Nor did these pursuits distract Bacon’s attention from a
work the most arduous, the most glorious, and the most useful
that even his mighty powers could have achieved, “the reducing
and recompiling,” to use his own phrase, “of the laws of England.”
To serve the exacting and laborious offices of Attorney-General
and Solicitor-General would have satisfied the appetite of any
other man for hard work, but Bacon had to add the vast literary
industries just described, to satisfy his. He was a born worker.
The service which he rendered to letters during the last
five years of his life, amid ten thousand distractions and
vexations, increase the regret with which we think on the many
years which he had wasted, to use the words of Sir Thomas Bodley,
“on such study as was not worthy such a student.”
He commenced a digest of the laws of England, a History of
England under the Princes of the House of Tudor, a body of
National History, a Philosophical Romance. He made extensive and
valuable additions to his Essays. He published the inestimable
TREATISE DE AUGMENTIS SCIENTIARUM.
Did these labors of Hercules fill up his time to his contentment,
and quiet his appetite for work? Not entirely:
The trifles with which he amused himself in hours of pain and languor
bore the mark of his mind. THE BEST JEST-BOOK IN THE WORLD is that
which he dictated from memory, without referring to any book,
on a day on which illness had rendered him incapable of serious study.
Here are some scattered remarks (from Macaulay) which throw
light upon Bacon, and seem to indicate–and maybe demonstrate–
that he was competent to write the Plays and Poems:
With great minuteness of observation he had an amplitude of comprehension
such as has never yet been vouchsafed to any other human being.
The ESSAYS contain abundant proofs that no nice feature of
character, no peculiarity in the ordering of a house, a garden,
or a court-masque, could escape the notice of one whose mind was
capable of taking in the whole world of knowledge.
His understanding resembled the tent which the fairy
Paribanou gave to Prince Ahmed: fold it, and it seemed a toy for
the hand of a lady; spread it, and the armies of the powerful
Sultans might repose beneath its shade.
The knowledge in which Bacon excelled all men was a knowledge
of the mutual relations of all departments of knowledge.
In a letter written when he was only thirty-one, to his uncle,
Lord Burleigh, he said, “I have taken all knowledge to be my province.”
Though Bacon did not arm his philosophy with the weapons of logic,
he adorned her profusely with all the richest decorations of rhetoric.
The practical faculty was powerful in Bacon; but not, like
his wit, so powerful as occasionally to usurp the place of his
reason and to tyrannize over the whole man.
There are too many places in the Plays where this happens.
Poor old dying John of Gaunt volleying second-rate puns at his
own name, is a pathetic instance of it. “We may assume” that it is
Bacon’s fault, but the Stratford Shakespeare has to bear the blame.
No imagination was ever at once so strong and so thoroughly
subjugated. It stopped at the first check from good sense.
In truth, much of Bacon’s life was passed in a visionary world–
amid things as strange as any that are described in the ARABIAN TALES
. . . amid buildings more sumptuous than the palace of Aladdin,
fountains more wonderful than the golden water of Parizade,
conveyances more rapid than the hippogryph of Ruggiero, arms more
formidable than the lance of Astolfo, remedies more effacious
than the balsam of Fierabras. Yet in his magnificent day-dreams
there was nothing wild–nothing but what sober reason sanctioned.
Bacon’s greatest performance is the first book of the NOVUM
ORGANUM. . . . Every part of it blazes with wit, but with wit
which is employed only to illustrate and decorate truth. No book
ever made so great a revolution in the mode of thinking,
overthrew so may prejudices, introduced so many new opinions.
But what we most admire is the vast capacity of that