Surely no
Baconian will deny it! Being so deeply in earnest, taking his "study
and meditation" so hard, I cannot see him as the author of Venus and
Adonis, and whatever plays of the period,--say, Love's Labour's Lost,
The Two Gentlemen of Verona, Henry VI, Part I,--are attributed to
him, about this time, by Baconians. Of course my view is merely
personal or "subjective." The Baconians' view is also "subjective."
I regard Bacon, in 1591, and later, as intellectually preoccupied by
his vast speculative aims:- what he says that he desires to do, in
science, is what he DID, as far as he was able. His other desires,
his personal advancement, money, a share in the conduct of affairs,
he also hotly pursued, not much to his own or the public profit.
There seems to be no room left, no inclination left, for competition
in their own line with Marlowe, Greene, Nash, and half a dozen other
professed playwrights: no room for plays done under the absurd
pseudonym of an ignorant actor.
You see these things as the Baconians do, or as I do. Argument is
unavailing. I take Bacon to have been sincere in his effusive letter
to Cecil. Not so the Baconians; he concealed, they think, a vast
LITERARY aim. They must take his alternative--to be "some sorry
bookmaker, OR a pioneer in that mine of truth," as meaning that he
would either be the literary hack of a company of players, OR the
founder of a regenerating philosophy.
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