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passionate judgment of the philosopher. Hooker aimed to show that God's law is not evidenced in the Bible alone, but in the entire scheme of things, that is, in the universe. The largeness and sublimity of Hooker's conception place him with the great spirits of his time. Francis Bacon (1561-1626) is one who commands our respect as a man of wonderful mental powers rather than our love as a noble or generous character. His biographer speaks of him as "the brightest, richest, largest mind but one, in the age which had seen Shakespeare and his fellows."

Life. Bacon was born in London, January 22, 1561. His father was Sir Nicholas Bacon, Lord Keeper of the Great Seal, and one of the most trusted of the early statesmen of Elizabeth; a yet more famous statesman, Lord Burleigh, was his uncle by marriage. From his earliest years, Bacon was thus connected with the court and with public life. At eighteen he was left, by the death of his father, to make his own way in the world. He accordingly entered upon the study of the law, and his advance was exceedingly rapid. He was made a barrister in 1582, Solicitor-General in 1607, Attorney-General in 1613, and Lord Chancellor in 1617. From this brilliant public success we get no idea of Bacon's inner life and deepest aspirations. In fact Bacon's character was one of contradictions. On the one hand was the scholar and philosopher, who had "taken all knowledge" for his " province," with the noble purpose of benefiting humanity by the discovery of truth. On the other was the worldly, ambitious man, the lover of great place and power. He was not one who in the service of truth could endure poverty or obscurity; and from this springs the tragedy of his life. Bacon's worldly ambitions were overthrown

and joyously. Life has not as yet shown to the poet its darker, more tragic side. He had, indeed, written Romeo and Juliet, that rapturous and romantic tragedy of ill-fated love, and The Merchant of Venice, with its pathetic figure of Shylock. He had composed The Rape of Lucrece, in which the brightness and joy of out-ofdoors and the ardent poetry found in the Venus and Adonis are replaced by the gloom of darker passion and crime, and by greater depth of meditation and thought. But the prevailing notes of the early work were those of free and even boisterous laughter, and unbroken, happily ending love.

Shakespeare's Tragic Period. Toward the close of the sixteenth century, however, a change begins to be apparent in the spirit of Shakespeare's work. As early probably as 1594, Shakespeare had begun to write a series of Sonnets, all of which are steeped in profound feeling. In the later of these we see a foreshadowing of Shakespeare's tragic mood. We read in them of a conflict between love and duty, of the passing of youth, of the death of friends, "hid in death's dateless night," of a profound disgust for a world in which evil is captain over good. Twelfth Night, although written a little later than the greater part of the Sonnets, is a rollicking comedy. The solemn Malvolio is the butt of the jolly, drunken Sir Toby and the quick-witted Maria. Yet even in this play the mirth is not wholly careless. The note of warning mingles with the clown's song: "What's to come is still unsure;" love is not "hereafter," seize it now, for

"Youth's a stuff will not endure."

The words seem at least prophetic. In the same year in which he wrote Twelfth Night (1601), Shakespeare

began in Julius Cæsar that great series of plays which won him a place among the supreme tragic poets of the world. In play after play we now find him turning from the humorous and gayer side of life to face the ultimate problems of existence, and to sound the depths of human weakness, agony, and crime. How far these great tragedies were wrought out of the suffering and bitterness of Shakespeare's cwn experience, and how far they were the result merely of the deepening and strengthening of Shakespeare's character, will never, in all likelihood, be determined. The vital thing is, that, from whatever cause, Shakespeare appears to have passed through a period of spiritual conflict.

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His Studies of Sin. It is evident that the thought of Shakespeare in these plays is largely occupied with the great fact of sin; sin, not in its relation to a life hereafter, but sin as it is in this present world. In Macbeth we are present at the ruin of a soul, standing irresolute at the brink of the first crime and then hurrying recklessly from guilt to guilt; in Othello we see the helplessness of a "noble nature" in the hands of fiendish ingenuity and malice; Hamlet and Ophelia, the fair rose of May," perish with the guilty King and Queen; the outcast Lear, "more sinned against than sinning, and his one faithful daughter, Cordelia, fall victims to a monstrous wickedness. Shakespeare views evil fearlessly and reports it honestly, and yet in the awful world of crime portrayed in these tragedies there is room for figures and examples of virtue and holiness. Our conception of the worth and dignity of life is raised, our ideals purified and ennobled, by the contemplation of the heroic in Shakespeare's world. Cordelia, Virgilia, Miranda, and Portia elevate and sanctify our thoughts of womanhood by their loveliness and purity. The

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at a stroke. He was accused of having taken bribes in his office of Lord Chancellor. He piteously confessed the charge, and was henceforth a ruined man in reputation and fortune. Bacon spent the remainder of his life in the compilation of some of the great philosophical and scientific works on which his fame chiefly rests.

Works. The most important of these are The Advancement of Learning (1605) and the Novum Organum (1620). In these, the former of which, by reason of its eloquent style, is to be ranked as pure literature, Bacon shows that the old modes of speculative thought used by the philosophers of ancient and medieval times had produced but little accurate or scientific knowledge, and he concludes that it is necessary to adopt a new method of study if we wish to arrive at truth. This new method is set forth in the Novum Organum, or New Instrument of learning, and has become the great principle of modern scientific research. If we wish to know the facts of Nature, Bacon says, we must study them in detail, by long, patient observation and experiment. Then from these details it may be possible to arrive at general truths or universal laws. It is from Bacon's comprehensive outline of the new idea that modern science largely takes its inspiration and beginning. Bacon himself made little progress in scientific investigation, but he was the forerunner of Harvey and Newton, and of the entire world of great men who have developed our present-day sciences.

Essays. But the student of literature is more directly concerned with Bacon's Essays, published in three editions between 1597 and 1625. 7

By an "essay," Bacon meant the first trial, or weighing, of a subject, as distinguished from a finished treatise. His Essays are pithy jottings on great subjects, informally

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set down, with no attempt to carry the thought to its full or logical conclusion. They read like the notebook of a profound thinker, a shrewd observer of life, a politic and active man of affairs. They are brief, suggestive, without ornament, but closely packed with thought. They give us the concentrated results of Bacon's experience, and are often comparable to the proverbial sayings in which wise men have delighted since the days of Solomon. Often they go to the heart of the matter with one quick thrust, as in "Men fear death as children fear to go into the dark; I cannot call riches better than the baggage of virtue;" and "A man's nature runs either to herbs or weeds, therefore let him seasonably water the one and destroy the other."

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Bacon's own account of the object of the Essays is that he "endeavoured to make them not vulgar (i.e. popular), but of a nature whereof much should be found in experience and little in books; so that they should be neither repetitions nor fancies;" and he desires that they should" come home to men's business and bosoms."

SUMMARY OF RENAISSANCE LITERATURE IN ENGLAND

We have seen England, lifted by a common wave of thought and emotion, advance under the influence of the new learning, and find an outlet for her richer and deeper experience in the creation of innumerable works in every department of literature. We have approached this many-sided and inexhaustible period chiefly through the study of three of its greatest men, Spenser, Shakespeare, and Bacon. The first is supreme as a poet of dreamland, the second supreme among all poets, the last is the great thinker who stands at the gateway of our modern science. These men are indeed preeminent,

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