decessor, no more recent writer has been able to vary Bacon's portrait of Henry to any appreciable extent. The tone is in general cool and unimpassioned, moral judgment remains in abeyance, and little use is made of the picturesque passages from the chroniclers, in which Shakespeare would have luxuriated; but the dryness which might have been the result of this sobriety is avoided by a frequent employment of quaint, brilliant, and striking metaphors and comparisons, some of which would in our day be thought below the dignity of history:

She began to cast within herself for what coast this blazing star should first appear, and at what time.

Upon the first grain of incense that was sacrificed upon the altar of peace at Bulloigne, Perkin was smoked away.

These fames grew so general as the authors were lost in the generality of speakers; they being like running weeds that have no certain root, or like footings up and down impossible to be traced.

For profit, it was to be made in two ways, upon his subjects for the war, and upon his enemies for the peace; like a good merchant that makes his gain both upon the commodities exported and imported back again.

The following is a good average specimen of Bacon's narrative:

The King went forwards on his journey, and made a joyful entry into Exeter, where he gave the citizens great commendations and thanks; and taking his sword he wore from his side, he gave it to the Mayor, and commanded it should for ever after be carried before him. There also he caused to be executed some of the ringleaders of the Cornishmen, in sacrifice to the citizens, whom they had put in fear and trouble. At Exeter the King consulted with his counsel whether he should offer life to Perkin if he would quit the sanctuary and voluntarily submit himself. The counsel were divided in opinion. Some advised the King to take him out of sanctuary perforce, and put him to death, as in a case of necessity, which in itself dispenses with consecrated persons and things; wherein they doubted not also but the King should find the Pope tractable to ratify his deed, either by declaration or at least by indulgence. Others were of opinion, since all was now safe and no further hurt could be done, that it was not worth the exposing of the King to new scandal and envy. A third part fell upon the opinion that it was not possible for the King ever either to satisfy the world well touching the imposture or to learn out the bottom of the conspiracy, except by promise of life and pardon and other fair means he should get Perkin into his hands. But they did all in their preambles much bemoan the King's case, with a kind of indignation at his fortune; that a prince of his high wisdom and virtue should have been so long and so oft exercised and vexed with idols. But the King said that it was the vexation of God Almighty himself to be vexed with idols, and therefore that was not to trouble any of his friends and that for himself he always despised them, but was grieved that they had put his people to such trouble and misery. But in conclusion he leaned to the third opinion; and so sent some to deal with Perkin; who seeing himself a prisoner and destitute of all hopes, having tried princes and peoples, great and small, and found all either false, faint, or unfortunate, did gladly accept of the condition. The King did also while he was at Exeter appoint the Lord Darcy and others commissions for the fining of all such as were of any value, and had any hand or partaking in the aid or comfort of Perkin or the Cornishmen, either in the field or in the flight. These commissions proceeded with such strictness and severity as did much obscure the King's mercy in the sparing of blood, with the bleeding of so much treasure. Perkin was brought unto the King's court, but not to the King's presence; though the King to satisfy his curiosity saw him sometimes out of a window or in passage. He was in show at liberty, but guarded with all the care and watch that was possible, and willed to follow the King to London. But from

:

his first appearance on the stage in his new person of a sycophant or juggler, instead of his former person of a Prince, all men may think how he was exposed to the derision not only of the courtiers but also of the common people, who flocked about him as he went along, that one might know afar off where the owl was by the flight of the birds; some mocking, some wondering, some cursing, some prying matter out of his countenance and gesture to talk of. So that the false honour and respects which he had so long enjoyed was plentifully repaid in scorn and contempt. As soon as he was comen to London, the King gave also the city the solace of this maygame. For he was conveyed leisurely on horseback, but not in any ignominious fashion, through Cheapside and Cornhill to the Tower, and from thence back again unto Westminster, with the churme' of a thousand taunts and reproaches.

