonymous articles. I thought there
was no honor in claiming that title now, unless
it is an honor to rush on the drawn swords of the
208 DELIA BACON.
world. I meant it for a challenge. I have to be-
gin with an unspeakable audacity. That is a part
of the play. Does anyone think that I am not
conscious of the position ? Mr. Emerson has never
been taught, as I have, what the human appro-
bation amounts to. If I thought I had a right
to do it, I would take this discovery to my grave
with me. As soon as I can get all my duties of
one kind and another reconciled and fulfilled, I
shall ask leave to retire from this scene for the
present, and shall hope to return again when it is
in better order.
In the first place I am going to write immedi-
ately to my sister, perhaps to my brother D. D., to
say that I lose my copyright here by coming home
now, and that it will be eventually valuable, and
that as my living here is hardly more expensive
than it would be in America, as far as they are
concerned in that particular, it is better for me to
stay here, till I am ready to help myself, than to
come home.
And in the second place, I will write to the Edi-
tors of the Magazine, and tell them to send me
immediately, without any demur at all, the three
hundred dollars due for the articles which they
engaged to print, and which they caused to be lost
instead. I will do it for the benefit of any poor
authors who may happen to be at their mercy
hereafter, as they thought I was. The loss of
those papers through their means, appears to me
DELIA BACON. 209
to introduce a new element into the question, and
they shall answer for them : — that is, if I am not
advised to the contrary. I do not like to receive
any money from them, as they derived no advan-
tage from the papers, but it is better that they
should pay it to me, than that I should owe it to
others in consequence of their deliberately destroy-
ing the provision I had made for my living here.
They knew about that contract with the Boston
Publishers, and that I was dependent on it, or
another as good, and that I had relinquished it to
fulfill my engagement with them, and they might
at least have answered my letters.
I am thinking a little of asking my brother to
get me a publisher in America. He does not know
at all what the work is. I did not know, when I
came here. My sister says that he thinks the book
will be read, whether it is a Discovery or not. He
is the first person I spoke to about my Discovery
of the philosophy, which was eleven or twelve
years ago, and he said " Go on with it," not know-
ing what he said. But he is a good man, though
he has had a bad education and he is in bad com-
pany. I have been very careful not to connect
him with it at all of late, because his obligations
are different from mine. He said to me in his last
letter, " Your * Philosophy of Shakespeare ' will
have readers, I dare say." It is death to be
charged with being ^' liberal " in his church, and
those who watch for his halting in this respect
210 DELIA BACON.
would be glad to make him. responsible for this
book, I know.
I think you will conclude not to write to Mr.
Emerson. I have written a letter which passed his
on the way, and I shall probably hear from him
no-ain. You will not be able to do more than read
this in the ten days that yoa are at Liverpool, and
I will not send you my tragedy, though it has been
sealed and directed these many days, until I have
your orders. / do very much rely on that, because
it is full of science. I do not know how it is pos-
sible ever to shut it up again after it has once been
opened. You need not reprove me for this letter
and tell me how many pages there are of it. I
know, and I am reproving myself. It is not the
business of the Consulship that I care for inter-
rupting, because this is the Consulship that we
talk of. But how do I know what mystic and
delicate processes I am disturbing and what new
and beautiful work of art, destined to be a joy
forever, is getting hindered with it.
Fresh from such an impressive lesson in chirog-
raphy, I ought not to make such work as this, but
you will forgive it I hope, and I will promise not
to trouble you in this way again.
Truly yours,
Delia Bacon.
T have been thinking hard whether to burn this
up or to send it. I have had the weakness which
DELIA BACON. 211
results from a severe attack of neuralgia to strug-
gle with in the writing of it, or it would not have
been so long. You asked me what I wished you
to do. I will answer you as Mr. Emerson has
answered me. I wish you to get the book pub-
lished by somebody or other on this side of the
water or that, that is if you continue to think it is
lit to be published, when you have heard this story
of the rejection of it without a reading, and be-
sides that I wish you to hear what else I have to
say, for it is very important. I want you to take
charge of this work, in case anything happens to
me, and act as you see fit in reference to it, sup-
press it or publish it, as your judgment and con-
science shall guide you. It is not good for any-
thing except as a beginning. D. Bacon.
[Hawthorne to D. B.]
Liverpool, July 21, 1856.
Dear Miss BACoisr, — I do not see any use in
writing to Mr. Emerson ; in fact, I always won-
dered at finding him in the position which he has
hitherto held, in respect to your work. I heartily
wish (on your own account) that you had a better
alternative than m3\self ; but I shall do what I can,
and as well as I know how.
It seems to me improbable that John Murray
will be induced to undertake the publication of a
book like this. However, if you judge it impor-
tant, I will endeavor to have the MS. presented to
212 DELIA BACON.
him under good auspices — those, for instance, of
some respectable English man of letters. My own
word would not be worth a farthing with him.
If the book were my own, I should not care who
published it, so long as it did really come before
the world. Were that once accomplished, through
whatsoever medium, you would have fulfilled your
mission, and would have a right to talk of going
hence. If a preacher is inspired, and cannot find a
pulpit, he must speak from the top of a barrel. But
there are very respectable publishers in London,
some one of whom, I hope, would undertake it.
Routledge has published about a hundred thousand
volumes of my books, and has several times sought
to institute personal relations with me. I do not
yet know him, but would see him, if you desire it,
on this subject; and if any commendation on my
part might avail with him, it should not be wanting.
It would be in his power to circulate the work
widely ; and I presume he would deal fairly with
you, on the principles of the Trade.
There are other publishers, to whom I should
have similar facilities of introducing the book.
I shall be able to return to London the latter
part of this week — perhaps not till Saturday. As
soon as possible, next week, I will call ; and per-
haps it is better that I should receive " Coriolanus "
from your own hands.
You will not accomplish any good purpose, I
think, by writing to those magazine people. They
DELIA BACON. 213
will pay you nothing, unless on compulsion of law :
and they will consider themselves free from lia-
bility, as having returned the papers to an agent
pointed out, I suppose, by your agent, Mr. Emer-
son. If anything can be done, Mr. E. ought to
feel himself bound to do it, that is, if he were a
man like other men ; but he is far more than that,
and not so much.
With my best wishes.
Very sincerely yours,
Nath' Hawthorne.
The reply to this, two days later, brought to
Hawthorne more and more narrative and discus-
sion — about the loss of the manuscript in America ;
about the responsibility for so heart-breaking a
disaster, whether upon Emerson, or the magazine
publishers, or upon whom ; about past communi-
cations with English publishers, and what should
now be done with them or with others. As for
Routledge, of whom Hawthorne had spoken : " I
should like nothing better," she says, " than to
have him publish it if he will, and if you would
give me a Title for it, — for that is the principal
thing at first, — I think you might make of it a
book for him. I have tried in vain to fix upon so
much as a tolerable one. Mr. Emerson sugo-ested
* The Authorship of Shakespeare's Plays,' or some-
thing of that kind, though he said he could not
name it himself, because he had not seen the book,
214 DELIA BACON.
but would wish to have it ' in stone.' I told him
that that was not the true title of the book, and
why it was not ; but for lack of the true one I con-
cluded to take it, and the copyright of a book
with that title has I believe been secured in my
name in America. But that is of no consequence
I suppose. I have now a chance to begin anew.
Let that book go, since they have killed it there
amongst them, or voted it dead, and performed
the last offices for it. Let us begin with a new
one here that nobody has heard of yet. I have
thought a little of calling it ' The Baconian Philos-
ophy Illustrated with Plays and Poems,' or ' The
Baconian Fables,' (and Aphorisms). Suppose we
say nothing about the Actor in the title this time.
He has had his name on the title-page of this Phi-
losophy long enough. But I must be careful what
I say, for I suppose I must take it for granted
there is a great gulf here between us still. I
am not fit to speak to any one else on that point,
for I have forgotten how to frame the venerable
chimera that that name used to stand for. I can
hardly persuade myself that there is anybody now
alive that really believes in that moon-calf."
Then again recurring to the great grief of the
lost manuscript, she submits herself nevertheless,
with a docility which certainly does not yet evince
complete mental overthrow, to Hawthorne's paci-
ficatory dissuasions, and consents to withhold the
sharp complaints she had determined to send. She
DELIA BACON. 215
does not overlook, indeed, the finely delicate anal-
ysis of one illustrious Concord neighbor by another,
in the closing words of the last letter, saying : " As
to Mr. Emerson, he has appeared so much like a
man, and a great man too, in this affair that I
almost forgot he was a ' genius ' ! " And she closes
with a reminiscence of words which she must first
have heard in the grievous days of her infancy, in
the Ohio log-cabin : " ' They that wait upon the
Lord shall renew their strength. They shall mount
up with wings as eagles ; they shall run and not
be weary, they shall walk and not faint.' And
since I have heard your voice in this outer dark-
ness reviving the mortal life in me when it was
well-nigh gone, I take it for an omen that there
is something more to be done here yet, and begin
to plan anew."
XIV.
It was only by metaphor that she spoke, in clos-
ing her letter of July 23, of hearing the '' voice
in the outer darkness." A few days afterward she
heard it, in literal truth, for the first time, — and
the last.
Under date July 29, 1856, of Hawthorne's
" English Note-Books," he mentions his visit,
within three days before, to Delia Bacon ; and in
his book, largely made up from those notes, which
he called " Our Old Home," he thus describes the
visit. It is in the chapter entitled, from the sub-
ject which so largely occupies it, " Recollections of
a Gifted Woman."
" I should hardly have dared to add another to
the innumerable descriptions of Stratford-on-Avon,
if it had not seemed to me that this would form a
fitting framework to some reminiscences of a very
remarkable woman. Her labor, while she lived,
was of a nature and purpose outwardly irreverent
to the name of Shakspeare, yet, by its actual ten-
dency, entitling her to the distinction of being
that one of all his worshippers who sought, though
she knew it not, to place the richest and stateliest
DELIA BACON. 217
diadem upon his brow. We Americans, at least,
in the scanty annals of our literature, cannot afford
to forget her high and conscientious exercise of
noble faculties, which, indeed, if you look at the
matter in one way, evolved only a miserable error,
but, more fairly considered, produced a result
worth almost what it cost her. Her faith in her
own ideas was so genuine, that, erroneous as they
were, it transmuted them to gold, or, at all events,
interfused a large proportion of that precious and
indestructible substance among the waste material
from which it can readily be sifted.
*' The only time I ever saw Miss Bacon was in
London, where she had lodgings in Spring Street,
Sussex Gardens, at the house of a grocer, a portly
middle-aged, civil, and friendly man, who, as well
as his wife, appeared to feel a personal kindness
towards their lodger. I was ushered up two (and
I rather believe three) pair of stairs into a parlor
somewhat humbly furnished, and told that Miss
Bacon would come soon. There were a number of
books on the table, and, looking into them, I found
that every one had some reference, more or less
immediate, to her Shakspearian theory, — a vol-
ume of Raleigh's ' History of the World,' a volume
of Montaigne, a volume of Lord Bacon's letters,
a volume of Shakspeare's Plays, and on another
table lay a large roll of manuscript, which I pre-
sume to have been a portion of her work. To be
sure, there was a pocket-Bible among the books, but
218 DELIA BACON.
everything else referred to the one despotic idea
that had got possession of her mind ; and as it had
engrossed her whole soul as well as her intellect,
I had no doubt that she had established subtile con-
nections between it and the Bible likewise. As is
apt to be the case with solitary students, Miss
Bacon probably read late and rose late ; for I took
up Montaigne (it was Hazlitt's translation) and
had been reading his journey to Italy a good while
before she appeared.
" I had expected (the more shame for me, hav-
ing no other ground of such expectation than that
she was a literary woman) to see a very homely,
uncouth, elderly personage, and was quite agree-
ably disappointed by her aspect. She was rather
uncommonly tall, and had a striking and expressive
face, dark hair, dark eyes, which shone with an in-
ward light as soon as she began to speak, and by
and by a color came into her cheeks and made her
look almost young. Not that she really was so ; she
must have been beyond middle age : and there was
no unkindness in coming to that conclusion, be-
cause, making allowance for years and ill health,
I could suppose her to have been handsome
and exceedingly attractive once. Though wholly
estranged from society, there was little or no re-
straint or embarrassment in her manner: lonely
people are generally glad to give utterance to their
pent-up ideas, and often bubble over with them as
freely as children with their new-found syllables.
DELIA BACON. 219
I cannot tell how it came about, but we immedi-
ately found ourselves taking a friendly and familiar
tone together, and began to talk as if we had
known one another a very long while. A little
preliminary correspondence had indeed smoothed
the way, and we had a definite topic in the con-
templated publication of her book.
" She was very communicative about her theory,
and would have been much more so had I desired
it ; but, being conscious within myself of a sturdy
unbelief, I deemed it fair and honest rather to
repress than draw her out upon the subject.
Unquestionably, she was a monomaniac; these
overmastering ideas about the authorship of
Shakspeare's plays, and the deep political philos-
ophy concealed beneath the surface of them, had
completely thrown her off her balance ; but at the
same time they had wonderfully developed her
intellect, and made her what she could not other-
wise have become. It was a very singular phe-
nomenon : a system of philosophy grown up in
this woman's mind without her volition, — con-
trary, in fact, to the determined resistance of her
volition, — and substituting itself in the place of
everything that originally grew there. To have
based such a system on fancy, and unconsciously
elaborated it for herself, was almost as wonderful
as really to have found it in the plays. But, in
a certain sense, she did actually find it there.
Shakspeare has surface beneath surface to an im-
220 DELIA BACON.
measurable depth, adapted to the plummet-line of
every reader; his works present many phases of
truth, each with scope large enough to fill a con-
templative mind. Whatever you seek in him you
will surely discover, provided you seek truth.
There is no exhausting the various interpretation
of his symbols ; and a thousand years hence, a
world of new readers will possess a whole library
of new books, as we ourselves do, in these volumes
old already. I had half a mind to suggest to Miss
Bacon this explanation of her theory, but forbore,
because (as I could readily perceive) she had as
princely a spirit as Queen Elizabeth herself, and
would at once have motioned me from the room.
" I had heard, long ago, that she believed that
the material evidences of her dogma as to the
authorship, together with the key of the new phi-
losophy, would be found buried in Shakspeare's
grave. Recently, as I understood her, this notion
had been somewhat modified, and was now accu-
rately defined and fully developed in her mind,
with a result of perfect certainty. In Lord Ba-
con's letters, on which she laid her finger as she
spoke, she had discovered the key and clew to the
whole mystery. There were definite and minute
instructions how to find a will and other docu-
ments relating to the conclave of Elizabethan phi-
losophers, which were concealed (when and by
whom she did not inform me) in a hollow space
in the under surface of Shakspeare's gravestone.
DELIA BACON. 221
Thus the terrible prohibition to remove the stone
was accounted for. Tlie directions, she intimated,
went completely and precisely to the point, obvi-
ating all difficulties in the way of coming at the
treasure, and even, if I remember right, were so
contrived as to ward off any troublesome conse-
quences likely to ensue from the interference of
the parish officers. All that Miss Bacon now
remained in England for — indeed, the object for
which she had come hither, and which had kept
her here for three years past — was to obtain pos-
session of these material and unquestionable proofs
of the authenticity of her theory.
" She communicated all this strange matter in a
low, quiet tone ; while, on my part, I listened as
quietly, and without any expression of dissent.
Controversy against a faith so settled would have
shut her up at once, and that, too, without in the
least weakening her belief in the existence of those
treasures of the tomb ; and had it been possible to
convince her of their intangible nature, I appre-
hend that there would have been nothing left for
the poor enthusiast save to collapse and die. She
frankly confessed that she could no longer bear the
society of those who did not at least lend a certain
sympathy to her views, if not fully share in them ;
and meeting little sympathy or none, she had now
entirely secluded herself from the world. In all
these years, she had seen Mrs. Farrar a few times,
but had long ago given her up, — Carlyle once or
222 DELIA BACON.
twice, but not of late, although he had received
her kindly ; Mr. Buchanan, while Minister in Eng-
land, had once called on her, and General Camp-
bell, our Consul in London, had met her two or
three times on business. With these exceptions,
which she marked so scrupulously that it was per-
ceptible what epochs they were in the monotonous
passage of her days, she had lived in the profound-
est solitude. She never walked out ; she suffered
much from ill health; and yet, she assured me,
she was perfectly happy.
" I could well conceive it ; for Miss Bacon im-
agined herself to have received (what is certainly
the greatest boon ever assigned to mortals) a high
mission in the world, with adequate powers for its
accomplishment ; and lest even these should prove
insufficient, she had faith that special interpositions
of Providence were forwarding her human efforts.
This idea was continually coming to the surface
during our interview. She believed, for example,
that she had been providentially led to her lodg-
ing house, and put in relations with the good-
natured grocer and his family ; and, to say the
truth, considering what a savage and stealthy tribe
the London lodging-house keepers usually are, the
honest kindness of this man and his household
appeared to have been little less than miraculous.
Evidently, too, she thought that Providence had
brouo;ht me forward — a man somewhat connected
with literature — at the critical juncture when she
DELIA BACON. 223
needed a negotiator with the booksellers ; and, on
my part, though little accustomed to regard myself
as a divine minister, and though I might even
have preferred that Providence should select some
other instrument, I had no scruples in undertaking
to do what I could for her. Her book, as I could
see by turning it over, was a very remarkable one,
and worthy of being offered to the public, which,
if wise enough to appreciate it, would be thankful
for what was good in it and merciful to its faults.
