Some final quotes on early opinions on Shakespeare and Bacon writing similarities

 "…The volunteer counsel [for the Stratfordian view], who have put more passion than reason in their arguments, and seem more satisfied that the crowd is with them than they are with the strength of their case, might as well abandon their line of defence, which has been to accuse you of being half-educated, cranky and insane . . . The personage to whom you assign the just fame of these marvelous productions seems to have been in every way born, educated and equipped for such a work. he had the requisite learning, the speculative aptitude and habit, the rhetorical skill and poetic feeling that the most cursory reading discloses as the everwhere dominant  tone in this grandest diapason of human speech."

--George Talbot, author and retired lawyer, 1904

"In wit . . . He [Bacon] never had an equal"

 - Mcaulay

"Lord Bacon was the greatest genius that England, or perhaps any country, ever produced."

-- Alexander Pope , 1741

"We are all Baconians here."

--Rev. H. R. Haweis, adding that he had never met anyone who, having thoroughly investigated the matter, came to a different conclusion.

Can anyone provide any similar evidence to anywhre near the same extent showing another candidate with as much recognized close language and knowledge likenesses between their candidate with the Shakespeare works? I haven't seen any.

Reputable Thinker's Opinions on Shakespeare and Bacon

 "Wilde (Lord Penzance)  argued, following Lord Campbell and others, that the works of Shakespeare are extremely accurate in matters of law. In The Bacon-Shakespeare Controversy (1890) he wrote of "Shakespeare's perfect familiarity with... English law... so perfect and intimate that he was never incorrect and never at fault", arguing that this was evidence that the plays were the work of a legal expert such as Bacon.[8] Several other authors followed Wilde's arguments about the legal expertise used in Shakespeare, including Sir George Greenwood." 

--  Wikipedia

"The Baconian thesis has up to this day been asserted in presence of three successive generations by able and most sincere writers . . . Such a controversy is therefore not disdainfully to be set aside, nor a priori declared unworthy of consideration."

.-- Journal Des Debats, Paris, 1903

"I cannot accord it to him who, though rich, did not educate his children, and who, though he sought fame through a coat-of-arms claimed to have been earned by the valor of his great-grandfather, nowhere, not even in his last will and testament, claimed the fame of authorship,--such authorship,--and whose sole posthumous anxiety centred on his dust and bones remaining undisturbed in the chancel of Stratford church." 

-- J. Warren Keifer, Former Speaker of the National House of Representatives, Washington, D.C., 1904

"You ask my opinion, in a few words, upon the Bacon-Shakspere controversy, which has been a study of immense interest to me for nearly twenty years. In examining a problem of such importance to  English literature as the authorship of the plays attributed to Shakspere one can hardly use too great deliberation. I felt this so strongly that it was only after about ten years' reading and reflection that I became a convinced Baconian. I have been brought to this conclusion mainly by the impossibility of reconciling the facts we know concerning the life of the man of Stratford with the technical and universal knowledge inherent in the plays."

-- Hon. William Waldorf Astor, attorney, politican, businessman, newspaper publisher, 1904

Still More Shakespeare and Bacon at the turn of the Century

 "The mere theory  that Bacon was the real author of the plays, though the mass of Shakespeare's readers still set it down as a delusion, does not, indeed, contain anything essentially shocking to common sense. On the contrary, it is generally recognized that on purely a priori grounds there is less to shock common sense in the idea that those wonderful compositions were the work of a scholar, a philosopher, a statesman, and a profound man of the world than there is in the idea that they were the work of a notoriously ill-educated actor, who seems to have found some difficulty in signing his own name." 

--W. H. Mallock, 1901

"The difficulty hitherto of getting a fair hearing for the mere literary argument has chiefly arisen from the illogical resentment shown by many people at the bare idea of dethroning a national idol. Shakespeare has so long been thought of as a genius of the very foremost order that any suggestion, tending to prove that he was a very commonplace person in reality, is treated as though it involved an attempt to detract from the sublimity of the works bearing his name. But in reason it must be conceded that we worship the memory of Shakespeare because we admire Hamlet, king Lear, and the rest. We do not admire the plays because any particular man wrote them . . . The question is still one which most English newspapers and periodicals are afraid to discuss freely for fear of offending the blind prejudice above referred to. Orthodox Shaksperean biographers simply ignore the all important question as though it were a craze in notorious antagonism to well-known facts, like the idea that the earth is flat, and in this way the minds of people who might be capable of independent judgment, if they had the evidence before them, are left in complete ignorance of the prodigious force residing in the Baconian argument -- unless, indeed, they have gone out of their way to make a special study of the Baconian books."

