With respect to this last effort of modern criticism, it might suffice with many to repeat an observation made by Lowell, who said that, if any person was disposed to believe that Bacon wrote the plays, he could set himself right by reading Bacon's paraphrase of the Psalms. One dose of that would settle the supremacy of Shakspeare back upon the seat of reason.
The following verse is a specimen of the average workmanship expended on this paraphrase:--
"So shall he not lift up his head In the assembly of the just. For why? The Lord hath special eye To be the godly's stay at call; And hath given over righteously The wicked man to take his fall."
Half a score of lines may be found of a better quality than those above exhibit; but the bad ones have been purposely selected as yielding the only sensible and conclusive test. The writer of the plays could not have been guilty of them. Some things we know to be impossible,--that Sidney should display the white feather; that a gentleman should ever once practise a scurvy trick; that a woman all compact of grace, animate with the instinct of fitness, should ever make a vulgar gesture; that the genius which interfused the plays should ever have gone to rot on the Lethean wharf of those prosaic lines. Nay, the question whether Bacon composed the plays grows pale before a greater one,--If he did compose them, what debility suggested to him this undertaking of the Psalms? There they already stood, in their tender, majestic English, simple as Hamlet's soliloquy and Macbeth's regrets,--a mother-tongue that resents the adulterate touch. We have a right to call upon those who espouse the Baconian theory of the plays to account for the existence of the paraphrase.
Lord Bacon wrote some lines commending the natural defence of an upright conscience. So did Shakspeare. Let us compare them:--
"The man of life upright, whose guileless heart is free From all dishonest deeds and thoughts of vanity; The man whose silent days in harmless joys are spent, Whom hopes cannot delude nor fortune discontent,-- That man needs neither towers nor armor for defence, Nor secret vaults to fly from thunder's violence."
In the second part of "Henry VI." are found the lines which are memorable to all English-speaking people:--