I Have presupposed hitherto that those who read this book must have understood the various doctrines of the heresy, and the history thereof. In case, however, that some may be ignorant of the bases of the various assaults, I shall go through a few of the chief statements. Since they have gained form various people have claimed priority.

Farmer, in 1789, was the first real anti-Shaksperean; and Horace Walpole's Historic Doubts have been ranked in the list. But this present contest was really first broached in The Romance of Yachting, a novel written in 1848 by Hart, New York.

In August 7, 1852, in Chambers's Edinburgh Journal, Mr. Jamieson wrote the anonymous article, “Who wrote Shakespeare?” and suggested that he “kept a poet.”

Miss Delia Bacon's article on the Philosophy of Shakespeare's Plays Unfolded appeared in Putnam's Magazine for January 1856, and was afterwards reprinted. She held that the poet Shakspere kept was “Bacon,” and that he had used these plays to unfold his new philosophy. She was nevertheless so inconsistent as to dwell over every souvenir of Shakspere; to haunt the places where he had lived; to spend even a night in Stratford Church by his tomb; and to lose her reason in her perplexity. But she suggested the idea in America, where many subsequent writers took it up. Meanwhile in England Mr. William Henry Smith was working at it, and in 1857 he published his book Bacon and Shakespeare, an Inquiry touching Players, Playhouses, and Playwriters in the days of Elizabeth.