His Character. Bacon's character has been the subject of violent dispute. Macaulay depicted him as the supreme example of a shining intellect conjoined to a base and abject moral nature. His treatment of Essex showed the coldness of his affections. His servility to the dispensers of office in an age when advancement went by favour seems to us deplorable, but reveals, not so much the baser kind of self-seeking, as his ambition to be great in practical affairs as well as in the world of thought, and to use his genius for the common progress. As a judge, it has never been proved that he was influenced by bribes; though, from a laxity inconsistent with his advanced ideals, he fell in with the habit of accepting presents from suitors. His one pure ambition was the pursuit of knowledge. A commanding intellect and a rich imagination were qualified by a strange incapacity for emotion or moral earnestness, and have left these enigmas in the conduct of his life.

The Baconian Philosophy. With superb confidence Bacon declared, on the threshold of manhood, that he had taken all knowledge to be his province. The fundamental purpose of his philosophy was the extension and organization of human knowledge. With the ultimate grounds of knowledge or the problem of the nature of truth he did not concern himself. He aimed at a complete natural philosophy, a systematic inventory of nature based on observation and experiment. Thus he broke away from the speculative idealism of Plato and the neoPlatonists on the one hand, and on the other from the futile subtleties into which the Aristotelian philosophy had degenerated in the hands of the schoolmen. By basing knowledge on the investigation of phenomena, and establishing induction as the instrument of truth, Bacon laid the foundations of modern science. In his view science had a practical end. Ancient philosophers had taken knowledge itself as the supreme object. Bacon held that the end of science was the establishment of man's sovereignty over nature. "Two words," says Macaulay, "are the key of the Baconian doctrine-Utility and Progress."

The method he taught was the questioning of nature by means of induction, with which he would supersede the deductive method of the old philosophies. From the premises thus established as a basis, he would proceed to lower, middle, and higher axioms, the last being the most general and abstract, the middle axioms

those of most practical applicability. He unduly disparaged what he called the anticipation of nature, or the agency of the scientific imagination, in his insistence on the fundamental importance of interpreting nature by the accumulation of He even thought that the quality of the investigating mind was of minor importance in comparison with the rightness of the method employed, and claimed that all wits and understandings were placed on a level by the possession of his instrument of discovery. Mind, to Bacon, was a mirror, passively reflecting the nature of things; but as a mirror may be defective and uneven, and liable to distort the image of objects, so the mind is prone to certain errors. Here he develops his famous doctrine of idols (eidola)-idols of the tribe, the cave, the forum, and the theatre; human error error due to idiosyncrasy, errors of language, and errors of the philosophic schools.

The Essays. Bacon had no more faith than the scholars of the previous century in the great destinies of the English language, and wished even the books that he wrote in his own noble English to be translated into Latin for permanence sake. His best-known English works are first the Essays, and then The Advancement of Learning. A Baconian essay is a thing apart. Entirely different from those of the discursive Montaigne, it consists of a string of aphorisms, gems of pregnant thought, sparkling with wit as well as profoundly luminous with wisdom. The transitions are abrupt, indicating that the thoughts were written down as they occurred, a circumstance explaining how the collection grew from ten in the first edition (1597) to fiftyeight in that of 1625. Here is a typical portion of a fairly short essay:

We take cunning for a sinister or crooked wisdom. And certainly there is a great difference between a cunning man and a wise man, not only in point of honesty, but in point of ability. There be that can pack the cards, and yet cannot play well; so there are some that are good in canvasses or factions, that are otherwise weak men. Again, 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 of the real part of business: which is the constitution of one that hath studied men more than books. Such men are fitter for practice than for counsel; and they are good but in their own alley: turn them to new men, and they have lost their aim; so as the old rule, to know a fool from a wise man, Mitte ambos nudos ad ignotos, et videbis, doth scarce hold for them. And because these cunning men are like haberdashers of small wares, it is not amiss to set forth their shop.-XXII. Of Cunning.

"The Advancement of Learning" and other English Works.-The Advancement of Learning is a conspectus of the different departments of knowledge, "a small globe of the intellectual world," in which all is classified under the heads of human, natural, and divine, and again minutely subdivided, on a psychological plan. The contents are admirably ordered, and form the natural introduction to Bacon's greatest work, the Novum Organum, which sets forth his method of investigation, together with his doctrine of the mind as a mirror of the world, and of the fallacious tendencies described as the Eidola.

The History of Henry VII. is an interesting piece of thoughtful history, sagacious in portraiture, and in its analysis of motive revealing the statesmanlike student of affairs. In his fragmentary The New Atlantis Bacon began a romance depicting a race of men who had preserved a higher civilization from the mythical time of the lost Atlantis of Plato. It has a charm of its own, which does not, however, entitle

it to rival More's Utopia.

Bacon's Style. The Essays display Bacon's characteristic bent towards aphoristic exposition of thought, a tendency that in his other works is held in check by the procession of his great argument. The majestic flow of his style may be marked in the well-known passage defining his idea of poetry, which, with strange inadequacy, he calls "feigned history":

Poesy is a part of learning in measure of words for the most part restrained, but in all other points extremely licensed, and doth truly refer to the imagination; which, not being tied to the laws of matter, may at pleasure join that which nature hath severed, and sever that which nature hath joined; and so make unlawful matches and divorces of things; Pictoribus atque poetis, etc. It is taken in two senses, in respect of words and matter. In the first sense it is but a character of style, and belongeth to arts of speech, and is not pertinent for the present. In the latter it is (as hath been said) one of the principal parts of learning, and is nothing else but feigned history, which may be styled as well in prose as in verse.

