THE AUTHOR.—I scarcely know why, but I never read an author of the true English school with so much gusto as in Paris. Shakspere, in one magic sentence, brings the tinkling pedantry of French literature to its true proportions, its miniature harmonies; and as for Bacon, one has only to meet him in the clear light that bleaches the fluted pillars of the Madeleine, to feel that the English milord loses on his travels none of his sterling consequence. With all our pride of thought, the worth of what men say or write is one of circumstance after all. The balderdash of Pistol became "brave 'ords" in the public opinion of the sensible Fluellen, when heard amid the pomp and circumstance of war; and if there were no statutes of taste in force, no Magna Chartæ of established fames, so that men might judge of authors, as in England they affect to do of faiths, on their own free poisings and likings, Homer would have to owe again his preservation to oriental shepherds, Virgil and Milton theirs to university professors, Shakspere and Bacon would have no reader under thirty, and Scott and Byron none over. Climate has as much perhaps to do with our appreciations as any other collateral influence. Our perceptions clear with the atmosphere. We think pellucidly at Paris, just as men think "beerily" in Amsterdam or London; and ten to one but that if we could get at the inner being of the mouse in the exhausted receiver, or the balloon-man in one of his ascents, we should find that their brightest notions held some kinship with the point of rarification that, without paining the lungs, most enfranchised the brain. How else should Bacon in his " Essays," who is only common sense on our side the channel, seem to me a miraculous inspiration on this?

influence lent to appreciate, or perhaps to magnify, Bacon, in a clearer sky, another name sometimes for better health, you have in Paris a second and more certain influence in what may be termed the social atmosphere, and its piquant contrast of thought and manners. There are spots, sings Milton, that brighten light; in the kingdom of the blind, the man with one eye is king; and may not Bacon easily rise into the inspired prince of wisdom amid a people who, as you yourself put it the other day, "seem to have been endowed with reason, as their cooks with the egg, just to demonstrate the infinite perversions of which it is susceptible." I am, however, on sufficiently good terms with myself-the arch-flatterer-to fancy that the concentrated lights which reflect an adventitious brilliancy on the one point of view, have for once not so dazzled my sight as to shut out the essential qualities of the object itself; and admitting all you may ask, even in Paris, for the common sense of Lord Bacon's "Essays," I no more think of praising them for that, than a peasant of thanking God for green fields. Mere common sense, however far carried, be it even profound, if such a quality be possible of such a thing, is still one of the humblest, just as one confesses it to be one of the most necessary, qualifications of a public teacher; and to my mind it is the "damned spot" in the "Essays," which all the "rain in the sweet heavens" will not wash white, nor "all the perfumes of Arabia sweeten," that if they are never less, they are never more than common sense.

THE AUTHOR.—An ex-cathedrá summary of an interesting question, which reminds one of a modern generalissimo ending a campaign in a charge. All you ask is, to retract an opinion that Literature for the first time finds a doubt on.

The Essays are "the best fruits," as he says himself so beautifully," that, by the good increase God gave to his pen and labours, he could yield:" they became, in his own time, "the most current of all his other works;" and already authorised the proud boast-sturdier than even that

of Horace or Ovid-that they "will last as long as books last." The patron genius of a new era and people, they formed the first or second work that issued from the English press of the other hemisphere, and men of genius of all places and habitudes-D'Alembert, Pope, Dugald Stewart, Brougham, James Macintosh, Johnson Samuel, and Jonson Benjamin—have ever since sung in chorus, that his mediocrity of common sense was, in the words of one of them, the "consummation of all wisdom." Nay, even your incredulity will not deny it to be the unparalleled inspirations of an experience without parallel.

THE WRITER. Which experience forms nothing more than a main, perhaps a primary, element of the common sense that we are both eulogising, and whose completeness, in a limited sense, I no more deny, than I admit its sufficiency in a large one. I know the abyss of literary heresy he tempts, who speaks with moderation of a volume it has been the wisdom of centuries to laud with intemperance. But just as I find no poetry in the verses in which Pope describes him as the "wisest of mankind," so I find no truth in the prose in which he or others deliberately adjudge him at the head of our race. You allege his marvellous experience. Are we sure that it was as extensive as he paints it, or as the world therefore believes it? Who knew better that "he who is only real, needs exceeding parts of virtue;" and that "in the ascents of authorship the flight is slow without some feathers of ostentation?" It is difficult to fancy that there was more of a wise experience in his private counsels to his friend and client, Essex, than in his public prosecution and libelling of him afterwards; and I must be forgiven for demanding strong proof of that vast reach of insight into affairs which could allow a Lord High Chancellor openly to accept bribes from suitors, in the very presence of a parliamentary faction as strong politically, as his insolence and inconsistency had made it hostile personally. The most explicit and favourable witnesses to his experience, these "Essays," were the work of a life, begun in the magni

