submission and full pardon for Bacon as the only sacrifice that could save them, being summoned to an interview with the King, he prepares some minutes for the conference, in which he says: "The law of nature teaches me to speak in my own defence. With respect to the charge of bribery, I am as innocent as any born upon St. Innocent's day I never had bribe or reward in my eye or thought when pronouncing sentence or order. If, however, it is absolutely necessary, the King's will shall be obeyed. I am ready to make an oblation of myself to the King, in whose hands I am as clay, to be made a vessel of honour or dishonour." The King advised (that is, commanded) a submission, and gave "his princely word he would then restore him again," if the Lords "in their honours should not be sensible of his merits." Bacon answered: "I see my approaching ruin; there is no hope of mercy in a multitude, if I do not plead for myself, when my enemies are to give fire. Those who strike at your Chancellor will strike at your crown." But he acquiesced, at last, with these words: "I am the first; I wish I may be the last sacrifice." 1 But when Coke, at the head of the Commons, sounding the trumpet of reform, had made an oblation necessary, and the first stroke fell upon the head of his hated rival; when Bacon discovered that a venal, corrupt, and perfidious crew of upstart minions, Churchill, Cranfield, Dean Williams, and the widow Villiers, following in the slimy train of Buckingham, and conspiring deeper than he knew, or could imagine, for the spoils of place and his ruin, had involved him and the King, too, in the inextricable meshes of an invisible net, and that his fall was inevitable; when he saw that he had "stepp'd into the law, which is past depth To those that, without heed, do plunge into it," and found himself caught in the fatal trap, and the sen1 Life, by Montagu, I. xciii. tence came with utter ruin to his fortunes, for which he cared less, his titles of honor and nobility being barely saved, under mercy of Buckingham, with the help of the Prince of Wales, the Earls of Pembroke and Montgomery, and others of the most illustrious peers, together with the whole bench of Bishops, yet with some loss of that "sweet odour of honour and reputation throughout the world," which he prized more, honour," as he said to the Lords, "being above life," or as it is said, elsewhere: 66 "The purest treasure mortal times afford Is spotless reputation; that away, Men are but guilded loam or painted clay. Is a bold spirit in a loyal breast. Mine honour is my life; both grow in one; Take honour from me, and my life is done"; when he saw the dark cloud lowering across the future ages, casting its shadow upon his credit, name, and memory, and obscuring his light to unborn generations; he was overwhelmed with the keenest anguish. He appealed to the magnanimity of the British Senate to make his fault no greater than it really was, and his sentence no more than was "for reformation's sake fit"; - not "heavy to my ruin, but gracious, and mixed with mercy": แ "O, my lords, As you are great, be pitifully good."— Tim., Act III. Sc. 5. When the committee of the House waited upon him to know if his submission and confession were genuine, he answered in deep distress: "My Lords, it is my act, my hand, and my heart. I beseech your Lordships to be merciful to a broken reed." Lord Campbell seems to take this touching humility as the last proof of baseness and guilt: is there any wonder that his distress was deep, and his affliction great, "Seeing his reputation touch'd to death?" Tim., Act III. Sc. 5. Rather, when the whole matter is duly weighed, charitable minds may be inclined to lend an ear to rare Ben Jonson, who says: "In his adversity, I ever prayed that God would give him strength, for greatness he could not want; neither could I condole in a word or syllable for him, as knowing no accident could do harm to virtue, but rather help to make it manifest: "O mighty love! Man is one world And hath another to attend him." All men see the world without, after a certain fashion; but each man only can see his own world within. We are accustomed (safely enough in general) to judge the soul of another by the relations which it may seem to sustain to the moving world of things without. But inasmuch as the best soul has to swim on the bosom of the stream, it may, in spite of itself, fall into the strangest apparent relations to the whirl of things that float together upon the surface it is still possible for a pure soul to swim unstained in very guilty looking company. What if it were possible for a great soul to be able to administer justice to a school of bribers! A certain other, for doing the like of this, was