was wont to
stick) —
That this same Verulam had writ the plays
Which were the fancies of my frolic brain.
What can they urge to dispossess the crown
[102] Which all my comrades and the whole loud
world
Did in my lifetime lay upon my brow?
Look straitly at these arguments and see
How witless and how fondly slight they be.
Imprimis, they have urged that, being
born
In the mean compass of a paltry town,
I could not in my youth have trimmed
my mind
To such an eagle pitch, but must be found,
Like the hedge sparrow, somewhere near
the ground.
Bethink you, sirs, that though I was
denied
The learning which in colleges is found,
Yet may a hungry brain still find its fo
Wherever books may lie or men may be;
[103] And though perchance by Isis or by Cam
The meditative, philosophic plant
May best luxuriate; yet some would say
That in the task of limning mortal life
A fitter preparation might be made
Beside the banks of Thames. And then
again,
If I be suspect, in that I was not
A fellow of a college, how, I pray,
Will Jonson pass, or Marlowe, or the rest,
Whose measured verse treads with as
proud a gait
As that which was my own? Whence did
they suck
This honey that they stored? Can you
recite
The vantages which each of these has had
And I had not? Or is the argument
[104] That my Lord Verulam hath written all,
And covers in his wide-embracing self
The stolen fame of twenty smaller men?
You prate about my learning. I
would urge
My want of learning rather as a proof
That I am still myself. Have I not traced
A seaboard to Bohemia, and made
The cannons roar a whole wide century
Before the first was forged? Think you,
then,
That he, the ever-learned Verulam,
Would have erred thus? So may my very
faults
In their gross falseness prove that I am true,
And by that falseness gender truth in you.
And what is left? They say that they
have found
[105] A script, wherein the writer tells my Lord
He is a secret poet. True enough!
But surely now that secret is o'er past.
Have you not read his poems? Know
you not