construction, the habit of putting into one long sentence with a variety of clauses what we should now make several sentences of, the disorganisation of the sentence which he sometimes indulged in with the view of putting the emphatic word in the most emphatic place, in order to render the argument clearer,-all these are but minor disadvantages which cannot detract from his great merits, his instinctive sense of the fitness of words to thought, his capacity of suiting his phrase to the intellectual mood, the enthusiasm and fervour of his eloquence. As Fuller says, it was only "where the copiousness of his style met not with proportionable capacity in his auditors that he was unjustly censured for perplext, tedious, and obscure. . . . Such as would patiently attend and give him credit all the reading and hearing of his sentences had their expectation ever paid at the close thereof." As for the charm of his style, its harmony and grace, its capacities for delicacy and grandeur, it has not only procured for him the admiration of Swift, who singles him out with Parsons, the Jesuit, as the master of a style simple and natural, which could be read without offence in the days of Addison, but it procured the full recognition of the Puritan age in which he lived, which, finding in it a proof of his undue regard for culture in its study of form, in its classical allusions and quotations, made it the subject of sneer and ridicule. Therefore not only in the history of thought, but as a master of what constitutes true literature, the art of giving adequate and attractive expression to thought, Hooker has claims to lasting fame. CHAPTER XIV. ELIZABETHAN THOUGHT IN SCIENCE. BACON, Francis, b. 1560-1; studied at Trinity College, Cambridge, 1573; entered at Gray's Inn, 1576; admitted as barrister, 1582; sat in Parliament as member for Melcombe Regis, 1584; trial of Essex and Southampton, 1600-1; knighted by James I., 1603; marriage, 1606; made Solicitor-General, 1607; made Attorney-General, 1613; made a Privy Councillor, 1616; made Lord Keeper, 1616-7; made Lord Chancellor, 1617-8; created Baron Verulam, 1618; created Viscount St. Alban, 1620-1; sentenced by the House of Lords, 1621; d. 1626. Advancement of Learning, 1605; Novum Organum, 1620; History of Henry VII., 1622; Historia Naturalis et Experimentalis, 1622; Three editions of the Essays, 1597, 1612, 1625. THE name of Bacon is as important in the history of Elizabethan literature as is that of Shakspere. Bacon, like Shakspere, was part of the "soul of his age." He also embodied the spirit of the Renaissance, which urged men not only to the development and exercise of the faculties, but to the study of the world and of the conditions of human life. It stimulated them to make those enquiries which can alone render progress possible, for it is the systematic study of nature which makes a higher future for man a tangible and attainable thing. Scientific knowledge alone can give man that power over nature necessary to the highest civilisation, necessary too to the highest art, "the spirit and pure breath of knowledge." Bacon by his method, by his endeavour to discover the laws which govern the workings of nature, began the great scientific work of the modern world. Actual knowledge he did not give us, but he pointed out the path which all discoverers have followed. Even if Bacon's name was not famous as coming first in the great list of English scientific workers, he would yet have a claim to the interest of posterity, through his more purely literary work and because of his strange and puzzling personality. A typical Elizabethan in his vigorous versatility, in his varied career at once practical and literary, he stood above his great age in virtue of his gigantic intellectual power, but below it in his cold, passionless nature, incapable of the generous impulses of the later Elizabethans, and incapable of understanding the high ideal morality of the earlier. "My conceit of his person was never increased towards him by his place or his honours; but I have and do reverence him for the greatness that was only proper to himself: in that he seemed to me ever, by his work, one of the greatest men and most worthy of admiration that had been in many ages. In his adversity I ever prayed that God would give him strength, for greatness he could not want." Thus speaks Ben Jonson; in moral greatness be may be wanting; in intellectual greatness, "by his work," he will ever be one of the greatest and most admirable of men. Francis Bacon was the son of a statesman, who was a fit representative of the race of politicians that came midway between the overbearing and imperious race of Hotspurs, Cliffords, and Nevilles, and the dashing but more statesmanlike race represented by Essex and Raleigh. "Nicholas Bacon," says Macaulay, "was deliberate, diplomatic, sincere but not zealous, resolute but often apparently vacillating, speculative, yet in actual life no man more free from theory." Such men as he, Mildmay, Burghley, and Walsingham, were admirably adapted to carry England through the critical years of the early part of Elizabeth's reign, when a tortuous, apparently irresolute policy was required to maintain her independence amidst the designs of a threatening Europe. Francis Bacon was born at a time when this policy was of all others most called for. In 1562 the Council of Trent, unsuccessful in what efforts it made to reunite a profoundly divided Christendom, had broken up. In 1566-7 happened the revolt of the Netherlands, the execution of Counts Egmont and Horn; in 1572 was the Massacre of St. Bartholomew what wonder then that Bacon, from inheritance and early experience, conceived the idea that a turning and twisting and tortuous policy was a necessity in the dealings of states and men ; for only the dubiously sincere policy of Elizabeth's statesman could, by allowing England to take neither side openly, have steered her safely through these difficulties. : This endeavour to gain support from both sides, while belonging to neither, is painfully evident in Bacon's political career. In 1584 he represented Melcombe Regis in the House of Commons, and endeavoured to play the very difficult game of obtain ing the favour of both king and people. It was on the delicate question of subsidies that Bacon first came forward prominently and posed as a popular champion. The Court had asked for supplies. Bacon opposed them in a speech on a motion for a grant of three subsidies to be payable in four years. 