had carefully studied that wonderful career. But memory is the child of association and interest, and what is more natural than that Bacon should forget the stray facts of a subject on which he knew little and cared less? Indeed, from the disdainful way in which he despatches the question, he has no wish to conceal that just because it was everybody's weakness it was not his.

THE WRITER.-But instead, the greater weakness of teaching what he never learnt.

THE AUTHOR.And that granted, and all one would found on it, what discrimination and good sense will yet remain in his lessons, as if his conjectures, even on such a subject, were to be better than the experience of others. Who else has told us so well, if at all, that "the speaking in a perpetual hyperbole is comely in nothing but love;" that "there never was a proud man who thought so absurdly well of himself as the lover doth of the person loved;" that "love is ever rewarded with the reciprocal, or with an inward contempt;" that "it hath its floods in the very times of weakness, which are great prosperity or great adversity;" that "if it cheek once with business, it maketh men that they can in no ways be true to their ends;" and that there is "in man a secret inclination towards love of others which, if it be not spent upon some one, doth naturally spread itself towards many, as seems in the friars!" Admit that the pedant owes little to books, even on his most alien subject; if he knew not love, he understood the lover, and if no poet, caught what escapes them!

THE WRITER. You have precipitated the gold of the assay, and admitting this you will confess in return, that the residue is as commonplace as the little you have extracted is precious. He takes the trouble to confess that "he does not know how it is that martial men are given to love;" assures us that nuptial love maketh man kind;" and that "wanton love actually corrupteth it," and infers with solemn einphasis, that because "Appius Claudius was an austere and wise man, love can find an entrance into a heart well "fortified;" a great truth, which he is at

pains, however, to qualify by adding, if watch be not well kept!"

THE AUTHOR.-I confess that we wanted no Lord High Chancellor to rise from the grave to tell us that.

THE WRITER.-Yet one might forgive him much for that brief but happy touch on the "kindling" influence of this "child of folly" in adversity; an influence, as he says, "that hath been less observed," so much less that it passed the notice of a panegyrist active as yourself.

THE AUTHOR.-True. The witness, like his age, of the adversity of so many famous men, it could not have escaped him that the hate of circumstances, and the alienation of the world, is a sort of sombre atmosphere that concentrates the divided affections, the scattered electricity of a man's nature, and makes it more intense as the storm

around is darker. The weakness is one of all time and of all degrees of moral and intellectual worth. It is as much a rule for cashiered officers and bankrupt merchants to make honest women of their mistresses, as for desolate gourmands to marry their cooks. The lion-hearted Abd-el-Kadir, in the downfall of his romantic fortunes, preferred Frank captivity, with his harem, to the Arab freedom he loved, without it; Pompey, the idol of a world he had subjugated, becoming the aged fugitive of defeat, tended, like his great opponent Mithridates, but so much nearer to his young wife; and Bonaparte, who knew something of the "tender passion" while a needy halfpay in yonder garret, seemed capable of it again, when, the captive of our insular wilderness, he stood, like Marius, a present ruin perishing amid the ruins of his past the ruins of all that was great in the century; an injury European civilisation, and especially that of France, will never forgive him. Although such catastrophes by the power of a single person happen but once in a thousand years, if so oftenfor before the Corsican, Cæsar, and perhaps Alexander, stood by themselves in this disastrous aspect :—

Velut immissi diversis partibus ignes Arentem in sylvam et virgulta sonantia lauró, Quisque suum populatus iter!"

yet Bacon's comprehensive survey

has not overlooked the contingency, and in one pithy sentence, "He that plots to be the only figure amongst ciphers is the decay of a whole age," strikes off the gigantic truth.

THE WRITER.An admirable sentence, for which he is indebted to the poet Lucan, who, standing on the very hearth of the calamity, would fain no tice what held such kinship to his own tumid muse:

impellens quicquid sibi summa petenti Obstaret, gaudensque viam fecisse ruinâ,"

But your great Lord Chancellor's "meanness," to follow the precise Mr. Pope, is never far from his " great. ness," and while he can recommend his "brief notes" as neither "repetitions nor fancies," but as "of a nature whereof a man shall find much in experience and little in books," he is by no means incapable of a literary larceny, though I admit that, wiser in his philosophical than in his legal peccadilloes, he is the last man in the world whose sleight-of-hand facilitates detection. I see in his chains of thought traces of Latimer neither few nor far between: the quotations in his essay "On Truth" from Lucretius, and on the "Regimen of Health" from Cel sus, show that Montaigne's Essays (from which he avowedly borrowed his "title," and unavowedly extracts an opinion) had not been read by him in vain. And you will admit that the advice, "Be so true to thyself as that thou be not false to others," is close enough to that of Polonius

To thine own self be true, And it must follow as the night the day Thou can'st not then be false to any man"

to show some acquaintance with Shakspere.

