We hunger and receive these
husks; we open our mouths for food and we break our teeth against
these stones."
Yes! The world has broken its teeth too long upon these stones to
continue to mistake them for bread. And as the accomplished scholar and
poetess the late Miss Anna Swanwick once declared to the writer, she
knew nothing of the Bacon and Shakespeare controversy, but Mr. Sidney
Lee's "Life of Shakespeare" had convinced her that his man never wrote
the plays. And that is just what everybody else is saying at Eton, at
Oxford, at Cambridge, in the Navy, in the Army, and pretty generally
among unprejudiced people everywhere, who are satisfied, as is Mark
Twain, that the most learned of works could not have been written by the
most _un_learned of men.
Yes! It does matter that the "Greatest Birth of Time" should no longer
be considered to have been the work of the unlettered rustic of
Stratford; and the hour has at last come when it should be universally
known that this mighty work was written by the man who had taken all
knowledge for his province, the man who said "I have, though in a
despised weed [that is under a Pseudonym] procured the good of all men";
the man who left his "name and memory to men's charitable speeches, and
to foreign nations, and the next ages.
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