Bacon's confinement in the Tower was cut short, after a few days, by the King. His fine was practically forgiven, and in spite of opposition he received a partial pardon. Nothing, however, could remove his disgrace, nor could he play any further part in public life, and he was dependent on the King's bounty. Yet it is a great mistake to think that Bacon was overwhelmed by his misfortunes and that he died of a broken heart. He fell back on that greater service to which he had devoted his leisure and to which he ought to have devoted his life. In the same year that saw his fall he wrote his admirable History of Henry the Seventh. He never gave up the hope of a full pardon and renewal of his public service. But neither of these came to him. All the more room was left for his greater work. To the last he was busied with his system for the new sciences, corresponding with learned men abroad, revising and translating his earlier writings. His service to philosophy was rather that of a pioneer than that of a colonist. He gives the idea and plans the system, leaving other men to do the work. It is a mistake to suppose that he accomplished something practical in the so-called natural sciences, although his death, as every one knows, was due to a scientific experiment. But everywhere he stimulated, reformed, and showed the way to better things. This is true even of his English style. Few books have a fresher appeal than Bacon's essays. In an era of ponderous and periodic prose it is refreshing to meet such sentences as that which opens the essay on Death: "Men fear death as children fear to go in the dark." No one has ever packed so much into so small a compass without prejudice to simplicity and clearness of style. His ideas, too, are almost invariably sound; for example, the essay on Plantations

might be taken as a forecast of England's best colonial policy.

Bacon was an extravagant man, never free from debt even in the days of his largest income. This state of things may be explained partly by his amazing fondness for display. His married life seems to have been no great success, as may be gathered from his will: "To my wife, a box of rings." Indeed, the chief interests of this document, like Bacon's whole life, lean to the advancement of science, for which purpose he left funds to the two universities. He died April 9, 1626. His fatal illness was due to an experiment which he had made of the antiseptic properties of cold, stopping his carriage while he stuffed a chicken with snow from the wayside. In a famous passage of his will, he leaves his name "to the next ages and to foreign nations." Posterity and the world at large have responded nobly to his wish, and general opinion assigns him a rank equaled by no man in the world's history save Aristotle for eagerness and breadth of mind.

WILLIAM SHAKESPEARE

It is a mistake to suppose that we know little concerning the life of Shakespeare. More is known about him than about other poets of his time, such as Fletcher and Chapman. It is because his works are so well and so widely appreciated that the facts of his life seem scant and unsatisfactory; moreover, absurd suppositions -Baconian and other heresies about the authorship of the plays have tended to make Shakespeare a far more obscure figure than he really is. And much as we know of his life, it is impossible to express him in a phrase. What Dryden said in satire of George Duke of Buckingham could be said of Shakespeare in earnest:

"A man so various that he seemed to be
Not one, but all mankind's epitome."

Byron may be called explosive, Shelley visionary, but for Shakespeare no single expression has been found.

1

The name Shakespeare was early discovered in Yorkshire and Cumberland, but is met more often in Warwickshire, where there were many of that name. Both spellings seem to have been used by the dramatist himself.

He was born at Stratford-on-Avon, April 22 or 23, 1564. One must not ignore the importance both of the time and the place of his birth. For the time, it is enough to recall the great names and the quickening national life of Elizabethan England. Warwickshire,

Shakspere has the sanction of the New Shakspere Society. Shakespeare is the prevailing literary form.

often called the Heart of England, was not only beautiful in landscape but rich in folk-lore, while its nearness to London put Shakespeare in the line of purely English literary traditions. North of the Tweed he would have been almost an alien to them. But the Thames valley from the time of Chaucer was the home of the literary language.

...

During the poet's earliest boyhood his father, who came of a good yeoman stock, must have been one of the chief men of the town. He was successively "ale-taster, constable, affeeror, chamberlain, alderman; lastly . . . Justice of the Peace and High Bailiff of the Town.” But he was incurably fond of lawsuits, sanguine, and given to undertaking tasks beyond his means of performance. He fell into difficulties of many kinds, and it was probably only through his son's success that he subsisted comfortably in later life. The attitude of Shakespeare in his plays towards old men in general, and fathers in particular, has been traced to recollections of his own experience. The elder man has been conceived as "fervent, unsteady, and irrepressible . . . excitable, sententious, and dogmatic;" and Dickens's portraiture of his father as Mr. Micawber is suggested as a parallel case. However this may be, there can be no doubt that Shakespeare's mother, Mary Arden, who inherited considerable money and lands from her father, was of gentle blood. To her and her ancestors biographers trace the undoubted sympathy which the poet shows in all his works for the gentler strain and for those modes of life and thought which can flourish only along with the traditions of the better classes.

In trying to reproduce, however, the boyhood of Shakespeare, we must by no means think of him as an