scientific programme in the Novum Organum, and the Advancement of Learning. The change in method had to come with the rise of the scientific spirit; it is Bacon's glory that he saw and expressed the need of change before others were quite conscious of it.

The "Essays."-Bacon holds his place in literature, however, not by reason of the Novum Organum (which is in Latin) and the Advancement of Learning, but by reason of his Essays. The Essays were at first mere jottings down of stray ideas, brief note-book memoranda. As such they were first published (then ten in number) in 1597, in the author's thirty-sixth year. Fifteen years later they were issued again, with additions; and in 1625 they were put forth in final form, the essays now numbering fifty-eight, the old ones revised and expanded. It is clear that their charm grew upon Bacon, and urged him, half against his will, to put more and more serious effort into the handling of a language for which, in comparison with Latin, he had no great respect, yet of which he is one of the greatest masters.

The Essays deal with many subjects, of public and private conduct, of statecraft, of human passions and human relations; and with these graver themes are intermingled others of a lighter sort, on building, on the planting of gardens, on the proper mounting and acting of masques. To a modern understanding those which deal with the deeper questions of human nature are apt to seem somewhat shallow and worldly wise. We get from them few large insights or generous points of view; everywhere we find wit, keen observation, grave or clever worldly wisdom. Now and again, to be sure, Bacon startles us with an altogether unworldly sentence, such as this: "Little do men perceive what solitude is, and how far it extendeth; for a crowd is not company, and faces are but a gallery of pictures, and talk but a tinkling cymbal, where there is no love." Some of the essays, such as the one entitled "Of Great Place," show an unworldly wisdom which, if applied to Bacon's own life, would have made it a very different thing. Not seldom, too, he lifts the curtain upon that inner passion of his existence, the thirst for intellectual truth, which made him noble in spite

of the shortcomings of his character: "Truth," he says, "which only doth judge itself, is the sovereign good of human nature."

Bacon's Style. For the student of expression, Bacon's essays are of endless interest and profit; the more one reads them, the more remarkable seem their compactness and their vitality. When the bulk of English prose was being written in loose sentences of enormous length, Bacon struck out a thoroughly modern. sentence, short, crisp, and clear. His style has a curious sharp emphasis, a tone of startling authority and command. The essays shock a sluggish attention into wakefulness as if by an electric contact; and though they may sometimes fail to nourish, they can never fail to stimulate.

Bacon represents the scientific curiosity of the later Renaissance. The mystical and religious thought of the age is equally well represented by a writer whose style is as ornate as Bacon's is simple-Sir Thomas Browne.

III. SIR THOMAS BROWNE (1605-1682)

Browne as a Mystic: The "Religio Medici."-Sir Thomas Browne, after studying medicine at the famous schools of Montpellier in Frarce and Padua in Italy, settled as a physician at Norwich, in Norfolk, and there passed his life. In 1642 appeared his first work, Religio Medici, a confession of his own personal religious creed. It is in essence a mystical acceptance of Christianity. "Methinks," he says, "there be not impossibilities enough in religion for an active faith

. I love to lose myself in a mystery; to pursue my reason to an O Altitudo!" This sense of solemn exaltation, this losing of himself in a mystery, is Browne's characteristic mood. We see in him how far the temper of men had departed from the Elizabethan zest of life, from the Renaissance delight in the stir and bustle of human activity. "Methinks," he says, "I begin to be weary of the sun. The world to me is but a dream and mock-show, and we all therein but pantaloons and antics, to my severer contemplations."

Browne as a Writer: The "Urn Burial."-It was not until long after the Civil War had ceased to shake the earth with its "drums and tramplings" that Sir Thomas Browne published his most famous piece, the Urn Burial (1658). It was suggested by the finding of some ancient Roman funeral urns buried in the earth in the neighborhood of Norwich. It pretends to be an inquiry into the various historic methods of disposing of the dead, but is in fact a sermon upon the vanity of earthly ambition, especially in its attempt to hand on mortal memory to future ages.

Like almost all the writers of his time, Browne is extremely uneven; his great passages come unexpectedly, but these have a pomp and majesty which even Milton has not surpassed. His English is full of large-sounding words coined from the Latin, and the music of his periods is deep, stately, and long-drawn, like that of an heroic funeral march or the full-stop of a cathedral organ. The opening of the last section of the Urn Burial will serve perhaps to make these comparisons clear: "Now, since these dead bones have already outlasted the living ones of Methuselah, and in a yard under ground, and thin walls of clay, outworn all the strong and specious buildings above it; and quietly rested under the drums and tramplings of three conquests: what prince can promise such diuturnity unto his reliques?" The way in which his imagination plays through his thought and flashes a sudden illumination of beauty over his pages, may be suggested by these words, written one night when he had sat late at his desk: "To keep our eyes open longer were but to act our Antipodes. The huntsmen are up in America!"

