And, year by year, always there intrudes itself into this meditation
the hope that Shakespeare's name will, one day, be swept into
oblivion.
I am not--you will have perceived that I certainly am not--a
`Baconian.' So far as I have examined the evidence in the controversy,
I do not feel myself tempted to secede from the side on which
(rightly, inasmuch as it is the obviously authoritative side) every
ignorant person ranges himself. Even the hottest Baconian, filled with
the stubbornest conviction, will, I fancy, admit in confidence that
the utmost thing that could, at present, be said for his conclusions
by a judicial investigator is that they are `not proven.' To be
convinced of a thing without being able to establish it is the surest
recipe for making oneself ridiculous. The Baconians have thus made
themselves very ridiculous; and that alone is reason enough for not
wishing to join them. And yet my heart is with them, and my voice
urges them to carry on the fight. It is a good fight, in my opinion,
and I hope they will win it.
I do not at all understand the furious resentment they rouse in the
bosoms of the majority. Mistaken they may be; but why yell them down
as knavish blasphemers? Our reverence, after all, is given not to an
Elizabethan named William Shakespeare, who was born at Stratford, and
married, and migrated to London, and became a second-rate actor, and
afterwards returned to Stratford, and made a will, and composed a few
lines of doggerel for the tombstone under which he was buried.
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