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their mutual relations, and, even in their separate interests, for the superintendence of a common authority. The time, we believe, has now come at which, independently of the great gain to all in political importance, the separate interests of each call for the change. Newfoundland may obtain measures from a Federal Legislature-the thing seems hopeless otherwise—which will ease, and may ultimately remove, its dead weight of voluntary pauperism. Prince Edward's Island may be freed from the incubus of an absentee proprietary by compulsory powers of landpurchase hardly to be entrusted to an insular jury. New Brunswick will inevitably find itself a sharer in the colonization so energetically fostered by the Canadian Government. Nova Scotia will be the starting point of the grand highway from Europe to the East. The colonies in the Far West will secure the great boon of a road. Canada will command an outlet to the sea. The whole Confederation will perforce assume a position relatively to this country, to the Australian colonies, to the States, and ultimately to European Powers, which must early demand from her statesmen the practical exposition of views enlarged beyond the capacities of a colony, the fine sense soon of international obligations, and then the self-elevating entrance into a foreign policy, the repudiation of which we cannot but regard as one of the sins of America. These results are things of the future, but of a future which may so well be assured, that immediate difficulties should be met on all hands with the common determination that they must be overcome.

ABT. V.-Personal History of Lord Bacon. From Unpublished Papers. By WILLIAM HEPWORTH DIXON, of the Inner Temple. Murray.

LORD MACAULAY'S article on Bacon is one of the most unfeeling and dogmatic pieces of composition in our literature. The vicious passion of the writer to be always painting with the brightest lights or in the deepest shadow is nowhere carried to a greater excess. It especially reminds us of a sage senator who is reported to have said, 'I wish I could be as sure of anything as Macaulay is of everything.' In forcing one of the greatest of mankind down to the condition of the meanest,' his Lordship's omissions and exaggerations are marvellous. Fortunately, this gifted writer is more frequently right than wrong in his estimates of character; but when he is wrong, as in the case of Cranmer

and Bacon, he is terribly wrong. Thirty years since, our Whig politicians were a great oligarchy, who ruled over the domain of literary taste and historical criticism hardly less than in regard to political principles. The verdicts passed on men and on their works, by the coteries at Holland House, became to the satellites of such magnates very much what the decrees of conclaves had been in old time to their ecclesiastical dependents. It was the fashion in that comfortable and complacent circle to think of Bacon as Pope thought of him; and Lord Macaulay has not only stereotyped that conception, he has given to it a deep and enduring impress, such as his genius only could have given to it. We regret very much that his extraordinary powers were not otherwise employed. Of Lord Campbell's sketch concerning this great man we need not say much. His facts, when they are not fictions, are taken mostly from Montagu, and they are interpreted, almost as a matter of rote, after the manner of Macaulay.

Mr. Dixon's style of writing is very much in the tone of Lord Macaulay, though his intention in the volume before us is just the opposite. He is as trenchant, positive, and uncompromising as his lordship. He seems to tell you at every step that the case before you is one that does not admit of question or doubt. It is as he has put it, certainly so-it cannot be otherwise. But we suspect that the effect of this manner of writing will be, not so much to preclude opposition as to provoke it. In authorship, as in oratory, it is not always discreet to seem to do everything, leaving nothing to be done by the reader or by the auditory. The pride of such persons is not offended by your placing before them materials from which a judgment may be formed; but it is apt to rise when they are told that even that process is not left to them -that they have only to assent to something that is settled and done. We cannot avoid thinking that Lord Macaulay's dogmatic utterances on the one side, have had much to do in generating a similar positiveness in the case of Mr. Dixon on the other; and we have met with more than one instance in which a disposition to question Mr. Dixon's statements has seemed to be called forth by the absoluteness which is so generally characteristic of them.

We fully sympathize, however, with the object Mr. Dixon has in view. We feel it to be due to him also, that he should have full credit for all that he has done towards vindicating the character of a man whose services to humanity, and whose wrongs at the hands of the humanity he has served, have been so extraordinary. Without meaning to say that we accept Mr. Dixon's portraiture of Bacon as being in all respects faithful, we feel bound

Bacon's Early Life.

393

to say that we regard his book as a work which must be read in the time to come by those who would appreciate the character of Bacon fully and justly. His statement of the case does not include all that really belongs to it; and on some points we should like to have seen that his strong language in favour of his hero is warranted by the manuscript authorities to which he appeals. But, looking generally, and yet carefully, to his chapters, we feel that he has furnished ground for a judgment on the character of Bacon, widely different from that to which the Edinburgh Review people have been committed by their Magnus Apollo. The man who has done this has done the state some service. Here is Mr. Dixon's picture of Bacon's early life:

If

'Sweet to the eye and to the heart is the face of Francis Bacon as a child. Born among the courtly glories of York House, nursed on the green slopes and in the leafy woods of Gorhambury; now playing with the daisies and forget-me-nots, now with the mace and seals; one day culling posies with the gardener or coursing after the pigeons (which he liked, particularly in a pie), the next day paying his pretty wee compliments to the Queen; he grows up into his teens a grave yet sunny boy; on this side of his mind in love with nature, on that side in love with art. Every tale told of him wins on the imagination; whether he hunts the echo in St. James's Park, or eyes the juggler and detects his trick, or lisps wise saws to the Queen and becomes her young Lord Keeper of ten. Frail in health, as the sons of old men mostly are, his father's gout and stone, of which he will feel the twinge and fire to his dying day, only chain him to his garden or his desk. When thirteen years of age he goes to read books under Whitgift at Cambridge; when sixteen to read men under Paulett in France. he is young, he is still more sage. A native grace of soul keeps off from him the rust of the cloister no less than the stain of the world. As Cambridge fails to dry him into Broughton, Paris and Poictiers fail to melt him into Montjoy. The perils he escapes are grave; the three years spent under Whitgift's hard, cold eye being no less full of intellectual snares than are the three years spent in the voluptuous court of Henri Trois, among the dames and courtiers of France, of moral snares. In the train of Sir Amias Paulett, he rides at seventeen with that throng of nobles who attend the King and the Queen-Mother down to Blois, to Tours, to Poictiers; mixes with the fair women on whose bright eyes the Queen relies for her success, even more than on her regiments and fleets; glides in and through the hostile camps, observes the Catholic and Hugonot intrigues, and sees the great men of either court make love and war. But Lady Paulett, kind to him as a mother, watches over his steps with care and love,-a kindness he remembers and repays to the good lady, and to her kin, in later years. For him the d'Agelles sing their songs, the Tosseuses twine their curls in vain.'

