the creature of Buckingham, and when the storm broke, popular indignation, heedless of the exact merits of the case, swept him away. Most important of all, his old enemy Coke was now directing that very storm. Bacon was charged by the House of Commons with corruption in office; witnesses alleged that he had taken gifts from suitors in his court. He had accepted bribes, they said, as high as one thousand pounds. Writing to the King, Bacon defended himself, and maintained that he had not perverted justice. To the public he seemed to put a sufficiently bold face on the matter, but in private he had already given up the fight. He made his will, and in a prayer which curiously reminds one of a man opposite to Bacon in every way, the sturdy old Dr. Johnson, confessed his weakness, while in a manner justifying his course: "The state and bread of the poor and oppressed have been precious in mine eyes: I have hated all cruelty and hardness of heart: I have (though in a despised weed) procured the good of all men." Why, we are forced to ask, could not Bacon have faced his accusers with words like these, and dared them to produce their facts and to prove the credibility of their witnesses? Instead of this, he appeals to the good offices of the King. But his enemies pressed him the harder. He offered to resign the Great Seal and so escape further condemnation; and towards the end of April, 1621, a full statement of the charges against him was brought forward. Without protest of innocence, without the least attempt to fight his case, he threw himself upon the mercy of the House of Lords, his judges, with the general plea of guilty. To a committee of this house, which demanded that he should confess all the separate abuses in the

charge, he yielded with what seems to us pitiful haste, and asked them to be "merciful to a broken reed." He was summoned to the bar of the House of Lords to receive sentence, but illness kept him at home. This sentence was severe enough, though some peers wished it even harder, and Coke hinted at the penalty of death. He was fined £40,000, an enormous sum for those days, was sent to the Tower during the King's pleasure, court and Parliament were closed to him, and he was never to hold office of any kind.

Never in history has so great a man suffered such a great disgrace; it can be accounted for, if at all, by two considerations. By the practice of those times Bacon's attitude was by no means as culpable as it would seem now; he was no vulgar and persistent taker of bribes, and probably rendered decisions according to the law; but he did take gifts from successful suitors. Moreover, he was continuing a system of court influence on the large scale, and shaping certain decisions to suit the purposes of his masters. With this system the public had become thoroughly enraged, and Bacon was the scapegoat whom they drove into the wilderness of disgrace. In the second place, Bacon's natural protectors, the King and Buckingham, lacked even the elementary gratitude to defend so able and so willing a servant, though the Duke cast the solitary vote against the sentence of the House of Lords; while Bacon himself had nothing of that courage, even in a bad cause, which ennobled a later victim of the Stuart ingratitude, and made Strafford's watchword "Thorough" as conspicuous in adversity as in success. Still a third excuse has been urged in Bacon's behalf: he knew well that resistance was useless.

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:

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

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,

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