Continued - Observations from 19th Century Educated Readers of Shakespeare and Bacon

 "When one comes to study the literature of the subject in an honest quest of truth, it will occur to him, as a strange feature of the controversy, that the literary world has confided for three hundred years in tradition alone, and thus accepted the belief that the jolly lessee of the Globe and Blackfriars wrote the celebrated plays, collected after his death in the folio of 1623; and yet, upon thorough investigation, it is manifest that he never wrote a line of them."

--John L. T. Sneed, Justice of the Supreme Judicial Court of the State of Tennessee, 1891.

"I am convinced that Bacon left the MSS. Either with Percy (the Earl of Northumberland) or Sir Toby Matthew, with authority to publish after his death. But the civil war broke out, and the trustees may have thought that under the rule of Cromwell and the Puritans the memory of Bacon, as a philosopher, would have been ruined, if it were published that he was the author of these dramas. In the interest of their deceased friend, they may have destroyed the MSS., together with the key."

---Count Vitzthum D'Eckstadt, Privy Councillor to the Emperor of Austria, 1888

"Firmly convinced that Shakspere of Stratford could not have been the author."

--Walt Whitman, 1888

"I see by your aid, better than before, the strength of Bacon's claim."

--W.T. Harris, U.S. Commissioner of Education

"There is nothing very outrageous in the supposition that the same mind might have given birth to the Essayas and 'Hamlet.'"

--The Daily News (London), 1902