It was founded on a prodigious error, but was built
up from that foundation with a good many prodig-
ious truths. And, at all events, whether I could
aid her literary views or no, it would have been
both rash and impertinent in me to attempt draw-
ing poor Miss Bacon out of her delusions, which
were the condition on which she lived in comfort
and joy, and in the exercise of great intellectual
power. So I left her to dream as she pleased
about the treasures of Shakspeare's tombstone,
and to form whatever designs might seem good to
herself for obtaining possession of them. I was
sensible of a ladylike feeling of propriety in Miss
Bacon, and a New England orderliness in her char-
acter, and, in spite of her bewilderment, a sturdy
common-sense, which I trusted would begin to
operate at the right time, and keep her from any
actual extravagance. And as regarded this matter
of the tombstone, so it proved.
" The interview lasted above an hour, during
224 DELIA BACON.
which she flowed out freely, as to the sole auditor,
capable of any degree of intelligent sympathy,
whom she had met with in a very long while. Her
conversation was remarkably suggestive, alluring
forth one's own ideas and fantasies from the shv
places where they usually haunt. She was indeed
an admirable talker, considering how long she had
held her tongue for lack of a listener, — pleasant,
sunny, and shadowy, often piquant, and giving
glimpses of all a woman's various and readily
changeable moods and humors ; and beneath them
all there ran a deep and powerful under-current of
earnestness, which did not fail to produce in the
listener's mind something like a temporary faith in
what she herself believed so fervently. But the
streets of London are not favorable to enthusiasms
of this kind, nor, in fact, are they likely to flourish
anywhere in the English atmosphere ; so that,
long before reaching Paternoster Row, I felt that
it would be a difficult and doubtful matter to
advocate the publication of Miss Bacon's book.
Nevertheless, it did finally get published."
Close upon this visit she sends Hawthorne, as
she had long been anxious to do, her study of
" Coriolanus," or part of it. It brought to her one
of the great joys of her fast shortening life ; for it
brought her into communication with Hawthorne's
wife, whose sister, Elizabeth Peabody, had been
almost the first confidante of her great secret, four
DELIA BACON. 225
or five years before. This was Mrs. Hawthorne's
letter ; and it is only justice to her to whom it
was addressed that it should be known what not
unkindly judgments were in those days formed of
the work she was doing, and by what manner of
persons : —
My dear Miss Bacois', — Mr. Hawthorne wishes
me to tell you that your manuscript arrived safely
on Saturday evening. He has not read it yet, for
the very good reason that he could not, as I have
had possession of it ever since it came, and only
finished it last evening. My dear Miss Bacon, I
feel so ignorant in the presence of your extraordi-
nary learning, that it seems absurd in me even to
say what I think of your manuscripts, and yet I
cannot help it ; for I never read so profound and
wonderful a criticism, and I think there never was
such a philosophic insight and appreciation since
Lord Bacon himself. No subject has so great a
fascination for me as " divine Philosophy," this
searching into the nature of things, and extracting
their essence and discovering the central order,
the Law that perpetually is striving to bring Har-
mony, and which never can be broken — I mean
not without a darkening of the Universe. I am
one of those who have
" a credence in my heart,
An espdrance so obstinately strong
As doth outdo the attest of eyes and ears." ^
^ Troilus and Cre.isida, Act V., scene 2. ^^ Invert the attest" is
the original. [T. B.]
226 DELIA BACON.
(I believe these are the Avords of the immortal poet
whom we have called Shakspere,) and so I am
always ready to say " Yes, it may be so," to every
new suggestion, however astounding. I have often
thought we had effects without cause in those
works, if they were written by an uncultivated
mind, or rather by a mind not cultivated and
educated to the last possibility, and I have said
" It is a miracle." Yet I could believe in a mir-
acle. To add all these, however, to what Lord
Bacon has avowedly done, is to make him such a
prodigy as the world never before saw. But this
I have room enough for also. What I want now
is more and more and more of your detections, your
proofs, your criticism. I have an insatiable hunger,
and I shall be glad when these and all are in
print, for just as sure as there comes a point of
trembling interest, you begin to interline and I am
driven wild. But this Inst manuscript is much
plainer than the others. Mr. Hawthorne has gone
to Routledge this morning to speak about them.
I hope that he will have the wit to publish them,
for, irrespective of their ulterior purpose, they are
wonderful, magnificent.
Sincerely yours,
Sophia Hawthorne.
August 8 [1856].
Blackheath Park, Mr. Bennock's.
The answer to this is dated August 9. '^ I was
truly glad to hear your voice at last. I have
DELIA BACON. 227
had a kind of image of you for some time in my
mind, and now that you draw nearer, I am very
glad to identify in the features of your letter the
' soul feminine ' of my so noble friend and helper,
whom not seeing I had known also. And yet I
think with Carlyle that the least glimpse of a
human face, or the poorest portrait, gives one a
better idea of the individuality than any other
kind of demonstration. But I found such decided
and constant features not in Mr. Hawthorne's
books only but in his letters, and not in his words
only but in his acts, that my confidence in him
did not need that confirmation. He has helped
me most of all by demonstrating his acquaintance
with this human doctrine, a knowledge in which
I have found some men of fame and learning
wanting^. . . .
" I should like very much to see you and those
dear little children of yours, that I saw once for a
moment. But there is but one thing for me to do
at present. If you are able to do so I should take
it as a great favor if you would come and see me.
But I will not ask it of vou, because I know it
would be a great deal of trouble, and there would
be nothing to pay you for it. My book is all that
there is of me now, or rather my work, for the
book is only the beginning of it. I broke off with
the Carlyles (for there are two of them) on that
account entirely. I did not think I was fit com-
pany for any one, and it was a mere imposition on
my part to be pretending to it."
228 DELIA BACON.
Liverpool, August 12, '56.
Dear Miss Bacon, — I had to return hither,
some days ago ; but I had already gone twice to
Routledge's, and, the second time,! saw one of the
partners — Routledge himself being absent for a
month or two. The partner (the same, perhaps,
whom you talked with) suggested the probable
unsuitableness of the book to their general line of
business ; but he desired to see the manuscript,
and promised me, in any case, his best advice and
utmost aid towards getting the work published.
He seemed to think that it would be quite prac-
ticable. The second part of Coriolanus had not
arrived when I left Blackheath ; but I propose to
deliver that portion of the work, first and alone, to
the Routledges, as being perhaps calculated to
make the best impression on their practical minds.
I expect, at all events, much benefit from the
counsels of these men, and I will not doubt that
the world shall be made to hear your voice,
I cannot now say how soon I shall return to
Blackheath; but Mrs. Hawthorne will be delighted
to receive the remaining part of Coriolanus, in the
meantime. I have not yet read the first part ;
but she, while reading it, kept overflowing into
my ears with the many passages that took effect
on her. In haste.
Sincerely yours,
Nath' Hawthorne.
DELIA BACON. 229
No one who knew Hawthorne through his books
alone could need evidence of his exquisitely refined
delicacy and sensibility. Nor could one who knew
him thus imagine that the same man was charac-
terized by the solidest and most substantial good
sense, and by a strong intrepidity which would
bring him, notwithstanding an almost morbid
shrinking from human contact, to confront utter
strangers with affairs not at all his own, and even
to incur the risk of being thought officious in the
business of others. In all these letters of his,
nothing seems better to declare at once his singular
good sense and his unselfish generosity than this
which follows, addressed to one with whom he had
no acquaintance, and venturing advice upon mat-
ters in regard to which men are sometimes very
sensitive to intrusion. Its manifest kindness, how-
ever, was answered with the sincerest thanks, as
having " brought some measure of relief to the
anxiety of her nearest friends." But it was plain
that he already discerned in her extreme exalta-
tion the danger, if not the actual beginning, of
that pronounced derangement of mind which was
but a few months distant.
U. S. Consulate,
Liverpool, August 14, '56.
My dear Sir, — I have recently held some com-
munication with your sister. Miss Delia Bacon, at
present residing in London : and, as I believe she
230 DELIA BACON.
has no other friend in England, you will not think
me impertinent in addressing you with reference
to her affairs. I understand from her (and can
readily suppose it to be the case) that you are
very urgent that she should return to America;
nor can I deny that I should give her similar ad-
vice, if her mind were differently circumstanced
from what I find it. But Miss Bacon has become
possessed by an idea, that there are discoveries
within her reach, in reference to the authorship of
Shakspeare, and that, by quitting England, she
should forfeit all chance of following up these dis-
coveries, and making them manifest to the public.
I say nothing as to the correctness of this idea (as
respects the existence of direct, nuiterial, and doc-
umentary evidence) as she has not imparted to me
the grounds of her belief. But, at all events, she
is so fully and firmly possessed by it, that she will
never leave England, voluntarily, until she shall
have done everything in her power to obtain these
proofs ; nor would any argument, nor, I think, any
amount of poverty and hardship avail with her to
the contrary. And I will say to you in confidence,
my dear Sir, that I should dread the effect, on her
mind, of any compulsory measures on the part of
her friends, towards a removal. If I might pre-
sume to advise, my counsel would be that you
should acquiesce, for the present, in her remaining
here, and do what may be in your power towards
makiny; her comfortable.
DELIA BACON. 231
However mistaken your sister may be, she has
produced a most remarkable work, written with
wonderful earnestness and ability, and full of very
profound criticism. Its merits are entirely inde-
pendent of the truth of her theory about the
authorship of the plays. I am in hopes to find a
publisher for the work, here in England ; and I
should judge that there was a fair chance of its
meeting with such success as would render her in-
dependent of her friends. But this, of course, must
be an affair of time.
At the only interview which I have had with
Miss Bacon, I found her tolerably w^ell in bodily
health, perfectly cheerful, and conversing with
great power and intelligence. She lodges in the
house of some excellent people, who seem to be
attached to her, and who treat her as few London
lodging-house keepers would treat their inmates, if
suspected of poverty. She is very fortunate in
having found such a home ; and I submit it to your
judgment, on a view of the whole case, whether it
will not be more for her well-beino; to remain here,
than (against such strong convictions as actuate
her) to return to America. And, as I have already
said, it seems to me quite certain that she will not
return (with her purpose unfulfilled) while she con-
tinues to be a free agent.
I write this note of my own motion, being
greatly interested by what I have seen of your
sister, and feeling, indeed, an anxious responsibility
in putting her situation fairly before you.
232 DELIA BACON.
Pardon me if I have used an undue freedom, and
believe me,
Very sincerely and respectfully,
Nath' Hawthorne.
Rev. Dr. Bacon.
On the 20th of August she writes briefly to Mrs.
Hawthorne, telling of much suffering from sick-
ness and pain, of plans for leaving London, of re-
lief which had come from her friends in America,
and of " a very pleasant letter from Mr. Emerson,"
which she is going to send, and which, having
been sent, is not among her papers. But she says
that Hawthorne's favorable criticism of such part
of herw^ork as he had read had ''had a good effect
already " on Emerson.
Then follow these two letters ; and after them
she left London for the last time. Her work was
almost done.
My dear Miss Bacon, — I have this moment
received your manuscript, and am thankful for
such a godsend this dull weather and in the con-
tinued absence of my husband. The winter of my
discontent will not be made glorious summer till
next Wednesday, and so we cannot read it together.
I rejoice at all your hopes and assurances, but
grieve much over your suffering. I have been
waiting for a good day to go and see you, but the
weather confines me on account of my throat.
DELIA BACON. 233
Will you tell me where you shall be after Monday,
that I may discover you when I can go to town.
In the greatest haste at present,
I am sincerely yours,
Sophia Hawthorne.
I send this directly to relieve your mind of
anxiety about the manuscript.
Blackheath Park,
August 21, 1856.
12 Spring St., August 26, '56.
Dear Mrs. Hawthorne, — I have been trying
to be able to write a note either to Mr. H. or your-
self ever since I received yours acknowledging the
manuscript, but the illness of which I spoke then
has proved a very serious one, and i£ I had thought
you were quite well enough to come and see me
I should certainly have sent for you. All my
arrangements were made to go into the country
on Monday, but yesterday I could not sit up, and
whether I get off to-day or not is very doubtful.
I looked on while the servant packed my trunks
for me last night after her fashion, and it nearly
killed me. I am dying partly, principally I think,
of want of proper food, proper for an invalid. The
mercy of the lodging-house keepers, in that re-
spect, is small when the difference in price be-
tween the nutritious and the poisonous article goes
to them. Just at the moment when it became
absolutely necessary that I should make a change
234 DELTA BACON.
on that account I found myself in possession of
the means of paying my bill here entirely, leaving
a very very small sum over. I hoped I should
receive more this week, but it has not come, . . .
Mrs. Farrar sent me some nice things last week,
but I think they came too late. They don't revive
or strengthen me at all that I can see. The Dr.
says that I must go to a farm-house ; I told him I was
very poor, and he says I can live on almost nothing
there, and have the very diet that I require. He
recommends the vicinity of Leamington, at least I
told him I had been thinking of that, and he says
it is the ver}'' best I can choose. I shall try to go
to-day. I shall take those chapters with me, and
write them over at my leisure. I put my book
into Mr. Hawthorne's hands to dispose of as he
thinks best whether I live or die. I wrote to my
friends that I had done so. If he can get it pub-
lished here or in America, I wish he would. I
know he will make the best terms for it that he
can, and he need not wait to consult me about it at
all.
In great haste.
Truly and affectionately yours,
Delia Bacon.
Direct to me at Stratford-on-Avon Post-office.
I shall leave my address there for any one who in-
quires for it.
XV.
In what condition it was that she made alone
this last expedition of her life, to Stratford, is
briefly told by Mrs. Farrar in the book already
quoted.
In London she " had suffered many privations
during the time that she was writing her book.
She lived on the poorest food, and was often with-
out the means of having a fire in her chamber.
She told me that she wrote a great part of her
large octavo volume sitting up in bed, in order to
keep warm. . . .
" Her life of privation and seclusion was very
injurious to both body and mind. How great that
seclusion was is seen from the following passage
from another of her letters to me : ' I am glad to
know that you are still alive and on this side of
that wide sea which parts me from so many that
were once so near, for I have lived here much
like a departed spirit, looking back on the joys and
sorrows of a world in which I have no longer any
place. I have been more than a year in this
house, and have had but three visitors in all that
time, and paid but one visit myself, and that was
to Carlyle, after he had taken the trouble to come
236 DELIA BACON.
all the way from Chelsea to invite me, and al-
though he has since written to invite me, I have
not been able to accept his kindness. I have had
calls from Mr. Grote and Mr. Monckton Milnes ; ^
and Mr. Buchanan came to see me, though I had
not delivered my letter to him.'
" All the fine spirits who knew Miss Bacon
found in her what pleased and interested them,
and had not that one engrossing idea possessed
her, she might have had a brilliant career among
the literary society of London.
" One dark winter evening, after writing all day
in her bed, she rose, threw on some clothes, and
walked out to take the air. Her lodgings were at
the West End of London, near to Sussex Gardens,
and not far from where my mother lived. She
needed my address, and suddenly resolved to go to
the house of Mrs. R. for it. She sent in her re-
quest, and while standing in the doorway she had
a glimpse of the interior. It looked warm, cheer-
ful, and inviting, and she had a strong desire to see
my mother ; so she readily accepted an invitation
to walk in, and found the old lady with her daugh-
ter and a friend just sitting down to tea. Happily
my sister remembered that a Miss Bacon had been
favorably mentioned in my letters from Cambridge,
so she had no hesitation in asking her to take tea
with them. The stranger's dress was such an ex-
traordinary dishabille that nothing but her lady-
^ Richard Monckton Milnes, afterward Lord Houghton. [T. B.]
DELIA BACON. 237
like manners and conversation could have con-
vinced the family that she was the person whom
she pretended to be. She told me how much
ashamed she was of her appearance that evening ;
she had intended going only to the door, but could
not resist the inclination to enter and sit down at
that cheerful tea-table, which looked so like mine
in Cambrido;e.
" The next summer I was living in London.
The death of a dear friend had just occurred in
my house ; the relatives were collected there, and
all were feeling very sad, when I was told by my
servant that a lady wished to see me. I sent word
that there was death in the house, and I could see
no one that night. The servant returned, saying,
* She will not go away, ma'am, and she will not
give her name.'
" On hearing this I went to the door, and there
stood Delia Bacon, pale and sad. I took her in my
arms and pressed her to my bosom ; she gasped for
breath and could not speak. We went into a va-
cant room and sat down together. She was faint,
but recovered on drinking a glass of port wine,
and then she told me that her book was finished
and in the hands of Mr. Hawthorne, and now she
was ready to go to Stratford-upon-Avon. There
she expected to verify her hypothesis, by opening
the tomb of Shakespeare, where she felt sure of
finding papers that would disclose the real author-
ship of the plays. I tried in vain to dissuade her
238 DELIA BACON.
from this insane project; she was resolved, and
only wished for my aid in winding up her affairs
in London and setting her off for Stratford. This
aid I gave witli many a sad misgiving as to the re-
sult. She looked so ill when I took leave of her
in the railroad carriage that I blamed myself for
not having accompanied her to Stratford, and was
only put at ease by a very cheerful letter from
her, received a few days after her departure."
This letter was very like in substance, and al-
most in terms, to that which follows here.
August 29-30, '56.
My dear Mrs. Hawthorne, — Twenty -four
hours after I left London — alone, and fearfully ill
— not knowing hardly whither I went, — I found
myself lying on the sofa, in the most perfect little
Paradise of neatness and comfort that you can
possibly conceive of — if it had been invented on
purpose, and dropped down out of the clouds to
receive me at the end of my journey, it could not
have been more exactly the place I wanted, — with
a dear good motherly old lady to nurse me and
take care of me, and no other creature in the
house but her little servant who is all of a piece
with the rest of it. It is not a lodging house.
