Poetry, they treasured and protected her in their honest but unwashed 1 bosoms. Out of the verminous swarm of whoremongers, rakehells, roaring boys, coney catchers and cozeners of Bankside and Shoreditch we are asked to believe that there sprang spontaneously a slum-born Minerva veiled in a Latinity of language, (much of which must have been Sanscrit and Hebrew to the unlettered hearers and utterly beyond the reaches of their souls)" the embodiment of all the Ages, Wisdom and Philosophy and the majestic and imperishable inheritance of the English speaking race. The elder Dumas set the English drama next to God in the cosmic system of the Universe. "After God," he wrote, "Shakespeare has created most." The authors of much of this miraculous Drama, if our records are not at fault were 'lightly the lewdest persons in the land,' whose lives" excelled all precedent of crime.

2

It is said by Milton that good men only give good things. Granting that the Dramatists were an exception to this rule and that their writings were the fruit of Pythian inspiration ; we must then answer Coleridge that God does play miracles in sport, and that He does choose idiots, and worse than idiots, by whom to convey Divine Truth to man. It were consistent if those who accept this theory ceased to train and educate their children, but left them to run among the gutters in the trust that by some Divine accident

I Good soap was an almost impossible luxury and clothes had to be washed with cowdung, hemlock, nettles and refuse soap than which, in Harrison's opinion, there is none more unkindly savour. Social Eng: Traill vol. 3. 544.

2 Charles and Mary Lamb on Shakespeare.

they too might be struck by a Heavenly beam of Poesy and Philosophy and become the Shakespeares of the future.

" 1

It is not habitual for Genius to flock in crowds among the common herd. "In sublimity of soul there is no contagion. High thoughts and high emotions are by their very existence isolated; but, as we have seen, the Elizabethan stews were bristling with encyclopaedic poets, all pioneers of liberty and justice, animated by identical aims; and lords of the truest gentleness. It seems as though Nature, having achieved a masterpiece, ("the greatest intellect, according to Carlyle, "in our recorded world "), grew enamoured with her handiwork and scrupled to destroy so extraordinary a prodigy. prodigy. As we have seen, the whole outburst of the Elizabethan drama, although apparently fortuitous, is in effect a succession of etched proofs, pulled seemingly from the same inimitable plate. Many of the early experimental impressions, blurred and indistinct, seem to have been thrown aside as defective. In Shakespeare, Nature, having worked up her masterpiece, obtained an almost flawless print; "I find no human soul so beautiful these fifteen hundred years, says Carlyle. "Wherever there are men, Emerson, "in the degree in which they are civil he has risen to his place as first poet in the world. Subsequent to Shakespeare, Nature's inimitable plate became much worn and obscured, but to the decline and final end the impressions obviously coincide even to the minutia of blots and scratches.

I De Profundis.

says

Not only does the Elizabethan drama show throughout that its writers were pervaded by a set of sentiments in common, but as we have seen, the dramatic intellect seems to have been a giant twin to the philosophic mind of the illustrious Bacon. What relationship, if any, existed between them? The answer returned by academic and popular opinion is none whatever. "Bacon and Shakespeare," according to Prof. Dowden, "stand far apart. In moral character and in gifts of intellect and soul we should find little resemblance between them. " 1 Mr. Sidney Lee maintains that the interval separating Bacon from Shakespeare is from every point of view a wide one; intellect of both Shakespeare and Bacon may well be termed miraculous. The facts of biography may be unable to account for the emergence of the one or the other, but they can prove convincingly that no two great minds of a single era pursued literary paths more widely dissevered.

2

"The

Of the value of these dicta the reader is in a position to form his own opinion. The actual truth is that in Shakespeare's plays, as Prof. David Masson said upwards of fifty years ago, before perception had unhappily been blinded by controversy, "we have Thought, History, Exposition, Philosophy, all within the round of the poet. as if into a mind poetical in form there had been poured all the matter that existed in the mind of his contemporary Bacon. The only difference

It is

between him and Bacon sometimes is that Bacon writes an essay and calls it his own, while Shake

I Shakespeare, His Mind and Art. p. 18.

2

Great Englishmen of the Sixteenth Century.

speare writes a similar essay and puts it into the mouth of a Ulysses or a Polonius. "1

Not merely the plays of Shakespeare, but the whole Elizabethan Drama form, I think I may claim to have shewn, a veritable Arbor Scientiae. Seduced by the wealth of fruit and flowers upon the topmost bough, we have been for the most part unconscious that the Dramatists are all branches from the same great trunk, a verity perceptible at once on pushing aside the leaves and flowers.

Though the human Mind is changeable and shifting as a quicksand, perpetually assimilating new grains of thought, and modifying or discarding old ones; not only were the faculties of Bacon and the dramatists identical, but the changes and modifications which must perpetually have occurred in their respective brain cells seem to have systematically synchronised. We have moreover seen the playwrights quoting from Bacon's personal and private correspondence; and we have seen them paraphrasing his State papers, and borrowing from his unpublished note books. On the other side we have seen Bacon's secretaries apparently making manuscript copies, not only of Shakespeare's plays, but also of those attributed to inferior players. We have seen Bacon the acknowledged Columbus of Literature, dogged on his voyage through the Pillars of Hercules by a flotilla of writers who traversed simultaneously the same Thought Oceans in the same latitude and the same longitude: yet Bacon seems never to have had an inkling of his fellow

I

Wordsworth, Shelley, Keats and Other Essays. 1874. Essay v. p. 242, reprinted from North British Review. 1853.

wanderers! In The Advancement of Learning he takes count of all current knowledge, and makes "a general and faithful perambulation of learning : not only does he ignore Shakespeare and the other dramatists, but he goes out of his path to deplore that he "stands alone," pointedly observing that he has "never met any person disposed to apply his mind to similar thoughts. In the Novum Organum, he goes even further, and claims to be "in this course altogether a pioneer, following in no man's track, nor sharing these counsels with any one.” (Bk. I, Aph. cxiii).

The

His own age, and subsequent ages, have conceded the justice of this claim. Oldenburg the first Secretary to the Royal Society wrote; enrichment of the storehouse of Natural Philosophy was a work begun by the single care and conduct of the excellent Lord Verulam. "I

have heard his Lordship, says Rawley, " speak complainingly that his Lordship (who thinketh he deserveth to be an Architect in this building) should be forced to be a workman and labourer, and dig the clay and burn the brick. And more than that (according to the hard condition of the Israelites at the latter end) to gather the straw and stubble over all the fields to burn the bricks withal. For he knoweth that except he do it nothing will be done.

Hallam comments upon the Temple of which "Bacon saw in vision before him the stately form, and decorated pediments in all their breadth of light and harmony of proportion, while long vistas of receding columns and glimpses of internal splendour revealed a glory that was not per