352 PREFACE TO THE NEW ATLANTIS. 



ought the stories which the Governor of the House of 



o 



Strangers tells about the state of navigation and pop- 

 j ulation 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 

 v4ie supposes to be used ; so in his speculations concern- 

 \ing the past, embodied in the traditions of Bensalem, 

 Si 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 knowl 

 edge 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 act 

 ually taken place during the short periods of which 

 we know something had suggested to him the proba 

 bility 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 bur 

 ied 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 forgot- 

 ten period of her history (possibly during the Heptar 

 chy) England had been far better peopled than she 