The owner of it lives on her rents, and never took
a lodger in her life before, but some person had
heard that she thouo-ht of taking^ a friend of hers
for company, and something had happened to pre-
DELIA BACON. 239
vent it, and she thought if she could find a hidj to
her mind, perhaps she would take one. I had stip-
ulated for a place near the church, and this was
mentioned in that connection. The only objects
to be seen from my window as I write are the
trees on the banks of the Avon, and the church
directly before me, only a few yards from here,
though I shall have to go about some to find ac-
cess to it, I suppose. I took the old lady by storm.
She was not at home when I arrived here. I had
come in a " Fly " from the " Red 'Orse," for I could
just as soon have forded the Atlantic Ocean as to
have walked the short distance from my inn to this
place. You must know I was so deadly ill that I
could not get taken in at an ordinary lodging
house ; they thought from my appearance that I
was going to die directly and that it would not be
worth the trouble. At least there was great hesi-
tation on that account evidently, and I could not
wait for the decision. This old lady had gone to
church — something about the Jews — her little
handmaid said, from which I argued favorably.
The moment I looked into the house I thought I
saw that it was the place appointed for me, and I
ordered the porter to take off my luggage. It
was deposited in the hall, and seating myself in
the room which I intended to occupy, and trying
to get as much life into my face as I could, I
awaited with some anxiety the return of the owner
of the establishment. The little handmaid seemed
240 DELIA BACON.
to have some misgivings and once she came to the
door and said timidly, " Do you know Mrs. Terrett ? "
I told her she need not give herself any trouble, I
would take all the blame of it. The kitchen was
what finally decided me to stop ; I walked into it,
and I thought it was the prettiest place I ever saw.
The walls were painted cerulean blue, and every-
thing in it shone like gold. The little servant kept
running up stairs and putting her head out of the
window, and finally she reported that the thing was
ended, whatever it was, and that her mistress was
coming. The moment I saw her kind countenance
I was sure that I had not made a mistake. She
was very much surprised of course, — said that she
had thought a little of such a thing, but was not
aware that she had named it to any one. She saw
that I was very ill, and that I think decided her not
to send me away, at least till I was better. We
talked about the price. — Two very, very nice
rooms, good sized, and well furnished — the front
room and the room over it. She asked me if I
thought — if she furnished linen, etc. — if seven
shillings per week would be too much for rent and
attendance. As I had been paying eighteen, for
accommodations very much less to my mind, I told
her I thought it would not. So all was settled,
and she made me lie down on the sofa and covered
me up like a mother, and went off to prepare some
refreshment for me immediately, and there I lay
at two o'clock — (the hour I left London the day
DELIA BACON. 241
before) looking out on that church spire, and those
trees on the Avon, so near, so very near, and yet
doubtful whether my feet would ever take me
the're. For such deathly, deathly weakness no
one ever felt before I believe who was able to go
about in person to take lodgings. I have scarcely
had a thought or an emotion since I left London.
I am only an automaton obeying some former pur-
pose, obeying rather the Power above that is work-
ing beneficently in all this. I have no anxiety,
no care about it. I love to be here. Those beau-
tiful trees and that church spire look a little like
dream-land to me, and after the trouble of the
journey yesterday I felt almost inclined to pro-
nounce the aspirate as the natives do here ; it
would not be the first time that that play on the
word has been made — 'Avon. I lie here as quiet
and as helpless as a baby waiting on the Power
that has brought me here, with no fear now that
any thing will fail which the opening of this new
fountain of blessings for men, requires to be done.
I shall be here perhaps for months to come. To
recover my health is now my only object. If that
can he done, this I think is the place for it. The
air is as pure as heaven, and the calm after that
noise for twenty months soothes me every moment.
Yesterday I could not have written a page of this
to save my life, but I have had the table drawn up
to the sofa and I stop and rest me whenever I am
tired. It gives me pleasure to write it to you, and
242 DELIA BACON.
I think you will like to know what has become of
me, though I do not know as you will care for all
these details. But I thought you might feel some
uneasiness about me, taking all the circumstances
into the account, and I wished both Mr. H. and
yourself to know that I am here for my health,
and for the rest I shall wait for clear indications,
and I expect help and direction from a power
which is not limited to the sphere of my conscious-
ness and volitions. I expect it to work in other
minds as well as my own if that should be required,
for I do not think that I have been brought here
after so long a time for nothing. I had to stop in
the midst of a sentence last night for that deathly
faintness came over me again and I could not even
sign my name to the letter so as to get it to the
Post in time. I slept eight hours last night and
this morning I begin to feel some faint return of
my former self. Till now my mind has instinc-
tively excluded all thoughts of my work and every-
thing connected with it. What I have put on pa-
per here is the most that I have thought on the
subject since I left London. There was no vital-
ity to spare, and I suppose it will take many days
yet to put me back where I was in health when
I planned my journey here.
Most truly yours,
Delia Bacon.
Address at Mrs. Terrett's,
College St., Stratford-on-Avon.
DELIA BACON. 243
[Mrs. HAWTHOKifE to D. B.]
My dear Miss Bacon, — When I received your
very welcome note dated Stratford-on-Avon, I had
on my bonnet to go to Oxford with Mr. Haw-
thorne, or I should have replied to it at once. I
have been to Oxford — and when there was hur-
ried from place to place and obliged to sit and be
polite part of the time, as we were guests of a
gentleman there. On my return I was obliged to
spend the very next day in London to see the
Doctor and a dentist. The next day I went to
Hampton Court, and now this is the first quiet and
leisure I have had. I am unspeakably stupid from
fatigue to-day, but I cannot allow another mail to
pass without telling you what a relief it was to me
to have your note, and to hear that you were in
such a sweet little quiet place, and under such
kind guardianship. May Heaven bless the old
lady and her little maid ! May the sun ever shine
on the cottage ! You seem led by the angel of
the Lord. I wish very much to know whether
you are getting better. If you cannot write, tell
the kind old lady to write for you and let me know
how you do. We shall leave Blackheath on the
Thursday or Friday of this week — and then will
you direct to the Consulate till I can tell you
where we are at the seaside. It seems to me
impertinent to be anxious or careful about you
whom the angels guard. Our friend Mr. Bennoch
244 DELIA BACON.
is going to aid us about getting your manuscripts
published, but I know nothing to tell you quite
yet.
My dear Miss Bacon, I did not know till your
note enclosed by Mrs. Farrar that your health was
feeble, or that your friends had left you solely to
God. Mr. Hawthorne had never informed me of
your present needs. I thought you " beyond the
utmost scope and vision of calamity," like a dis-
embodied thought. You ought not to be obliged
to think of what you shall eat or wherewithal
you should be clothed while occupied with your
noble work.
With the highest admiration and respect,
I am very sincerely yours,
Sophia Hawthoene.
7th September [1856].
[Hawthorne to D. B.]
Liverpool, Sept. 24, '56.
Dear Miss Bacon, — I have seen a notice of
the publication you tell me about, in the Athe-
naeum ; but I have not seen the thing itself, and
can not procure it here. The Athenseum refers to
your essay on the subject, published in Putnam's
Magazine. From the extracts, I should judge that
the author of the "Letter" takes hold of the
matter externally, without looking inside of the
plays for any part of his argument. I will write
to a friend in London to send you a copy.
DELIA BACON. 245
When I was compelled to leave London, I put
the affair (of publishing your work) into the hands
of a gentleman in whose energy I had all confi-
dence, and who seemed to take hold of it lovingly,
for my sake. But I do not yet know what he has
done about it. I shall stir him and all other peo-
ple up about it. I do not know what effect the
publication of the "Letter" will have on the
minds of booksellers ; but, should it draw notice
to the subject, I should deem it all the better.
Your original property in the idea is sufficiently
established.
Mrs. Hawthorne is at Southport, about twenty
miles from Liverpool, and is pretty well.
I write in immense haste.
Sincerely yours,
Nath' Hawthorne.
P. S. You say nothing about the state of your
funds. Pardon me for alluding to the subject;
but you promised to apply to me in case of need.
I am ready. N. H.
Two allusions in the last preceding letter are
worthy of explanation.
The "publication" which had been noticed in
the Athenceum, and of which she had evidently
written to Hawthorne in some alarm, was a pam-
phlet by Mr. William Henry Smith, printed in Lon-
don for private circulation in September, 1856,
and entitled, " Was Lord Bacon the Author of
246 DELIA BACON.
Shakespeare's Plays: A Letter to the Earl of
Ellesmere."
Upon this, Hawthorne, in his Introduction to
Delia Bacon's book, animadverted with severity,
as an unfair assumption of that lady's theory as
original with the author of the pamphlet.
This accusation, however, he afterward publicly
withdrew, upon sufficient assurance from Mr. Smith
that he had " never heard the name of Miss Bacon
until it was mentioned in the review of " his
pamphlet.
The friend in whose hands Hawthorne had now
"put the affair of publishing" was Francis Ben-
noch, F. S. A., a London merchant, and sometime
Member of Parliament. The published " English
Note-Books " of Hawthorne show on almost every
page how close their friendship was during all his
stay in England. He was himself — or he would
not have been Hawthorne's friend — a gentleman
of fine tastes, which are evinced in a collected
volume of his poems.^
^ Poems., Lyrics, Songs, and Sonnets:, Houghton, Mifflin & Co.,
1881.
XVI.
When Hawthorne saw his correspondent, on the
29th of July, he recorded in his diary the judg-
ment that she was " a monomaniac." The phrase,
which he may have used, as it is used so often, in
something less than its scientific sense, was rapidly
coming to be strictly exact. The complete signifi-
cance of these following letters, in showing her in-
creasing mental disturbance, will be made clearer
by giving some account of a long and most wise,
considerate, and affectionate one from her brother
to her, about the 12th of September.
He tells of that " ceaseless pressure of work,"
known to all who knew him, which had hindered
his writing to her very often or very long. " But
your last letter," he says, "moves me to seize time
from other duties, and to write more at length
than I have done heretofore. . . .
" I read with much interest your article in the
January number of Putnam's Magazine ; and I
shared with you — as I believe I have already told
you — in the disappointment which followed. The
thought of your obtaining for your long labors
something which might give you at least a tem-
porary support was one which I entertained the
248 DELIA BACON.
more gladly for its unexpectedness. I will still
hope that the materials which you have accumu-
lated as the result of so much toil may be made
available for your relief from the troubles that
crowd you. Of course, I have no means of judg-
ing what those materials are, except from the
specimen in the Magazine. If any one can help
you in making them available, Mr. Hawthorne is
the man. Let me beg you to follow his advice.
If he can find a publisher for you, do not hesitate
to accept any compensation which he may think
reasonable, or (in your circumstances) expedient.
As an experienced author, he is competent to ad-
vise you on all questions, both as to what yov\ will
select for publication, and how you will publish it.
As to the title, I would say. Let him and the pub-
lisher agree about that. Their judgment will be
worth more than yours and mine together. This,
however, I will venture to suggest. Your mate-
rials, if I have any idea of them, will be worth
more to you in the shape of separate articles for
magazines and other periodicals, than if put into
one solid volume. And, furthermore, your theor}'-
about the authorship of Shakspeare's Plays is
worth far less in money value to you or to any
publisher, than your exposition of the meaning of
those compositions. You know perfectly well that
the great world does not care a sixpence who wrote
Hamlet. But there are myriads who can read
Hamlet with delight, and who will be thankful to
DELIA BACON. 249
anybody that will make their reading of it more
delightful or more useful.
" Indeed, my dear sister, if you will but have
the courage to fall back on your natural good
sense, you will find your way out of ' the enchanted
wood ' into which you have been led. Misguided
by your imagination, you have yielded yourself to
a delusion which, if you do not resist it and escape
from it as for your life, will be fatal to you. How
to say less than this, I know not. I am not now
to inform you that your theory about Shakspeare
and Shakspeare's tomb and all that is a mere
delusion — a trick of the imagination. For five
years you have known that I think so. And —
my dear sister — can you not, in God's name, and
in the strength which he will give you, break the
spell, and escape from the delusion ? "
Then, after news of many persons in whom she
was interested, he resumes :
" I have written this long letter at intervals,
snatching; a few moments now and then for the
purpose of expressing my undiminished brotherly
interest in your welfare. Some passages were
written with the consciousness that they would be
painful to you, but T show you more respect and
treat you with more confidence by retaining them,
than I could by suppressing them. The friends
who humor your delusion, and permit you to be-
lieve that they think there may be something in
it, may have the kindest intentions, but they have
250 DELIA BACON.
less confidence in you than I have shown by
speaking frankly what they think would be lost
upon you. And having returned to this subject, I
will make another suggestion. Your theory about
the authorship of Shakspeare's plays may after all
be worth something if published as a fiction. You
might introduce such things into a romance, and
find readers who would accept it respectfully as
a work of imagination, and be gratified with it,
when if the same things are brought forward with
grave argument, as facts to be believed, they will
reject the whole work with contempt. I make
this suggestion, not to discourage you, but to
encourage you, by showing how all your materials
may be turned to good account. ... I hope to
write to you again before long. Meanwhile com-
mending you to the watchfulness and covenant
love of the God of our father and mother, I am
your affectionate brother."
This letter was never answered. Its effect upon
her however, so different from that which its wise
and solemnly tender remonstrance must surely
have had upon her normal mind, is plainly enough
shown in that to Hawthorne which follows. But
before e-ivino- that there should be mentioned three
little notes from the vicar of Stratford. On the
11th of October he expresses regret at having
been unable to call on her that morning, and
promises to come on Monday. That day he again
excuses himself on the ground of a forgotten en-
DELIA BACON. 251
gagement, and proceeds : " As further delay might
cause inconvenience to yourself I shall commit to
paper what I should have preferred to say viva
voce, viz., that I regret extremely that I cannot
accede to your request under a sense of the duty
which I owe to others; but I must at the same
time assure you most sincerely that my decision is
not influenced by the least want of confidence in
yourself. I shall however be most happy to find
that I can make such arrangements as will enable
you to accomplish your purpose. If you would
not object to the presence of the Clerk, who I feel
sure would not betray j^our confidence, or if you
w^ould like better to be accompanied by me, which-
ever you prefer, you have only to intimate your
wishes and I will pay the readiest attention to
them. I need scarcely add that I have complied
with 3'onr request not to mention the subject to
any human being." And at last, on the 14th, in
answer, it seems, to further urgency of the sort
disclosed in her letter which follows, he writes
again " to assure you that I am not in the least
disposed to look upon our brothers of the other
side of the Atlantic at all as strangers. The fact
of their coming so long a pilgrimage to the shrine
of Shakspeare would induce me to give them a
greater degree of consideration than my own
countrymen. Having a distinct and plain duty to
perform, I should not, even were Lord Carlisle
to come here and make the same request to me,
252 DELIA BACON.
grant it to him even, — and he has certainly done
much for us in Stratford ; and that I do trust you
will not conceive I am for one moment throwing
the least doubt on your good faith in the decision
I have come to."
[D. B. TO Hawthorne.]
Stratford-upon-Avon, Oct. 16 [1856].
Dear Mr. Hawthorne, — I have not yet tested
my belief in regard to the deposit of certain
memorials here which may tend to hasten the
reception of those new applications of science to
practice which the work you have so nobly taken
in hand was meant to propound, and which do not
depend on any such contingency for their value.
Since I have been here I have been in such a state
of health that it has been literally impossible for
me to make the experiment which I came here to
make. I could not bear so much as the thought
of it. Even though I had positively known before-
hand that I should be successful, I should still have
recoiled from it. But I felt that I must not yield
to that weakness, and I was constantly watching
for the moment when my physical strength would
allow me to take the preliminary steps. The week
after I wrote you last, I went to the church for the
second time since I have been here (I told you of
my first visit). I chose the hour at which the clerk
told me I should be the least likely perhaps to be
interrupted by other visitors, and in the course of
DELIA BACON. 253
that hour, I think he brought in not less than
twenty persons. I outstayed them all, but the lia-
bility to intrusion at any moment was not favor-
able to my objects.
" The clerk having locked me in, came for me at
six o'clock, by agreement. That was " a, fair day "
he said, but from eight o'clock in the morning
there was no hour in the day when I could be
sure of being left to myself. I then proposed the
evening, and he made no objection, but said he
would give me a candle and any assistance that I
wanted.
" So the next time I went was in the evening at
seven o'clock. He gave me the key, and he was
to call for me at ten. It was necessary for me to
make a sort of confidant of my landlady, and a
very excellent one she is. It happened that I met
her as I was going, and I induced her to walk
there with me. She shrank very much from going
into the church in the dark, but I told her I was
not in the least afraid, — I only wanted her to
help me a little. So I groped my way to the
chancel, and she waited till the light was struck.
