No More Learning

Drawing this
horse aside, we brought on another, and in this way ten, fifteen,
or twenty of us contrived to bring forward the horses of all our
number. The rest of the troops, even our best men, advanced
along the road that had been beaten for them, hanging their
heads. This was no time for plaguing them or employing
authority. Every man who possesses spirit or emulation hastens
to such works of himself. Continuing to advance by a track
which we beat in the snow in this manner, we reached a cave
at the foot of the Zirrin pass. That day the storm of wind was
dreadful. The snow fell in such quantities that we all expected
to meet death together. The cave seemed to be small. I took
a hoe and made for myself at the mouth of the cave a resting-
place about the size of a prayer-carpet. I dug down in the
snow as deep as my breast, and yet did not reach the ground.
This hole afforded me some shelter from the wind, and I sat
down in it. Some desired me to go into the cavern, but I
would not go. I felt that for me to be in a warm dwelling,
while my men were in the midst of snow and drift,- for me to
be within, enjoying sleep and ease, while my followers were in
trouble and distress,- would be inconsistent with what I owed
them, and a deviation from that society in suffering which was
their due. I continued, therefore, to sit in the drift.


## p. 1147 (#573) ###########################################

BABER
[147
Ambition admits not of inaction;
The world is his who exerts himself;
In wisdom's eye, every condition
May find repose save royalty alone.
By leadership like this, the descendant of Tamerlane became the
ruler of Kabul. He celebrates its charms in verse:-
Its verdure and flowers render Kabul, in spring, a heaven,-
but this kingdom was too small for a man of Baber's stamp. He
used it as a stepping-stone to the conquest of India (1526).
Return a hundred thanks, O Baber! for the bounty of the merciful
God
Has given you Sind, Hind, and numerous kingdoms;
If, unable to stand the heat, you long for cold,
You have only to recollect the frost and cold of Ghazni.
In spite of these verses, Baber did not love India, and his mon-
archy was an exile to him. Let the last extract from his memoirs
be a part of a letter written in 1529 to an old and trusted friend in
Kabul. It is an outpouring of the griefs of his inmost heart to his
friend. He says:-
My solicitude to visit my western dominions (Kabul) is
boundless and great beyond expression. I trust in Almighty
Allah that the time is near at hand when everything will be
completely settled in this country. As soon as matters are
brought to that state, I shall, with the permission of Allah, set
out for your quarters without a moment's delay. How is it pos-
sible that the delights of those lands should ever be erased from
the heart? How is it possible to forget the delicious melons
and grapes of that pleasant region? They very recently brought
me a single muskmelon from Kabul. While cutting it up, I felt
myself affected with a strong feeling of loneliness and a sense of
my exile from my native country, and I could not help shedding
tears. [He gives long instructions on the military and political
matters to be attended to, and continues without a break:-]
At the southwest of Besteh I formed a plantation of trees; and
as the prospect from it was very fine, I called it Nazergah [the
view]. You must there plant some beautiful trees, and all
around sow beautiful and sweet-smelling flowers and shrubs.
[And he goes straight on:-] Syed Kasim will accompany the
artillery. [After more details of the government he quotes.


## p. 1148 (#574) ###########################################

1148
BABRIUS
fondly a little trivial incident of former days and friends, and
says:] Do not think amiss of me for deviating into these
fooleries. I conclude with every good wish.
The Memoirs' of Baber deserve a place beside the writings of
the greatest of generals and conquerors. He is not unworthy to be
classed with Cæsar as a general and as a man of letters. His char-
acter was more human, more frank, more lovable, more ardent. His
fellow in our western world is not Cæsar, but Henri IV. of France
and Navarre.
Edward S. Holden
BABRIUS
(First Century A. D. )
B
ABRIUS, also referred to as Babrias and Gabrias, was the
writer of that metrical version of the folk-fables, commonly
referred to Æsop, which delights our childhood. Until the
time of Richard Bentley he was commonly thought of merely as a
fabulist whose remains had been preserved by a few grammarians.
Bentley, in the first draft (1697) of the part of his famous Disser-
tation treating of the fables of Esop, speaks thus of Babrius, and
goes not far out of his way to give a rap at Planudes, a late Greek,
who turned works of Ovid, Cato, and Cæsar into Greek:-
༥.
ambics.
Tzetzes.
-
came one Babrius, that gave a new turn of the fables into choli-
Nobody that I know of mentions him but Suidas, Avienus, and
There's one Gabrias, indeed, yet extant, that has comprised each
fable in four sorry iambics. But our Babrius is a writer of another size and
quality; and were his book now extant, it might justly be opposed, if not pre-
ferred, to the Latin of Phædrus. There's a whole fable of his yet preserved
at the end of Gabrias, of The Swallow and the Nightingale. ' Suidas brings
many citations out of him, all which show him an excellent poet.
There are two parcels of the present fables; the one, which are the more
ancient, one hundred and thirty-six in number, were first published out of the
Heidelberg Library by Neveletus, 1610. The editor himself well observed
that they were falsely ascribed to Æsop, because they mention holy monks.
To which I will add another remark, — that there is a sentence out of Job.
Thus I have proved one-half of the fables now extant that carry the
name of Æsop to be above a thousand years more recent than he. And the
other half, that were public before Neveletus, will be found yet more modern,
and the latest of all.
This collection, therefore, is more recent than
.


