"I can't help anticipating that, some of these days, Bacon letters or other papers will turn up, interpretive of his, at present, dark phrase to Sir John Davies, of 'your concealed poet.' We have noble contemporary poetry, unhappily anonymous, and I shall not be surprised to find Bacon the concealed singer of some of it. May I live to have my expectation verified."
-- Rev. Alexander B. Grosart, author of 'The Complete Poems of Joseph Hall'.
"To believe Shakspere to have written these wondrous works, saturated through and through with the reforming spirit of Francis Bacon, containing his philosophic theories and discoveries, advocating his new philosophy over that of Aristotle, containing the favorite, forceful phrases of his mother, the Lady Anne, his brother Anthony, and the Earl of Essex;--to believe that William Shakspere wrote these is to violate every principle of common sense, and be blind to truths plain as beacon lights for our guidance."
-- George James, 1896
"Only once grant that Bacon lacked imagination (he had infinite imagination), that he was devoid of humor (his humor was unbounded and inextinguishable), that he had no leisure to write the plays (he had years of waiting for place and work and years of struggle with debt), that he had no poetic faculty (his noblest prose is the highest poetry in all but metre), that he was cold and unsympathetic and selfish (Sir Tobie Matthew, and Rawleigh and other contemporaries did not think so)--only grant these postulates (all false) and a few others, and it will be certain that he did not write the plays"
-- Rev. L. C. Manchester, 1896
"The day has come when, rejecting fictitious lives of an imaginary Shakespeare, and scrutinizing the insignificant circumstances which are all that is known of him, the discrepancy becomes more and more apparent between the intellectual genius of the author of the plays and the sordid and squalid characteristics of the man of Stratford."
-- Pall Mall Gazette (London), 1900
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