'made perfect,—of that condition of the human soul which he loved in others, and aspired towards in himself. Even the dresses, the household arrangements, the order of their feasts and solemnities, their very gestures of welcome and salutation, have an interest and significance independent of the fiction, as so many records of Bacon's personal taste in such matters. Nor ought the stories which the Governor of the House of Strangers tells about the state of navigation and population in the early post-diluvian ages, to be regarded merely as romances invented to vary and enrich the narrative, but rather as belonging to a class of serious speculations to which Bacon's mind was prone. As in his visions of the future, embodied in the achievements of Solomon's House, there is nothing which he did not conceive to be really practicable by the means which he supposes to be used; so in his speculations concerning the past, embodied in the traditions of Bensalem, I doubt whether there be any (setting aside, of course, the particular history of the fabulous island) which he did not believe to be historically probable. Whether it were that the progress of the human race in knowledge and art seemed to him too small to be accounted for otherwise than by supposing occasional tempests of destruction, in which all that had been gathered was swept away,- or that the vicissitudes which had actually taken place during the short periods of which we know something had suggested to him the probability of similar accidents during those long tracts of time of which we know nothing, or merely that the imagination is prone by nature to people darkness with shadows,-certain it is that the tendency was strong in Bacon to credit the past with wonders; to suppose that the world had brought forth greater things than it remembered, had seen periods of high civilisation buried in oblivion, great powers and peoples swept away and extinguished. In the year 1607, he avowed before the House of Commons a belief that in some forgotten period of her history (possibly during the Heptarchy) England had been far better peopled than she was then. In 1609, when he published the De Sapientiâ Veterum, he inclined to believe that an age of higher intellectual development than any the world then knew of had flourished and passed out of memory long before Homer and Hesiod wrote; and this upon the clearest and most deliberate review of all the obvious objections; and more deci

dedly than he had done four years before when he published the Advancement of Learning. And I have little doubt that when he wrote the New Atlantis he thought it not improbable that the state of navigation in the world 3000 years before was really such as the Governor of the House of Strangers describes; that some such naval expeditions as those of Coya and Tyrambel may really have taken place; and that the early civilisation of the Great Atlantis may really have been drowned by a deluge and left to begin its career again from a state of mere barbarism.

Among the few works of fiction which Bacon attempted, the New Atlantis is much the most considerable; which gives an additional interest to it, and makes one the more regret that it was not finished according to the original design. Had it proceeded to the end in a manner worthy of the beginning, it would have stood, as a work of art, among the most perfect compositions of its kind.

The notes to this piece, which are not marked with Mr. Ellis's initials, are mine.

J. S.

TO THE READER.

THIS fable my Lord devised, to the end that he might exhibit therein a model or description of a college instituted for the interpreting of nature and the producing of great and marvellous works for the benefit of men, under the name of Salomon's House, or the College of the Six Days' Works. And even so far his Lordship hath proceeded, as to finish that part. Certainly the model is more vast and high than can possibly be imitated in all things; notwithstanding most things therein are within men's power to effect. His Lordship thought also in this present fable to have composed a frame of Laws, or of the best state or mould of a commonwealth; but foreseeing it would be a long work, his desire of collecting the Natural History' diverted him, which he preferred many degrees before it.

This work of the New Atlantis (as much as concerneth the English edition) his Lordship designed for this place2; in regard it hath so near affinity (in one part of it) with the preceding Natural History.

W. RAWLEY.

In the Latin translation Rawley adds, aliarumque Instaurationis partium conterendarum; alluding probably to the De Augmentis, the only portion of the Instauration, not belonging to the Natural History, which he seems to have been employed upon afterwards.

2 It was published at the end of the volume containing the Sylva Sylvarum. The titlepage bears no date.