so loud. The thug is aware that loudness convinces sixty
persons where reasoning convinces but one. I wouldn't be a thug, not
even if--but never mind about that, it has nothing to do with the
argument, and it is not noble in spirit besides. If I am better than a
thug, is the merit mine? No, it is His. Then to Him be the praise. That
is the right spirit.

They "presume" the lad severed his "presumed" connection with the
Stratford school to become apprentice to a butcher. They also "presume"
that the butcher was his father. They don't know. There is no written
record of it, nor any other actual evidence. If it would 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 theater, 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 historyless 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.