## p. 1149 (#575) ###########################################

BABRIUS
1149
that other; and, coming first abroad with Æsop's 'Life,' written by Planudes,
'tis justly believed to be owing to the same writer. That idiot of a monk
has given us a book which he calls The Life of Esop,' that perhaps cannot
be matched in any language for ignorance and nonsense.
He had picked up
two or three true stories, that Æsop was a slave to a Xanthus, carried a
burthen of bread, conversed with Crœsus, and was put to death at Delphi; but
the circumstances of these and all his other tales are pure invention.
But of all his injuries to Æsop, that which can least be forgiven him is the
making such a monster of him for ugliness, an abuse that has found credit
so universally that all the modern painters since the time of Planudes have
drawn him in the worst shapes and features that fancy could invent. 'Twas
an old tradition among the Greeks that Æsop revived again and lived a sec-
ond life. Should he revive once more and see the picture before the book
that carries his name, could he think it drawn for himself? - or for the
monkey, or some strange beast introduced in the Fables > ?
But what reve-
lation had this monk about Æsop's deformity? For he must have it by
dream or vision, and not by ordinary methods of knowledge. He lived about
two thousand years after him, and in all that tract of time there's not a
single author that has given the least hint that Æsop was ugly. "
-
Thus Bentley; but to return to Babrius. Tyrwhitt, in 1776, fol-
lowed this calculation of Bentley by collecting the remains of Ba-
brius. A publication in 1809 of fables from a Florentine manuscript
foreran the collection (1832) of all the fables which could be entirely
restored. In 1835 a German scholar, Knoch, published whatever had
up to that time been written on Babrius, or as far as then known by
So much had been accomplished by modern scholarship. The
calculation was not unlike the mathematical computation that a star
should, from an apparent disturbance, be in a certain quarter of the
heavens at a certain time. The manuscript of Babrius, it became
clear, must have existed. In 1842 M. Mynas, a Greek, who had
already discovered the 'Philosophoumena' of Hippolytus, came upon
the parchment in the convent of St. Lama on Mount Athos. He was
employed by the French government, and the duty of giving the
new ancient to the world fell to French scholars. The date of the
manuscript they referred to the tenth century. There were con-
tained in it one hundred and twenty-three of the supposed one hun-
dred and sixty fables, the arrangement being alphabetical and ending.
with the letter O. Again, in 1857 M. Mynas announced another dis-
covery. Ninety-four fables and a prooemium were still in a convent
at Mount Athos; but the monks, who made difficulty about part-
ing with the first parchment, refused to let the second go abroad.
M. Mynas forwarded a transcript which he sold to the British Mu-
seum. It was after examination pronounced to be the work of a
forger, and not even what it purported to be the tinkering of a
writer who had turned the original of Babrius into barbarous Greek


## p. 1150 (#576) ###########################################

1150
BABRIUS
and halting metre. Suggestions were made that the forger was
Mynas himself. And there were scholars who accounted the manu-
script as genuine.
The discovery of the first part added substantially to the remains
which we have of the poetry of ancient Greece. The terseness, sim-
plicity, and humor of the poems belong to the popular classic all
the world over, in whatever tongue it appears; and the purity of the
Greek shows that Babrius lived at a time when the influence of the
classical age was still vital. He is placed at various times. Bergk
fixes him so far back as B. C. 250, while others place him at the
same number of years in our own era. Both French and German
criticism has claimed that he was a Roman. There is no trace of
his fables earlier than the Emperor Julian, and no metrical version
of the Æsopean fables existed before the writing of Babrius. Socra-
tes tried his hand at a version or two. But when such Greek writ-
ers as Xenophon and Aristotle refer to old folk-tales and legends, it
is always in their own words. His fables are written in choliambic
verse; that is, imperfect iambic which has a spondee in the last foot
and is fitted for the satire for which it was originally used.
The fables of Babrius have been edited, with an interesting and
valuable introduction, by W. G. Rutherford (1883), and by F. G.
Schneidewin (1880). They have been turned into English metre by
James Davies, M. A. (1860). The reader is also referred to the article
( Æsop' in the present work.
THE NORTH WIND AND THE SUN
B
ETWIXT the North wind and the Sun arose
A contest, which would soonest of his clothes
Strip a wayfaring clown, so runs the tale.
First, Boreas blows an almost Thracian gale,
Thinking, perforce, to steal the man's capote :
He loosed it not; but as the cold wind smote
More sharply, tighter round him drew the folds,
And sheltered by a crag his station holds.
But now the Sun at first peered gently forth,
And thawed the chills of the uncanny North;
Then in their turn his beams more amply plied,
Till sudden heat the clown's endurance tried;
Stripping himself, away his cloak he flung:
The Sun from Boreas thus a triumph wrung.
THE fable means, "My son, at mildness aim:
Persuasion more results than force may claim. "


## p. 1151 (#577) ###########################################

BABRIUS
JUPITER AND THE MONKEY
BABY-SHOW with prizes Jove decreed
A
For all the beasts, and gave the choice due heed.
A monkey-mother came among the rest;
A naked, snub-nosed pug upon her breast
She bore, in mother's fashion. At the sight
Assembled gods were moved to laugh outright.
Said she, "Jove knoweth where his prize will fall!
I know my child's the beauty of them all. ”
THIS fable will a general law attest,
That each one deems that what's his own, is best.
THE MOUSE THAT FELL INTO THE POT
MOUSE into a lidless broth-pot fell;
A
Choked with the grease, and bidding life farewell,
He said, "My fill of meat and drink have I
And all good things: 'Tis time that I should die. "
THOU art that dainty mouse among mankind,
If hurtful sweets are not by thee declined.
THE FOX AND THE GRAPES
1151
TH
HERE hung some bunches of the purple grape
On a hillside. A cunning fox, agape
For these full clusters, many times essayed
To cull their dark bloom, many vain leaps made.
They were quite ripe, and for the vintage fit;
But when his leaps did not avail a whit,
He journeyed on, and thus his grief composed :-
"The bunch was sour, not ripe, as I supposed. "
THE CARTER AND HERCULES
A
CARTER from the village drove his wain:
And when it fell into a rugged lane,
Inactive stood, nor lent a helping hand;
But to that god, whom of the heavenly band
He really honored most, Alcides, prayed:
"Push at your wheels," the god appearing said,
"And goad your team; but when you pray again,
Help yourself likewise, or you'll pray in vain. ”


## p. 1152 (#578) ###########################################

BABRIUS
1152
THE YOUNG COCKS
wo Tanagræan cocks a fight began;
Τ
Their spirit is, 'tis said, as that of man:
Of these the beaten bird, a mass of blows,
For shame into a corner creeping goes;
The other to the housetop quickly flew,
And there in triumph flapped his wings and crew.
But him an eagle lifted from the roof,
And bore away. His fellow gained a proof
That oft the wages of defeat are best,-
None else remained the hens to interest.
WHEREFORE, O man, beware of boastfulness:
Should fortune lift thee, others to depress,
Many are saved by lack of her caress.
THE ARAB AND THE CAMEL
A
N ARAB, having heaped his camel's back,
Asked if he chose to take the upward track
Or downward; and the beast had sense to say
"Am I cut off then from the level way? »
THE NIGHTINGALE AND THE SWALLOW
AR from men's fields the swallow forth had flown,
When she espied amid the woodlands lone
The nightingale, sweet songstress. Her lament
Was Itys to his doom untimely sent.
F^
Each knew the other through the mournful strain,
Flew to embrace, and in sweet talk remain.
Then said the swallow, "Dearest, liv'st thou still ?
Ne'er have I seen thee, since thy Thracian ill.
Some cruel fate hath ever come between;
Our virgin lives till now apart have been.
Come to the fields; revisit homes of men;
Come dwell with me, a comrade dear, again,
Where thou shalt charm the swains, no savage brood:
Dwell near men's haunts, and quit the open wood:
One roof, one chamber, sure, can house the two,
Or dost prefer the nightly frozen dew,
And day-god's heat? a wild-wood life and drear?