See Spence.

ficent promise of youth, revised and completed when chastening adversity, ending a long career of busy ambition, gave him a few years' repose on the brink of the immortality he knew he had secured; yet to me it seems difficult to read them without feeling that his knowledge of actual life bore no proportion to his learning; that, a scholar from boyhood, he instinctively paid his highest homage to what he calls"optimi consiliarii, mortui;" and that there was more truth than he perhaps felt, in the modest confession of his early authorship, that he was less fitted for busy life than for "contemplations and studies." The truth is (I speak under correction) Bacon was vi naturæ a man of books and reasoning, as much as Aristotle, Thomas Aquinas, or Newton; his affections were in a literary philosophy, medical, scholastic, or theological; he was in busy life by ambition, and out of it by feeling and taste; and his last prayer acknowledges, but to my mind with no more clearness than his "Essays," that if he had not "hidden in a napkin his talent of gifts and graces,' he had at all events "misspent it in purposes for which he was the least fit!"

He is

THE AUTHOR.-The highest minds tend, of course, to the loftiest pursuits, as the eagle makes its home on the tallest cliff; but surely, with such a genius as Bacon's, it is not because there is so much in the more, there should be so little in the less. fond of pointing out the demarcations between the practical and the thoughtful; but I do not recollect that he has once insinuated their incompatibility. "There be many," he says, in his Essay of Cunning, "that can pack the cards, aud yet cannot play well: it is one thing to understand persons and another thing to understand matters, for many are perfect in men's humours that are not greatly capable (what a word, that greatly!') of the real part of business which is the constitution of one that hath studied men before books. Such men are more fitted for practice than counsel, and they are good but in their own alley. Turn them to new men, and they have lost their aim." "Certainly some there are," he says again, "that know the resorts and falls

C

of business that cannot sink into the main of it, like a house that hath convenient stairs and entries, but never a fair room; therefore you shall find them fit out pretty looses in the conclusion, but are no way able to examine or debate matters; and yet commonly they take advantage of their inability, and would be thought wits of discretion." You observe that he has partly anticipated, as of others, your discovery as of him, and going still further, and disentangling the whole complex skein of capacity, demonstrates that as the greater alone can contain the less, and the universal alone cope with the great, the practical in statemanship is not necessarily the successful, and thus suggests your refutation in advance.

THE WRITER.-May it not be, that the very trouble he takes to dispose of the difficulty, is proof that he felt that it came home to his own business and bosom? History favours the presumption.

THE AUTHOR.-Nay, I cannot go so far with you. That Bacon, at any period of his adult life you can name, was fitted for every sphere of public life, or even most of them, and still less, that he was modelled to extract from them for his own uses all their advantages, is what I will not contend for, and which, if I did, his own career, successful as it was for a time, would in some sense belie. The power, and the use of the power, are incidents not necessarily inseparable, as he knew well who wrote

"truly to be great,

Is not to stir without great argument."

Shallowness, a thing of instincts rather than of mind, alone is capable of, at the same time that it is unequal to, every rôle at short notice; just as the automaton can in a half way be qualified for complex manœuvres, more readily than the most sagacious charger. In early life it fell into the part of Bacon to see more than to do, to reason more than to influence, to rise more by the ascendancy of his genius than the ready skilfulness of his expedients; but if all this introduced, what I do not admit, an awkwardness in the action of life, it by no means necessitated an ignorance of its characteristics. Nay, as lookers-on see more of the game than the player, and the Stoic can better appraise the follies of love than the lover, Bacon's extraordinary

intuitions into life owe much of their happiness to the very circumstance which at the first shew takes away from their value. For the experience that does is sometimes-if common-place it is always-the experience that is unfitted to teach, for it is the experience which is not for the world, but, as he says, "for an alley ;" an experience which never rises to causes, which never looks to relations-which, in one word, never philosophises. It is not in action but thought that new truths are evolved; and if we would burn great verities into the world, we must do little else but observe and talk with Socrates, or pray, and be in the desert, with the Holy One. You shall see one man clever to act, another to originate, a third to appreciate, a fourth even to illustrate; but each or all these qualities fall far away from forming a Bacon, in whom a marvellous experience, a boundless erudition, and an almost divine comprehensiveness of vision, happily combine with a magic power, more wonderful than all, of enriching all he touches, to make him the nonpareil of human thinkers. stands alone in his view of life, just as he stands on the eminence of a genius that is alone in human things. one idolizes more "the gentle child of fancy," or values at a higher rate the at times infinite affluence carelessly flung to us by Montaigne; but say, on this point, the most for both :-Shakspere knew men and things as they are

He

No

Montaigne as they were in himself; Bacon alone rose to the science of them, as they were in both!

