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whereon he stood would make his fall the more exemplary. There were enough that wanted the place; and, to cover their own ambition, they could easily pretend his corruption. Besides, if Parliament could not get the Chancellor, they might entertain the thought of striking higher. And indeed both the King and Buckingham seem to have been apprehensive that Bacon might triumph, should he proceed in his own defence; (for who but an angel or a brute could be expected to resist so potent an enchanter, coming to the rescue of his good name?) in which case the popular resentment, sharpened by defeat, might turn to other objects, and demand a dearer sacrifice. At all events, "a sop for Cerberus" must be had.

Nothing can be more unfair than to attribute the crushing of Bacon to any peculiar hatred of bribery: it sprang rather from the general and just resentment of the nation at the tyranny and rapacity of the government; a resentment that was right in striking, but wrong in the place where it struck. It is remarkable that some have argued Bacon's guilt mainly from the fact of his being condemned. Yet the very next act of Parliament was one which nobody thinks of defending. The case was this: One Floyd, a Roman Catholic barrister, in speaking of the titular King and Queen of Bohemia, who were Protestants, had expressed his satisfaction "that goodman Palsgrave and goodwife Palsgrave" had been driven from Prague. For this offence, he was adjudged to be degraded from his gentility, and held an infamous person; to be pilloried four times for the space of two hours each time; to ride once from the Fleet to Cheapside, and once to Westminster, on horseback, with his face to the horse's tail; to be branded in the forehead with the letter K; to be whipped at the cart's tail from the Fleet to Westminster Hall; to pay a fine of £5,000, and be imprisoned for life. Hallam, referring to the act, says,"There is surely no instance in the annals of our own, and hardly of any civilized country, where a trifling offence, if it were one, has been visited with such outrageous cruelty." Perhaps this act of the Parliament may serve to remind some people of the proceedings of the Star-Chamber a few years afterwards. Are we to regard the punishment of Bacon and Floyd as any just argument or measure of their guilt? The King

endeavoured to arrest the proceeding against Floyd; for Parliament had not a shadow of right to meddle in the matter at all; but his endeavours ended in greatly augmenting the severity of their sentence. Such was the scrupulous justice of Par

liament in those times!

Such, then, are our views of this great man's character. Whatever may be thought of them, we have certainly used no little diligence, that we might do no injustice either to him or to truth. For we hold there is no other uninspired man to whom all men of the present age are so much indebted; and it seems as if we had rather ungenerously sought to indemnify ourselves for his acknowledged greatness by exaggerating his faults. Moreover, this is one of "the next ages" to which he bequeathed his "name and memory;" and we, for one, are unwilling to withhold the "charitable speeches" which he trusted to receive.

Yet, with all the mitigation which the circumstances seem to warrant, we conceive there is still room for no little blame. We have spoken of Macaulay's censure as being excessive; rather, he makes out an excess of matter whereon to ground it. For nothing is more certain than that men often overstate the criminality of others for the very reason that they do not feel it; in which case it is but natural that their censure should be just as disproportionate to the charges made, as those charges are to the facts whereon they rest. And in reading Macaulay one is often struck with the inadequacy of the blame to the weight of the accusation; except where he finds some. thing he can call bigotry or superstition; then, indeed, the inadequacy is all the other way. Thus, in the article under review, he spares no pains to multiply and magnify Bacon's offences; he allows no mitigation, no relief, and even browbeats those who presume to urge it; yet he at last assures us that after all Bacon was not a bad man. Wherein we agree with him; but we could by no means say so, if we thought Bacon to be what he represents him, an ingrate, a sycophant, a taker of bribes, and "the most obstinate champion of the foulest abuses." It is, we suspect, an exaggeration of faults, springing from dulness, and not from quickness, of moral sensibility. Nor does Macaulay enact the special pleader less in respect of Bacon's philosophy than of his character. Intellectually, it

is not easy to set Bacon too high; but it is easy to set him higher than to be well supported by so narrow a basis as Macaulay assigns him. We may, perhaps we should, believe him wiser than any who wrote before him; but not if, to make room for his wisdom, we must conclude all his predecessors fools. He presented, indeed, a most rare and remarkable union of confidence and modesty ; to a faith that would believe any thing he joined a skepticism that sifted every thing most severely; and though well assured of his ability to teach great lessons to mankind, no man ever had an eye and ear more open and apt to learn. And his mind was too elevated and comprehensive not to recognize much that was true and good in the speculations of other men; and what he so recognized he had the intellectual rectitude to employ perhaps the more willingly, and to prize the more highly, because it was not his own; and he was far too wise a man, his mind was far too calm and clear and serene not to know, that if he was to see further and better than others had done, it must be by standing upon their shoulders, not by crushing them out of the way. We will venture, that no candid, fair-minded reader of his works would ever suspect him of any thing like such a contempt of former writings and writers as Macaulay ascribes to him: there is nothing in his pages smacking in the least degree of the critic's modest assurance (who can read such a passage without indig nation and shame ?) that "words, mere words, and nothing but words, had been all the fruit of all the toil of all the most renowned sages of sixty generations." Whatever may have been Bacon's faults, he had none of that mean ambition which has sometimes endeavoured to put out the lights of others' kindling, to create an artificial darkness for the better exhibiting of his own.

