ture's Priest,' - and even in marriage and even in marriage a celibate of the imagination.

So even to Professor Legouis, to whom we all owe an unpayable debt, Wordsworth seems touched with the famous insular hypocrisy when he describes the 'growth of a poet's mind,' and suppresses the love affair, though its influence on him was enormous. One amorous fever schooled his blood and judgment forever, yet exalted and clarified his whole nature and understanding. His disguised confession, 'Vaudracour and Julia,' you shall think as shambling and dodging as you please. Whether for art or life, it is a poor-spirited episode anyhow, and you cannot call it good. But one passage at least, now shown in its original setting, but afterward separated from that text, could have been written only by a man who, through Annette, had known how love comes like double revelation to imaginative minds:

he beheld

A vision, and adored the thing he saw.
Arabian fiction never filled the world
With half the wonders that were wrought for him.
Earth lived in one great presence of the spring.

At Orléans and Blois in that spring of 1792 there was a revolution in his head and another in his breast. But Annette, though she never could have known it, had a revenge that her good nature would not have desired. When Wordsworth comes to that point of autobiography where for the first time he must tamper awkwardly with the truth, and practise suppression or evasion by narrative both feigned and stilted, the latter half of his poem suffers profound injury. To the end. there are splendid lines of natural description, but they are slender in proportion as argumentative stodginess increases. Never again does he touch that wonder of the fifth book, the owl-calling on the shores of Winder

mere, perhaps the only passage surpassing those repeated episodes of the first book, which still change forever the lives of some kinds of persons.

In all the greatest pages the two texts differ little. There are interesting variations, but on the whole the text as we have always known it is an improvement. There is one exception. The affair of the stolen boat on Ullswater, not Esthwaite, as hitherto supposed,-when the mountains rose higher in solemn rebuke the further he pulled out, is far fuller and better on the left-hand page than in the familiar version of 1850. As for The Prelude as a whole, we would not for the world have missed the knowledge of its earlier form. The later, on the whole, is superior; revision has been guided by sound critical judgment; but it is the judgment of an older, colder mind, and the left-hand text restores to us a thousand fresher and freer touches on word and phrase. To quote these would be a delightful but interminable task. We can take only one instance, the acute lines about the dropping acorn:

seeing nought, nought hearing, save When here and there about the grove of oaks Where was my bed, an acorn from the trees Fell audibly and with a startling sound.

But half seraph, half square-toes, Wordsworth was born. We all suspected that one notorious phrase was the perpetration of the older man returning to many Johnsonian correctitudes he had rejected in his youth. Not so. It is a man in the late twenties who can invoke Milton thus: 'O temperate Bard!' Mr. de Selincourt is rewarded for a meticulous toil guided throughout by enlightening insight. He has incalculably increased our understanding and delight in reading again what is both one of the great poems and one of the great autobiographies of the world.

APRIL marked the tercentenary of Francis Bacon, Lord Verulam, Viscount St. Albans, 1561-1626. As a line in a diary it means little to the ordinary man; yet if we reflect a moment we find that in celebrating this date we are honoring the godfather of all modern science as we know it today. Francis Bacon was an enormous influence, a Napoleon of the battlefield of intellectual freedom. No man of his age presents a greater puzzle to historians, and there is a good deal of excuse for the theorists who hold the wildest beliefs about the Bacon-Shakespeare controversy. There was much that was hidden in the man, and the face which Bacon chose to show to the world was not the whole man. An eminent psychologist has dissected the psychical body of Leonardo da Vinci. Francis Bacon would be an even better subject for this kind of post-mortem, but it calls for rather more knowledge than pure psychology and for some little learning in sixteenth-century mysticism and the political limitations of the time.

Bacon was essentially the first of the moderns. He was an organizer, a compiler, an enormous centripetal force who focused the revolt of the times against the formalized schools of deductive Aristotelian logic. For the unquestioned authority and the petrified wisdom of the classics he substituted the line of thought we still call natural science. He dignified experiment and

1 From Discovery (London popular-science monthly), May

gave it a new standing as inductive logic. He was the first outstanding intellect in historic times to realize that the function of science was not to repeat the official quips of fossil thought, but to experiment, observe, and see what caused all sorts of things to happen. To-day this seems to us a perfectly reasonable logical idea which should have occurred to anybody.

We all owe so much to Francis Bacon that it is with difficulty that we get any true picture, not of the pageantry, but of the mentality of his time.

It is perhaps best to see Bacon as a man of to-day set by circumstance three hundred years before his time. Yet even this device is inadequate, for Francis Bacon had a greater grasp and a deeper knowledge of the spiritual values than is common among the rare philosophers of his calibre to-day.