## p. 1153 (#579) ###########################################

BABRIUS
Come, clever songstress, to the light more near. "
To whom the sweet-voiced nightingale replied:
"Still on these lonesome ridges let me bide;
Nor seek to part me from the mountain glen:—
I shun, since Athens, man, and haunts of men;
To mix with them, their dwelling-place to view,
Stirs up old grief, and opens woes anew. "
SOME Consolation for an evil lot
Lies in wise words, in song, in crowds forgot.
But sore the pang, when, where you once were great,
Again men see you, housed in mean estate.
THE HUSBANDMAN AND THE STORK
TH
HIN nets a farmer o'er his furrows spread,
And caught the cranes that on his tillage fed;
And him a limping stork began to pray,
Who fell with them into the farmer's way:
"I am no crane: I don't consume the grain:
That I'm a stork is from my color plain;
A stork, than which no better bird doth live;
I to my father aid and succor give. "
The man replied:-"Good stork, I cannot tell
Your way of life: but this I know full well,
I caught you with the spoilers of my seed;
With them, with whom I found you, you must bleed. "
-
THE PINE
1153
WALK with the bad, and hate will be as strong
'Gainst you as them, e'en though you no man wrong.
SON
OME Woodmen, bent a forest pine to split,
Into each fissure sundry wedges fit,
To keep the void and render work more light.
Out groaned the pine, "Why should I vent my spite
Against the axe which never touched my root,
So much as these cursed wedges, mine own fruit;
Which rend me through, inserted here and there! "
A FABLE this, intended to declare
That not so dreadful is a stranger's blow
As wrongs which men receive from those they know.
II-73


## p. 1154 (#580) ###########################################

BABRIUS
1154
THE WOMAN AND HER MAID-SERVANTS
VERY careful dame, of busy way,
A Kept maids at home, and these, ere break of day,
She used to raise as early as cock-crow.
They thought 'twas hard to be awakened so,
And o'er wool-spinning be at work so long;
Hence grew within them all a purpose strong
To kill the house-cock, whom they thought to blame
For all their wrongs. But no advantage came;
Worse treatment than the former them befell:
For when the hour their mistress could not tell
At which by night the cock was wont to crow,
She roused them earlier, to their work to go.
A harder lot the wretched maids endured.
BAD judgment oft hath such results procured.
THE LAMP
LAMP that swam with oil, began to boast
At eve, that it outshone the starry host,
And gave more light to all. Her boast was heard:
Soon the wind whistled; soon the breezes stirred,
And quenched its light. A man rekindled it,
And said, "Brief is the faint lamp's boasting fit,
But the starlight ne'er needs to be re-lit. »
A
THE TORTOISE AND THE HARE
T
O THE shy hare the tortoise smiling spoke,
When he about her feet began to joke:
"I'll pass thee by, though fleeter than the gale. "
"Pooh! " said the hare, "I don't believe thy tale.
Try but one course, and thou my speed shalt know. "
"Who'll fix the prize, and whither we shall go? "
Of the fleet-footed hare the tortoise asked.
To whom he answered, "Reynard shall be tasked
With this; that subtle fox, whom thou dost see. "
The tortoise then (no hesitater she! )
Kept jogging on, but earliest reached the post;
The hare, relying on his fleetness, lost
Space, during sleep, he thought he could recover
When he awoke. But then the race was over;
The tortoise gained her aim, and slept her sleep.
FROM negligence doth care the vantage reap.


## p. 1155 (#581) ###########################################

1155
FRANCIS BACON
(1561-1626)
BY CHARLTON T. LEWIS
T
HE startling contrasts of splendor and humiliation which
marked the life of Bacon, and the seemingly incredible
inconsistencies which hasty observers find in his character,
have been the themes of much rhetorical declamation, and even of
serious and learned debate. From Ben Jonson in his own day, to
James Spedding the friend of Tennyson, he has not lacked eminent
eulogists, who look up to him as not only the greatest and wisest,
but as among the noblest and most worthy of mankind: while the
famous epigram of Pope, expanded by Macaulay into a stately and
eloquent essay, has impressed on the popular mind the lowest esti-
mate of his moral nature; and even such careful scholars as Charles
de Rémusat and Dean Church, who have devoted careful and instruct-
ive volumes to the survey of Bacon's career and works, insist that
with all his intellectual supremacy, he was a servile courtier, a false
friend, and a corrupt judge. Yet there are few important names in
human history of men who have left us so complete materials for a
just judgment of their conduct; and it is only a lover of paradox
who can read these and still regard Bacon's character as an unsolved
problem.
Mr. Spedding has given a long life of intelligent labor to the col-
lection of every fact and document throwing light upon the motives,
aims, and thoughts of the great "Chancellor of Nature," from the
cradle to the grave. The results are before us in the seven volumes
of 'The Letters and the Life of Francis Bacon,' which form perhaps
the most complete biography ever written. It is a book of absolute
candor as well as infinite research, giving with equal distinctness all
the evidence which makes for its hero's dishonor and that which
tends to justify the writer's reverence for him. Another work by Mr.
Spedding, 'Evenings with a Reviewer,' in two volumes, is an elab-
orate refutation, from the original and authentic records, of the most
damning charges brought by Lord Macaulay against Bacon's good
fame. It is a complete and overwhelming exposure of false color-
ing, of rhetorical artifices, and of the abuse of evidence, in the
famous essay.
As one of the most entertaining and instructive
pieces of controversy in our literature, it deserves to be widely read.
The unbiased reader cannot accept the special pleading by which, in
his comments, Spedding makes every failing of Bacon "lean to


