Love is merely [wholly] a madness.

SHAKESPEARE (As you like it 111. 2.) 1623.

Love is a madness.

DEKKER (Old Fortunatus III. 1.) 1600.
Are you not ashamed to make

Yourself a slave to the base lord of love
Begot of fancy and of beauty born?

CHAPMAN (All Fools 1. 1.) 1604-1605. What uncouth fit, what malady is this that thou dost prove?

....Love's our common wrack

That gives us bane to bring us low and lets us medicine lack.

PEELE (Arraignment of Paris) 1584.

Love is a discord and a strange divorce

Betwixt our sense and reason, by whose power As mad with reason we admit that force.

GREENE (Menaphon) 1589.

Love.... puzzles reason, distracts the freedom of the soul, renders a wise man a fool, and a fool wise in's own conceit-not else.

FORD (Fancies Chaste and Noble 111. 3.) 1638. Love is but a straggling from our reason.

SHIRLEY (Witty Fair One 1. 2.) 1628-1633. Love is a consuming of wit and restoring of folly, a staring blindness and a blind gazing.

LYLY (Love's Metamorphosis 111. 1.) 1601. Love, is anything more ridiculous?

SHIRLEY (Hyde Park 1. 2.) 1637. It is not granted men to love and be wise.

BACON (Advancement of Learning) 1605.

The Gods themselves cannot be wise and love. MARSTON (Dutch Courtezan 11. 1.) 1605.

To be wise and love exceeds man's might; that dwells with Gods above.

SHAKESPEARE (Troilus and Cressida 111. 2.) 1609.

LOVE CELESTIAL

My praise shall be dedicated to the happiest state of mind, to the noblest affection. I shall teach lovers to love, that have all this while loved by rote. I shall give them the alphabet of love.

BACON (Conference of Pleasure) 1591-1592. Sweet Love devoid of villainy or ill,

But pure

and spotless as at first he sprung Out of th' Almighty's bosom where he nests,

From thence infuséd into mortal breasts.

Such high conceit of that celestial fire

The base born brood of blindness cannot guess, Nor ever dare their dunghill thoughts aspire Unto so lofty pitch of perfectness.

SPENSER (Tears of the Muses) 1611.

'Tis rather to instruct deceived mankind
How much pure Love, that has his birth in
[Heaven,
And scorns to be received a guest but in
A noble heart prepared to entertain him,
Is, by the gross misprision of weak men,
Abused and injured; that celestial fire,
Which......

MASSINGER (Parliament of Love) 1624.
Most sacred fire that burnest mightily
In living breasts is kindled first above
Amongst the eternal spheres and lamping sky,
And thence poured into men which men call

[Love,

Not that same which doth base affections move
In brutish minds and filthy lust inflame,

But that sweet fit that doth true beauty love
And chooseth virtue for his dearest dame,
Whence spring all noble deeds and neverdying
[fame.
SPENSER (Fairy Queen III. III.) 1590-1609.
What thing is love? It is a power divine
That reigns in us

He that hath the feeling taste of Love
Derives his essence from no earthly toy.

GREENE (Menaphon) 1589.

No mortal passion, but a supernatural influence.
IBID (Morando) 1587.

Love is not love

Which alters when it alteration finds,
Or bends with the remover to remove :
O, no! it is an ever-fixéd mark

That looks on tempests and is never shaken;
It is the star to every wandering bark,
Whose worth's unknown, although his height
[be taken.
Love's not Time's fool, though rosy lips and
[cheeks
Within his bending sickle's compass come;
Love alters not with his brief hours and weeks,
But bears it out even to the edge of doom.
SHAKESPEARE (Sonnet cxvI.) 1609.
Love is not love unless love doth perséver,
That love is perfect love that loves for ever.
MARSTON (Insatiate Countess 11. 3.) 1613.
In their threefold treatment of Love as creep-
ing, a madness and a Celestial influence, Bacon
and the dramatists are all equally consistent in

their inconsistencies. It is a popular impression that Bacon knew nothing about this subject, but he himself thought differently. “I shall, says he, "teach lovers to love. This passage occurs in the Conference of Pleasure forming one of the pieces contained in the Northumberland House Manuscript discussed in the preceding chapter. Mr. Edwin Reed notes some very remarkable parallelisms between this MS. and Shakespeare's Love's Labour's Lost. I conclude this chapter by quoting them.

SHAKESPEARE (circa 1591-2.) Love gives to every power

a double power. Love is first learned in a

woman's eyes.

Is not love a Hercules?

Love... with the motion
of all elements.
But for my love.... where
nothing wants, that want
itself doth seek.

They here stand martyrs, slain in Cupid's wars.

BACON (circa 1591-2)

Love gives the mind power
to exceed itself.
The eye, where love begin-

neth.

What fortune can be such a Hercules [as love]? Love is the motion that animateth all things. When we want nothing,

there is the reason and the opportunity and the spring of love. Lovers never thought their profession sufficiently graced till they had compared it to a warfare.

CHAPTER XIII.

ERROR, WIT AND METAPHOR

Bacon, who acquired his knowledge of Natural History less from experience than from books, refers in his Apophthegms to "the King in a hive of bees." This is an error probably derived from Virgil. It is now a matter of common knowledge that bees have no king, but a queen. The dramatists sound a similar false note.

The honey bees.... have a King.

SHAKESPEARE (Henry V. 1. 2.) 1600.

The bees swarm to preserve the king of bees.

LYLY (Midas III. 1.) 1592.

A peaceful King [of bees].

DAY (Parliament of Bees 1.) 1641.

Their King [of bees].

BEAUMONT & FLETCHER (Elder Brother
1. 1.)1637.

In the Advancement of Learning (1603-5) Bacon writes: "Is not the opinion of Aristotle worthy to be recorded wherein he saith that young men are no fit auditors of moral philosophy?" This is another slip. Aristotle refers to political not moral philosophy; nevertheless, Shakespeare, and Beaumont and Fletcher similarly misquote him.