Yet there was a certain good in this massing of epithets, and in this tesselated cumulation of nice bits of language, from which the more wary and skilful of writers could choose as from a great vocabulary - what words were cleanest and clearest. Nor do I wish to give the impression that there were no evidences of thoughtfulness or of good purpose, under Lyly's tintinnabulation of words. Hazlitt thought excellently well of him; and Charles Kingsley, in these later times, has pronounced extravagant eulogy of him. Indeed he had high moral likings, though his inspirations are many of them from Plato or Boethius; it is questionable also if he did not pilfer from Plutarch; certainly he sugar-coats with his language a great many heathen pills.

In observation he is very acute. That Euphues who gives name to his book, is an Athenian youth of rare parts—"well-constituted as the Greek implies who has lived long in Italy, and who talks in this strain of the ladies he saw on a visit to England:

Marco Aurelio, 1529. It was translated into English by Lord Berners in 1531 (published in 1534).

"The English Damoiselles have their bookes tied to their girdles not feathers who are as cunning in the Scriptures as you are in Ariosto or Petrark. It is the most gorgeous court [of England] that ever I have seene or heard of; but yet do they not use their apparel so nicely as you in Italy, who thinke scorne to kneele at service, for fear of wrinckles in your silk, who dare not lift up your head to heaven, for fear of rumpling the ruffs in your neck; yet your handes, I confess, are holden up, rather I thinke, to show your ringes, than to manifest your righteousness."

Elizabeth would have very probably relished this sort of talk, and have commended the writer in person; nor can there be any doubt that, in such event, Lyly would have mumbled his thanks in kissing the royal hands: there are complaining letters of his on the score of insufficient court patronage, which are not high-toned, and which make us a little doubtful of a goodly manhood in him. Certainly his deservings were great, by reason of the plays which he wrote for her Majesty's Company of Child-players, and which were acted at the Chapel Royal and in the palaces. In some of these there are turns of expression and of dramatic incident which Shakespeare did not hesitate to convert to his larger purposes; indeed there is, up and down in them, abundance of dainty word-craft-of in

genuity of more than Elizabethan delicacy too, and from time to time, some sweet little lyrical outburst that holds place still in the anthologies.

One of these, with which I daresay you may be over-familiar, is worth quoting again. It is called Apelles' Song, and it is from the play of "Alexander and Campaspe : "

66 Cupid and my Campaspe played
At cards for kisses - Cupid paid.

He stakes his quiver, bows and arrows,
His mother's doves, and team of sparrows:

Loses them too: then down he throws

The coral of his lip - the Rose

Growing on's cheek (but none knows how);

With these the crystal of his brow,

And then the dimple of his chin

All these did my Campaspe win.
At last, he set her both his eyes-
She won; and Cupid blind did rise.
O Love, has she done this to thee?
What shall, alas! become of me ?"

He puts, too, into imitative jingle of words the song of the Nightingale (as Bryant has done for the Bobolink); and of the strain of the skylark nothing prettier was ever said than Mr. Lyly says:

"How, at Heaven's gate she claps her wings,
The morn not waking- till she sings."

Francis Bacon.

We go away from singing skylarks to find the next character that I shall cull out from these Elizabethan times to set before you: this is Lord Bacon or, to give him his true title, Lord Verulam- there being, in fact, the same impropriety in saying Lord Bacon (if custom had not "brazed it so") that there would be in saying Lord D'Israeli for Lord Beaconsfield.

Here was a great mind a wonderful intellect which everyone admired, and in which everyone of English birth, from Royalty down, took- and ever will take a national pride; but, withal, few of those amiabilities ever crop out in this great character which make men loved. He can see a poor priest culprit come to the rack without qualms; and could look stolidly on, as Essex, his special benefactor in his youth, walked to the scaffold; yet the misstatement of a truth, with respect to physics, or any matter about which truth or untruth was clearly demonstrable, affected him like a galvanic shock. His biographers, Montagu and Spedding, have padded his angularities into roundness; while

Pope and Macaulay have lashed him in the grave. I think we must find the real man somewhere between them; if we credit him with a great straightthinking, truth-seeking brain, and little or no capacity for affection, the riddle of his strange life will be more easily solved. Spedding,* who wrote a voluminous life of Bacon-having devoted a quarter of a century to necessary studies - does certainly make disastrous ripping-up of the seams in Macaulay's rhetoric; but there remain certain ugly facts relating to the trial of Essex, and the bribe-takings, which will probably always keep alive in the popular mind an under-current of distrust in respect to the great Chancellor.

He was born in London, in 1561, three years before Shakespeare, and at a time when, from his fath

*James Spedding, b. 1803; d. 1881. His chief work was the Bacon life; and there is something pathetic in the thought of a man of Spedding's attainments, honesty of purpose, and unflagging industry, devoting thirty of the best years of his life to a vindication of Bacon's character. His aggressive attitude in respect to Macaulay is particularly shown in his Evenings with a Reviewer (2 vols., 8vo), in which he certainly makes chaff of a good deal of Macaulay's arraignment.