senses. fact, not the fitting of fact into theory, was the one thing on which Bacon insisted, and he founds his system on the ordinary course of reasoning followed by every human being. "But to the immediate and proper perception of the senses he does not attach much weight:" therefore he proceeds to supply helps for the The art of conducting experiments is thus the principal part of Bacon's method; and when by experiments he has discovered the nature of a fact and its cause, he then proceeds to consider the ultimate cause of that cause. For instance, if he wished to investigate the nature of heat, he must ascertain not only the causes of heat in any one body, but the ultimate cause, form, or law that produces heat in all bodies. This is the science of metaphysics (in Bacon's sense of the term), above the science of physics, which only inquires into efficient causes. Physics could tell us the cause of heat, that it is a mode of motion; but metaphysics is the science that deals with final causes, showing us the nature of motion in itself, how it produces different phenomena, such as heat, light, generation, corruption, etc. And last comes Prima Philosophia, the parent and stem of all sciences, containing not merely "similitudes, as men of narrow observation may conceive them to be, but the same footsteps of nature, treading or printing upon several subjects or matters." But the axioms of Prima Philosophia are often no more than mere analogies, suggestive and characteristic of Bacon's poetic mind, which was for ever seeing the similarities of things, but so wide, so vague, so general, that they are of no scientific importance; as, for instance, the axiom that the nature of everything is best seen in its smallest portions is common to physics and politics. If equals are added to unequals the wholes will be unequal, an axiom of mathematics and also of justice. That a discord ending immediately in a concord sets off harmony is true both in ethics and in music. Many of them are but pathetic instances of Bacon's frantic attempt to realise the unity of nature. He fell into that danger which he himself recognised, "that tendency of the human understanding which, of its own nature, is prone to suppose the existence of more order and regularity in the world than it finds." His conception of the Prima Philosophia but showed his intense yearning to know those great laws for the discovery of which his method paved the way; he would have wished to be a discoverer like Newton, who, "by connecting the motions of the planets with the fall of the apple, bound heaven and earth together in the unity of one simple law of attraction." What he actually accomplished beyond the great stimulus he gave seems small when put into words: "he traced and formulated the steps of the rightly working mind." Lord Macaulay, with his illustration of the man and the mince-pies, tries to show that Bacon's work has been much overrated, that he simply systematised a process which every ordinary mind goes through in order to arrive at any conclusion. This Bacon would not deny: but he distrusted the conclusions of an ordinary mind left to work by itself: he felt that to genius only was it given to follow out the ordinary course of reasoning in great matters with adequate closeness and accuracy, "only a few by native and genuine force of the mind are able to fall into my form of interpretation." For those who could not claim genius he gave a substitute in his "Art of experiments." "Our method of discovering knowledge is of such a kind that it leaves very little to keenness and strength of intellect, but almost levels all intellects and abilities." It made scientific progress possible, without genius: "the rules of harmony are perhaps useless to Mozarts and Beethovens, but a statement of such rules is not only useful to music as a whole, but it opens possibilities of utility to those to whom harmony is not an instinct." Lord Macaulay, as he underrates the importance of Bacon's scientific work, so he overrates the exactness and the learning of Bacon. Bacon when he wrote the De Augmentis did not know the discoveries that had been made through Kepler's calculations: he probably did not know he certainly took no notice of, Napier's logarithms, of Archimedes' work in geometry, of Galileo's theory of the acceleration of falling bodies. Blinded by prejudice to the use and merits of deductive theory, he could not realise that a mathematician could dispense with induction. He despised what had been done in astronomy: he wished to set on foot a history of celestial bodies collected from purely inductive observation, without any infusion of dogma. Still the mote in Bacon's eye was very small compared to the beam that he wished to extract from the eye of his generation: that youthful anticipation of his great work, which he published in 1585, “which with great confidence and a magnificent title I named the greatest book of time,'" did not by its grand title overrate the subsequent achievement of its author, though it was rather different from what Bacon imagined it would be: his work was as useful from a destructive point of view, as it was stimulating from a constructive. If Bacon did not do much himself, he showed what could be done. Bacon's scientific work was not appreciated by the age. of James I. said of the Novum Organum, that it was like the peace God which passeth understanding. The idea of a college whose aim should be the advancement of science as a whole, containing departments at which worked a specialist in each branch, their work being conducted with reference to the advance of the whole, was never realised; and yet Bacon, not understanding that a great revolution could not be wrought, nor a new order of things established, in one man's lifetime, devoted everything in order to bring about the practical realisation of his theory. 