I had a dark lantern like Guy Fawkes, and some
other articles which might have been considered
suspicious if the police had come upon us. The
clerk was getting uneasy, and I found he had fol-
lowed us, though he had not proposed to do so, and
I was very glad Mrs. was with me, because
I made a statement in her presence which reas-
254 DELIA BACON.
sured him, and they both went off and left me
there. That was the chance that I had desired,
but I had made a promise to the clerk that I would
not do the least thing for which he could be called
in question, — and though I went far enough to
see that the examination I had proposed to make,
could be made, leaving all exactly as I found it, it
could not be made in that time, nor under those
conditions. I did not feel at liberty to make it, for
fear I might violate the trust this man had reposed
in me, and if I were not wholly and immediately
successful I should have run the risk of losing any
chance of continuing my research. I was alone
there till ten o'clock. On my right was the old
Player, I knew, looking down on me, but I could
not see him. I looked up to the ceiling but it
was not visible ; there was something that looked
like a midnight sky, and all the long drawn aisle
was in utter darkness. I heard a creaking in it,
a cautious step, repeatedly, and I knew that the
clerk was there and watching me. He told me
when he came in at last, that he had been about
the church all the evening. He evidently felt that
he w^as doing something questionable at least, in
permitting me to be there under those circum-
stances, and as I knew that my movements must
seem quite unaccountable to him, I told him then
and there, in general terms, what my objects were,
but that I had respected my promise to him, and
though I might need his aid I would not propose
DELIA BACON. 255
to him anything inconsistent with his duties, and
that I had concluded to ask the permission of the
Vicar before I proceeded any further. He told me
it would be as much as his place was worth (and
nobody knows how much that is) to assist me
without leave, but if the Vicar would give him leave
he should be very glad to do so. I told him not
to say anything to the Vicar about it until I had
seen him, and though I had not a letter to him I
had some testimonials which would answer my
purpose, and I would introduce myself. That was
rather a premature movement, and I had to stop
to rest upon it."
Then follow many pages — twice as many as
are printed above — telling of the letter from her
brother, with the bitterest complaints of his cold
and deliberate cruelty in writing to her thus. Be-
fore this, in the course of this pursuit of hers, she
says, " I have suffered, past the power of tongue
or pen to say how much, from his harshness and
coldness and from his desertion of me, but I have
always apologized for him and my belief in him
and affection for him has always been ready to re-
vive again, and asking leave to heal over all these
wrongs. But I do not think there is any healing
for this. . . . He knows how to express himself
according to the prescribed rules of Christian
kindness, when he is most cruel. This is a very
fraternal letter on the surface. . . . He affects to
256 DELIA BACON.
consider it [the book] a total failure, and suggests
that I might possibly, out of the wreck of my ma-
terials, compose a work of fiction which might be
amusing and saleable. I might in that way, he
thinks, avoid the * contempt ' — that is his word —
which my views in their present form provoke, —
a contempt which he has just been trying to ex-
press to me with a refinement of cruelty, which
is calculated to make up for its want of sincer-
ity. ... I told you my brother was a good man,
and I have always thought him the very very best
man there was, and the people who know him best
are apt to think that of him. And that is what
has given him this power to hurt me. But this
last letter has robbed him of it. It is the last of
many acts of which I have complained to him in
the bitterness of my soul, but now I understand
them and him, and I shall never complain to him
again. But I don't want any one — I don't want
Mrs. Hawthorne to think ill of him, and for that
reason — and for another which is, I think, a good
one — I wish you would not show her this letter
if you can help it. It is necessary that you should
know what fatal misunderstanding this is, that
separates me from my natural helpers. . . . The
case is a very difficult one you see. I have never
written to them for any aid. I would have died
first. ... I have used the money that my brother
sent me because I could not well help it ; but if he
sends me any more, as I suppose from a line at the
DELIA BACON. 257
end of his letter he expects to, I shall return it to
him. I have not written for any money, but I had
reason to suppose that from one source or the
other I should have some by this time ; but it has
not come yet, and I shall have to take your offer,
for the present. It is not much that I want, but
the money I brought with me is gone, — and to
undertake to do what I propose to do here abso-
lutely without money, though I am getting on
without any impediment thus far, is I suppose ask-
ing too much of human nature, in a place where
the visits of strangers are calculated on as the
principal means of living. . . .
"I am living now in High Street, in a house not
far from the one that Shakespeare retired to or
rather not far from the site of it, and on the same
side of the street, in a house that was evidently
here then, and one that he has often been in I
suppose, and whether it is the air of the place or
the spirit of that abused individual revengefully
inciting me — even without the means and appli-
ances of the New Place, I would be glad to settle
down here quietly as he did, and mind my own
business for the future. And I am not at all sure
that I shan't do that, if I find I can, and the world
should conclude it does not want any help of mine
— I am a great deal more at home here than I
am in America — I tell all the people here, that I
see, that they need not call me ' a foreigner.' My
fathers helped conquer this country, and I have as
258 DELIA BACON.
good a right here as they have. I have not defi-
nitely decided what I am to do in case all that I
am depending on now, fails, but the conviction that
I shall do something, and not die, is getting strong
in me. I shall be relieved from the necessity of
any future reference to the judgment of the world
on my conduct, though I propose to keep by all
means on good terms with myself, i want you to
help me till I can get over this difficulty. Help
me through this research. I won't ask any one
else. After that if I do live I will help myself.
I owe this year of my life to you, and I do not
mean that you, or yours, shall be the poorer for it,
and I say that not for your sake but for my own.
I should have died when Mr. Emerson's letter
came, I think, if it had not been for yours that
came with it, and this more cruel one was sheathed
■with those two little bits of paper on which you
wrote so much. I had had the first when this let-
ter came, and I received the second a few days
after. I have not acknowledged them, but I have
been living on them. I had no heart to go on
till I received the second, after that assault upon
my reason. I knew what fearful risk I was incur-
ring, what my own brother was prepared to say of
me in case I failed, as I expected to, for I began
to take part against myself — it was enough to
drive one mad. But I reviewed all the ground of
my belief, — I summoned to my aid all the faculty
for distinguishing truth from error which God has
DELIA BACON. 259
given me, and though I could not predict the re-
sult, though my belief as to what it may be, and
ought to be, is altogether different from that which
I have in regard to the authorship of the works,
(for that is a scientific certainty, that is knowledge
and not faith,) even under this so fearful penalty,
assured that I may find nothing there, — and that
that is perhaps the thing most to be expected, —
I have concluded that I should fail in the obliga-
tions which have been imposed on me, if I were
to shrink now from this examination for fear of the
personal consequences. That would be base and
cowardly. The inscription speaks of stones ; there
may be but one lying directly on the ground, and
if it is only of the usual thickness there is not
likely to be room for my theory in it. I suppose
this to be a lidy and that there is one beneath it.
Whether there is, or not, I mean to ascertain.
There may have been one beneath it and it may
have been removed. If it contained anything
valuable, it is the more likely to have been.
There must have been a trust reposed in some
one, — if I positively knew it was there once, I
could not be sure it is there now. The stones on
either side of it have been put there since. This
very clerk saw the two on the west side of it put
down, but as to the depth of this, he could not
give me any information. If I can ascertain the
depth beforehand, it might save the trouble of
going any further.
260 DELIA BACON.
" I wanted to have my book published before I
made this inquiry, and I never meant to have my
belief on this point known until I had had an op-
portunity of testing it ; but some one to whom I
told it in the most sacred confidence, and under a
solemn promise of secresy, caused it to be put in
the newspapers, and it has been published all over
England and America. My comfort was that a
paragraph in the newspapers does not live very
long if there is nothing to fan it.
" I want to stay here all winter. I like Stratford.
Shakespeare was right. It is a very nice comfort-
able place to stop in, much better than London for
a person of a genial but retiring turn of mind.
Some time while I am here I expect that exami-
nation to be made. Perhaps no one else but the
person who 7mist be present (I find) will know
whe7i it happens. Three persons in this town know
that it is to be made. They are the persons who
have the power and right to permit and sanction
it ; they are sworn to secresy in case of its failure.
I have taken the clerk and the vicar into my con-
fidence, and the vicar has consulted a friend who
is at the same time a lawyer and a Stratford man
and the one he would most rely on. I asked the
latter for leave to make the examination alone, and
the night is the only time possible for it. He took
my request into consideration, and the result was
that he found it would not be consistent with the
solemn obligations he assumed when he took for-
DELIA BACON. 261
mally the keys of the church from the wardens of
it, to allow of that. It was no want of confidence
in me. If Lord Carlisle should make the same re-
quest, and he has certainly done a great deal for
Stratford, he could only give him the same answer.
He knew why I wished for secresy, and he told me
if I would not object to the presence of the clerk,
who would not, he thought, betray my confidence,
or if I preferred that he himself should accom-
pany me, he would make the necessary arrange-
ments for accomplishing my wishes. I have seen
him since and told him I would accept his offer,
and though I should of course prefer to have him
there it might be a tedious operation ; but he says
he should not mind that at all, and from his last
note I see he has concluded to be there and he
only waits now to hear from me. He has been to
see me twice about it, and there has been consider-
able correspondence. He is ^High Church,' but not
affectedly or perhaps very zealously religious, and
I am glad he is not. I would not trust a very
religious man as I shall have to trust him. What
between justification, and free will, and the great-
est good of the greatest number, which, practically
applied, means number one for the time being,
there is quite too large a margin left for a case
like this. This man is a gentleman and naturally
a fine honorable man, which is much more to the
purpose. ' Nature hath meal and bran ' in the
church and out of it. The arrangements are all
262 DELIA BACON.
made, but they are made as if I were absolutely
certain of failure. I have found by experiment
that I can make the examination thoroughly, and
leave the stone exactly as I find it, and I could do
it alone, weak as I am, now, without any one to
lift a finger to help me. I have promised to per-
form the experiment without removing a particle
of the stone, or leaving a trace of harm, and what
is very gratifying to me under the circumstances,
neither the clerk nor the vicar appears disposed
to take it for granted that I am insane. I have
told them my reasons for it. The archives of this
secret philosophical society are buried somewhere,
perhaps in more places than one. The evidence
points very strongly this way, it points to a tomb
— Lord Bacon's tomb would throw some light on
it I think. Spenser's / know contains, or did when
it was closed, verses, ^ and the pens that writ
them,' the verses of his brother poets, — the poets
of this school, — Raleigh's school. . . .
" I am going to write to Mrs. Hawthorne as soon
as I can. But I cannot speak now, this thing
presses on me so heavily ; the terrors of it are
what you see. If I could do it alone it would not
be so fearful. If I had hope enough to justify it,
I would insist on your being here. But I have
not. The conviction that I ought to do it is the
strength in which I go about it. The vicar is very
friendly to me ; he has not told ^ a human being,'
not even his wife, he says, or he had not until I
DELIA BACON. 263
gave him leave to take advice confidentially, and
therefore, on his account perhaps, as well as on
account of what I have said about my brother, this
letter ought to be for your eye only. Don't stop
to answer this letter. If you will read it that is all
I ask — at present — I have been waiting till the
last moment to write it. I could not write any
less. Truly yours,
Delia Bacon."
It is not without doubt and hesitation that it has
been decided to make publicly known these letters
that follow. But it has seemed right that this part
of the story should be told with the rest; that the
inexhaustible patience, gentleness, and generosity
of Hawthorne should be known, as ih.Qy could never
be but by showing these shrewd trials to which
they were submitted ; while it is not unjust to the
memory of her whose life was now consciously end-
ing, that the approach should be shown of that mad-
ness which nevertheless had not yet stricken her.
His intercession for her brother, whom he did not
know, — seeking by gentle words to turn away
from him imjust accusation ; his untiring devotion
to the purpose which was all that she was now
living for; only served to involve him, the most
helpful friend, except her brother, whom she had
ever known, in the bitter suspicion and anger
which is so often the earliest sign of coming; insan-
ity. Yet misunderstanding, ingratitude, injustice,
264 DELIA BACON.
could not turn him back from helping her. His
clairvoyant soul could see through it all the sin-
cere, earnest, truthful spirit which he honored, and
would serve, even against its consent.
[Hawthorne to D. B.]
Liverpool, Oct. 21, 1856.
Dear Miss Bacon, — I send a post-office order
for five pounds, payable to you at the Stratford
post-office.
I should have had, probably, some decisive in-
telligence about your book, if my friend Mr. Ben-
noch had not been called away from London for a
few days. On his return, we shall certainly know
about it ; and the news shall be good — at least,
not bad — though all the fiends fight against us.
As regards your brother, it is to be considered
that he is, at all events, a brother, and cannot
divest himself of the duties of that relation. And
your claims upon him are quite independent of any
injustice on his part, and of any delicacy of feeling
on yours. He is bound to help you, and you to be
helped by him, just the same as if he had the high-
est faith in yourself and your deeds. No stranger
has a right to interfere in your behalf, unless
constrained by deep interest and respect; but a
brother stands on quite different ground. My con-
viction is strong that you ought not to return any
money that he may remit. Moreover (taking into
consideration as much of his character, and as
DELIA BACON. 2G5
many of all the circumstances, as I am aware of) I
can see that his sympathy was hardly to be hoped
for. In short, I mean to think him a good man
yet.
I shall not (unless you give me leave) show your
letter to Mrs. Hawthorne.
In great haste.
Sincerely yours,
Nath' Hawthorne.
[D. B. TO Hawthorne.]
Stratford-on-Avon, October 22, '56.
Dear Mr. Hawthorne, — I have received your
note with its enclosure of five pounds, for which I
thank you. As to my last letter, I put it entirely
at your discretion. You may publish it in the
newspapers if you choose. I gave you two reasons
for wishing it to be considered confidential for the
present, but of these the first appears to be de-
prived of its force by your answer, and as to the
second I know Mrs. Hawthorne would not betray
my confidence — I had no fear as to that — but
the fact is it was very foolish for me to write on
that subject at all at present, and I am very sorry
that I did so, particularly as I have not been able
to accept the permission given me, and the prob-
ability is that I shall not do so. I may feel that it
is better not to make the inquiry at all than to
make it under such conditions and liabilities. And
I cannot say that I feel at present any strong in-
266 DELIA BACON.
clination to pursue my inquiries on this subject any
further, and as to the book, my feehng at this
moment is that there would be very Uttle use in
pubhsliing it at present. All the evidence of my
sanity there is, you have, and you are not sur-
prised at the imputations my brother casts on me,
and certainly the world is not likely to make any
more favorable judgment. If my own household
and the world are against me, what else shall we
call it ? But it cannot be that I am alone, — a
creature by myself in my mental constitution, —
and if I am out of my way here, it is time that I
was looking for my kindred and the place where
my judgment of the true, and my feeling of the
just, are not insanity. Some such place I believe
in.
If I were sure that my brother would send me
any money I would send this back to you at once,
for I feel that it is a baseness in me to take it, but
I am very far from being sure of that, and unfor-
tunately I had encroached on this before it came
while hoping to receive some from another source.
As to my expectation from my brother, it was
only an inference of mine from the fact that he
knew exactly my circumstances, and that he spoke
of writing again in a few days in a connection which
seemed to imply that he would hardly write for any
other purpose. In case of any accident to myself,
or in case I should not be able to return it very
soon, I wish you to call on him for it, and for the
DELIA BACON. 267
rest of the money that I owe you, — and he knows
exactly what it is, — and tell him from me that he
is bound to pay it ; for in defending himself from a
charge against which there was no defense, he has
not scrupled to deprive me of the resources I had
left in the affection and confidence of my family
and my friends, and he has not even scrupled to
impair the respect which under these hard condi-
tions I had won from strangers. In referring to
my delusions he speaks of persons " who humor me
by affecting to believe that there may be something
in them because they tlunk there would be no use
in opposhig me " ! I supposed he referred to Mr.
Emerson. I knew he had had some correspondence
with him, and I suppose that Mr. Emerson really
thinks now, that that is the course he has taken.
But I could not understand why your so favorable
opinion of the book should be so wholly overlooked
— treated as if it had not been expressed — in all
that he said on that subject.
But I should be sorry to involve you in any
further correspondence on so painful a subject. It
was necessary for me to write this. I sincerely
hope that you will not think it necessary to reply
to it. As to the book, I do not trouble myself
much about that now. I have cast it on the waters,
and if I do not find it again, the world will.
Truly yours,
Delia Bacon.
268 DELIA BACON.
You must not answer this. It is a small matter
to you. You have nothing at stake. Any one
would say that you were perhaps called upon to
say exactly what you did, but this I had to write
and my life depends now on my not reading any
more letters.
That is literally true I believe, and I cannot
squander at this fearful rate that which is so pre-
cious. I have done with this. I will have no more
letters I say from brothers or strangers, friends or
foes. My experience for the last few days shows
that I am not equal to it, so I am obliged to take
this resolution.
October 23, '56.
P. S. This is what I wrote yesterday. But I
cannot let it go as it is. It does no justice at all to
the feeling with which I have received your letter,
or to the position in which I am placed by it. And
I cannot return you this money immediately, as of
course you thought I w^ould, when you wrote that.
Whatever other ill you thought of me you did not
think I could keep it, — you did not think me
capable of that ! — and yet you knew I must.
For that letter which it nearly cost me my life to
write, put you in possession of the case entirely.
But I see how it is. You have heard some bad
news about my book. You have ascertained that
it has no pecuniary value, and the other part of
my work of which I wrote is in that case not avail-
DELIA BACON. 269
able, and you think that I have nothing else to
depend on, and that what I said about promptly
helping myself as soon as this one more requisi-
tion was fulfilled, meant nothing, or that it was
only some vague, impracticable purpose that I was
weakly relying on. But that you should have
thought it necessary to w^ite in that manner to me
at just this time, as if I were a person of such
hardened sensibilities that something less, or some-
thing different, would not have sufficed — that is
what I do not understand. I will show you how
much of the feeling I have left that you thought
me wanting in, — that you must have thought me
wanting in, or you could not have written that to
me at the moment in which I was asking you for
money, and taking it from you. I will tell you
exactl}^ how much of that feeling T have left. You
cannot help me any more after writing that to me.
If you had the keys of heaven you could not. Ay,
but I keep this money, — so I do. — You do not
understand that, — but you shall. If I do not pay
you in one month, — and the chance that I shall is
small, but I ask that time — write to my brother
for it. He shall know what 't is to have a sister
with such a name as I have. I will not take my
book out of your hands because I do not know but
it may have some pecuniary value after all, and if
it has it is properly yours at least until you have
been paid for what I owe you. But what I desire
is that you should have no more trouble with it.
