of Machiavelli's work, which is on the subject "That Deluges, Pestilences, the change of Religion and Languages, and other accidents, in a manner extinguish the memory of many things.' Machiavelli's Discourses on Livy was facile princeps the history that made Bacon wise. From abstract principles in the sphere of government, Machiavelli appealed to experience; for authority as the test of truth, he substituted scientific facts. This practical method of writing history Bacon approved of highly. "We are much beholden," he says, "to Machiavel and others that wrote what men do, and not what they ought to do." The principle thus clearly stated explains such essays as, Of Cunning, Of Wisdom for a Man's Self, and the like.

What is called Bacon's Machiavellism has been the subject of much controversy and much misunderstanding. It seems to make it well-nigh impossible for historians of letters to write of him without taking sides. Pope's epigram, "the wisest, brightest, meanest of mankind," is said to have been the inspiration of Macaulay's well-known essay, Lord Bacon. R. W. Church, in English Men of Letters, and E. A. Abbott, one of the best of recent editors of the Essays, are both severe critics of Bacon. James Spedding devoted his life to the defence and succeeded in clarifying many of the points at issue. The subject can scarcely be presented better to the student, at first hand, and in brief compass, than by suggesting the reading of the essay Of Cunning in immediate connection with that Of Fortune. Bacon believed, as he says, that

every man is the architect of his own fortune. That is a truism. The experience of men in every land and at all times confirms it. The older democracy of the French Revolution and of the Signers cherished the idea as almost inspired doctrine. The difficulty is that moral ideas develop and change. Bacon, though a religious man, was essentially not a moralist. Like Machiavelli, but with the sea change from Italy to England, he ac- j cepted the moral and religious ideas of his time. His religious writings show that by preference he always took the middle course. In morals, Bacon's ideas combine curiously the enlightened thought of pagan Greece and Rome with the Christian ethics of the Bible. But this is theory with him; in practice he did not rise above the political morality of his time. He fell below it at the last. In that morality the distinction between right and wrong in conduct was neither so sharply nor so widely drawn as now. The development of moral ideas and the ethical point of view should be factors in any judgment of the actions of men and women of former times. The same justice which underlies James Spedding's eminently sane judgment of Bacon, John Morley extended to Machiavelli in his brilliant Romanes Lecture of 1897.

When we consider the great drama of the Elizabethan age, the bulk of it running to some fifteen hundred plays, its popularity, its reflection of contemporary life at all angles, its excellence and the high average of ability of the writers who were producing it, and Shakspere one of them, it is little

short of astounding that nowhere throughout the fifty-eight essays does Bacon either quote a thought from the drama or mention a single dramatist. His silence is all the more extraordinary from the fact that he was himself concerned in the representation of six masques, the first as a Gray's Inn man of twenty-five and the last so late in life as his Attorney-Generalship, when he was fifty-two years old. Various explanations may be offered. Bacon was born in Court circles and was a lifelong courtier. Players were held in such contempt as to be classed legally with vagabonds. We know that Shakspere was sensitive to the degradation of his calling in public opinion,

"My nature is subdued

To what it works in, like the dyer's hand."

Francis Beaumont was born a gentleman, and his name does not appear on the title-page of any play of his published during his lifetime. Further, Bacon was a busy man, probably occupied all day and every day with law and politics, and by night with his studies and authorship. He worked too hard to be much of a play-goer, even if he had been inclined to spend his afternoons at the theatres. Curious as the phenomenon is, nothing conceivable can better express the vitality and power of English literature than that it added to the thought of the world two such productions as the Essays of Bacon and the plays of Shakspere, the work of two men who walked the streets of London together for the span of some thirty years, so far as we know, each.

unknown personally to the other. One person made a link between them, the Earl of Southampton, to whom Shakspere dedicated Venus and Adonis, in 1593, 'the first heir of his invention.' Five years later Southampton lost the Queen's favor by marrying without her consent, Elizabeth Vernon, the Earl of Essex's cousin. He was

obliged to absent himself from Court, and we hear of him in 1599 as "passing his time in London merely in going to plays every day." Bacon knew Southampton as a friend to the Earl of Essex, and acted as Queen's counsel in prosecuting him for his complicity in Essex's treasonable practices. Later in James the First's reign, Bacon was associated with the Earl of Southampton on the board of governors of the South Virginia Company. But Southampton would seem not to have forgotten Bacon's share in Essex's death and his own imprisonment, for when Lord Chancellor Bacon was charged with corruption before the House of Lords, it was the Earl of Southampton who drove the charges home by insisting on a particular confession. The patron of Shakspere in youth did not befriend Bacon in age.

Doubtless a sufficient explanation of Bacon's unconsciousness of the local drama that was being written and acted all about him is that as a reader he preferred the classics. Nor, indeed, was he an omnivorous reader, though he had read much. He was a man who read the best books and read them thoroughly. Moreover, as a man of affairs rather than a mere bookish person, he thought about what

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he read and meditated upon it. But the books that he read most and knew best were the works of Latin authors; he wrote Latin fluently, he thought in Latin, as his writings in both Latin and English abundantly show. The Latin of Bacon is partly his individual bent and partly the tenor of his age. Latin has come into English mainly in two great streams, through the French of the Norman conquest and directly from the revival of learning, and just as one must read Chaucer to understand the French influence, so Bacon best represents the learned borrowing of Latin of the Renaissance. Bacon was the most learned man of Elizabethan times, and the Elizabethan time was learned. To learn to read then was to learn to read Latin. Boys in school learned their grammar from Latin grammars, as Shakspere shows that he did in the King's New School of Stratford-upon-Avon, and a very good way to learn grammar it is. By the time the boy had completed his university course, if he had made good use of his time, Latin had become to him a second vernacular. If the young man was the son of a landed proprietor and stayed at home, his household accounts were kept in Latin. If he entered one of the learned professions, the law, or the church, or medicine, he had to draw up legal documents in Latin, or to read theology in Latin, or to study medical science written in Latin. If he was ambitious to become an author, he thought he must write his books in Latin. Roger Ascham, dedicating his Toxophilus to Henry VIII, in 1545, remarked that it would have been easier,