This notion, derived from Plato, is repeatedly expressed both in Bacon and in Shake-speare.

age
and fathers declined, the father
should be as a ward to the son, and
the son manage the revenue."
King Lear, i. 2 (1608).

sons should expulse their fathers and mothers out of their possessions and put them to their pension." Advertisement touching a Holy War (1622).

The above passage from 'King Lear' was first printed in 1608, and the Advertisement touching a Holy War' in 1629, three years after Bacon's death. We know that the latter tract was composed, in the shape in which we now have it, in 1622, but various memoranda, found among Bacon's posthumous papers, show that he had made a study of the subject at different times several years earlier. The context clearly proves that this study was an original one on his part, and wholly independent of anything in 'King Lear.' Bacon's full statement is as follows:

"Let me put a feigned case (and yet antiquity makes it doubtful whether it were fiction or history) of a land of Amazons, where the whole government, public and private, yea, the militia itself, was in the hands of women. ... And much like were the case, if you suppose a nation where the custom were, that after full age the sons should expulse their fathers and mothers out of their possessions, and put them to their pensions: for these cases, of women to govern men, sons the fathers, slaves free men, are much in the same degree; all being total violations and perversions of the law of nature."

90

EMBLEMS

From Shake-speare "Prospero. Canst thou remember A time before we came to this cell? Miranda. Certainly, sir, I can. Pros. Of anything the image tell me, that

Hath kept thy remembrance."

Tempest, i. 1 (1623).

From Bacon

"Emblem reduceth conceits intellectual to images sensible, which strike the memory more." - Advancement of Learning (1603-5).

In the second edition of the Advancement' (De Augmentis, 1622) Bacon adds the following, to the sentence quoted above:

"An image strikes the memory more forcibly and is more easily impressed upon it than an object of the intellect; insomuch that even brutes have their memory excited by sensible impressions, never by intellectual ones. And therefore you will more easily remember the image of a hunter pursuing a hare, of an apothecary arranging his boxes, of a pedant making a speech, of a boy repeating verses from memory, of a player acting on a stage, than the mere notions of invention, disposition, elocution, memory, and action. . . . So much, therefore, for the art of retaining or keeping knowledge."

It is difficult to believe that when Prospero begged his daughter to give him the image of anything she might have retained in her memory of the time of their arrival on the island, the author did not have in mind the philosophical thesis on the art of memory that had been composed by Bacon ten or twelve years earlier.

And burn in many places; on the that, too, when the storm has in

topmast,

1 "To point" means in every particular.

creased, it is reckoned a good sign.

The yards and bowsprit, would I
flame distinctly,
Then meet and join."

But if there are three of them (that is, if Helen, the general scourge, arrive), the storm will become more

Tempest, i. 2 (1623). fearful. The fact seems to be, that one by itself seems to indicate that the tempestuous matter is crude; two, that it is prepared and ripened; three or more, that so great a quantity is collected as can hardly be dispersed." History of the Winds (1622).

Prospero's commission to Ariel to raise a storm at sea and wreck Antonio's ship illustrates the object for which the play was written; namely, to show man's destined command over the powers of nature. This was the professed object, too, of Bacon's system of philosophy; all his studies had been directed from his youth to that end.

Accordingly, we are not surprised to find in Bacon's prose works the preliminary details of such a wreck, as well as the source from which they were chiefly derived. We quote from Pliny's Natural History,' translated into English for the first time in 1601, as follows:

"They settle also upon the yards and other parts of the ship, as men do sail the sea, making a kind of vocal sound, leaping to and fro, and shifting their places as birds do which fly from bough to bough. Dangerous they be and unlucky when they come one by one without a companion; and they drown those ships on which they alight and threaten shipwreck; yea, and they set them on fire, if haply they fall upon the bottom of the keel. But if they appear two and two together, they bring comfort with them, and foretell a prosperous course in the voyage, by whose coming, they say, that dreadful, cursed and threatening meteor, Helena, is chased and driven away. And therefore it is that men assign this mighty power to Castor and Pollux and invocate them at sea, no less than gods."

It will be seen that, according to Pliny, it was a single ball of fire that struck terror to the hearts of the mariners; but in Bacon's version, while one alone signified danger, the really fatal omen, such as Ariel sought to create, lay in the appearance of three or more balls of fire together. That is to say, Bacon made a certain deviation from the classical story, and in this was duly followed by the author of the play; for in the lines "On the topmast,

The yards and bowsprit would I flame distinctly,
Then meet and join,”.

the word distinctly, used to qualify the kind of apparition produced by Ariel on the ship, means separately, or severally, that is, in three or more places at once.

Hakluyt described these lights, as he called them, in 1600, but apparently without any knowledge of their alleged character as portents.