270 DELIA BACON.
I will not have a novel made out of it as my
brother proposes that I should. I will not have
my monomania converted into never so profitable
a speculation, and this life and death earnest of
mine is not going to be published either for the
amusement or contempt of the world. Seal it up
and wait till it is true.
Truly yours,
Delia Bacon.
[Hawthorne to D. B.]
Liverpool, October 24, '56.
My dear Miss Bacon, — I do not know what
reply to make to your last note. Indeed, when
people misunderstand me, I seldom take the
trouble (and never should, on my own account) to
attempt to set them right. I meant, when I be-
gan this scrawl, to say something in my own de-
fence ; but I find it makes me sick to think of it
— so we will let it pass. By telling me what was
the state of affairs between yourself and your
brother, you made it my duty to give you the best
advice I could ; and, on further reflection, I find
my opinion precisely the same as it was at first.
And, seeing with his eyes, I cannot wonder at his
acting as he has.
My opinion of the book has never varied ; nor
have I, up to this moment, spared any effort to
bring it before the public, nor relinquished any
hope of doing so.
DELIA BACON. 271
I suppose it would be in vain to tell you that I
have never thought, for an instant, of any miser-
able little interest that I inio;ht have, in the sue-
cess of the book, or in your being on sisterly terms
with your brother. But really I don't think you
construe me very generously.
However, you will find me always just the same
as I have been ; and if ever I seem otherwise, the
fault is in the eyes that look at me. Nor do I
pretend to be very good ; there are hundreds of
kinder and better people in the world ; but such
as I am, I am genuine, and in keeping with my-
self. And, in honest truth, my dear Miss Bacon,
I wish to do you what good I can.
Hoping that, one day or other, you will be able
to believe this, I say no more.
Sincerely yours,
Nath' Hawthorne.
P. S. Can you possibly have thought that I
suggested your brother's advice to turn the book
into a novel ? I am afraid you did.
[D. B. TO Hawthorne.]
STnATFORD-ON-AvoN, October 29, 1856.
Dear Mr. Hawthorne, — You did not under-
stand my last letter and I will not undertake to
explain it. I supposed that you felt compelled to
write as you did. I attributed it to your sense of
duty and your view of the proprieties of the case.
272 DELIA BACON.
I did not call in question a disinterestedness and
generosity of character to which I have not found
any parallel. I kept your note 24 hours without
opening it, because I was literally unable to open
it, and I have not answered it, because the expla-
nation which it seemed to require did not appear
to me possible. I have written one or two notes
denying that I had made any such charge as the
ones you attributed to me, but the very denial
seemed insulting to you when I saw it on paper,
and I would not send them.
I had just prepared an answer however of half
a dozen lines or so, that you might not miscon-
strue my silence, when I received this morning a
note from Mr. Bennoch informing me that your
efforts and his on behalf of my w^ork had been
successful, so I have concluded to send you this
that my acknowledgment of what I owe you may
accompany what I had said already. My last let-
ter but one, contained allusions to subjects which
I am not in the habit of speaking of, confidentially
or otherwise, and I shall be glad to know that you
have destroyed it.
The fact that these particular publishers under-
take the publication of my work happens fortu-
nately to indicate exactly what it owes you. When
the subject was first presented to Carlyle three
years and a half ago he selected Mr. Parker as the
proper person to represent the English public on
that question, and proposed to take my article to
DELIA BACON. 273
him, giving me to understand that we were to
abide by his decision, which was to determine
whether the thing could go on here or not. You
know what the fate of the article was, and this
very book which he accepts now at your hands
and the hands of your friend he refused at mine
more than a year ago.
His acceptance of the book is in itself a success
which you can hardly estimate though I owe it to
you, because it relieves me on the instant from
the charge to which my belief on this subject has
it seems made me liable. At least that question
will now be before the world, and I shall not be
any longer at the mercy of men whose mercies,
when their own opinions and beliefs are called in
question, are so small. But for the sake of all my
friends, — for my brother's sake and for your sake,
I am glad of this.
And I hope you will not have any occasion to
be sorry for your part in it. If any good comes
of it, you will know just how much of it is the
result of your persevering and most noble efforts
on its behalf. For it would have been a private
manuscript only and never a book but for you.
No one would have dared so much as to read it, no
one had dared to read it till it found you. I had
exhausted all my means of getting it published, I
had tried everything but you. And the reason I
had not applied to you sooner was, I did not think
it would be possible for you with your official
274 DELIA BACON.
duties combined with your own engagements as an
author to give the attention to tlie work which it
would be necessary to give in order to help it at
all. I had tried authors who were not consuls,
and who were most kindly disposed to me, and
who wished to help me, but could not for lack of
time. For your sake I hope it will succeed, and
that you will not suffer my unfortunate personal
relations to you just at this time to detract from
the satisfaction that you might otherwise feel in
achieving anything so difficult. That Mr. Parker
should publish it after all is indeed a proof of what
you were able to do for me.
Gratefully yours,
Delia Bacon.
It was on the day of this last date that Mr. Ben-
noch began his correspondence with her, which
was to be for six months so frequent. It can
easily be gathered from these letters that it was
upon some personal guaranty by Hawthorne him-
self that the very considerable expense of print-
ing the book was incurred by Parker — w^hose
name, however, was after all not to appear on its
title-page.
At the same time with this new life that came
to her, she was making one more attempt to ex-
plore the secret of the tomb. Another — and the
last — note from the vicar, on the 31st of October,
tells her : " I shall be happy to accompany you to
DELIA BACON. 275
the Church at any time convenient to yourself, as
a preUminary step, and will then arrange a time
for further operations when we shall be undis-
turbed." Whether he was meaning thus to humor
the vagaries of an misound mind — of which the
unsoundness certainly had not declared itself to all
people — or had really changed his mind, and was
willing to take part in examining almost the only
famous grave in England which has never been
disturbed, is not easy now to tell. But the explo-
ration has, in fact, never yet been made.
Not long after this, too, comes in upon her
another kindly breath from the world which she
has shut out from herself. In July before, Car-
lyle had written to Emerson : " I have not seen or
distinctly heard of Miss Bacon for a year and a
half past: I often ask myself, what has become of
that poor Lady, and wish I knew of her being safe
among her friends again. I have even lost the ad-
dress (which at any rate was probably not a lasting
one) ; perhaps I could find it by the eye, — but
it is five miles away ; and my non plus ultra
for years past is not above half that distance.
Heigho ! " ^ But now, w^hen at last she felt that
she was above the need of friends, her pride no
longer disdained to speak to them.
* Correspondence of Carlyle and Emerson^ vol. ii. p. 265.
276 DELIA BACON.
[Carltle to D. B.]
Chelsea, 14 December, 1856.
Dear Miss Bacon, — I am greatly pleased to
hear of you again : my thoughts about you have
been many, and my inquiries many in America
and here ; but nothing would come out of them.
Not very long since, — having a House in these
days, and your old lodging having thus become
accessible to me again, I pulled at the bell of the
old House-door (House and Street recognizable to
me by eyesight, title of them entirely forgotten),
pulled there for several minutes, again and again :
but nobody would answer; — I considered withal
that probably nobody might in the least know.
But now we again hear from yourself ; that you
are still well ; nay more, that you have achieved
a manifest success in what has long been the grand
Problem of your life. Well done ! This must be
a greater joy to you than health itself, or any
other blessing : and I must say that by your stead-
fastness you have deserved it ! — You could not
have a better Publisher than Parker ; I am really
thankful, along with you, that your word is at last
to go forth.
My incredulity of your Thesis I have never
hidden from you : but I willingly vote, and have
voted, you should be heard on it to full length ;
and this, whatever farther come of it, will be a
profit to the world, and to yourself — I need not
say what profit it will be !
DELIA BACON. 277
When you return to London let us, so soon as
possible, see you again. We are in our old way,
except that my Wife is rather poorlier than in
common Winters (which are always unkind to
her), and that 1 myself am sunk deeper than ever
towards the very centre of Chaos, — in fact over-
whelmed with such a mud-ocean of confusions and
inexecutable businesses, late and early, as are WkQ
to drown me altogether, I sometimes think. But
they won't either ! Yours always,
T. Caelyle.
During almost four months, from October to
February, while Hawthorne was left wholly un-
disturbed by his importunate correspondent, ag-
grieved as she was by his very kindness and
unselfishness, there raged nevertheless an almost
daily storm of letters between her and Mr. Ben-
noch and the printer. In all Mr. Bennoch's letters
there is manifest a lively appreciation of the
woman with whose singular work he had been put
in charge, and even of the work itself ; and with it
all, such keen good sense and judicious tact in deal-
ing with her strong and obstinate temper, as more
than justified Hawthorne's choice of his friend for
so delicate a service. It is evident that the title of
the book was a subject of continual discussion ; on
the backs of the letters she received are countless
experiments, in her own hand, toward the selection
of a title ; and that ultimately adopted, although
278 DELIA BACON.
with Mr. Bennoch's frank approval, was the result
of mutual concessions on either side.
There arose, however, a trouble of a serious
kind. It was only upon the condition that the
book should have an Introduction by Hawthorne
that Parker had at all consented to publish it ; and
such an introduction the author seems to have
determined, at last, not to have. This determi-
nation, the cause of which is easy to find in the
offended pride which is discovered in her latest
letters to him, Mr. Bennoch seems in some way to
have succeeded in overcoming ; although when at
last it came, she would receive it only upon altera-
tions rigorously insisted upon by her and amiably
yielded by him. But she was not thus prevailed
upon until her refusal of the Preface had brought
Parker, after the printers' work had been almost
completed upon Mr. Bennoch's personal guaranty
of payment, to refuse on his part to publish it.
The best that, upon this grievous failure of plan,
could still be done was done by Mr. Bennoch. He
made new arrangements for the almost completed
work with a house far less known than Parker's
although entirely respectable : the house of Groom-
bridge and Sons, under whose name the book was
not many days after given to the world.
Meanwhile the author had been so far prevailed
upon as to address to Hawthorne this cold and
distant note : —
DELIA BACON. 279
[D. B. TO Hawthorne.]
Stratford-on-Avon, February 10, 1857,
Dear Mr. Hawthorne, — My part in this work
is I believe nearly done. I am finishing in great
haste a few more pages for the Introduction, which
I expect to send to-morrow. The printer writes
me to-day that he is now waiting for your preface
and wishes me to write to you for it. Of course I
understood that you preferred that the correspond-
ence should be conducted through Mr. Bennoch,
to whose kind interest in the subject I owe so
much, but I have never forgotten on that account
what you have done and are doing for the work.
I do not look on it as a private enterprise. I
had contributed what I could to it, and I did not
call for help till my own power failed. You have
caused it to be published, and I hope you will con-
tinue to give it whatever aid it may seem to you
to deserve and require. I consider that you have
a part in the work which is properly yours. As to
my own personal obligations to you, I will not now
speak of them. I have good hopes of an acquittal
that will pay all debts soon, and that you and no
one else will have occasion to regret the aid you
have given me.
Truly yours,
D. Bacon.
280 DELIA BACON.
[Hawthorne to D. B.]
Liverpool, February 11, 1857.
Dear Miss Bacox, — I wrote the Preface yes-
terday, and am now about forwarding it to Ben-
noch. It has been delayed by the difficulty of
getting a minute's clear space from daily interrup-
tions ; and, indeed, ever since I have had your book
in hand, my mind has been continually torn in tat-
ters ; so that I have had no right to deal with a
work demanding, at least, all the mind with which
nature gifted me.
My preface comprises extracts from the article
which you sent Bennoch, and which he and I
thought it better not to publish. I have said all
the external things that seemed to me necessary,
in order to put you fairly before the public, and
have stated what I think as to the merit of the
work. It is possible that you may say, in your
new Introduction, some things which I have
already said for you ; but this is no great matter.
Do not consider yourself under any personal
obligations to me. I appreciate the spirit in
which you sought my assistance, and did not pre-
sume to burthen you, even in my secret thoughts,
with the imposition of personal favors.
Truly yours,
Nath' Hawthorne.
What still harsher and unkinder rebuff may
have followed this grave and gentle letter does not
DELIA BACON. 281
now appear; Hawthorne seems not to have pre-
served it, perhaps out of consideration for the
writer. But it may be guessed from this which
he wrote in reply.
[Hawthorne to D. B.]
Liverpool, February 19, '57.
Dear Author of this Book, — (For you forbid
me to call you anything else), I utterly despair of
being able to satisfy you with a preface. The
extracts which I made from your Introduction were
such as seemed essential to me, and likely to be of
good effect with the Public. It seems to me they
had better remain.
In one of your early letters to me, you said that
I might call the book a Romance, or whatever I
would. I have not called it anything of the kind,
but have merely refrained from expressing a full
conviction of the truth of your theory. But the
book will be in the hands of the public. Let the
public judge ; as it must. Nothing that I could
say, beforehand, could influence its judgment; and
I do not agree with your opinion that I have said
anything likely to prevent your cause being heard.
Nevertheless, I am most willing to burn the
Preface at once. I desire quite as little as you do
to be known in reference to this work ; and I have
a right not to be known.^ Pray do not think of
1 Written in the margin, with reference by an asterisk: "I mean,
I have no r'ujht to be known."
282 DELIA BACON.
dedicating it to me. You owe me no such ac-
knowledgment; and, under the circumstances, it
would not gratify me in the least.
No better method of solving the difficulty occurs
to me, than to submit the Preface to Mr. Parker.
If he thinks it will do harm, let him say so, as he
will do readily enough, being materially interested
on that point.
I have no time to write more, but must leave the
matter with yourself and Parker and Bennoch, and
any other adviser (for instance, Mr. Carlyle) whom
you choose to call in.
Truly yours,
Nath' Hawthorne.
Just at this time her brother in America, failing,
as she had assured Hawthorne he should fail, to
get further news from her, was writing for news
to Hawthorne. How sincere and truthful Haw-
thorne had been, both in his laudations of her
work and his admonitions concerning its prospects,
may be seen in what he says to her brother, for
no one's eyes but his.
U. S. CONSULATK,
Liverpool, Feb. 26, '57.
My dear Sir, — Your sister is still at Stratford-
on-Avon, and was in her usual state of health
when I last heard from her, about a week ago. I
have forwarded your letter.
DELIA BACON. 283
Her book is now in print, and will probably be
published in this country and in America, within a
few weeks. It will undoubtedly do her credit, in-
tellectually, and may perhaps make many converts
to her theory ; but I do not anticipate a very gen-
eral success, in this latter respect. Her own anti-
cipations, I believe, are very sanguine. It will, I
think, be better received in America than here ;
and this may perhaps operate as an inducement to
her to return home. At all events, she will soon
know what her position really is, and will doubt-
less regulate her proceedings in accordance with it.
Very respectfully yours,
Nath' Hawthorne.
Rev. Dr. Bacon,
New Haven,
Conn.
XVII.
About the beginning of April, 1857, the book
came before the world.
Its title, so long and so laboriously disputed,
was this:
" The Philosophy of The Plays of Shakspere
Unfolded. By Delia Bacon. With a Preface by
Nathaniel Hawthorne, Author of ' The Scarlet
Letter,' etc."
Upon the copies sent to the American market
the name of Ticknor & Fields, Boston, replaced
that of the London publishers.
It was in form an octavo, of about seven hun-
dred pages, including a hundred pages, separately
numbered, of the author's " Introduction." This
" Introduction," after a statement, not too compact
or clear, of " The Proposition," contained a review
of " The Age of Elizabeth, and the Elizabethan
Men of Letters ; " extracts from an altogether
separate, and unpublished. Life of Raleigh ; " Ra-
leigh's School," and '^' The New Academy."
The Historical Argument, begun so brilliantly
in her Putnam article, was expressly omitted here,
and its omission announced.
Book I., on " The Elizabethan Art of Delivery
DELIA BACON. 285
and Tradition," is in two Parts : " Michael de Mon-
taigne's ' Private and Retired Arts,' " and " The
Baconian Rhetoric, or The Method of Progres-
sion."
Book II., on "Elizabethan * Secrets of Morality
and Policy ' ; or. The Fables of the New Learn-
ing," was also in two Parts : " Lear's Philosopher,"
and (Part II.) " Jidius Coesar and Coriolanus : The
Scientific Cure of the Common-Weal."
To all was prefixed this Preface, which Haw-
thorne, under so many discouragements, had writ-
ten for it.
PREFACE.
This Volume contains the argument, drawn from
the Plays usually attributed to Shakspere, in sup-
port of a theory which the author of it has de-
monstrated by historical evidences in another work.
Having never read this historical demonstration
(which remains still in manuscript, with the excep-
tion of a preliminary chapter, published long ago
in an American periodical), I deem it necessary to
cite the author's own account of it : —
" The Historical Part of this work (which was
originally the principal part, and designed to fur-
nish the historical key to the great Ehzabethan
writings), though now for a long time completed
and ready for the press, and though repeated ref-
erence is made to it in this volume, is, for the most
part, omitted here. It contains a true and before
286 DELIA BACON.
unwritten history, and it will yet, perhaps, be pub-
lished as it stands ; but the vivid and accumulating
historic detail, with which more recent research
tends to enrich the earlier statement, and disclos-
ures which no invention could anticipate, are wait-
ing now to be subjoined to it.
" The INTERNAL EVIDENCE of the assumptions
made at the outset is that which is chiefly relied
on in the work now first presented on this subject
to the public. The demonstration will be found
complete on that ground ; and on that ground
alone the author is willing, and deliberately pre-
fers, for the present, to rest it.