We are already transcending our limits, and therefore cannot think of entering now upon the subject of Bacon's philosophy; which would require an article by itself, and that, "unmixed with baser matter." We may present our views of it at some future time; and we are the more moved to do so, forasmuch as we believe some have been kept away from Bacon's writings by Macaulay's representation of them; while, if any have been drawn to them by that representation, they

could hardly have failed to be disgusted at finding how different those writings are from what they had been led to expect. For it is scarce possible that the same person should relish Bacon as he is, and Bacon as Macaulay represents him. have barely time, at present, to indicate the general scope and spirit of Macaulay's discourse on the subject, and to add two or three passages from Bacon, which may serve to put the reader on his guard, and perhaps induce him to seek his knowledge of Bacon in Bacon himself, or at least elsewhere than in Macaulay's statements concerning him.

The drift of those statements is fairly exemplified in the following: "What, then, was the end which Bacon proposed to himself? It was, to use his own emphatic expression, fruit. It was the multiplying of human enjoyments, and the mitigating of human sufferings. It was the relief of man's estate." And the whole article shows that by fruit, and the relief of man's estate, the writer understands nothing more nor less than what is usually meant by utilitarianism, that is, mere material and temporal utility. Which is not more unjust to Bacon's philosophy, as almost every page of his writings will show, than it would be to represent Nature as designed only for a corn-field, and adapted only to the nourishing and sustaining of our bodies; leaving out all her nobler adaptations to the unfolding, upbuilding, and furnishing of the mind and soul of man. "The relief of man's estate" was indeed one of the ends which "Bacon proposed to himself;" but it was not the only, nor even the primary end. This may be seen by the very sentence from which those words are quoted. Bacon is speaking of various errors in philosophy :

But the greatest error of all the rest, is the mistaking or misplacing of the last or farthest end of knowledge for men have entered into a desire of learning and knowledge, sometimes upon a natural curiosity and inquisitive. appetite; sometimes to entertain their minds with variety and delight; sometimes for ornament and reputation; and sometimes to enable them to victory of wit and contradiction; and most times for lucre and profession; and seldom sincerely to give a true account of their gift of reason, to the benefit and use of men as if there were sought in knowledge a couch, whereupon to rest a searching and restless spirit; or a terrace, for a wandering and variable mind to walk up and down with a fair prospect; or a tower of state, for a proud mind to raise itself upon; or a fort or commanding-ground, for strife and contention; or a shop, for profit or sale; and not a rich storehouse, for the glory of the Creator, and the relief of man's estate.

The same ideas run all through his works, from the first page to the last. Thus in the first of his Essays:

Yet truth, which only doth judge itself, teacheth that the inquiry of truth, which is the love-making or wooing of it; the knowledge of truth, which is the presence of it; and the belief of truth, which is the enjoyment of it; is the sovereign good of human nature. The first creature of GOD, in the works of the days, was the light of sense; the last was the light of reason; and His Sabbath work ever since is the illumination of His SPIRIT. First, he breathed light into the face of matter, or chaos; then He breathed light into the face of man; and still he breatheth and inspireth light into the face of His chosen. Certainly, it is heaven upon earth, to have a man's mind move in charity, rest in providence, and turn upon the poles of truth.

So, again, in the preface to the Novum Organum:

We would in general admonish all to consider the true ends of knowledge, and not to seek it for the gratification of their minds, or for disputation, or that they may despise others, or for emolument, or fame, or power, or such low objects, but for its intrinsic merit and the purposes of life; and that they would perfect and regulate it by charity. For from the desire of power the angels fell, and men from that of knowledge; but there is no excess in charity, and neither angel nor man was ever endangered by it.

Elsewhere he speaks of knowledge as the food of the soul,— pabulum animi,—and of philosophy as having, for one of its ends, "the purifying of the understanding, so as to fit it for the reception of truth." In short, if there be one subject on which he waxes more eloquent and enthusiastic than on any other, it is the worth of knowledge for its own sake, and for the beauty and dignity it imparts to the mind and character of its possessor. And if his principles and aims as a philosopher had been what Macaulay ascribes to him, and praises him for, we could more easily believe his character to have been as mean and sordid as Macaulay represents it.

NOTICES OF BOOKS.

Bacon's Essays: With Annotations by RICHARD WHATELY, D.D., Arch. bishop of Dublin. New York: C. S. Francis & Co. 1857.

Verily, Lord Bacon was a wonderful being. And it was a wonderful age that produced him; the age that, all in virtue of one and the same genius and spirit, gave us our English Bible and Prayer-Book, our Shakespeare and Hooker and Spenser, and, O transcendant dower! rescued English freedom

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