IV. THE CAVALIER POETS, HERRICK, AND WALTON

By-Paths in Seventeenth Century Literature.-It is natural in an intensely serious age like the seventeenth century, that literature should escape here and there with delight into a world of care-free pleasure. Such a wandering in flowery by-paths we may see in the amatory verse of the Cavalier poets, Carew, Lovelace, and Suckling; in the lyrics of love and country life of Herrick; and in Walton's famous little

book upon the art of angling, the humblest but one of the best-beloved of English classics.

The Cavalier Poets. Of the three poets whose connection with the court of Charles I. have given them the title of "Cavalier Poets," the eldest was Thomas Carew (15981638?). His best known lyric is "Give me more love or more disdain," in which his felicity and courtly charm display themselves at their height. Carew died in 1638, just before the bursting of the storm which was to scatter the gay society of Whitehall, and bring to poverty, exile, and death the men and women for whom he had sung.

Richard Lovelace (1618-1658) and John Suckling (1609– 1641) were young courtiers of wealth and great social brilliance, who practised poetry much as they practised swordsmanship, facility in turning a sonnet or a song being still, as in the Elizabethan age, considered a part of a courtier's education. Each of them wrote, it would seem almost by happy accident, two or three little songs which are the perfection of melody, grace, and aristocratic ease. Suckling's tone is cynical and mocking; the best songs of Lovelace, on the other hand, "To Lucasta, on Going to the Wars," and "To Althea from Prison," breathe a spirit of old-fashioned chivalry, of faithfulness to the ideals of love and knightly honor. Both Suckling and Lovelace met with tragic reversal of fortune; and the contrast between their careless, brilliant youth, and their wretched death, has thrown about their names a romantic glamour which has had perhaps as much to do with preserving their fame as the tiny sheaf of lyrics they left behind.

Robert Herrick.-Robert Herrick (1591-1674) was born in London, and apprenticed in boyhood to his uncle, a goldsmith in Cheapside. After some time spent at Cambridge, he returned to London in his thirtieth year, and lived on his wits in the literary bohemia of the Inns of Court. In 1629, having taken orders, he was presented by King Charles to the vicarage of Dean Prior, in Devonshire. Here, with no duties to perform save the reading of a weekly sermon to a handful of sleepy parishioners, he had ample opportunity, during the next nineteen years, to develop his lyrical gifts.

His genius was of the kind which carves cherry-stones, not of the kind which hews great figures from the living rock. Left perfectly to himself, amid the flowers of his vicarage garden, with the pretty traditional ceremonies and merrymakings of country life to look at, he spent his days carving cherry-stones indeed, but giving to them the delicate finish of cameos or of goldsmith's work. In poem after poem he enters into the homely joys and pageants of rural life—a bridal procession, a cudgel-play between two clowns on the green, a puppet-show at the fair, the hanging of holly and box at Candlemas Eve. Perhaps the most exquisite of all is "Corinna going a-Maying." This little masterpiece is drenched with the pungent dews of a spring morning. As the poet calls his "sweet slug-a-bed" out of doors, and leads her through the village streets, already decked with whitethorn, toward the fields and woods where the May-day festivities are to be enacted, we feel that the poetry of old English life speaks through one who has experienced to the full its simple charm. Even the note of sadness at the end, the looking forward to that dark time when Corinna herself and all her village mates shall "lie drowned in endless night," has a peasant-like sincerity of feeling.

Herrick's Religious Poetry. When the parliamentary forces had gained the battle which they had been waging with the king's men, and Herrick as a loyalist was ejected from his living, he went back to London. The year of his return (1648) he published his poems, under the title of Hesperides and Noble Numbers, the latter half of the title referring to the religious poems of the collection. There could be no more striking sign of the immense religious ferment of the time than these poems, coming as they do from a pleasure-loving, pagan nature, whose philosophy of life is summed up in his most famous song, "Gather ye rosebuds while ye may." In the wonderful poem called "The Litany," the masterpiece among Herrick's religious poems, we see how upon even his gay and sensuous nature there descended at times that dark shadow of religious terror which later found its final and appalling expression in the Grace Abounding of John Bunyan.