" External evidence, of course, will not be want-
ing ; there will be enough and to spare, if the
demonstration here be correct. But the author of
the discovery was not willing to rob the world of
this great question ; but wished rather to share
with it the benefit which the true solution of the
Problem offers — the solution prescribed by those
who propounded it to the future. It seemed
better to save to the world the power and beauty
of this demonstration, its intellectual stimulus, its
demand on the judgment. It seemed better, that
the world should acquire it also in the form of
criticism, instead of being stupefied and overpow-
ered with the mere force of an irresistible, exter-
nal, historical proof. Persons incapable of appre-
ciating any other kind of truth, — those who are
capable of nothing that does not ' directly fall
DELIA BACON. 287
Tinder and strike ihe senses,' as Lord Bacon ex-
presses it, — will have their time also ; but it was
proposed to present the subject first to minds of
another order."
In the present volume, accordingly, the author
applies herself to the demonstration and develop-
ment of a system of philosophy, which has pre-
sented itself to her as underlying the superficial
and ostensible text of Shakspere's plays. Traces
of the same philosophy, too, she conceives herself
to have found in the acknowledged works of Lord
Bacon, and in those of other writers contemporary
with him. All agree in one system; all these
traces indicate a common understanding and unity
of purpose in men among whom no brotherhood
has hitherto been suspected, except as representa-
tives of a grand and brilliant age, when the human
intellect made a marked step in advance.
The author did not (as her own consciousness
assures her) either construct or originally seek this
new philosophy. In many respects, if I have
rightly understood her, it was at variance with her
preconceived opinions, whether ethical, religious,
or political. She had been for years a student of
Shakspere, looking for nothing in his plays beyond
what the world has agreed to find in them, when
she began to see, under the surface, the gleam of
this hidden treasure. It was carefully hidden, in-
deed, yet not less carefully indicated, as with a
pointed finger, by such marks and references as
288 DELIA BACON.
could not ultimately escape the notice of a subse-
quent age, which should be capable of profiting
by the rich inheritance. So, too, in regard to Lord
Bacon. The author of this volume had not sought
to put any but the ordinary and obvious interpre-
tation upon his works, nor to take any other view
of his character than what accorded with the
unanimous judgment upon it of all the generations
since his epoch. But, as she penetrated more and
more deeply into the plays, and became aware of
those inner readings, she found herself compelled
to turn back to the "Advancement of Learning"
for information as to their plan and purport ; and
Lord Bacon's Treatise failed not to give her what
she sought ; thus adding to the immortal dramas,
in her idea, a far higher value than their warmest
admirers had heretofore claimed for them. They
filled out the scientific scheme which Bacon had
planned, and which needed only these profound
and vivid illustrations of human life and character
to make it perfect. Finally, the author's re-
searches led her to a point where she found the
plays claimed for Lord Bacon and his associates, —
not in a way that was meant to be intelligible in
their own perilous times, — but in characters that
only became legible, and illuminated, as it were,
in the light of a subsequent period.
The reader will soon perceive that the new phi-
losophy, as here demonstrated, was of a kind that
no professor could have ventured openly to teach
DELIA BACON. 289
in the days of Elizabeth and James. The conchid-
ing chapter of the present work makes a powerful
statement of the position which a man, conscious of
great and noble aims, would then have occupied ;
and shows, too, how familiar the age was with all
methods of secret communication, and of hiding
thought beneath a masque of conceit or folly. Ap-
plieably to this subject I quote a paragraph from a
manuscript of the author's, not intended for pres-
ent publication : —
" It was a time when authors, who treated of a
scientific politics and of a scientific ethics inter-
nally connected with it, naturally preferred this
more philosophic, symbolic method of indicating
their connection with their writings, which would
limit the indication to those who could pierce
within the veil of a philosophic symbolism. It was
the time when the cipher, in which one could
write ' omnia jycr omnia,' was in such request, and
when ^ wheel ciphers ' and ^ doubles ' were thought
not unworthy of philosophic notice. It was a
time, too, when the phonographic art was culti-
vated, and put to other uses than at present, and
when a nom de plume was required for other pur-
poses than to serve as the refuge of an author's
modesty, or vanity, or caprice. It w^as a time
when puns, and charades, and enigmas, and ana-
grams, and monograms, and ciphers, and puzzles,
were not good for sport and child's play merely ;
when they had need to be close ; when they had
290 DELIA BACON.
need to be solvable, at least, only to those who
should soloe them. It was a time when all the
latent capacities of the English language were put
in requisition, and it was flashing and crackling,
through all its lengths and breadths, with puns and
quips, and conceits, and jokes, and satires, and in-
lined with philosophic secrets that opened down
' into the bottom of a tomb' — that opened into
the Tower — that opened on the scaffold and the
block."
I quote, likewise, another passage, because I
think the reader will see in it the noble earnest-
ness of the author's character, and may partly
imagine the sacrifices which this research has cost
her : —
" The great secret of the Elizabethan age did not
lie where any superficial research could ever have
discovered it. It was not left within the range of
any accidental disclosure. It did not lie on the
surface of any Elizabethan document. The most
diligent explorers of these documents, in two cen-
turies and a quarter, had not found it. No faint-
est suspicion of it had ever crossed the mind of
the most recent, and clear-sighted, and able inves-
tigator of the Baconian remains. It was buried
in the lowest depths of the lowest deeps of the
deep Elizabethan Art : that Art which no plum-
met, till now, has ever sounded. It was locked
with its utmost reach of traditionary cunning. It
was buried in the inmost recesses of the esoteric
DELIA BACON. 291
Elizabethan learning. It was tied with a knot
that has passed the scrutiny and baffled the sword
of an old, suspicious, dying, military government
— a knot that none could cut — a knot that must
be untied,
" The great secret of the Elizabethan age was
inextricably reserved by the founders of a new
learning, the prophetic and more nobly gifted
minds of a new and nobler race of men, for a re-
search that should test the mind of the discoverer,
and frame and subordinate it to that so sleepless
and indomitable purpose of the prophetic aspira-
tion. It was * the device ' by which they under-
took to live again in the ages in which their
achievements and triumphs were forecast, and to
come forth and rule again, not in one mind, not in
the few, not in the many, but in all. ' For there
is no throne like that throne in the thoughts of
men,' which the ambition of these men climbed
and compassed.
^' The principal works of the Elizabethan Phi-
losophy, those in which the new method of learn-
ing was practically applied to the noblest subjects,
were presented to the world in the form of AN
ENIGMA. It was a form well fitted to divert in-
quiry, and baffle even the research of the scholar
for a time ; but one calculated to provoke the phil-
osophic curiosity, and one which would inevitably
command a research that could end only with the
true solution. That solution was reserved for one
292 DELIA BACON.
who would recognize, at last, in the disguise of
the great impersonal teacher, the disguise of a
new learning. It waited for the reader who would
observe, at last, those thick-strewn scientific clues,
those thick - crowding enigmas, those perpetual
beckonings from the * theatre ' into the judicial
palace of the mind. It was reserved for the stu-
dent who would recognize, at last, the mind that
was seeking so perseveringly to whisper its tale of
outrage, and ' the secrets it was forbid.' It waited
for one who would answer, at last, that philosophic
challenge, and say, * Go on, I'll follow thee ! ' It
was reserved for one who would count years as
days, for the love of the truth it hid ; who would
never turn back on the long road of initiation,
though all ' THE IDOLS ' must be left behind in its
stages ; who would never stop until it stopped in
that new cave of Apollo, where the handwriting
on the wall spells anew the old Delphic motto,
and publishes the word that ' unties the spell.' "
On this object, which she conceives so loftily,
the author has bestowed the solitary and self-sus-
tained toil of many years. The volume now be-
fore the reader, together with the historical dem-
onstration which it presupposes, is the product
of a most faithful and conscientious labor, and a
truly heroic devotion of intellect and heart. No
man or woman has ever thought or written more
sincerely than the author of this book. She has
given nothing less than her life to the work.
DELIA BACON. 293
And, as if for the greater trial of her constancy,
her theory was divulged, some time ago, in so par-
tial and unsatisfactory a manner — with so exceed-
ingly imperfect a statement of its claims — as to
put her at a great disadvantage before the world.
A single article from her pen, purporting to be the
first of a series, appeared in an American Maga-
zine ; but unexpected obstacles prevented the fur-
ther publication in that form, after enough had
been done to assail the prejudices of the public,
but far too little to gain its sympathy. Another
evil followed. An English writer (in a " Letter to
the Earl of Ellesmere," published within a few
months past) has thought it not inconsistent with
the fair-play, on which his country prides itself, to
take to himself this lady's theory, and favor the
public with it as his own original conception, with-
out allusion to the author's prior claim. In refer-
ence to this pamphlet, she generously says : —
" This has not been a selfish enterprise. It is
not a personal concern. It is a discovery which
belongs not to an individual, and not to a people.
Its fields are wide enough and rich enough for us
all ; and he that has no work, and whoso will, let
him come and labor in them. The field is the
world's; and the world's work henceforth is in it.
So that it be known in its real comprehension, in
its true relations to the weal of the world, what
matters it ? So that the truth, which is dearer
than all the rest — which abides with us when all
294 DELIA BACON.
others leave us, dearest then — so that the truth,
which is neither yours nor mine, but yours and
mine, be known, loved, honored, emancipated,
mitred, crowned, adored — who loses anything,
that does not find it." " And what matters it,"
says the philosophic wisdom, speaking in the ab-
stract, " what name it is proclaimed in, and what
letters of the alphabet we know it by ? — what
matter is it, so that they spell the name that is
good for all, and good for each," — for that is the
REAL name here ?
Speaking on the author's behalf, however, I am
not entitled to imitate her magnanimity; and,
therefore, hope that the writer of the pamphlet
will disclaim any purpose of assuming to himself,
on the ground of a slight and superficial perform-
ance, the result which she has attained at the cost
of many toils and sacrifices.
And now, at length, after many delays and dis-
couragements, the work comes forth. It had been
the author's original purpose to publish it in Amer-
ica ; for she wished her own country to have the
glory of solving the enigma of those mighty dra-
mas, and thus adding a new and higher value to
the loftiest productions of the English mind. It
seemed to her most fit and desirable that America
— having received so much from England, and re-
turned so little — should do what remained to be
done towards rendering this great legacy available,
as its authors meant it to be, to all future time.
DELIA BACON. 295
This purpose was frustrated ; and it will be seen
in what spirit she acquiesces.
" The author was forced to bring it back, and con-
tribute it to the literature of the country from which
it was derived, and to which it essentially and insep-
arably belongs. It was written, every word of it, on
English ground, in the midst of the old familiar
scenes and household names, that even in our nur-
sery songs revive the dear ancestral memories; those
'royal pursuivants' with which our mother-land
still follows and re-takes her own. It was written
in the land of our old kings and queens, and in the
land of our own philosophers and poets also. It
was written on the spot where the works it un-
locks were written, and in the perpetual presence
of the English mind ; the mind that spoke before
in the cultured few, and that speaks to-day in the
cultured many. And it is now at last, after so
long a time — after all, as it should be — the Eng-
lish press that prints it. It is the scientific Eng-
lish press, with those old gags (wherewith our
kings and queens sought to stop it, ere they knew
what it was) champed asunder, ground to powder,
and with its last Elizabethan shackle shaken off,
that restores, ' in a better hour,' the torn and gar-
bled science committed to it, and gives back ' the
bread cast on its sure waters.' "
There remains little more for me to say. I am
not the editor of this work ; nor can I consider
myself fairly entitled to the honor (which, if I
deserved it, I should feel it to be a very high as
296 DELIA BACON.
well as a perilous one) of seeing my name asso-
ciated with the author's on the title page. My
object has been merely to speak a few words,
which might, perhaps, serve the purpose of plac-
ing my countrywoman upon a ground of amicable
understanding with the public. She has a vast
preliminary difficulty to encounter. The first feel-
ing of every reader must be one of absolute re-
pugnance towards a person who seeks to tear out
of the Anglo-Saxon heart the name which for ages
it has held dearest, and to substitute another name,
or names, to which the settled belief of the world
has long assigned a very different position. What
I claim for this work is, that the ability employed
in its composition has been worthy of its great
subject, and well employed for our intellectual in-
terests, whatever judgment the public may pass
upon the question discussed. And, after listening
to the author's interpretation of the Plays, and
seeing how wide a scope she assigns to them, how
high a purpose, and what richness of inner mean-
ing, the thoughtful reader will hardly return again
— not wholly, at all events — to the common view
of them and of their author. It is for the public
to say whether my countrywoman has proved her
theory. In the worst event, if she has failed, her
failure will be more honorable than most people's
triumphs ; since it must fling upon the old tomb-
stone, at Stratford-on-Avon, the noblest tributary
wreath that has ever lain there.
Nathaniel Hawthokne.
xvm.
The reception which this volume was to meet
from the Eiighsh public and English critics had
been, indeed, pretty well apprehended in advance
by some of those few who were admitted to its
author's confidence, and were suffered to advise
her. Perhaps, nevertheless, they were right, these
men of philosophic insight and wide experience in
letters — Carlyle, Emerson, Hawthorne — in de-
claring that, whatever might come of it, it was a
work so full of truth and wisdom that the w^orld
ought by no means to be deprived of it. . At any
rate, here at last it was; and what did in fact
come of it Hawthorne himself has told.
" Without prejudice to her literary ability, it
must be allowed that Miss Bacon was wholly unfit
to prepare her own work for publication, because,
among many other reasons, she was too thoroughly
in earnest to know what to leave out. Every leaf
and line was sacred, for all had been written under
so deep a conviction of truth as to assume, in her
eyes, the aspect of inspiration. A practised book-
maker, with entire control of her materials, would
have shaped out a duodecimo volume full of elo-
quence and ingenious dissertation, — criticisms
298 DELIA BACON.
which quite take the color and pungency out of
other people's critical remarks on Shakspeare, —
philosophic truths which she imagined herself to
have found at the roots of his conceptions, and
which certainly come from no inconsiderable depth
somewhere. There was a great amount of rub-
bish, which any competent editor would have
shoveled out of the way. But Miss Bacon thrust
the whole bulk of inspiration and nonsense into
the press in a lump, and there tumbled out a
ponderous octavo volume, which fell with a dead
thump at the feet of the public, and has never
been picked up. A few persons turned over one
or two of the leaves, as it lay there, and essayed to
kick the volume deeper into the mud; for they
were the hack critics of the minor periodical press
in London, than whom, I suppose, though doubt-
less excellent fellows in their way, there are no
gentlemen in the world less sensible of any sanc-
tity in a book, ot less likely to recognize an au-
thor's heart in it, or more utterly careless about
bruising, if they do recognize it. It is their trade.
They could not do otherwise. I never thought of
blaming^ them. It was not for such En(]jlishmen as
one of these to get beyond the idea that an assault
was meditated on England's greatest poet. From
the scholars and critics of her own country, indeed,
Miss Bacon might have looked for a worthier ap-
preciation, because many of the best of them have
higher cultivation, and finer and deej)er literary
DELIA BACON. 299
sensibilities, than all but the very profoundest and
brightest of Englishmen. But they are not a cour-
ageous body of men ; they dare not think a truth
that has an odor of absurdity, lest they should feel
themselves bound to speak it out. If any Ameri-
can ever wrote a word in her behalf, Miss Bacon
never knew it, nor did I. Our journalists at once
republished some of the most brutal vituperations
of the English press, thus pelting their poor coun-
trywoman with stolen mud, without even waiting
to know whether the ignominy was deserved.
And they never have known it, to this day, and
never will. . . .
" I believe that it has been the fate of this
remarkable book never to have had more than
a single reader. I myself am acquainted with it
only in insulated chapters and scattered pages and
paragraphs. But, since my return to America, a
young man of genius and enthusiasm^ has assured
me that he has positively read the book from
beginning to end, and is completely a convert to its
doctrines. It belongs to him, therefore, and not
to me, — whom, in almost the last letter that I
received from her, she declared unworthy to med-
1 This " young man " (it was in 1863 that Hawthorne was writ-
ing) was Mr. William D. O'Connor, now of the Life- Saving Service,
Washington, and author of Hamlet''!! Note-book: Houghton, Mifflin
& Co., 1886. The task which Hawthorne, in the passage quoted,
seems to lay upon him, failing strength has forced him to abandon.
Materials, however, furnished to him by Hawthorne for such a pur-
pose, he has kindly put at my disposal. — [T. B.]
300 DELIA BACON.
die with her work, — it belongs surely to this one
individual, who has done her so much justice as to
know what she wrote, to place Miss Bacon in her
due position before the public and posterity." ^
^ Our Old Home: chapter, " Recollections of a Gifted Woman."
XIX.
When this work of hers, for which alone she
had for years been willing to live, was done — and
failed — her life was ended too.
Before this time in all that she wrote or did there
was nothing to mark a disordered intellect, unless
her disbelief in the accepted authorship of the
Plays was itself proof of insanity. Even her curi-
ous haunting of the Stratford church and grave
seems not to have been proof of derangement, to
the minds of the vicar and the few other Stratford
people whom she had come to know, or even to
the marvelous instinct of Hawthorne himself.
What he says of her in these last days, indeed, is
at once so kind, so just, and so wise, that it ought
to be reproduced fgr the mere value of its judg-
ment of her, even though there appear in it her
own phrases from her letters already printed above.
Nor can one refrain from thinking how apt to the
genius of the author of the " Scarlet Letter " must
have been the scene which, out of her own descrip-
tion, he presents here, of the night in the ancient
church, with the " Old Player's " grave beneath
her feet, and his image, unseen, looking down
upon her from the darkness. It seems as if only
302 DELIA BACON.
the tender reverence which he avows for the great
and true soul which was on the verge of distrac-
tion could have restrained him from making of it
a chapter in a romance.
