How figurative is this:

The King slept out the sobs of his subjects until he was awakened with the thunderbolt of a Parliament.'

What poet has written in prose anything more poetical than this?

The unfortunate destinies of hopeful young men, who, like the sons of Aurora, puffed up with the glittering show of vanity and ostentation, attempt actions above their strength. . . . For among all the disasters that can happen to mortals, there is none so lamentable, and so powerful to move compassion, as the flower of virtue cropped with too sudden a mischance. . . . Lamentation and mourning flutter around their obsequies like those funereal birds.?

How fine is this expression:

He took, as it were, the picture of words from the life of reason.3

There is a rhythm in this:

Bred in the cells of gross and solitary monks.1

And again, when he labors, prevented the

How poetical is his conception when he speaks of the preparation for the grand Armada and the Spanish invasion of England, as being "like the travail of an elephant." speaks of one of the Popes, who, by his Mohammedanizing of the white race, as one who had "put a ring in the snout of the Ottoman boar," whereby he was prevented from rooting up and ravaging the fair field of Europe. The words draw a picture for us which the memory cannot forget.

What a command of language does he exhibit! Take these

sentences:

Words that come from wasted spirits and an oppressed mind are more safe in being deposited in a noble construction."

Neither doth the wind, as far as it carrieth a voice, with a motion thereof, confound any of the delicate and figurative articulations of the air, in variety of words." Who taught the bee to sail through such a vast sea of air?8

The first of these expeditions invasive was achieved with great felicity, ravished a strong and famous port in the lap and bosom of their high countries." Whilst I live, my affection to do you service shall remain quick under the ashes of my fortune, 10

Take these sentences:

Religion sweetly touched with eloquence.'

The admirable and exquisite subtility of nature.

Have you never seen a fly in amber more beautifully entombed than an Egyptian monarch?

When it has at last been clearly seen what results are to be expected from the nature of things and the nature of the mind, we consider that we shall have prepared and adorned a nuptial couch for the mind and the universe, the Divine Goodness being our bridesmaid.

The blustering affection of a wild and naked people.

The melody and delicate touch of an instrument.4

But these blossoms of unripe marriages were but friendly wishes and the airs of loving entertainments.5

To dig up the sepulchers of buried and forgotten impositions."

But the King did much to overcast his fortunes, which proved for many years together full of broken seas, tides and tempests."

Neither was the song of the sirens plain and single, but consisting of such a variety of melodious tunes, so fitting and delighting the ears that heard them, as that it ravished and betrayed all passengers.

We might make a book of such citations.

Mr. John H. Stotsenburg, of New Albany, Indiana, has put together, in a newspaper article, a number of extracts from Bacon, and arranged them as if they were blank verse. I give a few of these. It is surprising to observe how much, in this shape, they resemble the poetry of the Shakespeare Plays, and how readily they would deceive an ordinary reader:

Truth may come, perhaps,

To a pearl's value that shows best by day,
But rise it will not to a diamond's price

That showeth always best in varied lights.

Yet it is not death man fears,

But only the stroke of death.

Virtue walks not in the highway

Though she go heavenward.

Why should we love our fetters, though of gold?

When resting in security, man is dead;

His soul is buried within him

And his good angel either forsakes his guard or sleeps.

1 Advancement of Learning, book i.

2 Novum Organum, book ii.

3 History of Henry VII.

Wisdom of the Ancients.

History of Henry VII.

6

Speech in Parliament, 39 Elizabeth, 1597. "History of Henry VII.

Wisdom of the Ancients-Sireus.

There is nothing under heaven

To which the heart can lean, save a true friend.

Why mourn, then, for the end which must be
Or spend one wish to have a minute added
To the uncertain date which marks our years?
Death exempts not man from being,
But marks an alteration only.

He is a guest unwelcome and importunate
And he will not, must not be said nay.
Death arrives gracious only

To such as sit in darkness

Or lie heavy-burdened with grief and irons.