## p. 1156 (#582) ###########################################

1156
FRANCIS BACON
virtue's side"; but will form upon the unquestioned facts presented a
clear conception of him, will come to know him as no other man of
an age so remote is known, and will find in his many-sided and mag-
nificent nature a full explanation of the impressions which partial
views of it have made upon his worshipers and his detractors.
It is only in his maturity, indeed, that we are privileged to enter
into his mind and read his heart. But enough is known of the
formative period of his life to show us the sources of his weaknesses
and of his strength. The child whom high authorities have regarded
as endowed with the mightiest intellect of the human race was born
at York House, on the Strand, in the third year of Elizabeth's reign,
January 22d, 1561. He was the son of the Queen's Lord Keeper of
the Seals, Sir Nicholas Bacon, and his second wife Anne, daughter
of Sir Anthony Cook, formerly tutor of King Edward VI. Mildred,
an elder daughter of the same scholar, was the wife of William
Cecil, Lord Burghley, who for the first forty years of her reign was
Elizabeth's chief minister. As a child Bacon was a favorite at court,
and tradition represents him as something of a pet of the Queen,
who called him "my young Lord Keeper. " His mother was among
the most learned women of an age when, among women of rank,
great learning was as common and as highly prized as great beauty;
and her influence was a potent intellectual stimulus to the boy,
although he revolted in early youth from the narrow creed which
her fierce Puritan zeal strove to impose on her household. Outside
of the nursery, the atmosphere of his world was that of craft, all
directed to one end; for the Queen was the source of honor, power,
and wealth, and advancement in life meant only a share in the
grace distributed through her ministers and favorites. Apart from
the harsh and forbidding religious teachings of his mother, young
Francis had before him neither precept nor example of an ambition
more worthy than that of courting the smiles of power.
At the age of twelve he entered Trinity College, Cambridge
(April, 1573), and left it before he was fifteen (Christmas, 1575); the
institution meanwhile having been broken up for more than half a
year (August, 1574, to March, 1575) by the plague, so that his inter-
mittent university career summed up less than fourteen months.
There is no record of his studies, and the names of his teachers are
unknown; for though Bacon in later years called himself a pupil of
Whitgift, and his biographers assumed that the relation was direct
and personal, yet that great master of Trinity had certainly ended his
teaching days before Bacon went to Cambridge, and had entered as
Dean of Lincoln on his splendid ecclesiastical career. University life
was very different from that of our times. The statutes of Cam-
bridge forbade a student, under penalties, to use in conversation with


## p. 1157 (#583) ###########################################

FRANCIS BACON
1157
another any language but Latin, Greek, or Hebrew, unless in his pri-
vate apartments and in hours of leisure. It was a regular custom at
Trinity to bring before the assembled undergraduates every Thurs-
day evening at seven o'clock such junior students as had been
detected in breaches of the rules during the week, and to flog them.
It would be interesting to know in what languages young Bacon con-
versed, and what experiences of discipline befell him; but his subse-
quent achievements at least suggest that Cambridge in the sixteenth
century may have afforded more efficient educational influences than
our knowledge of its resources and methods can explain. For it is
certain that, at an age when our most promising youths are begin-
ning serious study, Bacon's mind was already formed, his habits and
modes of research were fixed, the universe of knowledge was an
open field before him. Thenceforth he was no man's pupil, but in
intellectual independence and solitude he rapidly matured into the
supreme scholar of his age.
After registering as a student of law at Gray's Inn, apparently
for the purpose of a nominal connection with a profession which
might aid his patrons in promoting him at court, Bacon was sent
in June, 1576, to France in the train of the British Ambassador, Sir
Amyas Paulet; and for nearly three years followed the roving em-
bassy around the great cities of that kingdom. The massacre of
St. Bartholomew had taken place four years before, and the boy's
recorded observations on the troubled society of France and of
Europe show remarkable insight into the character of princes and
the sources of political movements. Sir Nicholas had hitherto directed
his son's education and associations with the purpose of making
him an ornament of the court, and had set aside a fund to provide
Francis at the proper time with a handsome estate. But he died
suddenly, February 20th, 1579, without giving legal effect to this
provision, and the sum designed for the young student was divided
equally among the five children, while Francis was excluded from
a share in the rest of the family fortune; and was thus called home
to England to find himself a poor man.
He made himself a bachelor's home at Gray's Inn, and devoted
his energies to the law, with such success that he was soon recog-
nized as one of the most promising members of the profession. In
1584 he entered Parliament for Melcombe Regis in Somersetshire,
and two years later sat for Liverpool. During these years the schism
between his inner and his outer life continued to widen. Drawing
his first breath in the atmosphere of the court, bred in the faith that
honor and greatness come from princes' favor, with a native taste
for luxury and magnificence which was fostered by delicate health,
he steadily looked for advancement through the influence of Burghley


## p. 1158 (#584) ###########################################

1158
FRANCIS BACON
and the smiles of the Queen. But Burghley had no sympathy with
speculative thought, and distrusted him for his confidences concerning
his higher studies, while he probably feared in Bacon a dangerous
rival of his own son; so that with expressions of kind interest, he
refrained from giving his nephew practical aid. Elizabeth, too, sus-
pected that a young man who knew so many things could not be
trusted to know his own business well, and preferred for important
professional work others who were lawyers and nothing besides.
Thus Bacon appeared to the world as a disappointed and uneasy
courtier, struggling to keep up a certain splendor of appearance and
associations under a growing load of debt, and servile to a Queen on
whose caprice his prospects of a career must depend. His unques-
tioned power at the bar was exercised only in minor causes; his
eloquence and political dexterity found slow recognition in Parlia-
ment, where they represented only themselves; and the question
whether he would ever be a man of note in the kingdom seemed
for twenty-five years to turn upon what the Crown might do for its
humble suitor.
Meanwhile this laborious advocate and indefatigable courtier,
whose labors at the bar and in attendance upon his great friends
were enough to fill the days of two ordinary men, led his real life
in secret, unknown to the world, and uncomprehended even by the
few in whom he had divined a capacity for great thought, and whom
he had selected for his confidants. From his childhood at the uni-
versity, where he felt the emptiness of the Aristotelian logic, the
instrument for attaining truth which traditional learning had conse-
crated, he had gradually formed the conception of a more fruitful
process. He had become convinced that the learning of all past ages
was but a poor result of the intellectual capacities and labors which
had been employed upon it; that the human mind had never yet
been properly used; that the methods hitherto adopted in research
were but treadmill work, returning upon itself, or at best could pro-
duce but fragmentary and accidental additions to the sum of knowl-
edge. All nature is crammed with truth, he believed, which it
concerns man to discover; the intellect of man is constructed for its
discovery, and needs but to be purged of errors of every kind, and
directed in the most efficient employment of its faculties, to make
sure that all the secrets of nature will be revealed, and its powers
made tributary to the health, comfort, enjoyment, and progressive
improvement of mankind.
This stupendous conception, of a revolution which should trans-
form the world, seems to have taken definite form in Bacon's mind
as early as his twenty-fifth year, when he embodied the outline of it
in a Latin treatise; which he destroyed in later life, unpublished, as


