Some Acrostic Signatures of Francis Bacon, Baron Verulam of Verulam, Viscount St. Alban

Excerpt from Some Acrostic Signatures of Francis Bacon, Baron Verulam of Verulam, Viscount St. Alban: Together With Some Others All of Which Are Now for the First Time Deciphered and Published It is ungracious to destroy a pleasing illusion, and this book is not written with that purpose. It is written solely in the interest of Science - in this case, the Science of Biography. By the simple process of cancelling one inference against another I came to the conclusion that what was left of the biography of Shakespeare was a few facts about the Actor, and the work of the Poet. I had already read and thought much about what we know of the work and the mental habits of Francis Bacon, and, like others, had been struck by the many seeming points of contact - and with one or two which were more than seeming - between his work and that of Shakespeare. As a mere step in a scientific enquiry I turned to see if Bacon could have signed his name to works for which he was supposedly responsible, by some such cipherer's trick as that of Francesco Colonna, and after some methodical tests I found that he, or others, had done so. I confess that I was daunted at the outset of my work by the personal obloquy that has been heaped upon scholar and charlatan alike by the men who are content with the inferential method of writing literary history; but, reflecting that life is short and that a little obloquy does not do much harm, I decided to make known these acrostics in the hope that their discovery might lead men to approach the problems of biography in a more scientific spirit. The man who in recent years has expressed in the bravest words the spirit in which we should approach such a problem as that with which this book deals, is Gaston Paris, in a lecture delivered at the College de France in 1870, when the German armies were surrounding the walls of Paris, and French patriotism was scouting German science. About the Publisher Forgotten Books publishes hundreds of thousands of rare and classic books. Find more at www.forgottenbooks.com This book is a reproduction of an important historical work. Forgotten Books uses state-of-the-art technology to digitally reconstruct the work, preserving the original format whilst repairing imperfections present in the aged copy. In rare cases, an imperfection in the original, such as a blemish or missing page, may be replicated in our edition. We do, however, repair the vast majority of imperfections successfully; any imperfections that remain are intentionally left to preserve the state of such historical works.