of the pleasure of the heart by the pleasure of the eye. Certainly virtue is like precious odors, most fragrant when they are incensed or crushed: for prosperity doth best discover vice; but adversity doth best discover virtue."-Essay of Adversity.

"To be, or not to be: that is the question;
Whether 'tis nobler in the mind to suffer
The slings and arrows of outrageous fortune,
Or to take arms against a sea of troubles,
And by opposing end them? To die: to sleep;
No more; and by a sleep to say we end
The heart-ache and the thousand natural shocks
That flesh is heir to; 'tis a consummation
Devoutly to be wish'd. To die, to sleep;

To sleep: perchance to dream; ay, there's the rub;
For in that sleep of death what dreams may come
When we have shuffled off this mortal coil,
Must give us pause: there's the respect

That makes calamity of so long life;

For who would bear the whips and scorns of time,
The oppressor's wrong, the proud man's contumely,
The pangs of despised love, the law's delay,
The insolence of office, and the spurns

That patient merit of the unworthy takes,

But that the dread of something after death,

The undiscovered country from whose bourn

No traveler returns, puzzles the will

And makes us rather bear the ills we have

Than fly to others that we know not of?
Thus conscience does make cowards of us all;
And thus the native hue of resolution

Is sicklied o'er with the pale cast of thought,
And enterprises of great pith and moment
With this regard their currents turn awry,
And lose the name of action."

Hamlet.

Here is a nice literary problem. In Milton, we have an eloquent eulogy of good books, and, following this, the grandest, most terrible figure the eye of imagination ever beheld. Boldness, originality, sublimity characterize both. The image of God shining upon us through the clear light of knowledge, and that of the ruined archangel like the sun seen through a mist, are metaphors so striking and at the same time so similar that under any circumstances, it would seem, we might have suspected their common origin. Certainly the two specimens are pitched in the same lofty key.

Turning to the couplet from Bacon, what do we find? An intellect of a wholly different type, at once incisive and profound, grasping principles as firmly as Jupiter grasped thunder-bolts, and wielding them with a brilliancy that is almost dazzling. The two passages, from the Essay and from Hamlet, illustrate almost precisely the same mental qualities. They are both philosophical. They deal analytically, one with the joys and sorrows of this world, and the other with doubts and misgivings on the perilous edge of the next. There is no spiritual rift, and conse

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quently no warm sunshine" pouring down through the clouds, in either.

“The truth is that Bacon was not without the fine frenzy of the poet."-Spedding.

7. Bacon's want of natural sympathy, as shown in his treatment of Essex, fails to satisfy our ideal, derived from the dramas themselves, of their great author; for the world has bestowed upon Shakespeare not only its reverence, but its love.

It cannot be denied that the author of the Plays possessed a heart of the most tender sensibilities. Like the tides of the ocean, his sympathies were "poured round all,” penetrating every bay, creek, and river of human experience. The voyager o'er the mighty current of his thought always feels embarked on the bosom of the unbounded deep. It is not enough, therefore, that Bacon was a man of lofty aims; that he devoted his great powers with tireless assiduity to the interests of mankind; was he also of that rare type of character that, with greatness of intellect, glows and scintillates at every touch of feeling?

This brings us to a most important test, the personality of Lord Bacon himself. Time has scarcely dimmed his figure; we know him almost as intimately as though he were walking our streets. We see him gathering violets in his garden, stringing pearls of thought in his essays, swaying the House of Commons with his eloquence, holding the scales of justice in the courts, marking the trend of

social progress in his histories, and breaking the chains that had bound the human intellect from the days of Aristotle. His mind and heart were in touch with every interest of mankind. He was poet, orator, naturalist, physician, historian, essayist, philosopher, statesman, and judge. No man ever filled more completely the ideal of the Roman poet :

"Homo sum; humani nihil a me alienum puto."

"The small, fine mind of Labruyère had not a more delicate tact than the large intellect of Bacon. His understanding resembled the tent which the fairy Parabanon gave to Prince Ahmed. Fold it, and it seemed a toy in the hand of a lady; spread it, and the armies of powerful sultans might repose beneath its shade."Macaulay.

“A soft voice, a laughing lip, a melting heart, made him hosts of friends. No child could resist the spell of his sweet speech, of his tender smile, of his grace without study, his frankness without guile.”—Hepworth Dixon.

He is accused of ingratitude toward his friend Essex, because, first, he appeared against the accused at the trial; and, secondly, because by superior tactics he was the means of insuring conviction.

On the first point, it is sufficient to say that Bacon was present as an officer of the crown at the express command of the Queen, having repeatedly forewarned the Earl of the result of his evil courses, and duly notified him that,

on any

breach of the peace, he himself would support the government. On the second, he was prominent in the proceedings because his mental stature made him prominent. As well attempt to force an oak back into its acorn as to bring Francis Bacon on any occasion down to the level of ordinary men.*

In the matter of the bribes, he suffered for the sins of society. So far as he was personally culpable, it is manifest from his subsequent demeanor that chronic carelessness in money matters, and not any guile, was at the bottom of the difficulty.†

* That Bacon felt himself compromised in public estimation we know very well, for in a letter to the Queen he says:

"My life has been threatened and my name libeled."

We find the same lament in one of his sonnets, as follows:

"Then hate me if thou wilt; if ever, now,

Now while the world is bent my deeds to cross,
Join with the spite of fortune."

Sonnet XC.

In another sonnet, the author expresses fear of assassination, anticipating "The coward conquest of a wretch's knife."

LXX.

+ Bacon's want of attention to his personal finances (a not uncommon failing in great men, due to a sort of instinct that the matter is beneath them) caused his mother the most lively concern. She even interfered at one time to protect him from his own servants. Spedding tells the following story in point:

"In the year 1655, a book-seller's boy heard some gentlemen talking in his master's shop; one of them, a gray-headed man, was describing a scene which he had himself witnessed at Gorhambury. He had gone to see the lord chancellor on business, who received him in his study and, having occasion to go out,