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FRANCIS BACON
1159
immature, and partly no doubt because he came to recognize in it an
unbecoming arrogance of tone, for its title was 'Temporis Partus Max-
imus' (The Greatest Birth of Time. ) But six years later he defines
these "vast contemplative ends" in his famous letter to Burghley,
asking for preferment which will enable him to prosecute his grand
scheme and to employ other minds in aid of it. "For I have taken
all knowledge to be my province," he says, "and if I could purge it
of two sorts of rovers, whereof the one with frivolous disputations,
confutations, and verbosities, the other with blind experiments and
auricular traditions and impostures, hath committed so many spoils,
I hope I should bring in industrious observations, grounded conclus-
ions, and profitable inventions and discoveries: the best state of that
province. This, whether it be curiosity or vain glory, or nature, or
(if one take it favorably) philanthropia, is so fixed in my mind as it
cannot be removed. "
This letter reveals the secret of Bacon's life, and all that we know
of him, read in the light of it, forms a consistent and harmonious
whole. He was possessed by his vast scheme, for a reformation of
the intellectual world, and through it, of the world of human experi-
ence, as fully as was ever apostle by his faith. Implicitly believing
in his own ability to accomplish it, at least in its grand outlines, and
to leave at his death the community of mind at work, by the method
and for the purposes which he had defined, with the perfection of
all science in full view, he subordinated every other ambition to this;
and in seeking and enjoying place, power, and wealth, still regarded
them mainly as aids in prosecuting his master purpose, and in intro-
ducing it to the world. With this clearly in mind, it is easy to
understand his subsequent career. Its external details may be read
in any of the score of biographies which writers of all grades of
merit and demerit have devoted to him, and there is no space for
them here. For our purpose it is necessary to refer only to the
principal crises in his public life.
Until the death of Elizabeth, Bacon had no place in the royal
service worthy of his abilities as a lawyer. Many who, even in the
narrowest professional sense, were far inferior to him, were preferred
before him. Yet he obtained a position recognized by all, and sec-
ond only in legal learning to his lifelong rival and constant adver-
sary, Sir Edward Coke. To-day, it is probable that if the two
greatest names in the history of the common law were to be selected
by the suffrages of the profession, the great majority would be cast.
for Coke and Bacon. As a master of the intricacies of precedent and
an authority upon the detailed formulas of "the perfection of reason,»
the former is unrivaled still; but in the comprehensive grasp of the
law as a system for the maintenance of social order and the protec-
tion of individual rights, Bacon rose far above him. The cherished


## p. 1160 (#586) ###########################################

1160
FRANCIS BACON
aim of his professional career was to survey the whole body of the
laws of England, to produce a digest of them which should result in
a harmonious code, to do away with all that was found obsolete
or inconsistent with the principles of the system, and thus to adapt
the living, progressive body of the law to the wants of the growing
nation. This magnificent plan was beyond the power of any one
man, had his life no other task, but he suggested the method and
the aim; and while for six generations after these legal giants passed
away, the minute, accurate, and profound learning of Coke remained
the acknowledged chief storehouse of British traditional jurispru-
dence, the seventh generation took up the work of revision and
reform, and from the time of Bentham and Austin the progress of
legal science has been toward codification. The contest between the
aggregation of empirical rules and formulated customs which Coke
taught as the common law, and the broad, harmonious application of
scientific reason to the definition and enforcement of rights, still
goes on; but with constant gains on the side of the reformers, all of
whom with one consent confess that no general and complete recon-
struction of legal doctrine as a science is possible, except upon the
lines laid down by Bacon.
The most memorable case in which Bacon was employed to rep-
resent the Crown during Elizabeth's life was the prosecution of the
Earl of Essex for treason. Essex had been Bacon's friend, patron,
and benefactor; and as long as the earl remained faithful to the
Queen and retained her favor, Bacon served him with ready zeal and
splendid efficiency, and showed himself the wisest and most sincere
of counselors. When Essex rejected his advice, forfeited the Queen's
confidence by the follies from which Bacon had earnestly striven to
deter him, and finally plunged into wanton and reckless rebellion,
Bacon, with whom loyalty to his sovereign had always been the
supreme duty, accepted a retainer from the Crown, and assisted Coke
in the prosecution. The crime of Essex was the greatest of which a
subject was capable; it lacked no circumstance of aggravation; if the
most astounding instance of ingratitude and disloyalty to friendship
ever known is to be sought in that age, it will be found in the con-
duct of Essex to Bacon's royal mistress. Yet writers of eloquence
have exhausted their rhetorical powers in denouncing Bacon's faith-
lessness to his friend. But no impartial reader of the full story in
the documents of the time can doubt that throughout these events
Bacon did his duty and no more, and that in doing it he not merely
made a voluntary sacrifice of his popularity, but a far more painful
sacrifice of his personal feelings.
In 1603 James I. came to the throne, and in spite of the efforts of
his most trusted ministers to keep Bacon in obscurity, soon discov-
ered in him a man whom he needed. In 1607 he was made Solicitor-


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FRANCIS BACON
1161
General; in 1613 Attorney-General; in March 1617, on the death of
Lord Ellesmere, he received the seals as Lord Keeper; and in Janu-
ary following was made Lord Chancellor of England. In July 1618
he was raised to the permanent peerage as Baron Verulam, and in
January 1621 received the title of Viscount St. Albans. During these
three years he was the first subject in the kingdom in dignity, and
ought to have been the first in influence. His advice to the King,
and to the Duke of Buckingham who was the King's king, was always
judicious. In certain cardinal points of policy, it was of the high-
est statesmanship; and had it been followed, the history of the
Stuart dynasty would have been different, and the Crown and the
Parliament would have wrought together for the good and the honor
of the nation, at least through a generation to come. But the upstart
Buckingham was supreme. He had studied Bacon's strength and
weakness, had laid him under great obligations, had at the same time
attached him by the strongest tie of friendship to his person, and
impressed upon his consciousness the fact that the fate of Bacon was
at all times in his hands. The new Chancellor had entered on his
great office with a fixed purpose to reform its abuses, to speed and
cheapen justice, to free its administration from every influence of
wealth and power. In the first three months of service he brought
up the large arrears of business, tried every cause, heard every peti-
tion, and acquired a splendid reputation as an upright and diligent
judge. But Buckingham was his evil angel. He was without sense
of the sanctity of the judicial character; and regarded the bench,
like every other public office, as an instrument of his own interests
and will. On the other hand, to Bacon the voice of Buckingham was
the voice of the King, and he had been taught from infancy as
the beginning of his political creed that the king can do no wrong.
Buckingham began at once to solicit from Bacon favors for his friends
and dependants, and the Chancellor was weak enough to listen and
to answer him. There is no evidence that in any one instance the
favorite asked for the violation of law or the perversion of justice;
much less that Bacon would or did accede to such a request.
But
the Duke demanded for one suitor a speedy hearing, for another a
consideration of facts which might not be in evidence, for a third all
the favor consistent with law; and Bacon reported to him the result,
and how far he had been able to oblige him. This persistent tamper-
ing with the source of justice was a disturbing influence in the Chan-
cellor's court, and unquestionably lowered the dignity of his attitude
and weakened his judicial conscience.
Notwithstanding this, when the Lord Chancellor opened the Par-
liament in January, 1621, with a speech in praise of his King and
in honor of the nation, he seemed to be at the summit of earthly


