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BACON.

I.

EXT to Shakespeare, the greatest name of the Elizabethan age is that of Bacon. His life has been written by his chaplain, Dr. Rawley, by Basil Montagu, by Lord Campbell, and by Macaulay; yet none of these biographies reconciles the external facts of the man's life with the internal facts of the man's nature.

Macaulay's vivid sketch of Bacon's career is the most acute, the most merciless, and for popular effect the most efficient, of all; but it deals simply with external events, evinces in their interpretation no deep and detecting glance into character, and urges the evidence for the baseness of Bacon with the acrimonious zeal of a prosecuting attorney, eager for a verdict, rather than weighs it with the candor of a judge deciding on the nature of a great benefactor of the race, who in his will had solemnly left his memory to "men's charitable speeches." When he comes to treat of Bacon as a philosopher, he passes to the opposite extreme of panegyric. The impression left by the whole representation is not

the impression of a man, but of a monstrous huddling together of two men, one infamous, the other glorious,

which he calls by the name of Bacon.

The question therefore arises, Is it possible to harmonize, in one individuality, Bacon the courtier, Bacon the lawyer, Bacon the statesman, Bacon the judge, with Bacon the thinker, philosopher, and philanthropist ? The antithesis commonly instituted between these is rather a play of epigram than an exercise of characterization. The "meanest of mankind" could not have written The Advancement of Learning; yet everybody feels that some connection there must be between the meditative life which produced The Advancement of Learning, and the practical life devoted to the advancement of Bacon. Who, then, was the man who is so execrated for selling justice, and so exalted for writing the Novum Organum?

This question can never be intelligently answered, unless we establish some points of connection between the spirit which animates his works and the external events which constituted what is called his life. As a general principle, it is well for us to obtain some conception of a great man from his writings, before we give much heed to the recorded incidents of his career; for these incidents, as historically narrated, are likely to be false, are sure to be one-sided, and almost always need

to be interpreted in order to convey real knowledge to the mind. It is ever for the interest or the malice of some contemporary, that every famous politician, who by necessity passes into history, should pass into it stained in character; and it is fortunate that, in the case of Bacon, we are not confined to the outside records of his career, but possess means of information which conduct us into the heart of his nature. Indeed, Bacon the man is most clearly seen and intimately known in Bacon the thinker. Bacon thinking, Bacon observing,

Bacon inventing,

these were as much acts of Bacon as Bacon intriguing for power and place. "I account,” he has said, "my ordinary course of study and meditation more painful than most parts of action are." But his works do not merely contain his thoughts and observations; they are all informed with the inmost life of his mind and the real quality of his nature; and, if he was base, servile, treacherous, and venal, it will not require any great expenditure of sagacity to detect the taint of servility, baseness, treachery, and venality in his writings. For what was Bacon's intellect but Bacon's nature in its intellectual expression? Everybody remembers the noble commencement of the Novum Organum: "Francis of Verulam thought thus." Ay! it is not merely the understanding of Francis of Verulam, but Francis himself that thinks; and we may be sure

that the thought will give us the spirit and average moral quality of the man; for it is not faculties, but persons using faculties, persons behind faculties and within faculties, that invent, combine, discover, create; and in the whole history of the human intellect, in the department of literature, there has been no exercise of live creative faculty without an escape of character. The new thoughts, the novel combinations, the fresh images, are all enveloped in an atmosphere, or borne on a stream, which conveys into the recipient mind the fine essence of individual life and individual disposition. It is more difficult to detect this in comprehensive individualities like Bacon and Shakespeare than in narrow individualities like Ben Jonson and Marlowe ; but still, if we sharply scrutinize the impression which Bacon and Shakespeare have left on our minds, we shall find that they have not merely enlarged our reason with new truth, and charmed our imagination with new beauty, but that they have stamped on our consciousness the image of their natures, and touched the finest sensibilities of our souls with the subtile but potent influence of their characters.

Now if we discern and feel this image and this life of Bacon, derived from his works, we shall find that his individuality — capacious, flexible, fertile, far-reaching as it was was still deficient in heat, and that this de

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ficiency was in the very centre of his nature and sources of his moral being. Leaving out of view the lack of stamina in his bodily constitution, and his consequent want of those rude, rough energies and that peculiar Teutonic pluck which seem the birthright of every Englishman of robust health, we find in the works as in the life of the man no evidence of strong appetites or fierce passions or kindling sentiments. Neither in his blood nor in his soul can we discover any of the coarse or any of the fine impulses which impart intensity to character. He is without the vices of passion, voluptuousness, hatred, envy, malice, revenge; but he is also without the virtues of passion, deep love, warm gratitude, capacity of unwithholding self-committal to a great sentiment or a great cause. This defect of intensity is the source of that weakness in the actions of his life which his satirists have stigmatized as baseness; and, viewing it altogether apart from the vast intellectual nature modifying and modified by it, they have tied the faculties of an angel to the soul of a sneak. While narrating the events of his career, and making epigrams out of his frailties, they have lost all vision of that noble brow, on which, it might be said, "Shame is ashamed to sit." Shame may be there, but it is shame shamefaced, - aghast at its position, not glorying in

it!