Excerpt from The Claims of Literary Culture: An Address Introductory to the Preliminary Course in the Hahnemann Medical College of Philadelphia; Delivered September Twenty-Seventh, 1875 The dramas of Shakespeare mirror not only his own great age, but universal humanity in all ages. And so wonderful is the knowledge which they exhibit, of na ture and of human life, and of the secret springs of individual being, that their authorship has been hotly disputed by this iconoclastic and analytic age. They who have most strongly questioned their authorship, have been unable to understand how a man who had not gone through, or been driven through, the currie ulum of Oxford or Cambridge, who had received little or no scholastic training of any kind, could have written plays that have been the wonder and admiration of the world; and they have looked around for the real au thor that has been deprived of his just honors, and (a most significant fact!) have settled upon the greatest analytic mind of the age, Francis Bacon, the Father of Experimental Philosophy, as the author of dramas that must have been the product of the most synthetic of human minds, - of a mind that took in everything that was presented to it, organized and complete. 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.