## p. 1162 (#588) ###########################################

1162
FRANCIS BACON
prosperity. No voice had been lifted to question his purity and
worth. He was the friend of the King, one of the chief supports of
the throne, a champion indeed of high prerogative, but an orator of
power, a writer of fame, whose advancement to the highest dignities
had been welcomed by public opinion. Four months later he was
a convicted criminal, sentenced for judicial corruption to imprison-
ment at the King's pleasure, to a fine of £40,000, and to perpetual
incapacity for any public employment. Vicissitudes of fortune are
commonplaces of history. Many a man once seemingly pinnacled on
the top of greatness has "shot from the zenith like a falling star,”
and become a proverb of the fickleness of fate. Some are torn down
by the very traits of mind, passion, or temper, which have raised
them: ambition which overleaps itself, rashness which hazards all
on chances it cannot control, vast abilities not great enough to
achieve the impossible. The plunge of Icarus into the sea, the mur-
der of Cæsar, the imprisonment of Coeur de Lion, the abdication of
Napoleon, the apprehension as a criminal of Jefferson Davis, each
was a startling and impressive contrast to the glory which it fol-
lowed, yet each was the natural result of causes which lay in the
character and life of the sufferer, and made his story a consistent
whole. But the pathos of Bacon's fall is the sudden moral ruin of a
life which had been built up in honor for sixty years. An intellect
of the first rank, which from boyhood to old age had been steadfast
in the pursuit of truth and in the noblest services to mankind, which
in a feeble body had been sustained in vigor by all the virtues of
prudence and self-reverence; a genial nature, winning the affection
and admiration of associates, hardly paralleled in the industry with
which its energies were devoted to useful work, a soul exceptional
among its contemporaries for piety and philanthropy - this man is
represented to us by popular writers as having habitually sold justice.
for money, and as having become in office "the meanest of man-
kind. "
But this picture, as so often drawn, and as seemingly fixed in the
popular mind, is not only impossible, but is demonstrably false. Το
review all the facts which correct it in detail would lead us far
beyond our limits. It must suffice to refer to the great work of
Spedding, in which the entire records of the case are found, and
which would long ago have made the world just to Bacon's fame, but
that the author's comment on his own complete and fair record is
itself partial and extravagant. But the materials for a final judg-
ment are accessible to all in Spedding's volumes, and a candid
reading of them solves the enigma. Bacon was condemned without
a trial, on his own confession, and this confession was consistent
with the tenor of his life. Its substance was that he had failed to


## p. 1163 (#589) ###########################################

FRANCIS BACON
1163
put a stop effectually to the immemorial custom in his court of
receiving presents from suitors, but that he had never deviated from
justice in his decrees. There was
no instance in which he was
accused of yielding to the influence of gifts, or passing judgment for
a bribe.
No act of his as Chancellor was impeached as illegal, or
reversed as corrupt. Suitors complained that they had sent sums of
money or valuable presents to his court, and had been disappointed
in the result; but no one complained of injustice in a decision.
Bacon was a conspicuous member of the royal party; and when the
storm of popular fury broke in Parliament upon the court, the King
and the ministry abandoned him. He had stood all his life upon the
royal favor as the basis of his strength and hope; and when it was
gone from under him, he sank helplessly. and refused to attempt a
defense. But he still in his humiliation found comfort in the reflec-
tion that his ruin would put an end to "anything that is in the
likeness of corruption" among the judges. And he wrote, in the
hour of his deepest distress, that he had been "the justest Chancellor
that hath been in the five changes that have been since Sir Nicho-
las Bacon's time. " Nor did any man of his time venture to contra-
dict him, when in later years he summed up his case in the words,
"I was the justest judge that was in England these fifty years. But
it was the justest censure in Parliament that was these two hundred
years. "
No revolution of modern times has been more complete than that
which the last two centuries have silently wrought in the customary
morality of British public life, and in the standards by which it is
judged. Under James I. every office of state was held as the private
property of its occupant. The highest places in the government
were conferred only on condition of large payments to the King.
He openly sold the honors and dignities of which he was the source.
"The making of a baron," that is, the right to sell to some rich ple-
beian a patent of nobility, was a common grant to favorites, and
was actually bestowed on Bacon, to aid him in maintaining the state
of his office. We have the testimony of James himself that all the
lawyers, of whom the judges of the realm were made, were "so bred
and nursed in corruption that they cannot leave it. " But the line
between what the King called corruption and that which he and all
his ministers practiced openly and habitually, as part of the regular
work of government, is dim and hard to define. The mind of the
community had not yet firmly grasped the conception of public office.
as a trust for the public good, and the general opinion which stimu-
lates and sustains the official conscience in holding this trust sacred
was still unformed. The courts of justice were the first branch
of the government to feel the pressure of public opinion, and to


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1164
FRANCIS BACON
respond to the demand for impersonal and impartial right. But this
process had only begun when Bacon, who had never before served
as judge, was called to preside in Chancery. The Chancellor's office
was a gradual development: originally political and administrative
rather than judicial, and with no salary or reward for hearing causes,
save the voluntary presents of suitors who asked its interference with
the ordinary courts, it step by step became the highest tribunal of
the equity which limits and corrects the routine of law, and still the
custom of gifts was unchecked. A careful study of Bacon's career
shows that in this, as every other branch of thought, his theoretic
convictions were in advance of his age; and in his advice to the
King and in his inaugural promises as Chancellor, he foreshadows
all the principles on which the wisest reformers of the public service
now insist.
But he failed to apply them with that heroic self-sacri-
fice which alone would have availed him, and the forces of custom
and example continually encroached upon his views of duty. Having
through a long life sought advancement and wealth for the purpose
of using leisure and independence to carry out his beneficent plans.
on the largest scale, he eagerly accepted the traditional emoluments
of his new position, in the conviction that they would become in his
hands the means of vast good to mankind. It was only the public
exposure which fully awakened him to a sense of the inconsistency
and wrong of his conduct; and then he was himself his severest
judge, and made every reparation in his power, by the most unre-
served confession, by pointing out the danger to society of such
weakness as his own in language to whose effectiveness nothing
could be added, and by devoting the remainder of his life to the
noblest work for humanity.
During the years of Bacon's splendor as a member of the govern-
ment and as spokesman for the throne, his real life as a thinker,
inspired by the loftiest ambition which ever entered the mind of
man, that of creating a new and better civilization, was not inter-
rupted. It was probably in 1603 that he wrote his fragmentary
'Prooemium de Interpretatione Naturæ,' or 'Preface to a Treatise on
Interpreting Nature,' which is the only piece of autobiography he
has left us. It was found among his papers after his death; and its
candor, dignity, and enthusiasm of tone are in harmony with the
imaginative grasp and magnificent suggestiveness of its thought.
Commending the original Latin to all who can appreciate its elo-
quence, we cite the first sentences of it in English:-
"Believing that I was born for the service of mankind, and regarding
the care of the Commonwealth as a kind of common property which, like the
air and water, belongs to everybody, I set myself to consider in what way