To

THE WRITER.-A very gallant defence, and not the less daring because the "Immortal Will." is brought in to discharge the expense. But is the comparison, well looked at, one to profit your illustrious client? know men and things as they are, what is it but as an author to interpret to every eye that has learned to see the hidden life of nature and veritable nature of life, and what is that but to exhaust at once both poetry and philosophy, and exercise the highest prerogative of earthly genius? Fortified by such an admission, Shakspere's truth, or even old Montaigne's candour, will prove sadly to discountenance what you call your friend's science— which, when you call a science that Shakspere did not know, you suggest the admission (if you will forgive me)

that Shakspere's thought was as unshackled by pedantry as his experience was uncharacterised by pretension.

THE AUTHOR.-That, now, is the true symptom of a bad case of Anglomania!in the name of Nature substituting Shakspere for her and everything else, just as our ignorant Mariolatists over here honour the Son by reserving all their prayers for his mother! None know better than you that the symmetry which graces genius may make it look less gigantesque, but strips it of no atom of greatness; and even an admirer of the great Bard might admit that the only thing want. ing to raise him above a height, superhuman as it is, was that power contemporaneously evidenced by his friend Bacon, of systematising whatever he handled, and so leaving on it the fertilising impress of order and science.

THE WRITER.-For ever systemsystem!-that refined torture by which modern Procrustes would limit the future to the forms and proportions of the past, and, in a jealous idolatry of contemptible imitations, dwarf, if they cannot annihilate, the infinite of human thought! The thing you dignify as "system," "order," and "science"ever changing yet ever wise—is to thought what the text-book of court ceremonies is to life, and the formulary of Chinese training to the human figure unadorned. The truth is, if you will forgive me the frankness, you are not wholly free here from the fault of the people among whom we are living, who, drilled in youth into a sort of classic regimentalism, their judgments snipped out for them by college modists on good Latin models, are all for graceful forms and symmetrical triflings. Bounded in their estimates of psychological action by certain given rules taught in the standard "repertoires" of orthodox criticism, they have no notion or thought that is not an aphorism, of style, that is not an antithesis, or of genius, that is not a system; and an attentive eye would detect them shuddering at a novelty of fancy, or falling into a syncope at a freedom of passion that stood without a precedent! They are all for the showy in expression, and all for the orderly which, nine times in ten, is the petty-in construction; and the artless Shakespere could no more have been a poet for them, than the unpretending Wellington a gene

say,

ral! To apply this, as the preachers and to shew how little what you call system in literature has to do with substantial results, except to dwarf them, compare the teachings of your statesman and scholar with those of the simple poet on what Frenchwomen call "La grande passion," a passion on which, luckily for us, everybody is an author and everybody a critic. Of all his subjects, coming home to everybody, this came home the nearest; yet for any light of my Lord Bacon, the Essay, "stale, flat and unprofitable," might have been written by Queen Elizabeth!

THE AUTHOR.-You have singled out the most unfavourable of Lord Bacon's chapters. "The stage," as he says, "is more beholden to love than the life of man ;" and true to the reality of his nature, he gives to the brief episode but about the hundredth part of his book. The noble lawyer, either before or after his marriage, appears to have been no lover, and therefore no exception to his dicta, that "great spirits and business do keep out this weak passion," and that "among all the great and worthy persons whereof the memory remaineth, ancient or modern, there is not one that hath been transported to the mad degree of love."

THE WRITER.-And thereby he shews himself no better informed on the literature than on the sensibilities of the subject; for passing Lais, or the blindness of Solomon, or the conjugal infatuation of Belisarius, how could he on such a subject have overlooked the madness of Cæsar under the magic of the "fatale monstrum” of Egypt? The party of the Senate dispersed, rather than defeated; the son of Pompey at the head of a large fleet and army in Spain; in Africa, the republic, supported by Cato, commanding a vast army and powerful allies; Cæsar, almost as weak in force as in right; yet at such a moment, when all appeared to depend on that celerity of which he was so admirable a master, the Hercules of war gave up nine precious months to the apronstrings of his Egyptian OmphaleRome meanwhile, agitated by factions, asking in vain where is he?

THE AUTHOR.-The omission is singular, especially as Antony is instanced. in the Essay, and the statesman's constant allusions to Cæsar prove that he