It was an unsafe age in England. Rome then stood for foreign domination, for the dead hand of priestcraft on all who sought knowledge. Lutheranism was no better, and the extravagances of the Protestant sectaries were just as bad. There is no sanction for natural philosophy in either Testament, and the inquiring and rational mind was a dangerous thing for its owner in those not too distant days when the ashes of those martyred by both sides were barely cold.

New ideas were perilous ideas, and the greater part of Bacon's work had to be done in secret. In open history he stands out as an eminently sound adviser and a poor politician. He had

the unforgivable vice of sincerity of purpose and the colossal hardihood to oppose Elizabeth Tudor. It is true that in his Essays he counsels a wise expediency, but a man of his calibre has an exacting judge to satisfy. He must live on honorable terms with himself. A balanced attitude was not a road to favor in partisan times. In addition, he had to counter the jealousy of his cousins, the Cecils. The support of Essex helped Bacon in his career, and the latter has been accused of betraying his patron. His attitude at the trial of Essex was harsh, but to a certain extent excusable. Essex had not taken Bacon's advice, and he had gone far toward a state of insurrection which would have meant civil war. Bacon was an autocratic Tory democrat, but not a revolutionary.

The whole tendency of Francis Bacon's policy was toward the betterment of the condition of the realm and the people of the realm as a whole. He urged a wide toleration, not only in matters of religious belief, but in matters touching oppression by the Crown. Yet he was no democrat, and believed in the divine right of kings. With the accession of James I he rose to power. Knighted in 1604, he became AttorneyGeneral in 1613. He steered a tortuous way through the difficulties of the times, and evidently became more 'expedient' as age withered his idealism. He abandoned the favorite Somerset for the rising star of Villiers, and in 1617 was appointed Keeper of the Privy Seal. A year later he became Lord Chancellor of England, and was raised to the peerage as Lord Verulam.

In 1621 he was at the height of his glory, but Parliament, which had been unconvoked for seven years, was at last summoned, and his enemies attacked him on charges of bribery. Bacon fell, and, though the sentences of fine and imprisonment were revoked,

he was obliged to live in retirement on his estate. Freed of the squalor of politics, Bacon now came to his real glory. These last six years of his life were the most important, for he then began to publish the thought of years. He had published a certain amount before. In 1605 he had issued his Advancement of Learning, a review of the state of knowledge of his time. During his career he had published various Essays, but the work was continually revised and added to. Few works have given us so many common aphorisms as these Essays, and new and larger editions were printed from time to time. Yet these, important as they are from the literary point of view, had not the influence on history which was exercised by his scientific work, the Novum Organum, the greatest stimulant of the age ever given to a group of thinkers.

So much for the external side of Bacon. Industrious historical emmets can trace the record, and it is a not too scrupulous career, of the external man. Yet we can ask ourselves, what is there in this spotted record which stresses the scientific side of Bacon's life? We see him in history as an able, true-serving attorney, a courtier, a man circumstanced by the moral conditions of his age. Yet when we turn back to the fundamental origins of organized science in Europe, every road, every line of research, leads to one centre, Bacon and his disciples, and there is no clear path which leads us to the individuals who preceded him.

It is doubtful if we shall ever know any particular original contributions to scientific knowledge for which Bacon was responsible. It is better to consider him as an enormous concentrating, classifying, and coördinating force. He was the first great editor of Nature to arise since classical times, the first administrator to conceive of organized science working for the good of human

ity in general. His New Atlantis sketches out a model society dominated by brains which would function for the good of humanity. This book was published posthumously, yet we have the authority of Joseph Glanville, chaplain to James I, that Bacon did actually found a scientific society of

some nature.

The enormous scope of his learning at a time when the range of all the knowledge of the age could be more or less grasped by a first-class intellect could be explained if he had not also led an active career but had worked as a recluse devoting all his time to study. Even granting the man a mental energy utterly abnormal, we must, when considering the limited, mechanism of the distribution of knowledge and the slow time factor for the dissemination of thought, look on him, not as an individual, but as the head of a widespread intelligence service.

A great many indications point to Bacon as a leading character in the Rosicrucian Society. His New Atlantis is modeled on the conceptions of the Rosicrucian Society, and in 1660 was reprinted under the nominal authorship of John Heydon as Voyage to the Land of the Rosicrucians.

