Serious treatment of serious themes, on the other hand, is nobly vindicated in the great work of Richard Hooker.
Bacon.
A style quite unlike that of Hooker is Bacon's. Francis Bacon, later Lord Verulam and Viscount St. Albans, was born in 1561, a younger son of Sir Nicholas Bacon (long time Keeper of the Seals under Elizabeth), and of his wife Elizabeth Cooke, daughter of Sir Anthony Cooke, and sister of the wife of the famous Cecil, Lord Burleigh. Bacon did not profit much by the high place of his uncle William, and his cousin Robert Cecil. They retarded from jealousy the worldly advancement, to secure which, and to aid the progress of Science, were Bacon's leading desires. After leaving Trinity College, Cambridge, and studying law at Gray's Inn, Bacon followed to Paris Sir Amyas Paulet, later the jailer of Queen Mary Stuart at Fotheringay. He was called to the Bar in 1582, and in 1584 entered Parliament, on the Court side. Ben Jonson has left lofty praise of his eloquent sagacity in debate. His memoirs of advice to Elizabeth were more admired than followed in practice. He was in favour of moderation towards both Catholics and Puritans. He attached himself to the fortunes of the Queen's brilliant wayward favourite, Essex, but his wisdom was not what Essex was fitted by nature to follow: he swayed the woman in Elizabeth by his beauty and daring grace: his military ambitions were distasteful to the pacific and parsimonious Queen. The mad enterprise of Essex, on Scottish models, to seize the Royal person, was no true English political move; it led to his trial, and Bacon was the leading speaker in his benefactor's prosecution. "It is the wisdom of rats," says Bacon, "that will leave a house some time before it fall" ("Essays," "Of Wisdom for a Man's Self").
He has never been forgiven for an action which could scarcely appear other than judicious, and praiseworthy, and even necessary, to himself. Like Cecil he made advances to James VI of Scotland, when it was clear that Elizabeth could not, as James feared, "last as long as sun and moon". On James, Bacon bestowed all his wisdom, and spoke for the project of Union between England and Scotland, a project not realized till after the lapse of a century.
Partly through the influence of King James's favourite, Buckingham, Bacon received promotion; he became Attorney-General; in 1617, Keeper of the Seals, like his father; in 1618, Chancellor, and Baron Verulam; in 1621 Viscount St. Albans. In the same year he was accused of taking gifts from suitors (then a not uncommon practice), pled guilty, with qualifications, and was disgraced. His last years were spent in literary pursuits at his place, Gorhambury, near St. Albans; he caught cold in an experiment in freezing poultry and died in March, 1626.
The industry of his biographer, Mr. Spedding, has not wholly redeemed the character of Bacon, whose personality does not endear him to mankind, and was not on a level with his genius. That genius was literary in a very high degree, and was influenced by a desire to benefit humanity through scientific knowledge of the laws of Nature and of human nature. To this task he brought an enthusiasm which reminds us of a man so different from himself as Shelley. In Bacon's belief, man might be and ought to be the master of things; and a reasoned account of all things in nature was the inventory of human possessions. To make this inventory, and to discover a new method of "interrogating nature," putting her to the question and wrenching from her all her precious secrets, was the main object of his scientific meditations.
His first important book, however, the "Essaies" (1597), was literary, and no doubt was suggested by the Essays of Montaigne, which were also familiar to Shakespeare. In its original form the book contained but ten brief studies, but Bacon kept improving them and adding to their number. There are thirty-four in the edition of 1612, fifty-eight in that of 1625. It is dedicated to Buckingham, who is informed that he has "planted things that are like to last," an unlucky prediction. "Of all my other works," adds Bacon, "my essays have been most current; for that, as it seems, they come home to men's business and bosoms". The phrase is a proverb,—indeed the essays, as the man said of "Hamlet," are "made up of quotations" of phrases that are now household words.
The genius of Bacon, in the essay, and even in his scientific works, "The Advancement of Learning" (1605), and the Latin "Novum Organum" (1620), was not desultory, like Montaigne's, but aphoristic. He coined Maxims or Aphorisms, brief sayings, weighty with wisdom, brilliant with points of wit and fancy, which sometimes remind us of La Rochefoucauld. It is interesting to compare the first drafts of the Essays in 1597 with the finished work in 1625, where they are considerably enlarged, and altered in details. "Of Faction" is increased fourfold, and strengthened by examples from Roman history. Like all the men of his time, Bacon is rich in classical references and anecdotes which, with him, are not tedious and pedantic. When he quotes Homer it is in Latin hexameters, he cites a Roman altered adaptation, "a prophecy, as it seems, of the Roman Empire," which, of course, Homer never predicted; but the Latin form serves Bacon's theory of "prophecies that have been of certain memorys and from hidden causes". This wise man notes that "the King of Spain's surname, they say, is Norway," in order that a folk-prophecy may be fulfilled by the defeat of the Armada. However on the whole he regards fulfilled prophecies, not scriptural, as accidental coincidences. "Men mark when they hit, and never mark when they miss, as they do generally also of dreams."
There is something pathetic in Bacon's wise futilities and generalities on the most pressing political question of his time, "Unity in religion". Concerning the means of procuring Unity, "Men must beware, that in the procuring or muniting of religious unity they do not dissolve and deface the laws of charity and of human society." Being men, they necessarily defaced both—Laud later had the ears of Puritans cut off, Puritans cut off the head of Laud, "and so as to consider men as Christians, we forget that they are men".
Bacon is not a little "Jesuitical". Secrecy is often necessary, "no man can be secret, except he give himself a little scope of dissimulation; which is, as it were, but the skirts or train of secrecy". Simulation is "more culpable and less politic; except it be in rare and great matters"—rather encouraging to Charles I, for we are bidden to have "dissimulation in seasonable use". Love is rather profitable to the Stage than to human existence, "in life it doth much mischief, sometimes like a syren, sometimes like a fury". "No great and worthy person" (except Mark Antony and Appius Claudius, famed for his adoration of Virginia) "hath been transported to the mad degree of love". "It is impossible to love and be wise." Bacon certainly varied much from Plato and all the poets "in this of love".