Excerpt from The Baconian Heresy: A Confutation This treatise was in large part compiled some years ago, under the shock of the revelation that Mark Twain had died a "Bacon-Shakespearean." Laid aside under a misgiving that the drudgery it involved had not been worth while, it has been finished, by way of a holiday task, at the instance of a friend somewhat disturbed by Baconian solicitings. It is finally published with a hope not merely of checking in some degree the spread of the Baconian fantasy, but of stimulating to some small extent the revival of scientific Shakespearean criticism. Any close reader of the Baconian literature will recognise that its doctrine flourishes mainly on the unsunned sides of the Shakespeare problem. If only the specialists had done their proper work of discriminating between the genuine and the alien in the Shakespeare plays, much of the Baconian polemic would have been impossible, if indeed it could have proceeded at all. What we latterly get from the professed historians of English literature is mostly "cathedral" declamation, somewhat analogous to much of the Baconian asseveration. It has been a question for me how far the confutation of Baconian fallacies may usefully be carried. 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.