But in his eighteenth year Bacon is called from Paris by the death of his father, Sir Nicholas, the Lord Keeper, and has to minister such comfort as he may to that true Englishwoman of the sixteenth century-his widowed mother. Lady Anne had translated Jewel's Apology from Latin into English, and had done it so well that the best scholars of the time were content that not a word should be altered. She could correspond in Greek; and might be seen with other devout women listening to the voice of those earnest men, the Puritan preachers. She was, at the same time, a model of order, economy, and industry, as the mother of a family and as the mistress of a household. Her great son spoke of her, in after years, with affection and reverence, as 'a saint of God;' and he had good reason so to do. The letters from this lady, addressed to Francis, and to his elder brother Antony, when both, as young men, were beginning to face the world in London, and which are published for the first time by Mr. Dixon, are deeply interesting on many grounds.

In his twentieth year Bacon becomes a resident in Gray's Inn. In his twenty-fifth year he is a member of Parliament, under the wing of his uncle Lord Burleigh. Mr. Dixon does not believe that Burleigh snubbed and kept down his nephew. The old statesman, it is said, was cautious-nothing more. He knew that his young kinsman had large ideal notions on State affairs, and thought that he needed the presence of a brain of more experience than his own to keep him from attempting impracticable things. But the first seven years in Bacon's parliamentary experience were not years of inaction or barrenness. Far from it.

'Rawley, Mallet, Montagu, and Lord Campbell have in turn slurred the ten or twelve years in which Bacon grows from a boy of nineteen into a man of thirty or thirty-one, though in drama and instruction these years hold rank among the noblest of his life. The writers set him high on the stage for the first time in 1592, when he is thirtyone. In the parliaments which met in 1586 and 1588,' says Lord Campbell, he had been returned to the House of Commons; but he 'does not seem to have made himself prominent by taking any decided 'part for or against the Crown.'’

What is the truth? In 1592 he is returned to parliament for Middlesex, the most wealthy, liberal, independent shire in England— the West Riding of the time and of long succeeding times. He is young, poor, out of place. He is even out of favour, since his uncle has turned from the young reformer his powerful face. Having neither rood of land nor hope of inheritance within the shire, the squires and freeholders of Middlesex choose him. Why, and how? Did penniless genius ever start in life by winning the first constituency in the realm?

Bacon in the Parliament of 1592.

395 Burke wooed the electors of Wendover before he dreamt of Bristol. Pitt began with Appleby, and only at his height of power won the University of Cambridge. Brougham suffered defeat at Liverpool, and was glad to sit for Knaresborough ere he tried to conquer the West Riding. So with Bacon. Service and success, of which the writers have never heard, lifted him to the height of Middlesex. When he rose at Brentford in 1592, he spoke to freeholders who knew his name and voice, not only as one of the most youthful, but as one of the most daring and effective members of a former House.'

Great events in English history belong to these early years of Bacon. Babington's conspiracy was detected. The Queen of Scots was sent to the block at Fotheringay. The Armada floated in the sight of Mount Edgecombe. In all the movements of the Commons in relation to these events Bacon took a conspicuous part. In 1589, the year after the Armada, he sits for Liverpool.

'In this new session Bacon serves on the most important committees, speaks on the most important bills: now standing for the privileges of the House of Commons, now assaulting the Royal purveyors, now denouncing the forestallers, regraters, and engrossers. The great debates of this year occur on subsidies and grants.

'Hatton proposes two subsidies and four fifteenths and tenths; to which Bacon, whose soul is in the patriotic tug, agrees: he moves, however, to insert in the bill a clause explaining that these grants are extraordinary and exceptional, meant for the war, and only for the war. To this the Queen objects, as fettering her future acts: enough for the squires to pronounce their Yea or Nay. The squires stand firm. Many men support what one man dares. After much debate, the Crown proposes to lay the bill, with Bacon's amendments to it, before the Learned Counsel; to which the House of Commons, insisting first that the author of the amendments shall be present at the sittings of that learned board, consents. Under his soft, persuasive tact, the interests of the sovereign are reconciled with the interests of her people, and the bill is passed to the satisfaction of Queen and Commons. Power and fame now seem to be in his grasp. Elizabeth sends for him to the palace; the electors of Middlesex cast their eyes upon him; and, when parliament meets again, he will represent the wealth and courage of that great constituency. From the session of 1589 dates his firm ascendancy in the House of Commons.'

But in the Parliament of 1592 Bacon ventured to move an

amendment upon a Government measure. His amendment was,

that the House should not submit to dictation from the Lords on a money bill; that the subsidies solicited by the Government should be voted, but that from their unprecedented largeness they should be declared to be extraordinary and exceptional; that