The well-known passage in the Sonnets (Bacon’s or Shakspeare’s)
And almost thence my nature is subdued To what it works in, like the dyer’s hand,
receives curious confirmation from Mr. Smith’s writings. He has studied Bacon’s works so closely and long that he has insensibly infected himself with some of that great man’s peculiarities. It is the vice, says Bacon, in the Novum Organum, of high and discursive intellects to attach too much importance to slight resemblances, a vice which leads men to catch at shadows instead of substances. Mr. Smith quotes this saying; yet how must this vice have got possession of his intellect when he drew up that list of “Parallel passages, and peculiar phrases, from Bacon and Shakspeare,” which may be read in his Bacon and Shakspeare! Take one instance only:—In the Life of Henry VII. occurs this passage: “As his victory gave him the knee, so his purposed marriage with the Lady Elizabeth gave him the heart, so that both knee and heart did truly bow before him”; in Richard II. is this line, “Show heaven the humbled heart and not the knee”; and in Hamlet this, “And crook the pregnant hinges of the knee.” Is it possible that Mr. Smith would seriously have us draw any inference from the fact that in these three passages the word “knee” occurs and in two of them the word “heart”? Really, he might as well insist that, because Mr. Swinburne has written “Cry aloud; for the old world is broken” and because Mr. Arnold has declared himself to be “Wandering between two worlds, one dead, the other powerless to be born,” the author of Dolores and the author of the Stanzas from the Grand Chartreuse must be one and the same man! Again, Macaulay has noticed how, contrary to general custom, the later writings of Bacon are far superior to the earlier ones in richness of illustration. It is the same with Mr. Smith. His first pamphlet, though direct and lucid enough, was singularly free from all illustration or ornament of any kind. His next contains passages of wonderful richness and imagination. Bacon, he says, is like an orange-tree, “where we may observe the bud, the blossom, and the fruit in every stage of ripeness, all exhibited in one plant at the same time.” And he goes on in a strain of splendid eloquence:—“The stentorian orator in the City Forum, who, restoring his voice with the luscious fruit, continues his harangue to the applauding multitude, little reflects, that the delicate blossom which grew by its side, and was gathered at the same time, decorates the fair brow of the fainting bride in the far-off village church.” Never surely before has the familiar fruit of domestic life been so poetized since “Bon Gaultier” wrote of the subjects of the Moorish tyrant how they would fain have sympathized with his Christian prisoner:—
But they feared the grizzly despot and his myrmidons in steel, So their sympathy descended in the fruitage of Seville.
We cannot conclude without offering to Mr. Smith, in all humility, a little theory of our own, vague as yet and unsubstantial, but worth, we do venture to think, his consideration or the consideration of anybody who is in want of a theory to sport with. This is, that these plays, or at any rate a considerable number of them, were really and truly written by Walter Raleigh. We have not as yet had time to examine this theory very closely, or (like Mr. Smith with his) to find very much evidence in support of it. But of what we have done in that direction we freely make him a present. The following plays were all produced after the year 1603, the year when Raleigh was sent to the Tower for his alleged share in the Cobham plot:—Othello, Measure for Measure, Lear, Pericles, Antony and Cleopatra, Macbeth, Cymbeline, Winter’s Tale, Tempest, Henry VIII., Taming of the Shrew. It has been allowed on Mr. Smith’s side that Bacon, amid all his variety of business, both public and private, must have been very hard put to it to find the mere time to write the plays. No man of that age could have had at that time so much leisure on his hands as Raleigh. But that is not all. In the ninth chapter of his Instructions to his Son, on the inconveniences arising from the immoderate use of wine, is a passage which might almost be described as a paraphrase of Cassio’s famous discourse on the same subject. