? Not entirely:

The trifles with which he amused himself in hours of pain and languor
bore the mark of his mind. _The best jestbook in the world_ is that
which he dictated from memory, without referring to any book, on a
day on which illness had rendered him incapable of serious study.

Here are some scattered remarks (from Macaulay) which throw light upon
Bacon, and seem to indicate--and maybe demonstrate--that he was competent
to write the Plays and Poems:

With great minuteness of observation he had an amplitude of
comprehension such as has never yet been vouchsafed to any other
human being.

The "Essays" contain abundant proofs that no nice feature of
character, no peculiarity in the ordering of a house, a garden or a
court-masque, could escape the notice of one whose mind was capable
of taking in the whole world of knowledge.

His understanding resembled the tent which the fairy Paribanou gave
to Prince Ahmed: fold it, and it seemed a toy for the hand of a lady;
spread it, and the armies of powerful Sultans might repose beneath
its shade.

The knowledge in which Bacon excelled all men was a knowledge of the
mutual relations of all departments of knowledge.

In a letter written when he was only thirty-one, to his uncle, Lord
Burleigh, he said, "I have taken all knowledge to be my province."

Though Bacon did not arm his philosophy with the weapons of logic, he
adorned her profusely with all the richest decorations of rhetoric.

The practical faculty was powerful in Bacon; but not, like his wit,
so powerful as occasionally to usurp the place of his reason, and to
tyrannize over the whole man.

There are too many places in the Plays where this happens. Poor old
dying John of Gaunt volleying second-rate puns at his own name, is a
pathetic instance of it. "We may assume" that it is Bacon's fault, but
the Stratford Shakespeare has to bear the blame.

No imagination was ever at once so strong and so thoroughly
subjugated. It stopped at the first check from good sense.

In truth much of Bacon's life was passed in a visionary world--amid
things as strange as any that are described in the "Arabian Tales" .
. . amid buildings more sumptuous than the palace of Aladdin,
fountains more wonderful than the golden water of Parizade,
conveyances more rapid than the hippogryph of Ruggiero, arm