THE BACON-SHAKESPEARE CRAZE. 737 



the year 1882, by John Fee, City Physician. The New Idea, weekly, Frank H. 

 Fenno, Altay, N. Y., $1.00 per year. The Eclectic Magazine, February, 1883, 

 monthly, E. R. Pelton, Publisher, $5.00 per annum. The British Quarterly 

 Review, the Leonard Scott Publishing Co., N. Y., $2.50 per annum. The His- 

 tory of the Science of Politics, by Fred Pollock, Humboldt Library, No. 42, 15c. 

 On Some Enclosures in Muscovite, by H. Carvill Lewis. 



SCIENTIFIC MISCELLANY. 



THE BACON-SHAKESPEARE CRAZE. 



RICHARD GRANT WHITE. 



And now we are face to face with what is, after all, the great inherent ab- 

 surdity (as distinguished from evidence and external conditions) of this fantasti- 

 cal notion, — the unhkeness of Bacon's mind and of his style to those of the writ- 

 er of the plays. Among all the men of that brilliant period who stand forth in 

 the blaze of its light with sufficient distinction for us, at this time, to know any- 

 thing of them, no two were so elementally unlike in their mental and moral 

 traits and in their literary habits as Francis Bacon and William Shakespeare ; and 

 each of them stamped his individuality unmistakably upon his work. Both were 

 thinkers of the highest order ; both, what we somewhat loosely call philosophers : 

 but how different their philosophy, how divergent their ways of thought, .and 

 how notably unlike their modes of expression ! 



Bacon, a cautious observer and investigator, ever looking at men and things 

 through the dry light of cool reason; Shakespeare, glowing with instant inspira- 

 tion, seeing by intuition the thing before him, outside and inside, body and spirit, 

 as it was, yet moulding it as it was to his immediate need, — finding in it merely 

 an occasion of present thought, and regardless of it, except as a stimulus to his 

 fancy and his imagination : Bacon, a logician ; Shakespeare, one who set logic at 

 naught and soared upon wings, compared with which syllogisms are crutches : 

 B^con, who sought, in the phrase of Saul of Tarsus, — that Shakespeare of Chris- 

 tianity, — to prove all things, and to hold fast that which is good; Shakespeare, 

 one who like Saul, loosed upon the world winged phrases, but who recked not 

 his own rede, proved nothing, and held fast both to good and evil, delighting in 

 his Falstaff as much as he delighted in his Imogen : Bacon, in his writing, the 

 most self-asserting of men; Shakespeare, one who, when he wrote, did not seem 

 to have a self: Bacon, the most cautious and painstaking, the most consistent 

 and exact, of writers ; Shakespeare, the most heedless, the most inconsistent, the 

 most inexact, of all writers who have risen to fame : Bacon, sweet sometimes, 

 sound always, but dry, stiff, and formal; Shakespeare, unsavory sometimes, but 



