FRANCIS BACON.

CHAPTER I.

THE BIOGRAPHERS.

1. A FINE wit has told the world that all men and women, all youths and girls, are true poets, save only those who write in verse. In such a saying, as in all good wit, there lies a core of truth. Men who have kept the poetry of their lives unshaped by art stand face to face with nature, seeing the blue sky, the bursting leaf, the hush of noon, the rising and setting sun, the green glade, the flowing sea, as these things are; not as they appear in books, cut off into lengths of lines, tricked into antithetical phrase, rounded and closed by rhyme. No false rule of art impels a man who sees and feels, but who does not mean to write or paint, to squint at a group of elms, to peer through his hand at moonlight shimmering on a lake, or at sunset on the tops of a range of hills; for such a man has no thought of how tree, lake, and alp may be described in verse of five or six feet, or of the lines in which this or that old painter would have framed them. He comes fresh to nature, and has an intimate and poetical relation to her.

I. 1.

B

I. 2.

2. As with nature, so with man. That figure, decked by Pope,

The wisest, brightest, meanest of mankind

-over which fools have grinned and rogues have rubbed their palms for more than a hundred years, has never yet been recognised by honest hearts. Men who trust the face of nature, not the point of satire, turn from this daub as from a false note in song, or from a painted living face. The young and pure reject satire, and they do well to reject it; for satire is the disease of art. The young and pure will not believe a thing true because it is made to look false. Taught by heaven, and not by rules, they judge of character in the mass. Nature abhors antitheses; loving the soft approach of dawn, the slow sprouting of the seed, and moving by a delicate gradation through her round of calm and storm, of growth and life. Her forks never flash from a blue vault, nor do her waves cease to crest when the wind which whipped them lulls. Gradation is her law. If she may make a god or devil, she will not put the two in one. That is the task of art; but of art in its lowest stage of depravity and decline.

3. Can you be good and evil, wise and mean? Gazing on the girl-like face in Hilyard's miniature, conning the deep lore of the Essays, toying with the mirth of the Apophthegms, lingering on the tale of a gay and pure, a busy and loving life,-how can they who judge by wholes and not by parts admit that one so eminently wise and good was also a false friend, a venal judge, a dishonest man?

4. Yet this comedy of errors has run its course from Alexander Pope to John Lord Campbell. Strange to say,

the grave writers have gone nearly as far astray from fact as those bright Parthians who, in choosing their shafts, look rather to the feather than the flight. With them Bacon is, in turn, abject, venal, proud, profuse-ungrateful for the gifts of Essex, mercenary in his love for Alice Barnham, callous to the groans of Peacham, servile in the House of Commons, corrupt on the judicial bench!

5. The lie against nature in the name of Francis Bacon broke into high literary force with Pope. Before his day the scandal had only oozed in the slime of Welden, Chamberlain, and D'Ewes. Pope picked it, as he might have picked a rough old flint, from the mud; fanged it, poisoned it, set it on his shaft:

It was not the only scum which in Pope's day frothed to the head. What man then believed in nobleness, even in intellect, unless that intellect were of the lowest type or served the basest cause? The sole end of wit was defamation, the sole end of poetry vice. Of pure genius there was little, of high virtue less. All glorious characters, all serious things, if not gone wholly from the minds of men, lingered in their memories only to be reviled. When Bacon became the meanest of mankind, Raleigh was assailed, and Shakespeare driven from the stage. Rowe was tainting our national drama, St. John undoing our political philosophy, Hume training his mind through doubts of God for the task of painting the most manly passage of arms in all history as our greatest blunder and our darkest shame. How should Francis Bacon have escaped his share in this moral wreck?

I. 4.

I. 6.

6. No man of rank in letters had yet soiled his fame; for the foes who had lived in his own age, who had danced with him in the Gray's Inn masques, or had bowed to him as he rode down to the House,-even those who, like Sir Robert Cecil and Sir Edward Coke, had most to fear from his gladiatorial strength, and in the madness of that fear pursued him with taunts and hate,—had never dreamt of denying that his virtues and his courage stood fairly in line with his vast abilities of tongue and pen. They had called him blind when they could not see, as he could, all the faces of an object. They had denied to his gratitude the strong vitality of his intellectual power. They had spoken of his vanity, of his presumption, of his dandyism, of his unsound learning and unsafe law; but the malice of these rivals had never strayed so far as to accuse him, to the ears of men who heard him in the House of Commons and met him at the tavern or the play, of a radical meanness of heart. Coke had called him a fool. Cecil had fancied him a dupe. But neither his rancorous rival at the bar, nor his sordid cousin at Whitehall, had ever thought him a rascal. That was the invention of a later time.

The age that took Voltaire to be its guide, found out that Bacon had been a rogue.

7. Since then he has been the prey of painters and pasquins; his offences deepening, darkening, as men have moved yet farther and farther from the springs of truth. Hume is comparatively fair to him. Hallam is less fair; though he will not, even for the sake of Pope, call Bacon the meanest of mankind. Lingard paints him with a more unctuous hate. Macaulay, in turn, is fierce and gay: his sketch of Rembrandt power: his lights too high,

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I. 7.

LORD CAMPBELL.

his smears too black: noon on the brow, dusk at the Nature never yet made such a man as Macaulay

heart. paints.

8. But of all the sins against Francis Bacon, that of Lord Campbell is the last and worst. I wish to speak with respect of so bold and great a man as our present Lord Chancellor. He is one who has swept up the slope of fame by native power of heart and brain; in the proud course of his life, from the Temple to the Peerage, from the Reporters' Gallery to the Woolsack, I admire the track of a man of genius-brave, circumspect, tenacious, strong; one not to be put down, not to be set aside; an example to men of letters and men of law. But the more highly I rank Lord Campbell's genius, the more I feel drawn to regret his haste. In such a case as the trial of Bacon's fame he was bound to take pains; to sift every lie to its root; to stay his condemning pen till he had satisfied his mind that in passing sentence of infamy he was right, beyond risk of appeal. A statesman and a law-reformer himself, he ought to have felt more sympathy for the just fame of a statesman and law-reformer than he has shown. Not that Lord Campbell finds fault with Bacon where he speaks by his own lights. Indeed, there he is just. He has no words too warm for Bacon's reforms as a lawyer, for his plans as a minister, for his rules as a chancellor. When Lord Campbell knows his subject at first hand, his praise of his hero rings out clear and loud. But there is much in the life of Bacon which he does not know. He has not given himself time to sift and winnow. Like an easy magistrate on the bench, he has taken the pleas for facts. That is his fault, and in such a man it is a very grave fault.