prayer that his exertions may be rendered effectual to the attainment of truth and happiness, the introductory chapter of the 'Instauratio,' which announces the distribution of its portions, concludes. Such was the temple, of which Bacon saw in vision before him the stately front and decorated pediments, in all their breadth of light and harmony of proportion, while long vistas of receding columns and glimpses of internal splendour revealed a glory that it was not permitted to him to comprehend."

As the reader will easily conclude from the titles of the various parts of the 'Instauratio,' the work was (with the few exceptions specified above) published in Latin; the original conceptions of its immortal author having been translated, under his immediate inspection, by Herbert, Hobbes, and other persons, "masters of the Roman eloquence." The Latin style in which it is written is admirably adapted to the subject, and a worthy vehicle for such majestic conceptions; it is in a high degree concise, vigorous, and accurate, though by no means free from obscurity, and of course in no way to be considered as a model of pure Latinity. In reading Bacon, either in his vernacular or more learned dress, we feel perpetually conscious of a peculiarity, inevitably accompanying the highest genius in its manifestations: -we mean that in him the language seems always the flexible and obedient instrument of thought; not, as it is in the productions of a lower order of mind, its rebellious and recalcitrant slave. All authors below the greatest seem to use the mighty gift of expression with a certain secret timidity, lest the lever should prove too ponderous for the hand that essays to wield it: : or, rather, they resemble the rash student in the old legend, who was overmastered by the demons which he had unguardedly evoked. There is, perhaps, no author so metaphorical as Bacon; his whole style is saturated with metaphor; the very titles of his books are frequently nothing else but metaphors of the boldest character; and yet there is not one of these figures of speech by which we do not gain a more vivid, clear, and rapid conception of the idea which he desires to convey. With him such expressions, however beautiful, are never merely ornamental: like some of the most exquisite decorations of Grecian and of Gothic architecture, what appears introduced into the design for the mere purpose of adornment will ever be found, when closely examined, to give strength and stability to the structure, of which it seems to inexperienced eyes a mere unessential and unnecessary adjunct.

It would be superfluous here to devote more than a passing notice to one objection which has been brought against the originality of the Baconian system of philosophy, and against the importance of the reformation which it produced in human science. The methods recommended by Bacon, say the objectors, have always been more or less in use from the very infancy of human knowledge. The art of

induction, and of advancing from particular to general cases in the investigation of the laws of nature, was certainly employed and repeatedly insisted on long before the Verulamiam method was in existence. We have in another place strongly insisted on the absurdity of considering Bacon as an inventor in the proper sense of the word: what he did was not to teach us a philosophy, but to show us how to philosophise; and the immeasurable importance of what he did will best be appreciated by a simple comparison of the progress made in real knowledge during the twenty-two centuries which have elapsed since the time of Aristotle, and the acquisitions made in the two hundred and nineteen years since the death of Bacon.

It is quite true that Bacon, as he was not a discoverer in the art of investigating truth in general, so neither did he make any specific discoveries in any particular department of science. He was not a mathematician, nor an astronomer, nor a naturalist, nor a metaphysician; and in this respect we might be disposed to echo the ironical criticism of his contemporary Harvey, who, competent enough himself to perceive Bacon's deficiency in the practical and technical parts of natural science, complained that the author of the 'Instauratio' "wrote philosophy like a Lord Chancellor." No! the true obligation which the human race must ever feel, to the latest generations, to Bacon is that he did what no man else perhaps was ever sufficiently gifted to do; that, seated as it were on the pinnacle of his sublime genius, he saw distinctly, and mapped out accurately, all that can ever be an object of human investigation; that his far-darting and all-embracing intellectual vision took in at once the whole expanse of the domains of philosophy; nay, that it penetrated into the obscurity which brooded over the distant and unexplored regions of the vast country of the mind, and traced, with prophetic sagacity, the paths that must be followed by future discoverers, in ages yet unborn.

With his own notions on physical subjects, there were mingled many of the prejudices and erroneous ideas prevalent in his day; but such is the essential and invariable justness of the rules which he has laid down for the conduct of investigation, that these false conclusions may be swept away, and replaced by facts more accurately observed, without any weakening of the system which he originated. To apply the admirable comparison of Cowley, Bacon, though himself not free from the errors of his time, yet clearly foresaw the gradual disappearance of those errors:—

"Bacon, like Moses, led us forth at last :

The barren wilderness he pass'd

Did on the very border stand

Of the bless'd promis'd land,

And from the Pisgah-height of his exalted wit
Saw it himself and show'd us it."

At the same time, gifted as he was with "the vision and the faculty divine," by which he could thus anticipate centuries, and behold "not as through a glass darkly, but face to face," sciences which had no existence when he wrote, nothing is more admirable than the common sense which distinguished Bacon's divine intelligence. The ruling and vital principle, the very life-blood of the new philosophy, is the indispensable necessity of accurate and complete observation of nature, anterior and preliminary to any attempt at theorizing and drawing conclusions. Yet, though he was the apostle of experiment, he has no less foreseen and warned us against the ill effects that would follow the rash generalization founded upon particular and imperfect observation-effects which have been very perceptible in modern science, and which have tended to give to the knowledge of later days an air of superficiality little less dangerous than the more visionary and sophistical tone which characterizes the ancient systems.

But above all, what strikes us as the most admirable peculiarity of Bacon's philosophy is the spirit of utility which runs through and modifies the whole design. We do not mean utility in the low and limited sense of a care for the development of man's merely physical comforts and advantages; the exercise and cultivation of the highest faculties of our being, the enlarging of our sphere of intellectual pleasures, the strengthening of our moral obligations, the refining and elevating of our perception of the beautiful-all these Bacon has treated, and would have exhausted, had they not been as infinite as the soul itself. On many of these subjects on the beau idéal, for example-it will be hardly too much to say that he has left nothing for future speculators.