" Months before that [the publication of the
book] happened, however, Miss Bacon had taken
up her residence at Stratford-on-Avon, drawn
thither by the magnetism of those rich secrets
which she supposed to have been hidden by
Raleigh, or Bacon, or I know not whom, in Shak-
speare's grave, and protected there by a curse, as
pirates used to bury their gold in the guardianship
of a fiend. She took a humble lodging and began
to haunt the church like a ghost. But she did not
condescend to any stratagem or underhand attempt
to violate the grave, which, had she been capable
of admitting such an idea, might possibly have been
accomplished by the aid of a re?urrection-man.
As her first step, she made acquaintance with the
clerk, and began to sound him as to the feasibility
of her enterprise and his own willingness to engage
in it. The clerk apparently listened with not un-
favorable ears ; but, as his situation (which the
fees of pilgrims, more numerous than at any Cath-
olic shrine, render lucrative) would have been for-
feited by any malfeasance in office, he stipulated
for liberty to consult the vicar. Miss Bacon re-
quested to tell her own story to the reverend
gentleman, and seems to have been received by
DELIA BACON. 303
him with the utmost kindness, and even to have
succeeded in making a certain impression on his
mind as to the desirability of the search. As their
interview had been under the seal of secrecy, he
asked permission to consult a friend, who, as Miss
Bacon either found out or surmised, was a practi-
tioner of the law. What the legal friend advised
she did not learn ; but the negotiation continued,
and certainly was never broken off by an abso-
lute refusal on the vicar's part. He, perhaps, was
kindly temporizing with our poor countrywoman,
whom an Englishman of ordinary mould would
have sent to a lunatic asylum at once. I cannot
help fancying, however, that her familiarity with
the events of Shakspeare's life, and of his death
and burial (of which she would speak as if she had
been present at the edge of the grave), and all the
history, literature and personalities of the Eliza-
bethan age, together with the prevailing power of
her own belief, and the eloquence with which she
knew how to enforce it, had really gone some little
way toward making a convert of the good clergy-
man. If so, I honor him above all the hierarchy
of Enofland.
" The affair certainly looked very hopeful.
However erroneously, Miss Bacon had understood
from the vicar that no obstacles would be inter-
posed to the investigation, and that he himself
would sanction it with his presence. It was to
take place after nightfall ; and all preliminary
304 DELIA BACON.
arrangements being made, the vicar and clerk pro-
fessed to wait only her word in order to set about
lifting the awful stone from the sepulchre. So, at
least, Miss Bacon believed ; and as her bewilder-
ment was entirely in her own thoughts, and never
disturbed her perception or accurate remembrance
of external things, 1 see no reason to doubt it, ex-
cept it be the tinge of absurdity in the fact. But, in
this apparently prosperous state of things, her own
convictions began to falter. A doubt stole into
her mind whether she might not have mistaken the
depository and mode of concealment of those his-
toric treasures ; and after once admitting the doubt,
she was afraid to hazard the shock of uplifting the
stone and finding: nothino;. She examined the sur-
face of the gravestone, and endeavored, without
stirring it, to estimate whether it were of such
thickness as to be capable of containing the archives
of the Elizabethan club. She went over anew the
proofs, the clues, the enigmas, the pregnant sen-
tences, which she had discovered in Bacon's letters
and elsewhere, and now was frightened to per-
ceive that they did not point so definitely to Shak-
speare's tomb as she had heretofore supposed.
There was an unmistakably distinct reference to
a tomb, but it might be Bacon's, or Raleigh's, or
Spenser's ; and instead of the * Old Player,' as she
profanely called him, it might be either of those
three illustrious dead, poet, warrior, or statesman,
whose ashes, in Westminster Abbey, or the Tower
DELIA BACON. 305
burial ground, or wherever they sleep, it was her
mission to disturb. It is very possible, moreover,
that her acute mind may always have had a lurk-
ing and. deeply latent distrust of its own fantasies,
and that this now became strong enough to restrain
her from a decisive step.
" But she continued to hover around the church,
and seems to have had full freedom of entrance in
the day time, and special license on one occasion
at least, at a late hour of the night. She went
thither with a dark-lantern, which could but
twinkle like a glow-worm through the volume of
obscurity that filled the great dusky edifice. Grop-
ing her way up the aisle and towards the chancel,
she sat down on the elevated part of the pavement
above Shakspeare's grave. If the divine poet
really wrote the inscription there, and cared as
much about the quiet of his bones as its depreca-
tory earnestness would imply, it was time for those
crumbling relics to bestir themselves under her
sacrilegious feet. But they were safe. She made
no attempt to disturb them ; though, I believe, she
looked narrowly into the crevices between Shak-
speare's and the two adjacent stones, and in some
way satisfied herself that her single strength would
suffice to lift the former, in case of need. She
threw the feeble ray of her lantern up towards the
buvSt, but could not make it visible beneath the
darkness of the vaulted roof. Had she been sub-
ject to superstitious terrors, it is impossible to con-
306 DELIA BACON.
ceive of a situation that could better entitle her to
feel them, for, if Shakspeare's ghost would rise at
any provocation, it must have shown itself then ;
but it is my sincere belief, that, if his figure had
appeared within the scope of her dark -lantern, in
his slashed doublet and gown, and with his eyes
bent on her beneath the high, bald forehead, just
as we see him in the bust, she would have met
him fearlessly and controverted his claims to the
authorship of the plays to his very face. She
had taught herself to contemn 'Lord Leicester's
groom' (it was one of her disdainful epithets for
the world's incomparable poet) so thoroughly, that
even his disembodied spirit would hardly have
found civil treatment at Miss Bacon's hands.
" Her vigil, though it appears to have had no
definite object, continued far into the night. Sev-
eral times she heard a low movement in the
aisles : a stealth}^, dubious footfall prowling about
in the darkness, now here, now there, among the
pillars and ancient tombs, as if some restless in-
habitant of the latter had crept forth to peep at
the intruder. By and by the clerk made his ap-
pearance, and confessed that he had been watch-
inij; her ever since she entered the church.
" About this time it was that a strange sort of
weariness seems to have fallen upon her : her toil
was all but done, her great purpose, as she be-
lieved, on the very point of accomplishment, when
she began to regret that so stupendous a mission
DELIA BACON. 307
had been imposed on the fragility of a woman.
Her faith in the new philosophy was as mighty as
ever, and so was her confidence in her own ade-
quate development of it, now aboiit to be given to
the world ; yet she wished, or fancied so, that it
might never have been her duty to achieve this
unparalleled task, and to stagger feebly forward
under her immense burden of responsibility and
renown. So far as her personal concern in the
matter went, she would gladly have forfeited the
reward of her patient study and labor for so many
years, her exile from her country and estrange-
ment from her family and friends, her sacrifice of
health and all other interests to this one pursuit, if
she could only find herself free to dwell in Strat-
ford and be forgotten. She liked the old slumbrous
town, and awarded the only praise that ever I
knew her to bestow on Shakspeare, the individual
man, by acknowledging that his taste in a residence
was good, and that he knew how to choose a suit-
able retirement for a person of shy but genial tem-
perament. And at this point, I cease to possess
the means of tracing her vicissitudes of feeling any
further. In consequence of some advice which I
fancied it my duty to tender, as being the only
confidant whom she now had in the world, I fell
under Miss Bacon's most severe and passionate
displeasure, and was cast off by her in the twink-
ling of an eye. It was a misfortune to which
her friends were always particularly liable ; but
308 DELIA BACON.
I think that none of them ever loved, or even
respected, her most ingenuous and noble, but like-
wise most sensitive and tumultuous character, the
less for it." ^
It was on the 12th of June that Mr. David Rice,
surgeon and Mayor of Stratford, wrote in terms of
great kindness and respect for his patient, to the
American consul at Liverpool, asking for " advice
or suggestions " in regard to an American lady
whom he had seen that afternoon. His report was :
" She is in a very excited and unsatisfactory state,
especially mentally, and I think there is much
reason to fear that she will become decidedly
insane." Hawthorne instantly replied, thanking
the surgeon " for your kind attention to my coun-
trywoman " ; authorizing all suitable expenditure
(for it was also reported that her means were ex-
hausted) that might be necessary for her comfort,
and twice over promising to be personally respon-
sible for it. At the same time he transmitted to
her brother in America the news he had received.
There was for a few days much improvement in
her condition, and '^ good reason to believe that
the equilibrium both of her mental and bodily
health will be happily restored, and at no very
distant period." She was troubled to learn that
both Hawthorne and her brother had been told of
her illness, yet grateful to hear of the former's
1 Hawthorne : Our Old Home.
DELIA BACON. 309
generous and instant response. To him she sent
immediately a long letter, clear, vigorous, and
coherent, yet displaying, for the first time, halluci-
nations other than that, if it were one, concerning
the authorship of the Plays. To her brother she
wrote a shorter one, with no word of complaint,
and with warm expressions of the old affection
which she had thought was gone forever. " Hav-
ing fulfilled my work as I thought, I have been
quietly waiting since the publication of my book,
to be informed as to the next movement, — if
movement was indeed the word. I have not
cared to know the result. Since the day I heard
it was published I have made no inquiry on the
subject. ... I am calm and happy. Never hap-
pier, — never so happy. I do not want to come
back to America. I can not come. I pay seven
shillings a week for my rooms and it takes very
little to keep me alive. I do not want any luxuries.
But I think this is the place for me at present.
" Your ever affectionate sister,
Delia Bacon.'*
Since the purpose of this sketch is simply to fur-
nish, to those who care for it, accurate knowledge
and the means of judging justly about her, it is
right not to withhold some passages from the grate-
ful answer which her brother wrote to Hawthorne,
on receiving his announcement of her prostration.
" The crisis at which my sister's case has arrived,
310 DELIA BACON.
requires me to say, plainly, that in my opinion
her mind has been ' verging on insanity ' for the
last six years. She knows that since 1851 I have
habitually distrusted the soundness of her judg-
ment. She knows that I have all along regarded
her darling theory as a mere hallucination. She
therefore distrusts me. When she went to Eng-
land she was very careful to conceal from me the
object of her going and the resources on which she
depended. Indeed, none of her family friends, as
I understand, had the opportunity of helping her
in that enterprise. Mr. Emerson, I believe, fitted
her out with some credentials and valuable letters
of introduction — partly, I doubt not, in that won-
derful ' good-nature ' which is so prominent a fea-
ture in his character — partly, I suspect, in the
special sympathy which he has in whatever is un-
belief. . . . My fear has been, all along, that when-
ever and wherever her book might be published,
the disappointment of that long and confident ex-
pectation would be disastrous if not fatal to her."
For month after month, notwithstanding inter-
mittent lifting of the cloud which had settled
about her, it became more and more evident that
the cloud was the darkness of night. There is let-
ter after letter of Hawthorne, showing his unceas-
ing care for the distracted woman whom he had
already so much befriended, and who had seemed
to requite his kindness with distrust and thankless-
ness. Down to his surrender of the consulate and
DELIA BACON. 311
his departure from England in October, his corre-
spondence with her surgeon at Stratford and her
brother in America was incessant. He had even
been able to arrange, difficult as such an arrange-
ment must have been, for her transportation, under
suitable care, to her native land ; but a new access
of violent mania compelled the abandonment of
the plan. When, about October, he passed over to
the continent, his brief and strange relation to her,
which had served at least to illustrate so exqui-
sitely the qualities of that rare character which
sought nothing more earnestly than to withdraw
itself from admiration, was wholly at an end.
When Hawthorne was gone, there was no longer
an American friend left to her in England. Every
one in Stratford was kind to her — more kind even
than she knew. Even the shoemaker's family,
with whom she lodged, and whom in her increas-
ing derangement she sorely tried, were patient
and considerate as if she were of their own kindred.
One Stratford family too, having many American
acquaintances, and who had received her hospi-
tably before this great misfortune came upon her,
seems to have done what little could be done for
her. But the only American who saw her in Strat-
ford was Miss Maria Mitchell, the eminent astron-
omer, who, being casually there in October, visited
her and reported the visit to the sick woman's
friends. But there was not one of those to whom
her sad condition brought the deepest distress, for
312 DELIA BACON.
whom it was possible to cross the Atlantic to her
relief.
In December, under the stress of her heighten-
ing malady, she was removed to an excellent pri-
vate asylum for a small number of insane persons
at Henley-in-Arden, — in " the forest of Arden,"
— eight miles from Stratford. While she was
there, Emerson was advised of her condition ; and
the terms in which, even in this eclipse of her
intellect and after the failure of her work, he
still expressed himself concerning her, are worth
preserving.
Concord, Mass., 18 February, 1858.
Dr. Leonard Bacon.
Dear Sir, — I have just received from Mrs.
Flower of Stratford-on-Avon the enclosed note,
which I hasten to forward to you. I could heartily
wish that I had very different news to send yon
of a person who has high claims on me and on all
of us who love genius and elevation of character.
These qualities have so shone in Miss Bacon, that,
whilst their present eclipse is the greater calamity,
it seems as if the care of her in these present dis-
tressing circumstances ought to be not at private,
but at the public charge of scholars and friends
of learning and truth. If I can serve you in any
manner in relation to her, you will please to com-
mand me. With great respect,
R. W. Emerson.
DELIA BACON. 313
Concord, 25 February [1858].
Dear Sir, — I received this morning your note,
and I think it proper to forward to you also this
second note from Mrs. Flower, because it seems as
if the apology it offers were meant to you. It also
gives you perhaps later notices, if you have not
yourself letters by the same arrival.
With great respect, yours,
R. W. Emerson.
Rev. Dr. Bacox.
She was not long in " the forest of Arden." Yet
to withdraw her from its seclusion, and to restore
her at last, after the five years of her separation
from home and friends, to her native land, to
find there only a grave, there seems to have been
needed an incident as dramatic as many that had
marked her life. There came to Eno-land late in
March, on his rapid way homeward by what was
called the " Overland Route," from a two years*
cruise in an American frigate in the China Seas,
one of the sons — the one best beloved by all who
knew him — of her eldest brother. He was a
young man not yet twenty-two years of age ; and
as he hurried in the eagerness of youthful home-
sickness, unwilling to spare an hour even for the
delights of the England which he had never seen,
he remembered nevertheless the relative whom he
had heard to be somewhere there, alone, but of
whose sickness and distraction he had heard noth-
314 DELTA BACON.
ing. Finding that she had been at Stratford, he
hastened there, and was shocked to learn where
she was, and in what condition. Without opportu-
nity to consult those who had authority to act or
advise, the young man ^ assumed the responsibility
which rested nowhere else in England. He sur-
rendered the passage homeward already engaged
for himself ; delayed his departure a week, and took
with him, when he embarked for home, the un-
happy woman who had known him in childhood,
and to whom, when he appeared to her at Henley,
a thousand pleasant recollections of her earlier
years came up to dispel the hallucinations which
had possessed her.
On the 13th of April, 1858, five years, want-
ing but a few days, after she had sailed from New
York upon her enthusiastic quest, she reached
her native land. She did not linger there long.
Her distraction was complete, and hopeless ; so
complete that only the care and restraint of an
institution designed for the treatment of the in-
sane was adequate to control her and to provide
for her needs. She was brought very soon to the
^^ Retreat " at that city of Hartford where so
many years of her childhood had been spent, and
there she remained until the end.
Late in August, 1859, there were brought to her
bedside the two sisters and two brothers who still
* Afterward the Rev. George Blagden Bacon, D. D., of Orange,
New Jersey, who died September 15, 1876.
DELIA BACON. 315
survived of their parents' children. A violent dis-
ease had brought her down into extreme debility,
and its fatal termination was plainly at hand. For
a few days the violence of her mania was abated ;
even her hallucinations seemed to be lifted from
her mind ; she knew tbose who surrounded her,
and received with joy the evidences of their life-
long love for her, which was no longer repelled, or
requited with suspicion or anger. She recognized,
and said so, that she had been imder delusions ;
although, in these solemn hours of meeting and
final parting, what some have thought the great
delusion of her life was neither spoken of nor
thought of. But the bitterness of her soul against
those who had loved her most and longest was all
gone, and instead there was peace, and the tender
affection of the early days of hardship and strug-
gle. " Stronger by weakness," she was able at last
to see what for years had been dark to her : —
" The soul's dark cottage, battered and decayed,
Let in new light through chinks that Time had made."
Thus attended, on the second day of September,
1859, as her brother then wTote, " she died, clearly
and calmly trusting in Christ, and thankful to
escape from tribulation and enter into rest." In
the old burying-ground at New Haven she was
laid, in the parcel of ground with her brother's
family. A cross of brown stone, set there by some
of the ladies who remembered the love and admi-
ration with which they had received her instruction
316 DELIA BACON.
in history, bears simply the record of her birth and
death, and the words :
" So He bring eth them to their desired haven"
No one, of all that cared most for her, could
wish to have her judged of more kindly or justly
than in the closing words that Hawthorne wrote
of her :
" What she may have suffered before her intel-
lect gave way, we had better not try to imagine.
No author had ever hoped so confidently as she ;
none ever failed more utterly. A superstitious
fancy might suggest that the anathema on Shak-
speare's tombstone had fallen heavily on her head
in requital of even the unaccomplished purpose of
disturbing the dust beneath, and that the ^ Old
Player ' had kept so quietly in his grave, on the
night of her vigil, because he foresaw how soon
and terribly he would be avenged. But if that
benign spirit takes any care or cognizance of such
things now, he has surely requited the injustice
that she sought to do him — the high justice that
she really did — by a tenderness of love and pity of
which onl}^ he could be capable. What matters it
though she called him by some other name ? He
had wrought a greater miracle on her than on all
the world besides. This bewildered enthusiast had
recognized a depth in the man whom she decried,
which scholars, critics, and learned societies de-
voted to the elucidation of his unrivalled scenes,
had never imagined to exist there. She had paid
DELIA BACON. 317
him the loftiest honor that all these ages of renown
have been able to accumulate upon his memory.