The Rosicrucian Brotherhood has the usual claims of esoteric societies to Egyptian origin. Actually it is difficult to trace any sound historical basis beyond the latter half of the fifteenth century. It may be looked on as an intelligent society accepting the Christian ethic, but equally hostile to the political oppressions and corruptions of the Catholic Church and to the intellectual savagery of Lutheranism. The probable reason for its insistence on Christianity was that most of the scientific and philosophic knowledge outside the sterile bounds of monastic thought was Oriental. It was either from Arabian sources, as in the case of

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alchemy and algebra, or it was cabalistic and derived from Hebrew thought. We know now that much then attributed to the Moslems was the relics. of classical knowledge, and that most of their work was translated and adopted by rabbinical writers. Nevertheless, in the days when an accusation of heresy was the portal to a painful death, and to be suspected of knowledge stirred the jealousy of the official priestly trade-union, it is obvious that any search for knowledge required an adequate 'safety first' insurance. To the adepts of the society the rose has always been more important than the cross; yet if they secretly eschewed orthodox mass theology and hated sectarianism, they were no worse than the modern man of science who imposes on himself a Christian rule of life and finds it not impossible to accept spiritual values as laws as binding as the laws of science. But in those days they had to be careful and, above all, secret. Any identification of the newly awakened desire for knowledge of Nature with any of the new sects would have brought the movement into conflict with the powerful political machine of the then reactionary Church.

The Renaissance set men's minds working; the European Reformation gave certain countries an advantage in being able to permit primitive research work to go on without political interference. The Rosicrucian fraternity has never had fixed constitutions, but has at certain times developed a working organization or international mechanism. The first published florescence of the society reached its height in the early seventeenth century. There was a recrudescence of activity in the mid-seventeenth and in the midnineteenth century, and the society still exists as a nucleus organization. It has nothing whatever to do with the various spurious Rosicrucian organiza

tions run by the theosophists or charlatans, and is still a secret society in the true sense of the term.

Bacon was not only the head of the society in England, but was in close touch with all Continental chapters as well. The light of his intellect illuminated many centres of thought. Reform was necessary, not only in the domain of the Church, but in the realms of politics and science as well. Bacon and his helpers were all part and parcel of an organized and inspired evolutionary but not revolutionary movement. Andrea, author of the Chymische Hochzeit Christiani Rosenkreutz, was one of the leaders in the younger generation of the movement. About 1614 the Fama Fraternitatis, the first public communication of the order, appeared. It was anonymous, and appealed to the savants and men of science of Europe. Its authorship is still in dispute, but it served to bring out into the light of day a movement and a widespread system of thought which had been previously secret or so carefully disguised as to be recognizable only by initiates. The wide scope of the profession-of-faith clause in the Fama was highly unorthodox. It was too wide for the Catholics and too wide for the Lutherans. It led to wild attack and equally wild defense and reckless pamphleteering by both sides, but it was good publicity. John Komensky, alias Comenius, 1592-1671, was received into the order. Baruch, Spinoza, Descartes, and other great men of the seventeenth century, were also powerful supporters of Rosicrucian thought, but it is in England that the speculative and philosophical side gave place to the practical result of the restoration of science and the cult of natural philosophy.

There were two sides to Bacon's philosophy: the purely abstract philosophical view, and the natural or ex

perimental - what we call to-day the scientific point of view. In the same way there were two main schools of thought in the Rosicrucian fraternity. On the one side were the mystics soaked in the search for cabalistic secrets and esoteric mysteries; they wished to keep their knowledge secret. On the other side we find the exotericists, men of science anxious for demonstrable knowledge and realizing the need of publicity.

A generation passes after Bacon. The gap is filled to a certain extent by Robert Fludd, a contemporary, but solely an exponent of the exoteric side. Then comes Robert Boyle, who, largely influenced by Fludd's teachings, founded in 1645 after the latter's death the Invisible College. This scheme was designed to put into practice the idea of a college of scientists as outlined in Bacon's New Atlantis. The college was to be essentially a secret organization of intellectual people, and was to be, in spite of the turmoil of the times, above politics and what was then much the same-variant religious views. The connection between Bacon's concept and Boyle's college is evident. In a few years it became possible to drop the secrecy postulated in the idea of the Invisible College, and the society became public as the Gresham College. In 1660 it became the Academy, and in 1662 it was raised by Charles II to its present status as the Royal Society.

The early detailed history of the Royal Society is not particularly clear, but it is clear that it is in direct connection with the exoteric half of Bacon's original conception. We find in association with it, not only Boyle, but Sir Christopher Wren, Sir Robert Moray, Elias Ashmole, and Locke. These are the most important names, not only in the early Royal Society, but in English Freemasonry as well. Sir Robert