The use of this feigned history hath been to give some shadow of satisfaction to the mind of man in those points wherein the nature of things doth deny it, the world being in proportion inferior to the soul; by reason whereof there is, agreeable to the spirit of man, a more ample greatness, a more exact goodness, and a more absolute variety, than can be found in the nature of things. Therefore, because the acts or events of true history have not that magnitude which satisfieth the mind of man, poesy feigneth acts and events greater and more heroical. Because true history propoundeth the successes and issues of actions not so agreeable to the merits of virtue and vice, therefore poesy feigns them more just in retribution, and more according to revealed providence. Because true history representeth actions and events more ordinary and less interchanged, therefore poesy endureth them with more rareness, and more unexpected and alternative variations. So as it appeareth that poesy serveth and conferreth to magnanimity, morality, and to delectation. And therefore it was ever thought to have some participation of divineness, because it doth raise and erect the mind, by submitting the shows of things to the desires of the mind; whereas reason doth buckle and bow the mind unto the nature of things. And we see that by these insinuations and congruities with man's nature and pleasure, joined also with the agreement and consort it hath with music, it hath had access and estimation in rude times and barbarous regions, where other learning stood excluded.—Advancement of Learning, Book II., III., 4, I-2.

SIR WALTER RALEIGH (1552-1618)

Raleigh, the courtier, soldier, and explorer, wrote several fine sonnets and other poems; various accounts of his travels and adventures, of which The Discoverie of Guiana shows his mastery of a clear, unassuming, and workmanlike prose; and the gigantic History of the World from the creation to 130 B.C., composed in the Tower, and originally planned for his young friend Prince Henry, son of James I. The preface, epilogue, and certain other parts of this contain some of the most eloquent and sonorous passages in English prose literature. The wonderful apostrophe to Death is familiar to every student:

O eloquent, just and mighty death! whom none could advise, thou hast persuaded; what none hath dared, thou hast done; and whom all the world hath flattered, thou only hast cast out of the world and despised: thou hast drawn together all the far-stretched greatness, all the pride, cruelty, and ambitions of man, and covered it all over with these two narrow words, Hic jacet.-History of the World, Book V., VI.

THE AUTHORIZED VERSION (1611)

The final translation of the Bible issued under James is the greatest prose work of this, or indeed of any age, and the book that has had most influence on later writers of every school and type. It was the composite work of forty-six translators and revisers, among whom were Dr. John Reynolds, President of Corpus Christi College, Oxford, the original mover and president; Dr. John Spenser, the editor of Hooker; Dr. Miles Smith, Bishop of Gloucester, who wrote the Dedication and Preface; and other writers of great eminence. As we have already seen, they had invaluable. material ready to hand in the successive versions put forth from Wyclif's time to Cranmer's, notably Tyndale's translation, which forms the main foundation of our English Bible. Not only so, but they were able to avail themselves of the many discussions that had taken place over the meaning of particular passages and particular words. Thus the new Bible was the outcome of a process of evolution, over which the finest intellects of the time had exercised a controlling influence. Various circumstances combined to perfect the result-the literary splendour of the original,

Sir Walter Raleigh. (From a painting in the National Portrait Gallery.)

the beauty of the older versions in the Septuagint and the Vulgate, and the actual state of the language. Prose was in transition from the stately but complicated and slow-moving Latinized diction to the nimbler and racier style of the novelists and pamphleteers. The ponderous and majestic qualities that befitted the dignity of sacred literature were saved from elaboration and excess by the need for strict fidelity to the original, and by the verse structure happily adopted; and, furthermore, the vernacular elements gave a concrete character and an inimitable vigour and sense of life. From the older versions, and especially from Wiclif's, came also the rich archaic flavour, and much of that verbal melody which is one of the most impressive attributes of the Authorized Version.

TRANSLATORS, HISTORIANS, TRAVELLERS, ETC.

Translators. The chief translations of novels and tales under Elizabeth have been enumerated earlier in this chapter. This was the golden age of translation into English. Rich booty awaited every adventurer, and no pedantic tradition hampered the free expression of what each interpreter, himself a man of letters in the great age of letters, conceived to be the spirit of his original. Caxton had made the Englishing of foreign classics an industry. It was now not only a flourishing craft, and the chosen occupation of writers not endowed with original genius, but a cherished hobby for men of leisure, scholars, and statesmen, as it has often been since. A vast number of works from the French, Italian, or Spanish were registered at Stationers' Hall; and Homer, Xenophon, Ovid, Livy, Tacitus, Sallust, Cæsar, Pliny, part of Virgil, the chief works of the Silver Age, and in fact most of the classics, except Plato and the greater dramatists, were now made available for the English reader.

Continental Works.-Reference has been made to North's popular rendering of Guevara's Diall of Princes, and to the host of translations from Spanish. Another translation on which the interpreter has lavished almost as much of himself and his own idiosyncrasy as of his author is Florio's exuberant rendering of Montaigne. Machiavelli's Prince seems not to have been Englished till 1640, and the Decameron did not appear as a whole until 1620. But the lesser works of both Machiavelli and Boccaccio had already been given to the English world, and had made their influence deeply felt on action and thought. Sir Thomas Hoby had achieved a skilful translation of the Cortegiano of Castiglione (1561). Thomas Danett had done parts of Guicciardini into English in 1593, and translated De Commines in 1601. Other famous versions of the moderns were Sylvester's Du Bartas, which exercised an almost inexplicable fascination on English writers, two renderings of Tasso by Edward Fairfax and Richard Carew, and Sir John Harington's Ariosto.

Classical Works. Among translations from the classics North's Plutarch, and those of Philemon Holland from Pliny and Suetonius stand with the highest.

North