Psalms

Shakespeare has depicted a similar situation to Perkin's in his Richard II., and the contrast between his profuseness and Bacon's sobriety, as marked as that between The New Atlantis and The Tempest, should alone suffice to decide the so-called Baconian controversy. He who can believe the Bacon's parawriter of all others most resplendent in thoughts and fancies to have here phrase of the shone with so dry a light may well believe the rustic merry-making in The Winter's Tale to be the creation of one who lived entirely in cities. The prevalence, nevertheless, of this remarkable delusion justifies a few words upon what might otherwise have been passed over-Bacon's technical claims to the character of poet. That Shelley was justified in claiming this character for him in the largest sense is indisputable; his errors as a man of science are chiefly due to his sensitiveness to the picturesque aspects of the kingdom of nature. But, considered in the more restricted point of view as a practitioner of the poetical art, in which he must have excelled to have produced but one of the dramas of Shakespeare, his pretensions are but humble. The only poetical production that can with safety be attributed to him is a paraphrase of some of the Psalms, made in 162 which enshrines with similar felicities this delectable couplet :

There hast thou set the great Leviathan,

That makes the seas to seeth like boiling pan.

The writer who can not only perpetrate but print such a piece of bathos
can have but scant claim to the quality of poet: while he may yet be able
to express himself metrically with dignity and eloquence when his theme
is entirely congenial to him. The following stanzas are from the paraphrase.
of the ninetieth Psalm:

O God, thou art our home, to whom we fly,
And so hast always been from age to age,
Before the hills did intercept the eye,

Or that the frame was up of earthly stage.
O God, thou wert and art, and still shalt be:
The line of time, it doth not measure thee.

Both death and life obey thy holy lore,

And visit in their turns as they are sent ;
A thousand years with thee, they are no more
Than yesterday, which as it is, is spent:

1 Confused noise.

Bacon as a
Statesman

Richard Hooker

Or like a watch by night, that course doth keep,
And goes and comes unwares to them that sleep.

Thou carriest man away as with a tide;

Then down swim all his thoughts that mounted high,
Much like a mocking dream that will not bide,

But flies before the sight of waking eye;
Or as the grass that cannot term obtain
To see the summer come about again.

Teach us O, Lord, to number well our days,
Thereby our hearts to wisdom to apply;

For that which guides man best in all his ways,

Is meditation of mortality.

This bubble light, this vapour of our breath,
Teach us to consecrate to hour of Death.

If this is not poetry of the highest order, it is something more than rhetoric in rhyme. But imagine the author of Hamlet and The Tempest, with the First Folio under his hand, spending his time over a generally mediocre paraphrase of the Psalms!

Bacon's letters form an extensive collection. The most important are the elaborate considerations on affairs of state, drawn up in epistolary form for the enlightenment of rulers and public men others refer merely to the events of the day. All are profoundly interesting, not so much on account of the particular themes as from the contact into which they bring us with Bacon himself. We see the man whose outlook is too wide for his time, and whose ideas have far outrun it, striving to obtain recognition by a policy of accommodation and suasion. In an age of liberty he might have led the Commons, and seated himself in power; in an age of civil discord he might have been chosen arbitrator by both parties; the condition of his own times left him no other part than that of a secret counsellor, commonly disregarded. The circumstances of his age also deprived him of much of his legitimate renown as an English author writing for the world, and not for his own country alone, he was obliged to compose the most important of his works in Latin. Immense as was his service, immortal as was his meed, it was in him to have achieved and to have deserved much more. The identification of his person with the author of Shakespeare's plays, in itself an absurdity, acquires significance if regarded as an instinctive acknowledgment that, but for the faults of our ancestors, our debt to Bacon might have been even greater than it is, an awkward way of formulating the world's consciousness that, although Bacon laboured unremittingly throughout a life exceeding the average term of human existence, he is, nevertheless, an "inheritor of unfulfilled renown."