THE AUTHOR.-But it must be owned too, that Shakspere himself, who in the same speech advises,

neither a lender nor a borrower be,"

could be as well the one as the other; and if the dates of publication are against me on the passage you compare, it is not so with regard to the nine Essays first published by Bacon, and in which there are morsels to warrant the conjecture, that the bard as often

incurred small obligations to the states man, as both appear to have done to Montaigne. But these are, after all, suspicions rather than accusations; coincidences which, as the French say of married delinquencies, if known to the parties, most concerned were peu de chose, and if unknown rien. You have but to bring the great man to any one of the questions of state policy and state rulers your observations recently referred to, to catch overwhelming proof that he could too well dispense with the inconsiderate trifles to be had from his few and well read predecessors, to risk so needless a desecration of his genius-a folly formed to remind one of a child I once saw in Pere la Chaise, with his angel face jaundiced over by a tawdry crown of immortals stolen from the festering dead. Once in the great arena of human action, the work and its competitors alike realising in their worthiness the royal wish of Alexander, "Give me princes for opponents," the all-potent athlete stands confessed. It is no longer his powers or his acquisitions that astound us, but the use of them. All is intellectual alchemy, and of the boundless stores, not to say rubbish, of classic, dogmatical, and physical literature he has at command, you are never reminded, except by the priceless drops of wisdom and experience they furnish when distilled through the magic alembic of his science. We have only to study what he said before 1626, and watch the course of history thenceforward to our own day, to feel that it is only by neglect of him revolutions are possible; for

"Quid utille, quid non Plenius et melius Chrysippo et Crantore dicit,"

In his appreciation of motives and characters he equals Tacitus, and may "set the murderous Machiavel to school." How finely, how completely does he lay down the canon to allay sedition, to suppress insurrections, to deal with abuses and dangerous ambitions, to choose ministers, to aggrandise a state;-in short to govern! Far above the fears and passions of his time, and the prejudices and even interests of his order, in the reign of our first James and of Buckingham, he tells them, "the wisdom of all these latter

times in princes' affairs is rather fine deliveries and shiftings of dangers and mischief when they are near, than solid and well grounded courses to keep them aloof;" demonstrates that "the multiplying of nobility and other degrees of quality in an over-proportion to the common people doth speedily bring a state to necessity"-"and so doth likewise an overgrown clergy, for they bring nothing to the stock, and make the common subject groan to be a peasant and base swain;" teaches "that the first remedy or prevention of sedition is to remove its natural causes, which are want and poverty in the state;" and among a thousand lessons of wisdom you will recall, lays down the striking aphorism, one in itself enough to agitate a people and reform a government, "that the blessing of Judas and Issacher will never meet, that the same people should be both the lion's whelp and the ass between burthens."

THE WRITER.-There is a "Radicalism" in the absolutist Lord Chancellor, which left the Pyms and Vanes of the rising generation little to learn, and less that they could wish to better.

THE AUTHOR.-But for the happiest elucidation, in briefest space, of Bacon's political wisdom, you must go to his thoughts on "Innovation, which to my judgment-sharpened by some Parisian experience-form the happiest of his "Essays." Suggesting with his customary temperance and discrimination, "that what is settled by time, though it be not good yet at least it is fit;" that "statesmen must beware that it is the reformation that draweth on the change, and not the desire of change that pretendeth the reformation;" (how happy a phrase!) he lays down the sublime truth, "TIME IS THE GREATEST INNOVATOR;" asks with an air of triumph"If time of course alter all things for the worse, and counsel shall not alter them to the better, what shall be the end?" (in few plain words what a conclusive generalisation !)-then warns the fearful that he that will not apply new remedies must expect new evils;" that a "froward retention of custom is as turbulent a thing as an innovation;" and sums up a wisdom, that is surely divine, in the one advice worthy of a Socrates, a Thomas a-Kempis, or a greater than either—

"Follow the example of time, which innovateth greatly but quietly!"

THE WRITER.-The sentiment better expressed, for which Canning, two centuries later, won a portion of his cheap celebrity-"Oppose improvement because it is innovation, and you will one day be compelled to accept innovation when it is no longer improvement!" James's Lord Chancellor displayed courage in propounding such

axioms.