--A.P. Sinnet, 1901

"It is desperately hard, nay, impossible to believe that this uninstructed, untutored youth, as he came from Stratford, should have written these plays; and almost as hard, as it seems to me, to believe that he should have rendered himself capable of writing them by elaborate study afterwards . . . The difficulty of imagining this your man to have converted himself in a few years from a state bordering on ignorance into a deeply read student, master of French and Italian, as well as of Greek and Latin, and capable of quoting and borrowing largely from writers in all these languages, is almost insuperable . . . His name once removed from the controversy, there will not, i think, be much question as to the lawyer to whose pen the Shakespeare plays are to be attributed."

--Lord Penzance, 1903

"I am not a Baconian, but I  have a perfectly open mind on the matter. I have no objection at all to being  convinced that Sir Francis  Bacon wrote the splended dramas attributed to Shakespeare; it is so much easier to suppose from our unquestionable knowledge of his life and genius that he MIGHT have written them, than to accept  from the unquestioned little that we know of Shakspere and his life that he COULD have done so. It is unnecessary to refer at length to the extraordinary similarity in the knowledge of law, science, art, politics, history, literature, and every other branch of human understanding, exhibited by Shakespeare and Bacon."

--R. B. Marston, 1902

Additional Turn of the Century Observations on Shakespeare and Bacon

 "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

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

More 19th Century Observations by those who read closely both Shakespeare and Bacon

 "That  Shakespeare possessed an altogether extraordinary knowledge of law, of medicine, of science, of philosophy, of language, of everything, in short, which would be impossible for an uneducated man, whatever his genius as a poet might be, has long seemed to me an insoluble mystery."

--Sir Lewis Morris, 1888.

"The philosophical writings of Bacon are suffused and saturated with Shakespeare's thought . . . These likenesses in thought and expression are mainly limited to those two contemporaries:.

--Gerald Massey, 1888

"Experience disposes me to think that most of the finer Shakespearean Plays may be illustrated from the works of Bacon in the same way. If this be so, it certainly suggests the exceeding probability that the universal genius, enthroned by Ben Jonson on the summit of Parnassus, and the author of the Plays were one and the same person."

--Prof. Samuel Edmund Bengough, 1890

"On the general question of the authorship of the Shakespeare Plays, I may say that I have no more  doubt that Lord Bacon was the author of all of them, and of the poetry attributed to Shakspere, than I have of the fact that Pope wrote the Essay on Man."

--Sir Joseph N. McKenna, M.P., 1891

Bacon's Writings resembles Shakespeare's Writings

 "This presents one of the most extraordinary facts in the history of the human mind. It makes necessary the conclusion that two men, living contemporaneously in the same town, then a comparatively small city, --one a philosopher, endowed with the most brilliant imagination, the other a most imaginative poet, possessing the profoundest philosophical genius, and both reckoned among the greatest thinkers the world ever saw--did, possibly in the same year, at the same time, and certainly at the same period of their lives, write, without any interchange of views or opinions, upon the same identical subjects, follow the same train of thought, arrive at the same conclusions, and digest the results of their study, reading and meditation into the same system or body of philosophy, the which one stated to the world in abstract scientific propositions, while the other embodied it in poetic forms and framatic creations. No coincidence of mental action so remarkable as this can be found, it is believed, in any other age of the world."

--Henry J. Ruggles, 1870.

"Identification will come in due time. Meanwhile the admissions show how able men perceive in the works of Bacon indications of a mind gifted with the highest poetic power."

--William Thomson, 1880.

"Bacon desired nothing less than a natural history of the passions, the very thing that Shakespeare produced."

--Kuno Fischer, Prof. of Philosophy at Heidelberg, and a foremost literary critic. Also not a Baconian.

"It has often been said of Shakespeare that he was even more of a philosopher than a poet. Bacon's ambition was to grasp the universe, making all knowledge his province. Lessing has profoundly remarked of Shakespeare that his drama is the mirror of nature. And M. de Remussat has said that in Bacon's ordinary way of reflecting and representing the characters and affairs of men we cannot but notice something which brings Shakespeare to mind.' The analogy between the two is certainly very strong."

--Louis De Raynal, 1888