## p. 1165 (#591) ###########################################

FRANCIS BACON
1165
mankind might be best served, and what service I was myself best fitted
by nature to perform.
"Now, among all the benefits that could be conferred upon mankind, I
found none so great as the discovery of new arts for the bettering of human
life. For I saw that among the rude people of early times, inventors and
discoverers were reckoned as gods. It was seen that the works of founders
of States, law-givers, tyrant-destroyers, and heroes cover but narrow spaces
and endure but for a time; while the work of the inventor, though of less
pomp, is felt everywhere and lasts forever. But above all, if a man could, I
do not say devise some invention, however useful, but kindle a light in
nature-a light which, even in rising, should touch and illuminate the borders
of existing knowledge, and spreading further on should bring to light all that
is most secret—that man, in my view, would be indeed the benefactor of
mankind, the extender of man's empire over nature, the champion of freedom,
the conqueror of fate.
"For myself, I found that I was fitted for nothing so well as for the study
of Truth: as having a mind nimble and versatile enough to discern resem-
blances in things (the main point), and yet steady enough to distinguish the
subtle differences in them; as being endowed with zeal to seek, patience to
doubt, love of meditation, slowness of assertion, readiness to reconsider, care-
fulness to arrange and set in order; and as being a man that affects not the
new nor admires the old, but hates all imposture. So I thought my nature
had a certain familiarity and kindred with Truth. »
During the next two years he applied himself to the composition
of the treatise on the Advancement of Learning,' the greatest of
his English writings, and one which contains the seed-thoughts and
outline principles of all his philosophy. From the time of its publi-
cation in 1605 to his fall in 1621, he continued to frame the plan
of his 'Great Instauration' of human knowledge, and to write out
chapters, books, passages, sketches, designed to take their places in
it as essential parts. It was to include six great divisions: first, a
general survey of existing knowledge; second, a guide to the use of
the intellect in research, purging it of sources of error, and furnish-
ing it with the new instrument of inductive logic by which all the
laws of nature might be ascertained; third, a structure of the phe-
nomena of nature, included in one hundred and thirty particular
branches of natural history, as the materials for the new logic;
fourth, a series of types and models of the entire mental process of
discovering truth, "selecting various and remarkable instances"; fifth,
specimens of the new philosophy, or anticipations of its results, in
fragmentary contributions to the sixth and crowning division, which
was to set forth the new philosophy in its completeness, comprehend-
ing the truths to be discovered by a perfected instrument of reason-
ing, in interpreting all the phenomena of the world. Well aware that
the scheme, especially in its concluding part, was far beyond the


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1166
FRANCIS BACON
power and time of any one man, he yet hoped to be the architect
of the final edifice of science, by drawing its plans and making them
intelligible, leaving their perfect execution to an intellectual world
which could not fail to be moved to its supreme effort by a com-
prehension of the work before it. The Novum Organum,' itself
but a fragment of the second division of the 'Instauration,' the key
to the use of the intellect in the discovery of truth, was published
in Latin at the height of his splendor as Lord Chancellor, in 1620,
and is his most memorable achievement in philosophy. It contains
a multitude of suggestive thoughts on the whole field of science,
but is mainly the exposition of the fallacies by which the intel-
lect is deceived and misled, and from which it must be purged in
order to attain final truth, and of the new doctrine of "prerogative
instances," or, crucial observations and experiments in the work of
discovery.
In short, Bacon's entire achievement in science is a plan for
an impossible universe of knowledge. As far as he attempted to
advance particular sciences by applying his method to their detailed
phenomena, he wrought with imperfect knowledge of what had been
done, and with cumbrous and usually misdirected efforts to fill the
gaps he recognized. In a few instances, by what seems an almost
superhuman instinct for truth, rather than the laborious process of
investigation which he taught, he anticipated brilliant discoveries of
later centuries. For example, he clearly pointed out the necessity
of regarding heat as a form of motion in the molecules of matter,
and thus foreshadowed, without any conception of the means of
proving it, that which, for investigators of the nineteenth century,
has proved the most direct way to the secrets of nature. But the
testimony of the great teachers of science is unanimous, that Bacon
was not a skilled observer of phenomena, nor a discoverer of scien-
tific inductions; that he contributed no important new truth, in the
sense of an established law, to any department of knowledge; and
that his method of research and reasoning is not, in its essential feat-
ures, that which is fruitfully pursued by them in extending the bound-
aries of science, nor was his mind wholly purged of those "idols
of the cave," or forms of personal bias, whose varying forms as hin-
drances to the "dry light" of sound reason he was the first to expose.
He never appreciated the mathematics as the basis of physics, but
valued their elements mainly as a mental discipline. Astronomy
meant little to him, since he failed to connect it directly with human
well-being and improvement; to the system of Copernicus, the begin-
ning of our insight into the heavens, he was hostile, or at least
indifferent; and the splendid discoveries successively made by Tycho
Brahe, Galileo, and Kepler, and brought to his ears while the 'Great


