Shall you pace forth; your praise

shall still find room,

E'en in the eyes of all posterity

That wear this world out to the

ending doom."

Sonnet 55 (1609).

No comment on Shake-speare has been more often or more approvingly quoted than one of Jonson's: "he [Shakespeare] was not of an age, but for all time." How exactly these words also describe Bacon's literary ambition, as above expressed!

A MURDERED MAN'S WOUNDS BLEEDING AFRESH

"If thou delight to view thy hein

ous deeds,

Behold this pattern of thy butcher-
ies.

O gentlemen, see, see! dead
Henry's wounds

Open their congeal'd mouths and
bleed afresh."

Richard III., i. 2 (1597).

"If the body of one murdered be brought before the murderer, the wounds will bleed afresh." Natural History (1622-25).

In his prose treatment of this subject Bacon makes several points that are not alluded to in Shake-speare, and that must have come from independent sources, thus:

"Some do affirm that the dead body, upon the presence of the murderer, hath opened the eyes; and that there have been such like motions, as well, where the party murdered hath been strangled or drowned, as where they have been killed by wounds."

He makes the same superstition the subject of an apothegm:

"A lover met his lady in a close chair, she thinking to go unknown. He came and spake to her. She asked him- 'how did you know me?' He said, 'because my wounds bleed afresh.""

191

REBELLION AGAINST THE BELLY

From Shake-speare

"There was a time when all the body's members

Rebell'd against the belly; thus accused it:

That only like a gulf it did remain I' the midst of the body, idle and inactive,

Still cupboarding the viand, never bearing

Like labor with the rest, where the

other instruments

Did see and hear, devise, instruct, walk, feel,

And, mutually participate, did minister

Unto the appetite and affection

common

Of the whole body."

Coriolanus, i. 1 (1623).

From Bacon

"In this they fall into the error described in the ancient fable, in which the other parts of the body did suppose the stomach had been idle, because it neither performed the office of motion, as the limbs do, nor of sense, as the head doth; but yet, notwithstanding, it is the stomach that digesteth and distributeth to all the rest."- Advancement of Learning (1603–5).

Found in Plutarch (1579), and in Sir Philip Sidney's 'Apology for Poetry' (1581). 'Coriolanus' was probably written sometime between 1612 and 1619; first printed in 1623.

A better example of the kind of cunning which Bacon describes cannot be found in all literature than the one given above from the play of 'Othello.' Iago first incites the feeling of jealousy in his victim, and then, as if surprised and grieved to discover it, utters his warning against it. Mr. Wigston, to whom we owe this splendid parallelism, thus comments upon it: "If we study the whole of this scene

where Iago first begins working upon Othello's mind, we find this exactly illustrated. This caution against jealousy, uttered by Iago, reads as if Othello, and not Iago, had first started the subject, and places the latter in the position of a friend endeavoring to disabuse a suspicious mind of jealous fancies."

Troilus and Cressida, ii. 3 (1609). of the devil."-Essay of Envy

(1625).

Bacon calls envy the "vilest affection and the most depraved." Shake-speare wrote a play to show its effect, when exerted from without, even upon a mind wholly free from it. Dante has pictured the result: the tempter and his victim (Cassius and Brutus) both being eternally crunched between the jaws of the Devil.

Alcibiades, a sycophant, had praised Timon "to his hurt."

Timon. What would'st do then,

Apemantus?

Apem. E'en as Apemantus does now; hate a lord with all my heart.

Tim. What, thyself?

Apem. Ay."

Timon of Athens, i. 1 (1623).

tempt of self, and it becomes philosophy." - De Augmentis (1622).

Apemantus is the "philosopher" of the play.

This singular conception of the Maker of the Universe as an Edile, arranging the stars as shows, common to both authors, seems to have been taken from Cicero's De Naturâ Deorum.

The use of the word "plays" in this connection by Bacon is significant, as Mr. Wigston with admirable pertinency points out. It suggests the idea which lay deep in the minds of both authors and which finds frequent expression in the writings of both, that the world is a theatre:

"All the world's a stage, And all the men and women

merely players."

As You Like It, ii. 7 (1623). "I hold the world but as the world, Gratiano;

A stage where every man must play a part."

Merchant of Venice, i. 1 (1600).

"Men must know that, in this theatre of man's life, it is reserved only for God and the Angels to be lookers-on." - Advancement of Learning, Book ii. (1603-5).