Another peculiarity which we cannot forbear noticing, as forming one of the striking features of Bacon's intellectual character, is the circumstance that his writings will not be found in any high degree apophthegmatic: that is, the reader will not be likely to meet with many of those short, extractable, and easily remembered sentences, or gnomai, which pass from mouth to mouth as weighty maxims, or separate masses of truth-the gold coins, if we may so style them, of the intellectual exchange. Many such are undoubtedly to be found in his pages, but they are certainly less plentiful in Bacon than in other great writers; but we shall generally find these passages so embedded and fixed in the argument of which such propositions form a part, as not to be extracted without manifest loss to their value and significancy. In consequence of this, Bacon is one of those authors who must be read through to be correctly judged and worthily appreciated. Nor will any aspiring and truly generous mind begrudge the labour which will attend this exercise of the highest faculties with which God has endowed it; it is surely no mean privilege to be thus admitted into the laboratory and workshop of the new philo

sophy, and to behold-no indifferent spectator-the sublime alchemy by which experience is transmuted into truth.

Among the minor works of the illustrious Chancellor it may not be improper to mention two or three of the principal. We shall specify, first, a very curious treatise On the Wisdom of the Ancients,' being an attempt to explain the classical mythology, by a system of moral and political interpretation, much less founded on probability than calculated to elevate, in our eyes, the degree of knowledge possessed by the pagan world. The following is the judgment, respecting this work, attributed to Balzac, from one of whose letters it is supposed to be a quotation: "Croyons donc, pour l'amour du Chancelier Bacon, que toutes les folies des anciens sont sages, et tous leurs songes mystères; et de celles-là qui sont estimées pures fables, il n'y en a pas une, quelque bizarre et extravagante qu'elle soit, qui n'ait son fondement dans l'histoire, si l'on en veut croire Bacon, et qui n'ait été déguisée de la sorte par les sages du vieux temps, pour la rendre plus utile aux peuples." Another work is entitled the 'Felicities of the Reign of Queen Elizabeth;' and a third is a production of greater importance, a History of King Henry VII.,' written probably in a courtly desire to gratify King James, who was, as everybody knows, ambitious of the reputation of the pacific glories of a wise and tranquil administrator, and whose character in this respect would find a flattering parallel in the unwarlike reign of the politic Henry. Besides these, he is the author of a philosophical fiction entitled "The New Atlantis.'

The glory of Bacon, as he himself had predicted, rose gradually but steadily on the literary horizon of Europe. It may however be complained (and this is not a circumstance to be wondered at) that his works were often rather vaguely eulogized than accurately studied: the profound nature of their subject, and the vastness of their design, were likely to have much limited the number of their readers; and in consequence many erroneous opinions became prevalent, not only respecting the true value of the Baconian revolution in science, but even respecting the nature of the system itself. It is unnecessary to say, that what the great philosopher gained in this way from vague and unintelligent praise he lost in true glory, which can only be founded on justice. It was reserved for various illustrious metaphysicians of the Scottish school "to turn," in Hallam's words, "that which had been a blind veneration into a rational worship." profound and elegant writers, Reid, Stewart, Robison, and Playfair, by clothing the philosophy of Bacon in the language of the nineteenth century, have deprived it of whatever repulsive and difficult features it may have retained from its being written in a dead language, and from its somewhat complicated arrangement and subdivisions; while some of the greatest among modern experimental philosophers have been proud to draw, from practical observations

These

and more recent improvements of astronomy and other branches of physics, new illustrations of the justness of Bacon's predictions, new conclusions clearing up obscure passages, and new proofs of the truth of his system. It is delightful to see experiment thus the willing handmaid of theory, and Herschel paying practical worship at the shrine of Bacon.

CHAPTER V.

ORIGIN OF THE ENGLISH DRAMA.

Comparison between the Greek and Medieval Dramas - Similarity of their Origin-Illusion in the Drama-Mysteries or Miracle-Plays Their Subject and Construction - Moralities-The Vice-Interludes-The Four P.'sFirst Regular Dramas-Comedies-Tragedies-Early English Theatres Scenery-Costume-State of the Dramatic Profession.

THERE are very few æsthetic subjects upon which more controversy has been raised than upon the respective merits of various schools of the Drama: and certainly there are not many which have excited more critical asperity than the long-vexed question as to the comparative merits of the two great dramatic schools, to which Schlegel has assigned the not inapposite titles of Classical and Romantic. But both parties seem to have forgotten the similar origin and history of the two schools which they represent as so different, nay, even as so opposed; and to have pretty generally overlooked the important fact that the peculiarities of structure which respectively characterise the two classes of productions, so falsely considered as antagonistic, are really not essential or inherent, but arise from merely technical or superficial circumstances. Thus, for example, the Greek tragic drama was originally a religious ceremony, and, however modified, never entirely lost that sacred character. The personages of the Attic stage were almost always to a certain degree mythic: that is, they were almost invariably heroic; invested, either by antiquity, by the greatness of their exploits, or their immediate relations with the deities, with something of a religious character; and it is easily conceivable that, with such a people as the Greeks, the boundary-line between the god and the hero was not very distinctly traced: Theseus, for instance, was very little less a god than Hermes, and Apollo very little more divine than Orestes; there were indeed many characters, frequently produced on the Athenian stage, who, like Hercules, obviously partook of the two qualities. Thus the Attic tragedy always retained a good deal of the historico-mythic