And when, not many months after the outward
failure of her lifelong object, she passed into the
better world, I know not why we should hesitate
to believe that the immortal poet may have met
her on the threshold and led her in, reassuring
her with friendly and comfortable words, and
thanking her (yet with a smile of gentle humor in
his eyes at the thought of certain mistaken specu-
lations) for having interpreted him to mankind so
weU." 1
1 Hawthorne : Our Old Home.
INDEX.
Ancestry, 1-4.
Arden, the Forest of: her asylum
there, 312; withdrawn from it,
314.
Authorship of the plays : the ac-
cepted opinion as to it a harrier to
the true understanding of them,
136 seqq. The question of author-
ship subordinate in her view to
that of the contained philosophy,
43-4, 174, 179. Never attributed
by her to a single writer, 45-6 ;
153-4; 204.
Bacon, Rev. David, father of Delia,
born, 4 ; a missionary to the In-
dians, 4-6 ; colonizes the town of
Tallmadge, 6-8, 10; failure of
the enterprise, 9-10 ; returns to
Connecticut and dies, 10-11.
Bacon, Francis : his philosophy
found in the plays, 43-46 ; 287-
292 ; one of the writers of the
plays, 45-6 ; 153-4 ; never be-
lieved by her the sole writer, 45 ;
204.
Bacon, Leonard, biographical sketch
of David Bacon, 5, note ; letters
to, from Delia, 15, 10, 17, 23, 33,
87, 309. From Hawthorne, 229,
282. From Emerson, 102, 312,
313. Seeks to dissuade her from
entertaining her new ideas, 51,
248-250. Letter from, to Haw-
thorne, 309. Letter from, 247.
His explanation of the support
given her by Emerson, 310.
Bacon, Joseph, grandfather of Delia,
3.
Bacon, Michael, the first American
ancestor, 2.
Beecher, Catherine, her school at
Hartford, 11-12; her description
of Delia as a schoolgirl, 12-14.
Bennoch, Francis : put in charge of
the publication by his friend Haw-
thorne, 243, 245-6 ; his good-sense,
tact, and diligence in directing
the work, 277-8, 279.
" Bride of Fort Edward, The," 20-
21.
Buffalo Creek, in 1801, 5.
Cabman, a guide to London lodg-
ings, 159.
Cambridge : her historical classes
there, 28-31. Its relations to Con-
cord, 4S.
Carlyle, Jane : letter from, 72 ; her
ill-will to ' ' Frederick, ' ' id.
Carlyle, Thos. : introduction to,
from Emerson, 58 ; letters from,
60, 61, 63, 66, 70, 79, 276, to
Emerson, 64, 67, 275. Letter to,
from Emerson, 78 ; her descrip-
tion of her visits to, 62, 75 ; he
describes her to Emerson, 64-5,
67.
Death, 315.
320
INDEX.
Dedham, the earliest residence of
her American ancestors, 2.
Detroit, in 1801, 5.
Elizabethan coterie of men of letters,
45-6: 100; 109-110; 143-149;
153; 169; 181; 204; 287.
Emerson, R. W. : first communica-
tion with him, 48. Letters from,
48, 57, 58, 73, 82, 93, 191. To Miss
E. P. Peabody, 55. To Carlyle,
78. To Leonard Bacon, 162.
Letters to, 50, 51, 57, 68, 77, 88 ;
from Carlyle, 64, 67, 275.
England : her desire to go there, 47 ;
the means provided, 56 ; the jour-
ney accomplished, 59. She is
brought back from there, 314.
Farrar, Mrs. Eliza, her account of
Delia Bacon, 28-30. Receives
with distrust the earliest intima-
tions of her skepticism regarding
Shakspere, 47. Letter to her,
159. Account of her London life,
235-8.
Grote, George : long conversation
with, 182, 236.
Grote, Mrs. Hannah: Sydney Smith's
compliment, 84 ; letter from, 85.
Hartford : her childhood there, 11—
16 ; Catherine Beeeher's school,
11; received into the " Retreat,"
314 ; last sickness and death
there, 315.
Hatfield : lodges at, for a month,
75.
Hawthorne, N. : consul at Liverpool,
164. Introduces herself to him,
165. His acceptance of the task
imposed, 171. Letters to him,
165, 173, 178, 184, 190, 197, 21.3,
252, 265, 271, 279. Letters from
him, 171, 178, 183. 188, 196, 211,
244, 264, 270, 280, 281. His visit
to her, 216. His description of
her appearance, 218-224. Letters
from him to Dr. L. Bacon, 229,
282. His Preface to the Book,
285. His account of the reception
given it, 297-300. His unweary-
ing care for her, 308,310-311. Hia
last tribute to her, 316.
Hawthorne, Mrs. Sophia : her kind-
ness and admiration, 225-6, 228,
232, 243. Letters from her, 225,
232, 243. Letters to her, 226,
232, 2oo, 2o8.
Henley-in-Arden : is taken to an
asylum there, 312 ; is withdrawn
from it, 314.
Henshaw, Mrs. Sarah E., her de-
scription of Delia Bacon, 24-27.
Historical Instruction, 20, 23-31, 54.
Holmes, Abigail, wife of Joseph
Bacon, 3, 4.
Homelessness, abnormal, of her life,
32-34.
Homeric Poems : the question of
their authorship compared, 99-
102; 114.
Insanity : the first hint of its possi-
ble approach, .34 ; never became
amentia, or driveled among Sortes
VirgilianfB and the like, 46. Haw-
thorne's early apprehension of it,
229. Its evident approach, 247,
263. Medical report of some
mental disturbance, 308. Medi-
cal hope of early restoration, id.
Her brother's opinion that she
had been verging upon it from
1851, 310. It settles down per-
manently upon her, 310. She is
taken to a private asylum at Hen-
ley, 312; to the "Retreat" at
Hartford, 314. The lifting of
the cloud before the night closes
in, 315.
INDEX.
321
Jamaica (Long Island), her school
at, 17.
Lost Manuscript, 191, 200.
Milnes, Richard Monckton : asks
leave of Carlyle to see a paper on
Shakspere, 61, 63. A visit from,
236.
Mitchell, Maria, visits her at Strat-
ford, 311.
Montaigne : her reading of, 183, 217.
Name, Baptismal : how acquired, 8.
Name, Family : gave no direction
to her studies or theories, 1-2.
New Connecticut, 6-10.
New Haven : ' ' Tales of the Puri-
tans" published there, 19. Her
instruction of ladies there, 27.
Her burial, 315.
Peabody, Miss E. P., a warm friend,
54, 164, 166 ; letter to, from
Emerson, 55.
Penn Yan : her feeling in regard to
the name, 18.
Perth Amboy, her school at, 16.
" Putnam's Monthly " : letter from
the publishers, 96 ; the Shakspere
Article, 97.
Raleigh, Sir Walter, the pioneer of
the New World, 7 ; one of the
writers of the plays, 45, 204.
Her Life of him, 78, 168, 284.
His " History " on her table, 217.
Religious introspection and distress,
14-15.
St. Albans: takes lodgings there,
67 ; removes to Hatfield, 75.
School-teaching : at Southing^ton,
16; Perth Amboy, 16; Jamaica,
17.
Shakspere : her earnest study of the
plays, 35. Early questions as to
authorship, 35—41 ; his title open-
ly disputed, 42 ; the philosophy in
them of more moment to her
than the authorship of them, 43-
46; her first avowal of skepti-
cism, 47-48 ; the natural condi-
tions of authorship of the drama
wanting in him, 44, 105. The
obscurities of his life a real sup-
port for the theory of his author-
ship, 109-110.
Shakspere Drama : a new force in
literature, 44, 104 ; accepted opin-
ion as to the authorship a bar-
rier to the true understanding of
the plays, 136 seqq. ; the ques-
tion of authorship unimportant
except as connected with the phi-
losophy involved in them, 43-44,
174-179. The Philosophy con-
tained in it, 44, 287-292.
Shakspere's Grave : her idea con-
cerning its contents, 220, 223,
237, 258-262. Arrangements with
the vicar of Stratford, 250-252,
274. Her account of her visit
to the church, 252-5. She partly
gives over the purpose of exam-
ining the grave, 265.
Smith, Wm. Henry: his " Letter to
the Earl of Ellesmere," 245;
293-4.
Southington, her school at, 16.
Spedding, James : invited to meet
her at the Carlyles' , 60.
Spenser, Edmund : one of the writ-
ers of the plays, 45.
Stowe, Harriet Beecher, schoolmate
of Delia, and life-long friend, 12.
Stratford-on-Avon : her journey
thither, 235, 237. Her arrival
and establishment there, 238-242.
A place quite fit for Shakspere to
live in, 257, 260. His choice of
it the ground for the only praise
322
INDEX.
Hawthorne ever knew her to be-
stow on him, 307.
Stratford, Vicar of: arrangements
with, for examining the tomb,
250-252, 260-261, 274. Haw-
thorne's tribute to him, 303.
Tallmadge, Delia Bacon's birth-
place, 6-10.
" Tales of the Puritans," 19.
Western Reserve, 6-10.
WiUiams, T. S., Chief Justice, 8 ;
Delia receives the name of his
wife, id. ; Delia a member of his
family, 11-16.
Woodstock, birthplace of Delia
Bacon's father, 3-4.
BOOKS ON HISTORY
BY EMINENT AUTHORS.
Published by
HOUGHTON, MIFFLIN AND COMPANY,
4 Park St., Boston; ii East 17TH Sr,, New York.
American Commonwealths.
Edited by Horace E. Scqdder.
Virginia. By John Esten Cooke.
Oregon. By Rev. William Barrows.
Maryland. By William Hand Browne.
Kentucky. By Professor N. S. Shaler.
Michigan. By Hon. Thomas M. Cooley.
Kansas. By Professor Leverett W. Spring.
California. By Josiah Royce.
New York. By Ellis H. Roberts. Two volumes.
Connecticut. By Alexander Johnston.
Missouri. By Lucien Carr.
Indiana. By J. P. Dunn, Jr.
(/« Preparation^
Pennsylvania. By Hon. Wayne MacVeagh.
Ohio. By Rufus King.
New Jersey. By Austin Scott.
With Maps. Each volume, uniform, i6mo, gilt top, $1.25.
American Statesmen.
Edited by John T. Morse, Jr.
John Quincy Adams. By John T. Morse, Jr.
Alexander Hamilton. By Henry Cabot Lodge.
John C. Calhoun, By Dr. H, Von Holst.
Andrew Jackson. By Professor W. G. Sumner.
John Randolph. By Henry Adams,
James Monroe, By President D. C. Oilman.
Thomas Jefferson. By John T, Morse, Jr,
Daniel Webster, By Henry Cabot Lodge.
Albert Gallatin. By John Austin Stevens.
James Madison. By Sydney Howard Gay.
John Adams By John T, Morse, Jr.
John Marshall. By Allan B. Magruder.
Samuel Adams, By James K. Hosmer.
Thomas H. Benton. By Theodore Roosevelt.
Henry Clay. By Hon. Carl Schurz. Two volumes.
Patrick Henry. By Moses Coit Tyler.
Gouverneur Morris. By Theodore Roosevelt.
Martin Van Buren. By Edward M. Shepard.
(/« Preparation.')
George Washington. By Henry Cabot Lodge. 2 vols.
Each volume, uniform, i6mo, gilt top, $1.25; half morocco,
$2.50.
John Adams and Abigail Adams.
Familiar Letters of John Adams and his Wife, Abigail Adams,
during the Revolution. With Memoir by Charles Francis Adams. With
Portrait of Mrs. Adams. i2mo, J2.00.
G. Lathom Browne.
Narratives of State Trials in the Nineteenth Century. From the
Union with Ireland to the death of George IV., 1801-1830. 2 vols. i2mo,
$5.00.
Rev. M. Creighton.
History of the Papacy during the Period of the Reformation,
4 vols. 8vo, $17.50.
Thomas De Quincey.
Biographical and Historical Essays. i2mo, $1.50.
Essays in Ancient History and Antiquities. i2mo, $1.50.
Charles Dickens.
A Child's History of England. Illustrated. i2mo, $1.00.
George E. Ellis.
The Puritan Age and Rule in the Colony of the Massachusetts
Bay. 1629-16S5. Svo, $3.50.
C. C. Felton.
Lectures on Ancient and Modern Greece. Svo, $5.00.
John Fiske.
The Critical Period of American History, 1 783-1 789. Crown
8vo, $2.00.
Maj.-Gen. George H. Gordon.
Urook Farm to Cedar Mountain ; in the War of the Great Rebel-
lion, 1S61-2. With Maps and Illustrations. Crown Svo, $3.00.
History of the Campaign of the Army of Virginia, under General
Pope, from Cedar Mountain to Alexandria, 1S62. Five Maps. Svo, $4.00.
A War Diary of Events in the War of the Great Rebellion,
1863-5. With Maps and Illustrations. Crown Svo, $3.00.
These three books, in the order named, form a history of the Civil War.
George "Washington Greene.
A Historical View of the American Revolution, Crown 8vo,
$1.50.
The German Element in the War of American Independence.
i2mo, $1.50.
Nathaniel Hawthorne.
True Stories from History and Biography. Illustrated. 12 mo,
^1.25.
James K. Hosmer.
Young Sir Henry Vane. With Portrait, Plans of Battles of
Naseby and Marston Moor, a fac-simile of a Letter by Vane, and a Copy of
the Great Seal of the Commonwealth under Cromwell. 8vo, 5^4.00.
John Scribner Jenness.
The Isles of Shoals. An Historical Sketch. Illustrated. Sec-
ond Edition. i6mo, $1.50.
Oliver Johnson.
William Lloyd Garrison and his Times ; or, Sketches of the Anti"
Slavery Movement in America. With Portrait, and Introduction by John
G. Whittier. New edition, revised and enlarged. 8vo, gilt top, $2.00.
Charles O. Jones, Jr.
The History of Georgia. Illustrated. 2 vols. 8vo, $10.00.
Julian Klaczko.
Two Chancellors : Prince Gortchakof and Prince Bismarck.
From the French. i2mo, $2.00.
Henry Cabot Lodge.
Studies in History. Crown 8vo, $1.50.
Thomas Babington Macaulay.
History of England. From the last Edition of the Works, edited
by his sister, Lady Trevelyan. With steel Portrait. Riverside Edition.
8 vols. i2mo, $16.00.
New Riverside Edition. 4 vols. 12 mo, $5.00; half calf, $10.00.
Critical, Historical, and Miscellaneous Essays. With Memoir,
Index, and Portrait. Riverside Edition. 3 vols. i2mo, $3.75; half calf,
$7.50.
Clements R. Markham.
The Fighting Veres. With two Portraits and Maps. 8vo, $4.00.
J. A. W. Neander.
General History of the Christian Religion and Church. Trans-
lated from the German by Rev. Joseph Tokrey, Professor in the l.-niver-
sity of Vermont. With an Index volume. The set, six vols. 8vo, $20.00 ;
the Index volume separate, $3.00.
Carl Ploetz.
Epitome of Ancient, Mediaeval, and Modern History. Trans-
lated from the German by W. II. TiLLiNGHAsr, assistant in Harvard Uni-
versity Library. Crown 8vo, $3.00.
Abby Sage Richardson.
The History of Our Country, from its Discovery by Columbus to
the Celebration of the Centennial Anniversary of its Declaration of Inde-
pendence. Illustrated by over 240 Engravings, Maps, and Plans. 8vo,
$4.50; sheep, $5.00; morocco, $6.25.
Sir ^Walter Scott.
Tales of a Grandfather, With six Steel Plates. Illustrated Li-
brary Edition. i2mo, $4.50; half calf, $7.50.
■William H. Seward.
The Diplomatic History of the Civil War in America. Edited
by George E. Baker. With Portraits and Memoir. Crown 8vo, ^3.00.
George Shea.
Alexander Hamilton. A Historical Study. With Portraits.
8vo, gilt top, $4.50.
Thomas Pitt Taswell-Langmead.
English Constitutional History. From the Teutonic Conquest
to the Present Time. Third edition, revised. 8vo, J^7.50.
Joseph P. Thompson, D. D.
The United States as a Nation. Lectures on the Centennial of
American Independence. Crown 8vo, $2.50.
Herbert Tuttle.
The History of Prussia to the Accession of Frederick the Great.
With Maps. Crown 8vo, $2.25.
History of Prussia under Frederick the Great. Vols. I. and II.
Crown 8vo, $4.50.
F. M. A. de Voltaire.
History of Charles XII. With a Life of Voltaire by Lord
Brougham, and Critical Notes by Macaulay and Carlyle. i2mo,
$2.25 ; half calf, $3.50.
Henry "Wilson.
Rise and Fall of the Slave Power in America. 3 vols. 8vo, each,
$3.00. The set, 59-00; half calf, $15.00.
*** For sale by all Booksellers. Sent by mail, post-paid, on receipt of price by
the Fublisliers,
HOUGHTON, MIFFLIN & CO., Boston, Mass.
KTx
^,
THE LIBRARY
UNIVERSITY OF CALIFORNIA
Santa Barbara
THIS BOOK IS DUE ON THE LAST DATE
STAMPED BELOW.
Series 9482
3 1205 03059 1075 ^