colored busts in terra cotta representing Sir Nicholas Bacon, Lady Anne Cooke Bacon, and their son Francis, as a boy of about twelve. The workmanship is Italian, and by the same hand, and of a high degree of artistic excellence. From the age of the boy the busts must have been made about the year 1572. The boy's bust is especially interesting, because seen beside the busts of his father and mother, it shows that Francis Bacon's likeness was to his mother. The frontispiece of Vol. XI of James Spedding's The Works of Francis Bacon is an engraving from a drawing of the bust of Bacon done in profile.

The next portrait is a miniature made by Nicholas Hilliard, in 1578, when Bacon was living in Paris in the household of Sir Amias Paulet, the English ambassador. Nicholas Hilliard is the artist of whom John Donne wrote in his poem, The Storm,

"" a hand or eye

By Hilliard drawn is worth a history
By a coarse painter made."

Mr. Spedding describes the Hilliard miniature as "a work of exquisite beauty and delicacy." An engraving of it was made for Basil Montagu's, The Works of Francis Bacon, Lord Chancellor of England, 1825-1834, whose notice in The Edinburgh Review, for July, 1837, is T. B. Macaulay's celebrated essay on Lord Bacon. The Hilliard miniature was at that time in the possession of John Adair Hawkins.

The Earl of Verulam owns a portrait of Bacon by the Dutch artist, Paul Van Somer. Mr. Spedding dates the picture 1618 or thereabout, after Bacon had been made Lord Chancellor and created Baron Verulam. Van Somer's work is more interesting for the details of the dress of the period than for character, and he gives Lord Chancellor Bacon a rather wooden and expressionless face. He is painted in his robe and wearing a hat. A second portrait at Gorhambury, without a hat, is there attributed to Van Somer. Mr. Spedding thinks it is not a Van Somer, but a copy of the other done by an inferior artist at some later period when the fashion of painting people with the head covered had gone out. The reputed Van Somer, with a very wooden face, is figured in Vol. II of John Nicol's Francis Bacon: His Life and Philosophy.

The frontispiece of Vol. I of James Spedding's edition of Bacon is an engraving after the old print of Simon Pass. This artist, whose name is variously spelled Pass, Van de Pas, or Passe, Passaeus, was one of the earliest copperplate engravers in England, having emigrated from the Netherlands to pursue his art in London. Mr. Spedding thought that he had "some reason to suspect" that Pass's engraving was made from a painting, now lost, by the Dutch artist, Cornelius Jannsen Van Ceulen. Whoever the artist, his work is much superior to that of Van Somer. He portrays a handsome man, well worthy to have developed out of the graceful youth of the Hilliard miniature and the beautiful boy of the Italian bust.

Another portrait of Bacon, not mentioned by Spedding, is now in the National Portrait Gallery. A process print of it illustrates the article on Francis Bacon, at page 214 of Sidney Lee's Great Englishmen of the Sixteenth Century. The original is a second portrait of Bacon as Lord Chancellor by Paul Van Somer. As a work of art the picture seems to have more character and it is certainly more attractive than the Van Somer at Gorhambury.

In the effort to make a fair judgment of Bacon's moral character, Bacon himself is found to be at once his best advocate and worst accuser. He was inconsistent and he wielded a ready pen. An anecdote of the time relates that Bacon retired to Gorhambury while his trouble was upon him to try to recover there his disturbed health and harassed spirits. On the journey, the story says, Prince Charles returning from a hunt "espied a coach, attended with a goodly troop of horsemen, who, it seems, were gathered together to wait upon the Chancellor to his house at Gorhambury, at the time of his declension. At which the Prince smiled: 'Well, do what we can,' said he, 'this man scorns to go out like a snuff. But arrived at Gorhambury, Bacon made the first draft of his will, dated 10th April, 1621, and wrote "the majestic prayer to which Addison refers as more after the manner of an archangel than of a man." Majestic also, easily overtopping the language of all but the greatest of men, is the opening sentence of the will,"For my name and memory, I leave it to men's

charitable speeches, and to foreign nations, and the next ages."

The world has accepted Bacon's own judgment of himself,

"I was the justest judge that was in England these fifty years. But it was the justest censure

of Parliament that was these two hundred years.

Francis Bacon was a man of his time, and it was a time of gift-giving and gift-taking. He was ostentatious and lived always beyond his means. He kept a large retinue of servants and was too busy and too careless of detail to look to them closely. All this made him an easy prey to facility, which he describes as the fourth vice of authority, -"As for facility, it is worse than bribery; for bribes come but now and then; but if importunity or idle respects lead a man, he shall never be withOf Great Place. During the four years of Bacon's Chancellorship he made some two thousand orders and decrees a year. Not one of these judgments was reversed, even in the twenty-three cases where bribery was charged. No case of proved injustice was brought forward in all that heat of prosecution, nor has historical research discovered any such case since. Bacon did not sell injustice. But the selling of justice, even through carelessness or time-serving, is intolerable. There is no freedom, except under the supremacy of law. The reign of law cannot be maintained by corrupt judges. By his own confession, Lord Chancellor Bacon was a corrupt judge. "The pity of it."

II

THE ESSAYS

THE Elizabethan age is the most creative period in English literature. The foreign wars in which the young Chaucer bore a part had ended in the abandonment of the English claim to the French crown. The civil Wars of the Roses had brought forward the Tudor family, who in Henry VII, Henry VIII, and Elizabeth, gave to the English nation three of the ablest rulers it has ever produced. By the marriage of one of the Tudors the Scottish king who had become heir to the English throne was to carry peace with him into England after three centuries of warfare on the northern border. For the first time Englishmen had leisure to devote their energies to other interests than war upon their neighbors. Fortunately, just at this time, the great wave of the Renaissance, the new birth of letters, having spent itself in Italy and crossed France and Spain, reached the shores of England. There it was eagerly welcomed by men, who, if they had not the poise and mental reach of the Italians of the Renaissance, or the gayety and sense of form of their French contemporaries, had yet more daring and more intellectual curiosity. The same spirit of adventure that carried Sir Francis Drake around the globe induced the Elizabethans to try all sorts of new forms in literature. Shakspere would not be "our myriad-minded