Shakspere," as Coleridge called him, if he had not best expressed the thought of a myriad-minded age. Most of the new literary forms were first made known to the Elizabethans by translations from the Italian and French. Sir Thomas Wyatt translated Italian songs and sonnets and presages a burst of lyric music from that "nest of singingbirds," the poets and dramatists of Elizabeth's time. William Painter translated novels from Boccaccio and Queen Marguerite, and Robert Greene composed original tales after their manner. Translations of Machiavelli and Comines taught men how to write history, and Sir Walter Ralegh, ending his days in imprisonment, wrote the History of the World in the Tower. Richard Hakluyt's Principall Navigations, "the great Elizabethan bible of adventure," largely translated from the journals of Italian, Spanish, and Portuguese navigators, is the beginning of that splendid series of stories of voyage and discovery and peaceable conquest by Englishmen which is unsurpassed in the literature of any nation. Sir Philip Sidney, an Italianated Englishman of the noblest type, inaugurates English criticism in The Defence of Poesie. With Francis Bacon begins philosophical reflection upon life, in the style of Plutarch's Morals and the Essais of Montaigne. Bacon's mind was catholic in its range like Plutarch's, but the subjects of moral thought that interest him are comparatively few, because generalized. His treatment of a moral subject is more scientific also than that of the classical writer, more scientific than

himself even when writing on a strictly scientific theme. In the Sylva Sylvarum: or A Natural History, for example, Bacon brings together a great many facts about nature, which he calls "experiments," some of them observations of real value, while others must have been trivial even to himself. In the Essayes or Counsels, Civill and Morall, the method is ever to reduce reflection to its lowest terms, to try to discover the fundamental principles of conduct that influence the actions of men. Again, Bacon has nothing of the attractive personality of Montaigne, a man of the world who made a point of finding out what the world was like from all sorts and conditions of men, from the king on his throne to the groom of his riding-horse. Montaigne writes on and on about a subject in breezy discursiveness, like a man on horseback traversing an interesting country. Bacon's Essays reflect his experience of life, but they tell us little or nothing of his personal likes and dislikes. They are austere, brief to the point of crudeness, they smell of the lamp.

Bacon's own judgment of his Essays, as we know from the dedicatory epistle prefixed to the third edition, was that they might last as long as books }{ last. In the essay, Of Innovations, he says, "Time is the greatest innovator." The most obvious division of the Essays is that which time has made. Certain essays do "come home to men's business and bosoms" in a universal way. They appeal to all men at all times. They discourse of great subjects in the grand manner. The essays, Of Truth, Of

Death, Of Great Place, might have been written by Aristotle, and what is said in these and other essays of like character is as true to-day as when Bacon lived. Another type of essay is distinctly limited, partly by Bacon's own character and partly by the social characteristics of his time. The essay Of Friendship grew out of Bacon's longest and most disinterested friendship, but no man can write an adequate essay on this noble theme, and yet say, as Bacon did in Of Followers and Friends, "There is little friendship in the world, and least of all between equals, which was wont to be magnified. That that is, is between superior and inferior, whose fortunes may comprehend the one the other." A thought like that puts friendship on the low plane of a paying basis. That Bacon could utter it has tarnished his fame with the charge of treachery towards Essex. The essays, Of Love, and Of Marriage and Single Life, were. the product of a social condition in which passion did not necessarily enter into the marriage relation, and marriage itself was an affair to be arranged between parties suitably situated. It was a man's world, and it is impossible to judge it fairly now, because in the modern world the advancement of woman has revolutionized the older ideas of domestic relations. Essayists of Bacon's mental characteristics will still write on love and marriage, but their treatment of these themes must inevitably be broader and deeper, because it has been spiritualized. It is juster, because it recognizes the mutual obligations of men and women.

When Emerson talks about Friendship and Love we are in another world than Bacon's. Emerson opens his essay on Domestic Life with impassioned tenderness for the child in the house. There are no children in Bacon's world and the few children in Shakspere's plays are all sharp of wit, precocious beyond their years. They are the children of his brain, not little people he had lived with. Some eight or ten of Bacon's essays have become obsolete in thought.. They are those which grew out of his experience of life at the Courts of Elizabeth and James I, of the petty rivalries and intrigues which led him to believe and to say, "All rising to great place is by a winding stair." Bacon's "winding stair" to the Lord Chancellorship runs through the essays, Of Simulation and Dissimulation, Of Delays, Of Cunning, Of Wisdom for a Man's Self, Of Dispatch, Of Suspicion, Of Negociating, and Of Followers and Friends. Fancy Emerson writing an essay on cunning! It is not that dissimulation and cunning no longer exist in the world, but that the intellectual appeal of such subjects is now restricted to their kind. Like drunkenness, dissimulation has descended in the social scale.

When we recall that the composition of his Essays occupied Bacon's thought for the space of more than thirty years, it is curious that he nowhere alludes to any English contemporary by name, except Queen Elizabeth, and that after her death. But between the lines Bacon has left on record the characters of three men who crossed his path.

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From the singularly intimate private diary which he called Commentarius Solutus, we know that the essay Of Seeming Wise is a portrait of Sir Henry Hobart, who by securing the appointment of Attorney-General, in 1606, effectually barred Bacon's way to that position for seven years. Bacon bitterly resented being passed over, and jotted now in his notes a series of epigrams on "Hubbard's disadvantages" which seem to have developed into this essay, in which Attorney-General Hobart represents as type the weak man who is made to believe himself wondrous wise. The essay Of Deformity, at the time of its publication, was said to be a portrait to the life of Bacon's cousin, Robert Cecil, Earl of Salisbury, who may be also in mind in the essays Of Envy and Of Cunning. Cecil's stature of scarce five feet was produced by curvature of the spine. He was so small that Elizabeth called him "little man" or "little elf." James I addressed him as "pygmy" or even "little beagle." The fine essay Of Judicature is the substance of a charge to Sir Richard Hutton, on his being raised to the bench of the Court of Common Pleas, 3d May, 1617. Bacon as Lord Chancellor on delivering him his patent complimented him on possessing the virtues of a judge, essentially those set forth in the essay.

Three of the essays tell us what recreations appealed to Bacon in the intervals of his busy life of statecraft and authorship. The essay Of Masques and Triumphs grew out of a long experience of writing in lighter vein. Between 1588 and 1614