## p. 1167 (#593) ###########################################

FRANCIS BACON
1167
Instauration filled his mind and heart, met with but a feeble welcome
with him, or none. Why is it, then, that Bacon's is the foremost
name in the history of English, and perhaps, as many insist, of all
modern thought? Why is it that "the Baconian philosophy" is
another phrase, in all the languages of Europe, for that splendid
development of the study and knowledge of the visible universe
which since his time has changed the life of mankind?
A candid answer to these questions will expose an error as wide
in the popular estimate of Bacon's intellectual greatness as that
which has prevailed so generally regarding his character. He is
called the inventor of inductive reasoning, the reformer of logic, the
lawgiver of the world of thought; but he was no one of these.
His
grasp of the inductive method was defective; his logic was clumsy
and impractical; his plan for registering all phenomena and selecting
and generalizing from them, making the discovery of truth almost a
mechanical process, was worthless. In short, it is not as a philoso-
pher nor as a man of science that Bacon has carved his name in the
high places of enduring fame, but rather as a man of letters; as on
the whole the greatest writer of the modern world, outside of the
province of imaginative art; as the Shakespeare of English prose.
Does this seem a paradox to the reader who remembers that Bacon
distrusted all modern languages, and thought to make his 'Advance-
ment of Learning' "live, and be a citizen of the world," by giving
it a Latin form? That his lifelong ambition was to reconstruct meth-
ods of thought, and guide intellect in the way of work serviceable
to comfort and happiness? That the books in which his English
style appears in its perfection, the 'History of Henry VII. ,' the
'Essays,' and the papers on public affairs, were but incidents and
avocations of a life absorbed by a master purpose?
But what is literature? It is creative mind, addressing itself in
worthy expression to the common receptive mind of mankind. Its
note is universality, as distinguished from all that is technical, lim-
ited, and narrow. Thought whose interest is as broad as humanity,
suitably clothed in the language of real life, and thus fitted for
access to the general intelligence, constitutes true literature, to the
exclusion of that which, by its nature or by its expression, appeals
only to a special class or school. The Opus Anglicanum' of Duns
Scotus, Newton's 'Principia,' Lavoisier's treatise Sur la Combus-
tion,' Kant's 'Kritik der Reinen Vernunft' (Critique of Pure Reason),
each made an epoch in some vast domain of knowledge or belief; but
none of them is literature. Yet the thoughts they, through a limited
and specially trained class of students, introduced to the world, were
gradually taken up into the common stock of mankind, and found
their broad, effective, complete expression in the literature of after


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1168
FRANCIS BACON
generations. If we apply this test to Bacon's life work, we shall find
sufficient justification for honoring him above all special workers in
narrower fields, as next to Shakespeare the greatest name in the
greatest period of English literature.
It was not as an experimenter, investigator, or technical teacher,
but as a thinker and a writer, that he rendered his great service to
the world. This consisted essentially in the contribution of two mag-
nificent ideas to the common stock of thought: the idea of the utility
of science, as able to subjugate the forces of nature to the use of
man; and the idea of continued and boundless progress in the com-
fort and happiness of the individual life, and in the order and dignity
of human society. It has been shown how, from early manhood, he
was inspired by the conception of infinite resources in the material
world, for the discovery and employment of which the human mind
is adapted. He never wearied of pointing out the imperfection and
fruitlessness of the methods of inquiry and of invention hitherto in
use, and the splendid results which could be rapidly attained if a
combined and systematic effort were made to enlarge the bounda-
ries of knowledge. This led him directly to the conception of an
improved and advancing civilization; to the utterance, in a thousand
varied, impressive, and fascinating forms, of that idea of human
progress which is the inspiration, the characteristic, and the hope of
the modern world. Bacon was the first of men to grasp these ideas
in all their comprehensiveness as feasible purposes, as practical aims;
to teach the development of them as the supreme duty and ambition
of his contemporaries, and to look forward instead of behind him
for the Golden Age. Enforcing and applying these thoughts with a
wealth of learning, a keenness of wit, a soundness of judgment, and
a suggestiveness of illustration unequaled by any writer before him,
he became the greatest literary power of modern times to stimulate
minds in every department of life to their noblest efforts and their
worthiest achievements.
Literature has a twofold aspect: its ideal is pure truth, which is
the noblest thought embodied in perfect beauty of form. It is the
union of science and art, the final wedding in which are merged the
knowledge worthy to be known and the highest imagination present-
ing it. There is a school calling itself that of pure art, to which
substance is nothing and form is everything. Its measure of merit
is applied to the manner only; and the meanest of subjects, the
most trivial and even the most degraded of ideas or facts, is wel-
comed to its high places if clothed in a satisfying garb. But this
school, though arrogant in the other arts of expression, has not yet
been welcomed to the judgment-seat in literature, where indeed it is
passing even now to contempt and oblivion. Bacon's instinct was for


## p. 1169 (#595) ###########################################

FRANCIS BACON
1169
substance. His strongest passion was for utility. The artistic side
of his nature was receptive rather than creative. Splendid passages
in the Advancement' and 'De Augmentis' show his profound appre-
ciation of all the arts of expression, but show likewise his inability
to glorify them above that which they express. In his mind, lan-
guage is subordinate to thought, and the painting to the picture, just
as the frame is to the painting or the binding to the book. He
writes always in the grand style. He reminds us of "the large
utterance of the early gods. " His sentences are weighted with
thought, as suggestive as Plato, as condensed as Thucydides. Full
of wit, keen in discerning analogies, rich in intellectual ornament, he
is yet too concentrated in his attention to the idea to care for the
melody of language. He decorates with fruits, not with flowers.
For metrical movement, for rhythmic harmony, he has no ear nor
sense. Inconceivable as it is that Shakespeare could have written
one aphorism of the 'Novum Organum,' it would be far more absurd
to imagine Bacon writing a line of the Sonnets. With the loftiest
imagination, the liveliest fancy, the keenest sense of precision and
appropriateness in words, he lacks the special gift of poetic form,
the faculty divine which finds new inspiration in the very limitations
of measured language, and whose natural expression is music alike
to the ear and to the mind. His powers were cramped by the fetters
of metre, and his attempts to versify even rich thought and deep
feeling were puerile. But his prose is by far the weightiest, the
most lucid, effective, and pleasing of his day. The poet Sprat justly
says:-
"He was a man of strong, clear, and powerful imaginations; his genius was
searching and inimitable; and of this I need give no other proof than his
style itself, which as for the most part it describes men's minds as well as
pictures do their bodies, so it did his above all men living. "
And Ben Jonson, who knew him well, describes his eloquence in
terms which are confirmed by all we know of his Parliamentary
career:
"One, though he be excellent and the chief, is not to be imitated alone;
for no imitator ever grew up to his author: likeness is always on this side
truth. Yet there happened in my time one noble speaker, who was full of
gravity in his speaking. His language (when he could spare or pass by a
jest) was nobly censorious. No man ever spake more neatly, more rightly,
more weightily, or suffered less emptiness, less idleness in what he uttered.
No member of his speech but consisted of his own graces. His hearers could
not cough or look aside from him without loss.