By Irving Browne.
CURRENT TOPICS. The Baconian Theory. — Possibly politeness re quires us to acknowledge the receipt of a circular of a book perpetrated by Orville W. Owen, M.D., in which he essays to establish the theory that Bacon wrote not only the works which are conceded to his authorship, and the only works which he ever pub licly claimed to have written, but also all the plays of Shakespeare, Green, Peele and Marlowe, all the works of Spenser, and Burton's Anatomy of Melancholy! But politeness does not require us to refrain from ex pressing the opinion that anybody who professes to believe such a theory is either a conscious imposter or next door to a lunatic. As Addison said that when a man declared that he had drunk a dozen bottles of wine over night it would be a compliment to him to believe that he was a liar rather than such a beast, so it is compliment to the persons who put forward such senseless and incredible propositions to believe that they are playing on the credulity of the public, rather than that they are such fools. This whole Bacon business is a proof of the soundness of Barnum's assertion that the public love to be hum bugged. It is also to a lawyer a curious study of evidence. These silly Baconians do not know enough of the principles of evidence to realize that they have not adduced, and from the nature of the case cannot adduce, a particle of evidence that Bacon wrote Shakespeare's plays. If we grant that they find in Bacon's writings the cypher which they pretend, and that Bacon intended to put it there for the alleged purpose, it amounts to nothing more than his own assertion, and the verdict of every critical scholar must be that he lied. This is a point that the antiBaconians have never pressed, but it disposes of the whole ridiculous imposture. No man's agency can be proved by his bare assertion of his agency. It is of a piece of the foolish argument that Christ was divine because he uniformly asserted his divinity. Christ must be judged by his works, and so must Bacon. The circular sent to us is accompanied by specimens of the idiotic drivel spelled out of the cypher, in which Dr. Owen, following in Donnelly's path, but far outstripping him, discovers the "evi dence " of Bacon's authorship of all the writings
mentioned above, and by sundry certificates of adhe sion from mischievous or credulous newspaper people, including the following ambiguous one from the " Pastor of the First Baptist Church " of Detroit : "I hope you may succeed in establishing the reality of your discovery to the conviction of the most skepti cal." One's faith in the sanity of the present cypher is strongly disturbed by his announcement in the circular that Bacon's "Disclosure is to the effect that he was the son of Elizabeth and the Earl of Leicester by a secret marriage, and therefore the rightful heir to the throne; he tells how this became known to him; and he relates how Essex, his dearest friend, was murdered at the command of the (iueen, and how he was made party to his condemna tion; how Elizabeth, in her last sickness, acknowledged Bacon as her son to the doctor who attended her; how Elizabeth was poisoned and afterward strangled in her bed by Robert Cecil, and various other startling things that historians of the Elizabethan era have never set down in the books. Except the murder of Elizabeth and the reasons for the execution of Sir Thomas Seymour, all assertions have at least the semblance of collateral historical evidence to sustain them." It is quite probable that if this sage doctor, or the versatile Donnelly, should set about it, he could find a cypher in Lowell's writings claiming the au thorship of Lincoln's Gettysburg oration, addresses and State papers, and there is no doubt that every one of these open-mouthed, shallow-pated Bacon ians would eagerly believe it and Lowell's claim. We indignantly resent the imputation cast on our intelligence by the sending of this circular to us in the apparent belief that we may credit such nonsense, and on our pecuniary sagacity in the apparent hope that we may squander fifty cents for the pamphlet in which it is set forth.
The Prize Fight. — It was the earnest wish of the Easy Chair that the laws of Florida might prove sufficiently civilized to enable the Governor to pre vent the recent prize fight. Next to that, it was our hope that these two vicious and ill-conditioned brutes, whose barbarous doings have taken up more space in the newspapers for several weeks than any
