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THE POPULAR SCIENCE MONTHLY.— SUPPLEMENT. 



earnestness at one object, while all the time he 

 was intent at knocking over another. It was an 

 innocent game of guile, appropriate in the servant 

 of the great master of transparent kiugcraft that 

 then ruled England. Then, his extravagant flat- 

 tery of the great, especially of King James, must 

 surely be offensive to every mind not yet fortified 

 against healthy human feeling by reasonings and 

 explanations. And his taste for expense and love 

 of splendor, by keeping him constantly in debt, 

 account for much of what is condemnable or 

 questionable in his career. 



To conclude. The general impression of Ba- 

 con's character that a careful and certainly not 

 unfavorably prepossessed reading of his letters 

 and occasional papers has left on my mind is 

 something like this : He was not a man to whom 

 superlatives or strong language of any color can 

 fairly be applied. He was not the " meanest of 

 mankind." "Base" and " despicable," " gener- 

 ous " and " noble," are words that the historian 

 of Bacon's life will never have occasion to draw 

 from his vocabulary. Most assuredly his place is 

 not with the morally great, the strong-hearted, 

 much-enduring, self-sacrificing, heroic spirits, the 

 Keplers and Newtons, the Miltons and Johnsons. 

 Bacon's place is not with these ; it is with the 

 Lakes, the Cranfields, the Yelvertons, the Nevilles 

 of his day ; ranked with such men he is a re- 

 spectable figure enough. It is when you with- 

 draw him from the crew of contemporary politi- 

 cians and courtiers, and set him among the great 

 and noble of all time, that his figure shrinks and 

 his features become commonplace. There is no 

 trace of the heroic about his moral character; 

 there is nothing in the man that appeals to the 

 universal heart, nothing to stir enthusiasm, noth- 

 ing to win admiration. His literary partisans 

 struggle desperately for his good name ; but the 

 utmost that their efforts, if successful, could gain 

 from us is, that we should refrain from condemn- 

 ing. His nature wanted elevation, a finer tone, 

 a richer flavor ; his motives were the motives of 

 the crowd of self-seekers around him. We might 

 even go further and say that Bacon lacked com- 

 mon manliness. When misfortune came, he lost 

 all sense of dignity, buried himself in his bed- 

 clothes, moaned forth his confessions of guilt, 

 and begged piteously for mercy : " My lords, it 

 is my act, my hand, my heart. I do beseech you, 

 my lords, be merciful to a broken reed." Com- 

 pare the demeanor of certain other historic Eng- 

 lishmen in the presence of circumstances im- 

 measurably more trying : the cheery humor of 



More, the calm self-possession of Raleigh, the 

 stately self-respect of Strafford, the high-toned 

 courage of Vane, remain forever part of Eng- 

 land's wealth and the world's ; their story gives 

 a warmer tint to life. But Bacon prostrate and 

 crying for mercy — this is a sight that no one can 

 care to look at ; the emotion it awakens is neither 

 sympathy nor pity. The truth would seem to be 

 that Bacon hardly ever touches humanity on the 

 moral and emotional side. He seems to have 

 been incapable of deep feeling, seems hardly ever 

 to have known what love or hate was ; there are 

 few traces of tenderness in his letters and papers, 

 there are as few traces of malice. His was an 

 almost passionless nature ; there was little moral 

 spontaneity of any kind. He had to jot down 

 among his memoranda " to bear in mind the at- 

 torney's weaknesses," and to run up a column of 

 that official's disadvantages for his future use. 

 Mr. Spedding construes these and similar memo- 

 randa of Bacon's into a proof of his goodness of 

 nature ; an evil nature would have remembered 

 all these against a man whose place it sought to 

 fill without tables. This explanation makes Ba- 

 con a man who deliberately does violence to his 

 own nature, commits treason against his own 

 soul, for selfish ends. The fact seems rather to 

 be that Bacon had no strong natural impulses 

 either to good or to evil ; and, had his intellect 

 told him that it would be for his interest to do a 

 good action of a particular kind, he would have 

 had to jot down a memorandum of it also. For 

 in Bacon's opinion intellect held the highest place. 

 "A man is but what he knoweth," he wrote in 

 his thirty-fourth year ; and then continues : " Are 

 not the pleasures of the affections greater than 

 the pleasures of the senses ? and are not the 

 pleasures of the intellect greater than the pleas- 

 urea of the affections ? " Yet — this knowledge — 



" "What is she, cut from love and faith, 

 But some wild Pallas from the brain 



" Of demons ? fiery hot to burst 

 AH barriers in the onward race 

 For power. Let her know her place — 

 She is the second, not the first." 



"Born for the universe" — the phrase is al- 

 most his own — Bacon narrowed, not his mind— 

 that was incompressible — but his soul, and gave 

 up to his worse self, to his craving after power, 

 distinction, grandeur, everything that the philo- 

 sophical mind professes to despise most, those 

 peerless gifts which might have made his name 

 an ennobling influence to all time. — Frames 

 Magazine. 