66 'We are here to search the wounds of the realm and not to skim them over," he says, "to grant subsidies at once will be to breed discontent and endanger her Majesty's safety,"—it will be a bad precedent for popular liberties. But Bacon found that the philosophic mind which sees two sides to things was then out of place in politics. His speech was resented by the Queen; but once more in 1597 he speaks on the Liberal side in Parliament against enclosures: this was the last time he ever appeared in opposition to Government. He now began that study of self-interest which ended in his becoming "a peremptory royalist." In 1593 and 1595, having sued unsupported, and therefore unsuccessfully, first for the post of Attorney- and then for that of Solicitor-General, he turned to Essex, who was then just rising, and in whom Bacon, with characteristic sagacity, saw the promise of success. Essex, who seems to have recognised the greatness of Bacon, made him in 1795 a present of an estate to console him for his disappointment. The Device which he wrote for Essex on this occasion seems to show real gratitude and friendship; but his conduct in Essex's trial in 1601 seems to show how subordinate a place friendship held in his mind in comparison with his cherished worldly aims. In this little treatise he draws the character of a hollow statesman, prophetic with an irony which Fate has made to recoil on the author. "Let him make himself cunning in the humours and drifts of persons more than in the nature of business and affairs . . . and ever let him take the side that is likeliest to be followed." Perhaps Bacon himself was shocked at first with the moral dangers of a successful political career. Although on James's accession he tried to obtain his favour, although he gladly accepted knighthood from him, yet he says: "I desire to meddle as little as possible in the King's causes: I desire to put my ambition wholly upon my pen." But his talents were now well known, particularly his genius for public speaking, to which Ben Jonson bears such admiring testimony. "There happened in my time," he says, one noble speaker who was full of gravity in his speaking. His language when he could spare or pass by a jest was nobly censorious. No man ever spoke more neatly, more pressly, more weightily, or suffered less emptiness, less idleness, in what he uttered." Often, therefore, was he chosen to be spokesman for the House of Commons when in conference with the Lords: his diplomatic talent, to use no worse an adjective, had made the road to power easy to him. He became successively Solicitor-General, Member for the University of Cambridge, Privy Councillor, Lord Keeper, Lord Chancellor, being made in 1618 Lord Verulam, in 1620 Viscount St. Albans. Even his disgrace and fall in 1620, when the charges against him of taking money for despatch of suits were investigated and proved, when he wrote "the humble submission of me, the Lord Chancellor," could not quench his ambition. His imprisonment being ended by a pardon under the Great Seal, he retired in 1621; but in 1623 he sued, though unsuccessfully, for the Provostship of Eton, and even when convinced by this failure that further worldly success was denied him, yet, by the grandeur of his residence, by the splendour of his living, even when in what he termed "his retirement," he showed that the world and its "vanities" had still vast attractions for him. "Do what we can," says Prince Charles, "this man refuses to go out like a snuff." To disentangle Bacon's political views from the facts of his self-interested and chequered career is impossible. We have to refer to his essays, those autobiographical notes of his life, sincere and genuine as statements of his thought, "set down significantly rather than curiously," sometimes showing the unconsideredness of impulse in their inconsistency. We gather from them that Bacon's one fundamental political object was national unity. All his minor political aims centre round this one great object. In Bacon's political creed we see not only the well-considered belief of a thoughtful statesman, but also, on one point at least, the expression of the national instinct. National unity, he held, was only to be preserved by war: war was to the body politic what exercise was to the human body: war alone could give that health to the country which would ensure in its constitution the harmonious working of all members of the body politic. Bacon was no upholder of despotism: he believed firmly in the symmetry of the constitution, which consists in the mutual beneficial action of King and Commons. Balance was everything to Bacon. In the predominance of the French. nobility over the middle class he saw possibilities of danger which the future only too soon realised. Each class in the body politic was to move freely within its own sphere: predominance was to be given to none. The King was like the sun, a heavenly body, moving round another heavenly body which it benefits. And |