was keen-sighted but not far-sighted, and dexterous rather than wise. His contempt for Henry's avarice reveals itself in such expressions as that which describes how obloquy was "sweetened to him by confiscation." So far from investing the king with imaginary nobility he assumes that it was only in his earlier days that the virtues of nobleness and bounty "had their turns in his nature." It is true he describes "this great king's felicity towards the end of his life, as being at the top of all worldly bliss; but he is careful to add in the same sentence that he enjoyed "the great hatred of his people," and that he needed an opportune death to deliver him from the danger of being dethroned by his own son.

This peculiar use of the word "felicity" (felicitas) may be illustrated by a fragment on the character of Julius Caesar.1 If Henry's "felicity" was compatible with the "hatred of his subjects," the "felicity" of Caesar is said to have been compatible with, and a result of, an unflinching selfishness. "He referred everything to himself, and was himself the true and perfect centre of all his own actions, which was the cause of his singular and almost perpetual felicity, i.e. material prosperity." In judging Julius, as in judging Henry, Bacon manifests the same dispassionate appreciation of intellectual ability even when separated from moral excellence :

"He undoubtedly had greatness of mind in a very high degree . . . . yet he allowed neither country, nor religion, nor services, nor kindred, nor friendships, to be any hindrance or bridle to his purposes."

But the palm is given, not to Julius but to Augustus :

"For Julius, being of a restless and unsettled disposition, though for the compassing of his ends he made his arrangements with consummate judgment, yet had not his ends themselves arranged in any good order . . . whereas Augustus, as a man sober and mindful of his moral condition, seems to have had his ends likewise laid out from the first in admirable order and truly weighed."2

Among other historical fragments the one best worth mentioning is entitled, In Felicem Memoriam Elizabethae.3 It is a spirited

1 Spedding, Works, vi. 335.

3 Ibid. vi, 233-303.

2 Ibid. vi. 347.

vindication of Elizabeth against Papist attacks, and as it was written in 1608, when there was nothing to gain by flattery, it has the authority due to a disinterested eulogy proceeding from one who knew the Queen well and owed her little. Making his will in 1621 he mentions this alone among all his works as the one that he desires to have published: "In particular I wish the Elogium I wrote, In Felicem Memoriam Reginae Elizabethae, may be published."

§ 59 MINOR LITERARY WORKS

2

Bacon's collection of Apophthegms was probably intended to supply the deficiency noted in the Advancement of Learning and in the De Augmentis; in the latter of which (1623) he describes Apophthegms as serving "not for pleasure only and ornament, but also for action and business, being, as one called them, mucrones verborum, speeches with a point or edge, whereby knots in business are pierced and severed." He expresses his regret at the loss of Caesar's collection; "for, as for any others that we have in this kind, but little judgment has, in my opinion, been used in the selection." In the following autumn (1624) while he was recovering from a severe illness, the Apophthegms were written from his dictation.3

His religious works (besides some prayers and translations. into verse from the Psalms) consist of two short treatises entitled, A Confession of Faith and Meditationes Sacrae. In the Confession (written before 1603, but how long before is not known) there is little to indicate that the author was a man of science. At the outset, it is true, there is something Baconian in the recognition of the universality of the Law of Mediation, which, he says, pervaded the Universe from the beginning, because, “neither angel, man, nor world could stand, nor can stand, one moment in His eyes, without beholding the same in the eyes of a Mediator; and,

1 This clause does not occur in the last will, made in 1625; but a clause in almost identical words is quoted by Tenison as being from Lord Bacon's last will "--perhaps from an earlier draft of it in his possession. (See Spedding, Life, vii. 540.)

2 Adv. II. iii. 4; De Augm. ii. 12.

3 Spedding, Works, vii. 111-186.

therefore (before Him with whom all things are present), the Lamb of God was shown before all worlds." For the rest, there is little individuality in Bacon's Confession. The origin of Evil, instead of being admitted to be inscrutable, is more freely than luminously spoken of to this effect: "He made all things in their estate good, and removed from Himself the beginning of all evil and vanity into the liberty of the creature." God created the constant Laws of Nature, which, however, have had three changes, viz. 1st, when "the matter of heaven and earth was created without forms;" 2nd, after each of the six days; 3rd, at the curse and there will be a fourth change at the end of the world.

