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One who studies the works published under the name of Bacon, and those under the name Shakespeare, finds himself at the end face to face with an astounding problem. Here are the same thoughts often expressed in the same manner, or modified to suit the occasion; and since he knows the impossibility of two minds thinking the same thoughts, and expressing them in like manner, though subject to different experiences through life, he is forced to the conviction that these works, though published under different names, are the product of one mind.

Not long ago Laing and others, finding that Romano was only referred to as a painter, hastily rushed into print with the discovery that the author of The Winter’s Tale had made “the egregious blunder of calling him a sculptor.” Vasari, his contemporary, and the best of authorities, called him only a painter. Even Churton Collins, in the Reprint from the First Folio, classes this allusion to Romano among his author’s blunders, which would have passed unquestioned had not a copy of the Italian original of Vasari, published in 1550, been discovered.

In this is a Latin epitaph which was upon Romano’s tomb in the Church of St. Barnabas, and which lauded him for his achievements in “painting, architecture, and sculpture.”