He retired to the classic Tusculum of his villa in St John’s Wood. There, cheered by the faithful adherence of some elegant companions, who, if they did not believe him innocent, found him unalterably agreeable, he sipped his claret and moralised on his creed. Doubtless he believed that “the talk would soon subside,” “the thing blow over.” The world would miss him too much not to rally again round the sage who so justly despised it. Perhaps his belief might have been realised, but,
“Vita summa brevis spem nos vetat inchoare longam”—
Death, the only player that no man can cheat, cut into his table, and trumped the last card of his long suit.
In the more brilliant period of this amiable man-scorner’s social career, once, and once only, he is said to have given way to anger. One of his associates (I say designedly associates, not friends, out of respect for his memory, since friendship is a virtue, and he therefore denied its existence)—one of his associates, warmed perhaps into literature by his own polite acquaintance with all that is laide in belles lettres, wrote a comedy. The comedy was acted. My hero honoured the performance by appearing in the author’s box. Leaning forward so as to be seen of all men, he joined his hands in well-bred applause of every abortive joke and grammatical solecism, till, in a critical part of the play, there occurred a popular claptrap—a something said in praise of virtue and condemnation of vice. The gallery of course responded to the claptrap, expressing noisy satisfaction at the only sentiment familiar to their comprehension which they had hitherto heard. But my archetype of modern misanthropy paused aghast, suspended
“The soft collision of applauding gloves,”
and, looking at his associate as reproachfully as Cæsar might have looked at Brutus when he sighed forth “Et tu, Brute!” let fall these withering words, “Why, Billy, this is betraying the Good Old Cause.” So saying, he left the box, resentful. Now, this man I call the genuine, positive, realistic Misanthrope, compared to whom Timon and Alceste are poetical make-believes!
SPEDDING’S LIFE OF BACON.[[6]]
[6]. ‘The Letters and the Life of Francis Bacon.’ By James Spedding. Vols. I. & II. Lord Macaulay’s ‘Essay on Francis Bacon.’
Mr Spedding, in the modest form of a commentary on the letters and occasional writings of Lord Bacon, is now giving us a biography of that celebrated man, which bids fair, for a long time to come, to be our highest authority on the subject. To place all the facts before us on which our judgment of the character of Lord Bacon should be formed, is his great object; he deals in few assertions of his own; he is disposed to let facts speak for themselves; he guides our opinion by a full narrative of the events, and makes few attempts to influence us by argument or eloquence. A more satisfactory or trustworthy book has rarely come before us.
We will not say that Mr Spedding’s narrative is never coloured by an imagination which has received its unconscious prompting from his admiration of Bacon: one rather amusing instance of this colouring of the imagination we think we have detected, and shall have occasion to notice; but no admiring biographer of a great man has more studiously refrained from thrusting forward his own opinions or conceptions where the reader is merely desirous of obtaining a clear insight into the facts themselves. Mr Spedding has not yet completed his task, but he has given us in these two volumes more materials of interest than in the space of a single paper we shall have room to touch upon, and the main topic which occupies them is fully discussed and finally dismissed.