Before Francis Bacon had taken a leading place in the world's eye save as an advocate, the second great name in Elizabethan prose literature had accomplished his work and passed away. RICHARD HOOKER occupied by comparison a narrow sphere: he could not, like Bacon, bequeath his memory to foreign nations, while it was destined to be a precious possession

of his own. On the other hand, his work, regarded as a finished labour, is
more complete and durable than Bacon's. Bacon communicated an immense
impulse to human thought, destined to result in the greatest achievements,
but his own actual achievements were inevitably full of imperfections.
Hooker, taking a theme large indeed, but still enclosed by definite
boundaries, so handled it that little remained to be added, and his work is
the very last which any successor would dream of superseding. Though
professedly a mere expositor of the principles of the Church of England, he
has gained the authority of a legislator. His position in intellectual history
is akin to that of the great Roman Jurists who, seeming to expound the
law, made it with the difference that while

their abhorrence of ornament amounts to
repulsiveness, Hooker is one of the greatest
examples in our language of ample, stately,
and musical expression. The man who
erected such a monument for himself, and
such a bulwark for his Church, was in his
person so quiet and unpretentious that, but
for the happy accident of an enthusiastic
biographer, almost the only personal pro-
blem this "most learned, most humble, most
holy man" would have bequeathed to the
world might have been, Was he henpecked?
In the succeeding age, however, Izaak
Walton, a man deeply imbued with the
genius of the Church of England, made it
his business to retrieve the minor biographi-
cal records of what he regarded as her
golden age and Hooker, at the instance,
as is said, of Archbishop Sheldon, received
a large share of his attention. Biographer
and theme could not be more perfectly in
harmony: yet, as Walton's talent was in no sense creative, the charming
portrait seems painted on very thin canvas.

Richard

Richard Hooker was born at Heavitree, near Exeter, probably in March Life of 1554. The family name had originally been Vowell, and he was nephew to Hooker the Exeter antiquary, known by both appellations, who revised Holinshed's Chronicles and presided over Exeter Grammar School. Hooker, whose parents seem to have been poor, was educated by his uncle, and showed such promise that the latter brought him under the notice of Jewel, Bishop of Salisbury, the champion of the Church of England in the Roman Catholic controversy, who bestowed a pension on his parents and obtained for the lad a clerkship at Corpus Christi College, Oxford. Richard's special abilities obtained for him a scholarship, irregularly bestowed as a mark of special distinction, he being beyond the statutable age. A Fellowship and a readership in Hebrew followed, and about 1581

Hooker took orders. Going up to London to preach at St. Paul's Cross, and arriving in a condition of exhaustion from fatigue and wet, he was nursed by his landlady into recovery, but less fortunately into a marriage with her daughter, the only person, the good lady declared, who could possibly take care of him. Without adopting all Walton's statements to the disadvantage of this lady, she appears to have been but an unsympathetic mate for her studious husband, who was shortly afterwards discovered by two of his former pupils at his country parsonage of Drayton-Beauchamp in Buckinghamshire, alternately tending sheep and rocking the cradle. Being persons of influence, the young men procured

for him no less preferment than that of the mastership of the Temple Church, where he became involved in a vehement though not irate controversy with Travers, the afternoon lecturer. "The pulpit," says Fuller, "spoke Canterbury in the morning and Geneva in the afternoon." In 1591 Hooker, "weary of the noise and opposition of the place," received the living of Boscombe in Wiltshire, and in 1595 that of Bishopsbourne near Canterbury, to allow him leisure to compose his great work, The Ecclesiastical Polity, half of which was written in Wiltshire, and which was left incomplete at his death. Walton depicts him at Bishopsbourne as "an obscure harmless man, a man in poor clothes, his loins usually girt in a close gown or canonical coat; of a mean stature and stooping, and yet more lowly in the thoughts of his soul; his body worn out not with age but with study and holy mortifications; his face full of heat pimples he got by his inactivity and sedentary life." The characteristic most