To the poor Christian that sits slave-bound

In the galleys;

To despairful widows, pensive pensioners and deposed kings;

To them whose fortune runneth backward

And whose spirits mutiny:

Unto such death is a redeemer,

And the grave a place of retiredness and rest.

These wait upon the shore, and waft to him

To draw near, wishing to see his star

That they may be led to him,

And wooing the remorseless sisters

To wind down the watch of life

And break them off before the hour.

It is as natural to die

As to be born.

In many of these there are scarcely any changes, except in arranging them as blank verse instead of the form of prose; and they have been taken as prose simply because Bacon so first wrote them.

No man, I think, can have followed me thus far in this argument without conceding that Bacon was a poet. If a poet, "the greatest of mankind" would be the greatest poet of mankind. Whatever such a mind strove to accomplish would be of the highest. Nothing commonplace could dwell in such a temple.

We must admit that he possessed everything needed for the preparation of the Shakespeare Plays. Learning, industry, ambition for immortality; command of language in all its heights and depths; the power of compressing thought into condensed sentences; wit, fancy, imagination, feeling and the temperament of genius.

XIII. HIS WIT.

But it will be said, Was he not lacking in the sense of humor? By no means. It was the defect of his public speeches that his wit led him aside from the path of dignity. Ben Jonson says his oratory was "nobly censorious when he could spare or pass by a jest." Sir Robert Naunton says, "He was abundantly facetious, which took much with the Queen." The Queen said, “He hath a great wit." "I wish your Lordship a good Easter," says the Spanish Jew, Gondomar, about to cross the Channel. "I wish you a good Pass-over," replied Bacon. Queen Elizabeth asked Bacon whether he had found anything that smacked of treason in a certain book. "No," said Bacon, "but I have found much felony." "How is that?" asked the Queen. "The author," said Bacon "has stolen many of his conceits from Cornelius Tacitus."

In the midst even of his miseries, after his downfall, he writes. (1625) to the Duke of Buckingham:

I marvel that your Grace should think to pull down the monarchy of Spain without my good help. Your Grace will give me leave to be merry, however the world goeth with me.

I have just quoted Macaulay's declaration that Bacon's sense of wit and humor was so powerful that it oftentimes usurped the place of reason and tyrannized over the whole man.

We find in the author of the Shakespeare Plays the same inability to restrain his wit.

Says Carlyle:

In no point does Shakespeare exaggerate but only in laughter. Fiery objurgations, words that pierce and burn, are to be found in Shakespeare; yet he is always in measure here, never what Johnson would remark as a specially "good hater." But his laughter seems to pour from him in floods. . . . Not at mere weakness, at misery or poverty, never.

CHAPTER II.

THE WRITER OF THE PLAYS A PHILOSOPHER.

First, let me talk with this philosopher.

Lear, iii, 4.

N the attempt to establish identity I have shown that Bacon

IN

was a poet as well as a philosopher. I shall now try to establish that the writer of the Plays was a philosopher as well as a poet. In this way we will come very near getting the two heads under one hat.

The poet is not necessarily a philosopher; the philosopher is not necessarily a poet. One may be possessed of marvelous imaginative powers, with but a small share of the reasoning faculty. Another may penetrate into the secrets of nature with a brain as dry as grave-dust.

The crude belief about Shakespeare is that he was an inspired plow-boy, a native genius, a Cornish diamond, without polishing; a poet, and nothing but a poet. I propose to show that his mind was as broad as it was lofty; that he was a philosopher, and more than that, a natural philosopher; and more than that, that he held precisely the same views which Bacon held.

Let us see what some of the great thinkers have had to say upon this subject:

Carlyle makes this most significant speech:

There is an understanding manifested in the construction of Shakespeare's Plays equal to that in Bacon's Novum Organum.

Hazlitt has struck upon the same pregnant comparison:

The wisdom displayed in Shakespeare was equal in profoundness to the great Lord Bacon's Novum Organum.

Coleridge said:

He was not only a great poet, but a great philosopher.

Richard Grant White calls him

The greatest philosopher and the worldly-wisest man of modern times.