Francis Bacon and his secret society - Grand Lodge of Colorado

312 FEANCIS BACON
houses, for state papers, or for the letters
and other documents
of important personages. In short, the earlier paper was, so
far as we may yet judge, writing paper, too expensive to be used
for books, but, as a rule, substituted, in important documents,
for the costly parchment and vellum of earlier times.
It strikes us as a curious thing that, when our expert instructor
comes to the point at which he affords some " general observations
1 on what are termed toater-marks," he should, for the
second time, be drawn to illustrate his subject by circumstances
connected with Shakespeare. Having briefly commented
upon the use which has sometimes been made of watermarks
in the detection of frauds, monkish or legal, he continues
in a long passage, which we abridge:
" A further illustration of the kind occurs in a work entitled,
Ireland's Confessions, respecting his fabrication of the Shakespeare
manuscripts, — a literary forgery even more remarkable
than that which is said to have been perpetrated by Chatterton,
as Rowley's Poems.' ' . . . This gentleman tells us that the
sheet of paper which he used was the outside of several others,
on some of which accounts had been kept in the reign of Charles
the First; and being at the time wholly unacquainted with the
'
water-marks used in the time of Elizabeth, I carefully selected
two half sheets, not having any mark whatever, on which I
penned my first effusion.' "
After relating, with a naivete which borders on the comical,
the way in which, by a payment of five shillings to a bookseller
named Verey, the narrator obtained permission to take from all
the folio and quarto volumes in his shop the fly-leaves which
they contained, " by which means I was stored with that commodity,
" Ireland goes on to say that the quiet, unsuspecting
disposition of the bookseller would, he was convinced, never
lead him to make the transaction public.
" As I was fully aware, from the variety of water-marks which
are in existence at the present day, that they must have constantly
been altered since the time of Elizabeth, and being for
some time wholly unacquainted with the water-marks of that
1 They are rightly described as general.