And in the craving for a period of "perpetual rest," which shows itself all through this essay, we catch a glimpse of the melancholy which overwhelmed the soul of him who cried out, through the mouth of Hamlet:

Oh, that this too, too solid flesh would melt,

Thaw and resolve itself into a dew!

Or that the Everlasting had not fixed

His canon 'gainst self-slaughter.

All through the essay it seems to be more than prose. From beginning to end it is a mass of imagery: it is poetry without rhythm. Like a great bird which as it starts to fly runs for a space along the ground, beating the air with its wings and the earth with its feet, so in this essay we seem to see the pinions of the poet constantly striving to lift him above the barren limitations of prose into the blue ether of untrammeled expression. It comes to us like the rude block out of which he had carved an exquisite statue full of life and grace, to be inserted perchance in some drama, even as we find another marvelous essay on death interjected into Measure for Measure.

II. THE STYLE OF A BARREN MIND.

As a means of comparison and as an illustration of the wide difference between human brains, I insert the following letter from Lord Coke, who lived in the same age as Bacon, and was, like him, a lawyer, a statesman, a courtier and a politician.

Bacon's language overruns with flowers and verdure: it is literally buried, obscured and darkened by the very efflorescence of his fancy and his imagination. Coke speaks the same English tongue in the same period of development, but his thoughts are as bare, as hard, as soulless and as homely as an English work-house, in the midst of a squalid village-common, a mile distant from a flower or a blade of grass. When we read the utterances of the two men we are reminded of that amusing scene, depicted by the humorous pen of Mark Twain, where Scotty Briggs and the village parson carry on a conversation in which neither can understand a word the other says, though both speak the same tongue; illustrating that in the same language there may be many dialects

1 Act iii, scene 1.

separated as widely from each other as French from German, and depending for their character on the mental constitution of the men who use them. The speech of an English navvy" does not differ more from the language of Tennyson's Morte d'Arthur than do the writings of Coke from those of Bacon. It will puzzle our readers to find a single Shakespeareanism of thought or expression in a whole volume of Coke's productions.

THE HUMBLE AND DIRECT ANSWER TO THE LAST QUESTION ARISING UPON BAGG'S CASE.

It was resolved, that to this court of the King's bench belongeth authority not only to correct errors in judicial proceedings, but other errors and misdemeanors tending to the breach of the peace, or oppression of the subjects, or to the raising of faction or other misgovernment: so that no wrong or injury, either public or private, can be done, but it shall be reformed and punished by law.

Being commanded to explain myself concerning these words, and principally concerning this word, "misgovernment,"

I answer that the subject-matter of that case concerned the misgovernment of the mayors and other the magistrates of Plymouth.

And I intended for the persons the misgovernment of such inferior magistrates for the matters in committing wrong or injury, either public or private, punishable by law, and therefore the last clause was added, "and so no wrong or injury, either public or private, can be done, but it shall be reformed and punished by law;" and the rule is: "verba intelligenda sunt secundum subjectam materiam."

And that they and other corporations might know, that factions and other misgovernments amongst them, either by oppression, bribery, unjust disfranchisements, or other wrong or injury, public or private, are to be redressed and punished by law, it was so reported.

But if any scruple remains to clear it, these words may be added, "by inferior magistrates," and so the sense shall be by faction or misgovernment of inferior magistrates, so as no wrong or injury, etc.

All which I most humbly submit to your Majesty's princely judgment.

EDW. COKE.

Now it may be objected that this paper is upon a dry and grave subject, and that Bacon would have written it in much the same style. But if the reader will look back at the quotations I have made from Bacon, in the foregoing pages, he will find that many of them are taken from his law papers and court charges, and his weighty philosophical writings, and yet they are fairly alive with fancy, metaphor and poetry.

CHAPTER II.

IDENTICAL METAPHORS.

Touchstone. For all your writers do consent, that ipse is he;

Now you are not ipse, for I am he.
William. Which he, sir?

As You Like It, v, 1.

OOTH Bacon and Shakespeare reasoned by analogy. When

BOTH

ever their thoughts encountered an abstruse subject, they compared it with one plain and familiar; whenever they sought to explain mental and spiritual phenomena, they paralleled them with physical phenomena; whenever they would render clear the lofty and great, they called up before the mind's vision the humble and the insignificant. All thoughts ran in parallel lines; no thought stood alone. Hence the writings of both are a mass of similes and comparisons.

I. HUMBLE AND BASE THINGS USED AS COMPARISONS.

We have seen that Bacon and his double were both philosophers, and especially natural philosophers, whose observation took in "the hyssop on the wall, as well as the cedar of Libanus;" and when we come to consider their identity of comparisons, we shall find in both a tendency to use humble and even disgusting things as a basis of metaphor.

We shall see that Bacon was always "puttering in physic," and we find Shakespeare constantly using medical terms and facts in his poetry.

We find, for instance, that both compared the driving-out of evil influences, in the state or mind, to the effect of purgative medicines.

Bacon says:

The King . . . thought . .

...

to proceed with severity against some of the principal conspirators here within the realm; thereby to purge the ill humors in England.'

And again:

Some of the garrison observing this, and having not their minds purged of the late ill blood of hostility."

And again:

But as in bodies very corrupt the medicine rather stirreth and exasperateth the humor than purgeth it, so some turbulent spirits laid hold of this proceeding toward my lord, etc.'

And so this traitor Essex made his color the scouring of some noblemen and counselors from her Majesty's favor.

In Shakespeare we have:

What rhubarb, senna, or what purgative drug

Will scour these English hence ?8

The comparison of men and things to bodily sores is common in both an unusual trait of expression in an elevated mind and a poet; but it was part of Bacon's philosophy "that most poor things point to rich ends."

Bacon says:

Augustus Cæsar, out of great indignation against his two daughters and Posthumus Agrippa, his grandchild, whereof the first two were infamous, and the last

otherwise unworthy, would say "that they were not his seed, but some imposthumes that had broken from him."1

And again he says:

Should a man have them to be slain by his vassals, as the posthumus of Alexander the Great was? Or to call them his imposthumes, as Augustus Cæsar called his??

While in Shakespeare we have:

This is the imposthume of much wealth and peace,

That inward breaks, and shows no cause without
Why the man dies.3

And we find precisely the same thought in Bacon:

He that turneth the humors back and maketh the wound bleed inwards, ingendereth malign ulcers and pernicious imposthumations.1

We have a whole body of comparisons of things governmental to these ulcers, in their different stages of healing.

Bacon says:

We are here to search the wounds of the realm, not to skin them over." Spain having lately, with much difficulty, rather smoothed and skinned over than healed and extinguished the commotion of Aragon."

Shakespeare says:

A kind of medicine in itself

That skins the vice o' the top."

Mother, for love of grace,

Lay not that flattering unction to your soul,

That not your trespass, but my madness speaks:

It will but skin and film the ulcerous place;

While rank corruption, mining all within,
Infects unseen.s

And even this curious word mining we find in Bacon used in the same figurative sense:

To search and mine into that which is not revealed.9

And we find this same inward infection referred to in Bacon:

A profound kind of fallacies, . . . the force whereof is such as it . . . doth more generally and inwardly infect and corrupt."

10

And then we have in both the use of the word canker or cancer