'Qu'est-ce que c'est qu' une grande vie?" asks Comte. "La pensée de la jeunesse accomplie dans l'âge mûr." In this sense Bacon's life was not great. Very sad is the passage in his diary which he wrote at the end of his life. "Besides my innumerable sins, I confess before thee that I am debtor to thee for the gracious talent of thy gifts and graces, which I have neither put into a napkin, nor put it, as I ought, to exchangers, where it might have made best profit, but misspent it in things for which I was least fit: so as I may truly say, my soul hath been a stranger in the course of my pilgrimage." "Death," says Bacon, "openeth the door to good fame," but a thinking posterity, though recognising that Bacon has a great and unique nature which must not be judged by ordinary standards, though recognising that the stimulus he gave to science by seeking it, "not arrogantly within the little cells of human wit, but humbly in the greater world," by his method in observation, by his love of truth, and by his sense of law, was great and unparalleled, must necessarily regard his practical life as the history of the gradual moral degradation of a human soul, which became in the end incapable of great and noble impulse, incapable, too, of that lasting remorse which can be a power over conduct. As Sir Thomas More made a noble failure in practical life because his ideals were too high, and because he possessed no knowledge of the art of advancement in life, so Bacon made a miserable failure, because he had no ideals, no belief in humanity, and guided his action by an art of life which was grounded solely on his knowledge of the worst side of human nature. 2 A CHAPTER XV. DECLINE OF ELIZABETHAN POETRY. DONNE, John, 1573-1631; BROWNE, William, 1588-1643; WITHER, George, 1588-1667; FLETCHER, Giles, 1588-1623; CAREW, Thomas, 1589-1639; HERRICK, Robert, 1594-1674; HABINGTON, William, 1605-1654; SUCKLING, Sir John, 1608-1642; LOVELACE, Richard, 1618-1658; HERBERT, George, 1592-1634; CRASHAW, Richard, 16151650; VAUGHAN, Henry, 1621-1695. THE Poetry of the Elizabethan period suffered in the same way as Dramatic Art from the circumstances of national life-from the divorce between the serious and artistic interests of society. It became fantastic, obscure, dealing with far-fetched thoughts, out-of-the-way conceits. The brains of the poets of these later times, like those of the schoolmen of medieval times, became locked up in the cells of their own imaginations, and these imaginations were fed by no robust, wide, or healthy interests. Prose, on the contrary, increased in dignity of style and weight of thought the serious thoughts and ideas that agitated men on the brink of the great Puritan struggle, their enthusiasm for freedom and religious independence, found in prose the vehicle for their expression. The prose of this time was not truly artistic; it was not polished, self-controlled, and restrained, as it was when the eighteenth century had inflicted its severe discipline on the English mind; but it was eloquent, full of the enthusiasm of deep feeling, and lighted up occasionally by flashes of that true poetic vision which was the inheritance even of the degenerate Elizabethan. Its faults were those of over-elaboration, reminding one of too much straining after "the witty quaintness" of Lyly and Sidney: sometimes it was cumbered with images and metaphors, sometimes clumsy and strained with excess of matter. But it rarely displayed the fatal faults of emptiness or artificiality. These qualities, together with the advantages that sometimes go with them, grace and charm and refinement, were the characteristics of a declining school of poetic art. 66 Dr. Johnson has given to that school, which embraces the poets of the decline, the name of Metaphysical, because, as Hallam says, they labored after conceits or novel turns of thought, usually false, and resting on some equivocation of language or exceedingly remote analogy." They are poets who for delicacy of genius and facility and grace of expression have few equals in any period of our literature. But with the exception of their rural poetry, all their work is marked by the slenderer genius that pursues ingenuities and refinements of thought. Contrast the simplicity and directness of a sonnet of Sylvester's with one addressed by Browne to his mistress— "Were I as base as is the lowly plain, And you, my love, as high as heaven above, Yet should the thoughts of me, your humble swain, Wheresoe'er you were, with you my love should go. And look upon you with ten thousand eyes, Till heaven waxed blind, and till the world were done. Wheresoe'er you are, my heart shall truly love you." In the following sonnet, the feeling, though it may be as sincere as Sylvester's bids fair to become entangled and lose itself in subtlety "Fairest, when by the rules of palmistry You took my hand to try if you could guess By them conceive my thoughts, and tell me, fair, DONNE was the most obscure and fanciful of the metaphysical poets. Mr. Hales says, "His chief interest is that he was the |