popular tendencies of Puritanism-and great as were its faults, Puritanism may fairly claim to be the first political system which recognized the grandeur of the people as a wholeShakspere knew nothing. His roll of dramas is the epic of civil war. The Wars of the Roses fill his mind, as they filled the mind of his contemporaries. It is not till we follow him through the series of plays from "Richard the Second" to "Henry the Eighth " that we realize how profoundly the memory of the struggle between York and Lancaster had moulded the temper of the people, how deep a dread of civil war, of baronial turbulence, of disputes over the succession it had left behind it. From such a risk the Crown seemed the one security. With Shakspere as with his contemporaries the Crown is still the centre and safeguard of the national life. His ideal England is an England grouped round a king such as his own Henry V., a born ruler of men, with a loyal people about him, and his enemies at his feet. Socially too the poet reflects the aristocratic view of life which was shared by all the nobler spirits of the Elizabethan time. Coriolanus is the embodiment of a great noble; and the taunts which Shakspere hurls in play after play at the rabble only echo the general temper of the Renascence. But he shows no sympathy with the struggle of feudalism against the Crown. He had grown up under the reign of Elizabeth; he had known no ruler save one who had cast a spell over the hearts of Englishmen. The fear of misrule was dim and distant; his thoughts were absorbed, as those of the country were absorbed, in the struggle for national existence, and the heat of such a struggle left no time for the thoughts of civil liberty. Nor were the spiritual sympathies of the poet those of the coming time. Turn as others might to the speculations of theology, man and man's nature remained with him an inexhaustible subject of interest. Caliban was among his latest creations. It is impossible to discover whether his faith, if faith there were, was Catholic or Protestant. It is hard, indeed, to say whether he had any religious belief or no. The religious phrases which are thinly scattered over his works are little more than expressions of a distant and imaginative reverence. But on the deeper grounds of religious faith his silence is significant. He is silent, and the doubt of Hamlet deepens his silence, about the after-world. "To die," it may be, was to him as to Claudio, "to go we know not

whither." Often as his "questionings" turn to the riddle of life and death, he leaves it a riddle to the last, without heeding the common theological solutions around him. "We are such stuff as dreams are made of, and our little life is rounded with a sleep."

The contrast between the spirit of the Elizabethan drama and the new temper of the nation became yet stronger when the death of Shakspere left the sovereignty of the English stage to Ben Jonson. Jonson retained it almost to the moment when the drama itself perished in the storm of the Civil War. Webster and Ford, indeed, surpassed him in tragic grandeur, Massinger in facility and grace, Beaumont and Fletcher in poetry and inventiveness; but in the breath of his dramatic quality, his range over every kind of poetic excellence, Jonson was excelled by Shakspere alone. His life retained to the last the riotous, defiant color of the earlier dramatic world, in which he had made his way to fame. The stepson of a bricklayer, he enlisted as a volunteer in the wars of the Low Countries, killed his man in single combat in sight of both armies, and returned at nineteen to London to throw himself on the stage for bread. At forty-five he was still so vigorous that he made his way to Scotland on foot. Even in old age his "mountain belly," his scarred face, and massive frame became famous among the men of a younger time, as they gathered at the "Mermaid" to listen to his wit, his poetry, his outbursts of spleen and generosity, of delicate fancy, of pedantry, of riotous excess. His entry on the stage was marked by a proud resolve to reform it. Already a fine scholar in early manhood, and disdainful of writers who, like Shakspere, "had small Latin and less Greek," Jonson aimed at a return to classic severity, to a severer criticism and taste. He blamed the extravagance which marked the poetry around him, he studied his plots, he gave symmetry and regularity to his sentences and conciseness to his phrase. But creativeness disappears: in his social comedies we are amongst qualities and types rather than men, amongst abstractions and not characters. His comedy is no genial reflection of life as it is, but a moral, satirical effort to reform manners. It is only his wonderful grace and real poetic feeling that lightens all this pedantry. He shares the vigor and buoyancy of life which distinguished the school from which he sprang. His stage is thronged with figures. In spite of his

talk about correctness, his own extravagance is only saved from becoming ridiculous by his amazing force. If he could not create characters, his wealth of striking details gave life to the types which he substituted for them. His poetry, too, is of the highest order; his lyrics of the purest, highest fancy; his masques rich with gorgeous pictures; his pastoral, the "Sad Shepherd," fragment as it is, breathes a delicate tenderness. But, in spite of the beauty and strength which lingered on, the life of our drama was fast ebbing away. The interest of the people was in reality being drawn to newer and graver themes, as the struggle of the Great Rebellion threw its shadow before it, and the efforts of the playwrights to arrest this tendency of the time by fresh excitement only brought about the ruin of the stage. The grossness of the later comedy is incredible. Almost as incredible is the taste of the later tragedians for horrors of incest and blood. The hatred of the Puritans to the stage was not a mere longing to avenge the insults which it had levelled at Puritanism; it was in the main the honest hatred of God-fearing men against the foulest depravity presented in a poetic and attractive form.