The soul of man was not produced by heaven or earth, but breathed immediately from God, so that the ways and proceedings of God with spirits are not included in Nature, that is, in the laws of heaven and earth. Adam's sin consisted in "presuming to imagine the commandments and prohibitions of God were not the rules of Good and Evil, but that Good and Evil had their own principles and beginnings." Jesus Christ was the Word, not taking flesh, but made flesh, "so as the Eternal Son of God and the ever-blessed Son of Mary was one person; so one as the Blessed Virgin may be truly and catholicly called Deipara, the Mother of God." Christ having man's flesh, and man having Christ's spirit, there is an open passage and mutual imputation; whereby sin and wrath are conveyed to Christ from man, and merit and life are conveyed to man from Christ. After the souls of those that die in the Lord have passed from their present blessed rest into the further revelation of glory at the Last Day, the glory of the Saints shall then be full, and the Kingdom shall be given up to God the Father, from which time all things shall continue for ever in that being and state which they shall then receive.1

In the Meditationes Sacrae (published with the first edition of the Essays in 1597) there are several thoughts which may be found embodied in Bacon's later works. Among these is the statement (repeated in the Advancement of Learning) that in order to improve the vicious we must know vices:

"There are neither teeth, nor stings, nor venom, nor wreaths and folds of serpents, which ought not to be all known, and, as far as examination doth lead, tried; neither let any man here fear infection or pollution; for the sun entereth into sinks and is not defiled." There are three kinds of

1 Spedding, Works, vii. 215-226,

2 Ibid. vii. 227-242.

imposture in Religion; ist, the formal or scholastic theology of those who, as soon as they get any subject matter, straightway make an art of it; 2nd, the accumulation of legends; 3rd, mystical use of high-sounding phrases, allegories, and allusions. Heresies spring from two sources, either from not knowing the Scriptures, or from not knowing the power of God; for the Scriptures reveal God's will, the Universe God's power. The former error breeds Superstition; the latter, Atheism. What the shell is to the kernel, what the Ark was to the Tables of the Law, that is the Church to the Scriptures.

Next to the importance attached by Bacon to the Bible as the only source of Unity, his denunciation of " terrestrial hope" claims principal attention. Himself one of the most sanguine and hopeful of mankind, Bacon would banish hope from all matters relating to life on earth, and relegate it to expectations of heaven. About earthly matters men should not hope, but only entertain reasonable anticipations. Idly do the poets fable that Hope was left in Pandora's casket to be the antidote against all diseases; rather it was itself the worst disease of all, making the mind, "light, frothy, unequal, wandering. . . . By how much purer is the sense of things present, without infection or tincture of imagination, by so much wiser and better is the soul." To the same tenour run the remarks on Hope in the Essays: it is a habit by which rulers can deceive the seditious into peace: "the politic and artificial nourishing and entertaining of hopes, and carrying men from hopes to hopes, is one of the best antidotes against the poison of discontentments."1 Perhaps the most characteristic and doubtful of the dicta in the Meditations is the passage in the section on Heresies, where he asserts that those heresies are worst which deny God's power: "for in civil government also it is a more atrocious thing to deny the power and majesty of the Prince than to slander his reputation;" the inference from which seems to be that it is a greater sin to deny God's power than to deny His goodness, and that he who worships a non-omnipotent Being of goodness is morally worse than the worshipper of an omnipotent Satan.

The Translation of certain Psalms into English Verse was made, like the collection of Apophthegms, during a period of illness in 1624.2 The fact that he not only dedicated these

1 Essays, xxv. 186.

2 Spedding, Works, vii. 263-286.

translations to his friend George Herbert but actually published them in the same year, appears to require explanation. Mr. Spedding thinks it possible that "he owed money to his printer and bookseller, and if such trifles as these would help to pay it, he had no objection to their being used for the purpose." There are probably few data for determining the value of an author's profits in the early part of the seventeenth century; but it seems unlikely that a little pamphlet for it contains no more than seven Psalms, and can hardly claim to be called a bookcould have gone far in the direction of paying the printer's bill for the author of such abstruse works as the Novum Organum and subsequent Latin works. Perhaps he may have published them as a kind of thankoffering for his recovery. In any case the publication is a proof that he thought well of his verses; and the reader may be naturally curious to see what kind of verse was written and approved by one who in old days called himself a "concealed poet," 1 and who wrote magnificent prose in almost every conceivable style.

The following is an extract from the first Psalm, and it does not give us a high notion of Bacon's poetic powers:

"Who never gave to wicked reed2

A yielding and attentive ear;

Who never sinner's paths did tread,

Nor sat him down in scorner's chair;
But maketh it his whole delight

On law of God to meditate,

And therein spendeth day and night:
That man is in a happy state.

"He shall be like the fruitful tree,
Planted along a running spring,
Which, in due season, constantly

A goodly yield of fruit doth bring:
Whose leaves continue always green,

And are no prey to winter's pow'r :
So shall that man not once be seen
Surprised with an evil hour.”

A translation of the ninetieth Psalm is, in parts, far more forcible and rhythmical; but the last of the four following stanzas is both bald and cacophonous :