nailed up between two thieves as if he had been no better than they; for to the nailors he appeared to steal corn on Sunday. Temples of Jerusalem, and Ephesus, and St. Peter, and St. Paul! What sums have not been expended in attempting to bribe the Supreme Judge to pass in goats among the sheep! So much may be permitted, and justice be administered, nevertheless, at " the top of judgment." § 2. PHILOSOPHER AND POET. Shakespeare has long been considered by all that speak the English tongue, and by the learned of other nations likewise, as the greatest of dramatic poets. The ancients had but one Homer: the moderns have but one Shakespeare. And these two have been fitly styled "the Twin Stars of Poesy" in all the world. These plays have kept the stage ; better than any other for nearly three centuries. They have been translated into several foreign languages; a vast amount of critical erudition has been expended upon them and numerous editions have been printed, and countless numbers of copies have been distributed, generation after generation, increasing in a kind of geometrical progression, through all ranks and classes of society from the metropolitan palace to the frontier cabin, until it may almost be said, that if there be anywhere a family possessing but two only books, the one may be the Bible, but the other is sure to be Shakespeare. Nevertheless, the plays have been understood and appreciated rather according to existing standards of judgment than according to all that was really in them. In general, our English minds seem to have been aware that their poet was more or less philosophical, or rather that he was a kind of universal genius; but that he was a Platonic thinker, a transcendental metaphysician and philosopher, an idealist and a realist all in one, not many seem to have discovered. Coleridge certainly had some inkling of this fact, and to Carlyle, it stood perfectly clear, that Shakespeare “does not look at a thing, but into it, through it; so that he constructively comprehends it, can take it asunder, and put it together again; the thing melts, as it were, into light under his eye, and anew creates itself before him. That is to say, he is a Thinker in the highest of all senses: he is a Poet. For Goethe, as for Shakespeare, the world lies all translucent, all fusible we might call it, encircled with WONDER; the Natural in reality the Supernatural, for to the seer's eyes both become one.”1 And so also Gervinus concludes upon the question of "the realistic or ideal treatment," that he is sometimes the one, sometimes the other, but in reality neither, because he is both at once.” 2 searching criticism, on this side of the sea, has been able to sound the depths and scale the heights of the Higher 1 Essays, III. 209. 2 Shakespeare Comm. (London, 1863), II. 569. Deep "1 Philosophy of Bacon, and it is almost equally clear that it has discovered in it the world-streaming providence of Shakespeare. "The English shrink from a generalization," says Emerson. "They do not look abroad into universality, or they draw only a bucket-full at the fountain of the First Philosophy for their occasion, and do not go to the springhead. Bacon, who said this, is almost unique among his countrymen in that faculty, at least among the prose-writers. Milton, who was the stair or high table-land to let down the English genius from the summits of Shakespeare, used this privilege sometimes in poetry, more rarely in prose. For a long interval afterwards, it is not found." 1 We know how Bacon attained to these heights; but it is not explained how the unlearned William Shakespeare reached these same "summits" of all philosophy, otherwise than by a suggestion of "the specific gravity" of inborn genius. Have we any evidence outside of these plays, that this dry light" of nature was greater in William Shakespeare than in Francis Bacon? In Bacon, as in the plays, we have not only the inborn genius, but a life of study, knowledge, science, philosophy, art, and the wealth of all learning. Are these things to be counted as nothing? Then we may as well abolish the universities, burn the libraries, and shut up the schools, as of no use: 66 66 Hang up philosophy: Unless philosophy can make a Juliet, It helps not, it prevails not: talk no more." Romeo and Juliet, Act III. Sc. 3. For the most part, all that has been seen in Shakespeare has been considered as the product of some kind of nat.ıral genius or spontaneous inspiration. The reason has been nearly this, that since Bacon, if Berkeley be excepted, England, or the English language, has never had a philosophy at all: we have had nothing but a few sciences and a theology. Bacon's Summary Philosophy, or Philosophy 1 English Traits, 244. |