If the imaginative resources of the new England were seen in the creators of Hamlet and the Faerie Queen, its purely intellectual capacity, its vast command over the stores of human knowledge, the amazing sense of its own powers with which it dealt with them, were seen in the work of Francis Bacon. Bacon was born at the opening of Elizabeth's reign, three years before the birth of Shakspere. He was the younger son of a Lord Keeper, as well as the nephew of Lord Burleigh, and even in boyhood his quickness and sagacity won the favor of the Queen. Elizabeth "delighted much to confer with him, and to prove him with questions: unto which he delivered himself with that gravity and maturity above his years that her Majesty would often term him 'the young Lord Keeper.'" Even as a boy at college he had expressed his dislike of the Aristotelian philosophy, as "a philosophy only strong for disputations and contentions, but barren of the production of works for the benefit of the life of man." As a law-student of twenty-one he sketched in a tract on the "Greatest Birth of Time" the system of inductive inquiry he was already prepared to substitute for it. The speculations of the young thinker were interrupted by hopes of

Court success; but these were soon dashed to the ground. He was left poor by his father's death; the ill-will of the Cecils barred his advancement with the Queen: and a few years before Shakspere's arrival in London he entered as a barrister at Gray's Inn. He soon became one of the most successful lawyers of the time. At twenty-three he was a member of the House of Commons, and his judgment and eloquence at once brought him to the front. "The fear of every man that heard him was lest he should make an end," Ben Jonson tells us. The steady growth of his reputation was quickened by the appearance of his "Essays," a work remarkable not merely for the condensation of its thought and its felicity and exactness of expression, but for the power with which it applied to human life that experimental analysis which Bacon was at a later time to make the key of Science. His fame at once became great at home and abroad, but with this nobler fame Bacon could not content himself. He was conscious of greater powers, as well as great aims for the public good; and it was a time when such aims could hardly be realized save through the means of the Crown. But political employment seemed further off than ever. At the outset of his career in Parliament he had irritated Elizabeth by a firm opposition to her demand of a subsidy; and though the offence was atoned for by profuse apologies, and by the cessation of all further resistance to the policy of the court, the law offices of the Crown were more than once refused to him, and it was only after the publication of his "Essays" that he could obtain some slight promotion as a Queen's Counsel. The moral weakness which more and more disclosed itself is the best justification of the Queen in her reluctance-a reluctance so strangely in contrast with her ordinary course-to bring the wisest head in her realm to her Council-board. The men whom Elizabeth employed were for the most part men whose intellect was directed by a strong sense of public duty. Their reverence for the Queen, strangely exaggerated as it may seem to us, was guided and controlled by an ardent patriotism and an earnest sense of religion; and with all their regard for the royal prerogative, they never lost their regard for the law. The grandeur and originality of Bacon's intellect parted him from men like these quite as much as the bluntness of his moral perceptions. In politics, as in science,

he had little reverence for the past. Law, constitutional privileges, or religion, were to him simply means of bringing about certain ends of good government; and if these ends could be brought about in shorter fashion he saw only pedantry in insisting on more cumbrous means. He had great social and political ideas to realize, the reform and codification of the law, the civilization of Ireland, the purification of the Church, the union-at a later time-of Scotland and England, educational projects, projects of material improvement, and the like; and the direct and shortest way of realizing these ends was in Bacon's eyes the use of the power of the Crown. But whatever charm such a conception of the royal power might have for her successor, it had little charm for Elizabeth; and to the end of her reign Bacon was foiled in his efforts to rise in her service.

"For my name and memory," he said at the close of his life, "I leave it to men's charitable speeches, and to foreign nations, and the next age." Amid political activity and court intrigue he still found room for the philosophical speculation which had begun with his earliest years. At forty-four, after the final disappointment of his political hopes from Elizabeth, the publication of the "Advancement of Learning" marked the first decisive appearance of the new philosophy which he had been silently framing. The close of this work was, in his own words, "a general and faithful perambulation of learning, with an inquiry what parts thereof lie fresh and waste, and not improved and converted by the industry of man; to the end that such a plot, made and recorded to memory, may both minister light to any public designation and also serve to excite voluntary endeavors." It was only by such a survey, he held, that men could be turned from useless studies, or ineffectual means of pursuing more useful ones, and direct to the true end of knowledge as "a rich storehouse for the glory of the Creator and the relief of man's estate." The work was in fact the preface to a series of treatises which were intended to be built up into an "Instauratio Magna," which its author was never destined to complete, and of which the parts that we possess were published in the following reign. The "Cogitata et Visa" was a first sketch of the "Novum Organum," which in its complete form was presented to James in 1621. A year later Bacon produced his "Natural and Ex

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