THE AUTHOR.-Yes; but it seems a law, that we cannot think great truths without hazarding their publication. It requires at times as much power of will to be silent as to speak; and was it not Fox, the first Quaker, who said, "I preach because I cannot help it?" The felt uselessness of her previsions could not silence Cassanova, more than the Inquisition Luther; and when thought takes the shape of conviction, persecutors can no more be indifferent than their victims. Apropos of victims, I am reminded of the highest glory of the "Essays." In an age when persecution was the rule in religion, statecraft, and almost in literature, the war waged upon intolerance by so vigilant a time-server as Bacon is a proud thing in the annals of authorship. With what a noble vehemence does this contemporary of Laud stigmatise "the personation of God," and the blasphemy of "bringing him in like. the prince of darkness," and "the making the cause of religion to descend to the cruel and execrable actions of murdering princes, butchery of people, and subversion of states and government." "Surely," he continues, "this is to bring down the Holy Ghost, instead of in the likeness of a dove, in the shape of a vulture or raven, and to set out of the bark of a Christian Church the flag of a bark of pirates and assassins. Therefore it is most necessary that the Church, by doctrine and decree, princes by the sword, and all learnings, both Christian and moral, as by their mercury-rod, do damn and send to hell for ever these facts and opinions tending to the support of the same. Surely in councils concerning religion that counsel of the Apostle would be prefixed, Ira hominis non implet justitiam Dei;' and it was a notable observation of a wise father, and no less ingenuously confessed, that those which held and per

suaded pressure of consciences were commonly interested herein themselves for their own ends."*

THE WRITER.-The passage deserves to be prized, the more so, as it is probably the only one through the «Essays” in which he has expressed himself in the tones of earnestness and feeling. But after all, to a man believing less than Plato, and scarcely more than Lucretius, it could not have cost much to blaze out against principles which would have roasted, à la Servetus, the professor of his own; and we are not obliged to forget his later piety to think that, notwithstanding all his clever fencings and "self inquisitorship, that he may say nothing infectious to the state of religion and manners," there was one period of his life at least on which he thought his business done with Religion, when he had estimated her social or directed her political influence. Nay, on going through all his writings, and especially his tract On Incredulity"-I think that is the title-one might be forgiven for fancying that he was not above trying with one hand an occult advocacy of his indifference, while ostentatiously dealing it a theatrical blow with the other. Not to take you into the question to-day, do you remember the passage: "All that impugn a received religion or superstition are by the adverse part branded with the name of Atheists, but the great Atheists, indeed, are hypocrites which are ever handling holy things but without feeling."

THE AUTHOR.-You omit the significant addition, "So as they, the Atheists, must needs be cauterised in the end!"

THE WRITER.-That is the "theatrical blow" I spoke of; it is a concession made with an ill grace; a levity peeps out of the solemn equivoque; and he is glad to run from the topic to a formal summary of causes. Whatever, however, his views in faith, his disclaimers of infidelity win little support from his estimates of religious obligations. He may call "Truth the sovereign good of human nature," but his enjoyment of it is that of his own spectator in the Tower, watching the storm in the distance. Contrast is a portion of his pleasure. He reasons on falsehood after the fashion of the

"On Unity of Religion."

Irish father who punished his son, not for a lie, but a lie in the wrong place, and every phrase from his pen, in more or less affinity with the sentiment of the poet

"Exeat auleå

Qui vult esse pius,"

"

seems but an advertisement to the Court that conscience and honour are two sacrifices with him ever in waiting for the service of his country. He teaches that a mixture of falsehood is "like alloy in coin of gold or silver, which may make the metal work the better" has a feeling of enjoyment for the good, shrewd, Spanish proverb,' tell a lie, and find a truth;' and contentedly lays down, as the result of his reflections on dissimulation, "the best composition and temperature is, to have openness in fame and opinion, secresy in habit, dissimulation in seasonable use, and a power to feign, if there be no remedy!" In truth, while giving pompous eulogies on Truth"to make the metal work the better" -he cares no more than he says the world does, for that "naked daylight" which has the disadvantage of shewing "the mummeries of life not half so daintily as candlelight;" and if, as he tells us, the last peal calling the inquest of God shall be the want of faith on earth, he takes care to avouch to us, that it will be no principle of truthfulness in him that shall stay for an hour the vast denouement. unprincipled and heartless, he is only a less sanguinary and less daring politician than the Cecils and Walsinghams of his youth. Their infernal subtlety and unscrupulousness, qualities of all the advisers of Elizabeththe crowned instigator and instrument of the school-pervade all he writes. Fond of Machiavelli, he is not the man to designate him "murderous," with Shakspere, nor to pass him over with the contemptuous reference of Montaigne, "They say, in our times, that he is an authority in some quarters!" Heedless of the charities of life, he tells you "Account your suspicions true, but bridle them as false"and advising, in some places, as if mankind were made for princes, he lays down the iron formulæ by which worth and eminence shall be crushed to the

"Of Atheism,”

As