ould have helped
their case any, they would have apprenticed him to thirty butchers, to
fifty butchers, to a wilderness of butchers--all by their patented method
"presumption." If it will help their case they will do it yet; and if it
will further help it, they will "presume" that all those butchers were
his father. And the week after, they will _say_ it. Why, it is just
like being the past tense of the compound reflexive adverbial
incandescent hypodermic irregular accusative Noun of Multitude; which is
father to the expression which the grammarians call Verb. It is like a
whole ancestry, with only one posterity.

To resume. Next, the young Bacon took up the study of law, and mastered
that abstruse science. From that day to the end of his life he was daily
in close contact with lawyers and judges; not as a casual onlooker in
intervals between holding horses in front of a theatre, but as a
practicing lawyer--a great and successful one, a renowned one, a
Launcelot of the bar, the most formidable lance in the high brotherhood
of the legal Table Round; he lived in the law's atmosphere thenceforth,
all his years, and by sheer ability forced his way up its difficult
steeps to its supremest summit, the Lord Chancellorship, leaving behind
him no fellow craftsman qualified to challenge his divine right to that
majestic place.

When we read the praises bestowed by Lord Penzance and the other
illustrious experts upon the legal condition and legal aptnesses,
brilliances, profundities and felicities so prodigally displayed in the
Plays, and try to fit them to the history-less Stratford stage-manager,
they sound wild, strange, incredible, ludicrous; but when we put them in
the mouth of Bacon they do not sound strange, they seem in their natural
and rightful place, they seem at home there. Please turn back and read
them again. Attributed to Shakespeare of Stratford they are meaningless,
they are inebriate extravagancies--intemperate admirations of the dark
side of the moon, so to speak; attributed to Bacon, they are admirations
of the golden glories of the moon's front side, the moon at the full--and
not intemperate, not overwrought, but sane and right, and justified. "At
every turn and point at which the author required a metaphor, simile or
illustration, his mind ever turned _first_ to the law; he seems almost to
have _thought_ in legal phrases; the commonest legal phrases, the
commonest of legal expressions were ever at t