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 straight-thinking, 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 bribetakings, 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 father's house in the Strand he could look sheer across the Thames to Southwark, where, before he was thirty, the Globe Theatre was built, in which Shakespeare acted.

1

He

1 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.

was in Paris when his father died; there is no grief-stricken letter upon the event, but a curious mention that he had dreamed two nights before how his father's house was covered with black mortar-so intent is he on mental processes.

He had a mother who was pious, swiftthoughted, jealous, imperious, unreasonable, with streaks of tenderness.

"Be not speedy of speech," she says in one of her letters-"nor talk suddenly, but when discretion requireth, and that soberly then. Remember you have no father; and you have little enough-if not too little, regarded your kind, no-simple mother's wholesome advice."

And again: "Look well to your health; sup not, nor sit not up late; surely I think your drinking near to bedtime hindereth your and your brother's digestion very much: I never knew any but sickly that used it; besides ill for head and eyes." And again, in postscript: "I trust you, with yr servants, use prayers twice in a day, having been where reformation is. Omit it not for any."

And he responds with ceremony, waiving much of her excellent advice, and sometimes suggesting some favor she can do him,

"It may be I shall have occasion to visit the

Court this Vacation [he being then at Gray's Inn], which I have not done this months space. In which respect, because carriage of stuff to and fro spoileth it, I would be glad of that light bed of striped stuff which your Ladyship hath, if you have not otherwise disposed it.”

Sharpish words, too, sometimes pass between them; but he is always decorously and untouchingly polite.

Indeed his protestations of undying friendship to all of high station, whom he addresses unctuously, are French in their amplitude, and French, too, in their vanities. He presses sharply always toward the great end of selfadvancement-whether by flatteries, or cajolement, or direct entreaty. He believed in the survival of the fittest; and that the fittest should struggle to make the survival good— no matter what weak ones, or timid ones, or confiding ones, or emotional ones should go to the wall, or the bottom, in the struggle. His flatteries, I think, never touched the Queen, though he tried them often and gave a lurid color to his flatteries. She admired his parts as a young man; she had honored his father; she accepted his services with thanks-even the dreadful services which he rendered in demonstrating the treason of the gallant and

generous, but headstrong Earl of Essex. He never came into full possession of royal confidences, however, until James I. came to the throne: by him he was knighted, by him made Lord Chancellor, by him elevated to the peerage; and it was under him that he was brought to trial for receiving bribes-was convicted, despoiled of his judicial robes, went to prison -though it might be only for a day-and thereafter into that retirement, at once shameful and honorable, where he put the last touches to those broad teachings of "Philosophy," which the world will always cherish and revere: not the first nor the last instance in which great and fatal weaknesses have been united to great power and great accomplishment.

But lest you may think too hardly of this eminent man, a qualifying word must be said of that stain upon him-of receiving bribes: it was no uncommon thing for high judicial personages to take gifts; no uncommon thing for all high officers of the Government-nay, for the Government itself, as typified in its supreme head. And, strange as it may seem, Bacon's sense of justice does not appear to have been swayed by the gifts he took. Spedding has demonstrated, I think, that no judgment he rendered was ever reversed by subse