Life — July 28, 1887 — page 7: what you’re looking at

Machine-transcribed from the original scan — historical spelling and the odd misread are preserved.

YOUTH and a maid went a-fishing one day— One sunshiny morning in May ; She with a sketch book, he with a fly, And little they guessed that Cupid so sly— That Cupid himself was fishing hard by— Was fishing just over the way. Cupid's bow was unstrung on that morning in May, And made with the bowstring a fish-pole that = day ; "And over the way, had he happened to look, ‘Sate he of the fishing-rod, she of the book, Little thinking that Cupid was fishing the brook, The very same brooklet as they. And so it fell out as they angled away, A big shiny carp came a-swimming that way; And as in a moment they each made a cast, Cupid's line caught the line of the youth as it passed, And tangled him up with the maiden so fast— Ina tangle so witchingly woven they say, It has not been untied since that morning in May. TRUE ACCOUNT OF THE BACON-SHAKE- to a well-established genius. A famous French philosopher dated SPEARE IMBROGLIO. his mental development from the time when he received a severe blow + onthe cranium, which readjusted the bony environment of his brain, T is the prerogative of Lire, as distinguished from its esteemed Now, the facts about Shakespeare and Bacon, as communicated to contemporaries of the daily press, to extend its reporting function us, are the following : Shakespeare started out as a youth of consider over the past and the future as well as the present. By our special _ able promise and wrote some poems and a play or two, which bade fair facilities in this line we are now enabled to offer an authentic state to win him renown, Bacon at the same time was becoming known as ment received by direct private wire from the early portion of the a jurist and philosopher, but had not shown any faculty as a drama- seventeenth century, which throws an important light on the vexed ist. One afternoon, as Shakespeare was hurriedly coming around the question of the authorship of ‘ Shakespeare.” corner of the Globe Theatre, on his way home from rehearsal, he ran The adherents of Sir Francis Bacon have lately become more against Francis Bacon, who was hastening to the green-room in adhesive than ever in sticking to their claim that he, and not Shake- search of purely philosophical data. The two men bumped their speare, wrote the plays which have been masquerading for nearly three hundted years.as the work of the “divine William,” But Lire is now ina position to declare authoritatively that these dramatic trifles were not written by a divine at all, and that they were not entirely the offspring of Bacon's fancy nor of Mr. Ignatius Donnelly's. It is weli known that a slight depression of the skull, caused by the merest accident—such as diving from the Brooklyn Bridge at an incorrect angle, or coming into unpremeditated contact with a moving railroad Again—will sometimes throw a cloud over the brightest intellect. On the other hand, people of ordinary ‘ability sometimes have their intelligence quickened by hard knocks which would prove disastrous j heads together, and the result was a sudden depression in the skull of Shakespeare which promptly remodeled him into the dull lout that the Baconian theorists represented him to have been. He ceased to write plays. But Bacon's head was greatly improved by this sudden encounter with Shakespeare's. The bump which he at first thought to be a temporary enlargement of the caput—or an attack of “big head"—proved to be a permanent mansard addition to the Baconian phrenology, which gave room for the dramatic faculty. Bacon thereupon wrote the plays which Shakespeare would otherwise have written, while Shakespeare lapsed into a state of comparative imbecility, tempered by financial success as a theatre manager, comicbooks.com