confess, that he missed a plain point from his eyes being so sharp that
they looked through it without seeing it, having focused themselves
beyond it.

A specimen of the kind of question he would ask and answer himself,
occurs to me as I write, for he put it to me once as we read together.

"Why," he said, "did Margaret, in _Much ado about Nothing_, try to
persuade Hero to wear her other rabato?"

And the answer was,

"Because she feared her mistress would find out that she had been wearing
it--namely, the night before, when she personated her."

And here I may put down a remark I heard him make in reference to a
theory which itself must seem nothing less than idiotic to any one who
knows Shakespeare as my uncle knew him. The remark was this--that whoever
sought to enhance the fame of lord St. Alban's--he was careful to use the
real title--by attributing to him the works of Shakespeare, must either
be a man of weak intellect, of great ignorance, or of low moral
perception; for he cast on the memory of a man already more to be pitied
than any, a weight of obloquy such as it were hard to believe anyone
capable of deserving. A being with Shakespeare's love of human nature,
and Bacon's insight into essential truth, guilty of the moral and social
atrocities into which his lordship's eagerness after money for scientific
research betrayed him, would be a monster as grotesque as abominable.

I record the remark the rather that it shows my uncle could look at
things in a large way as well as hunt with a knife-edge. At the same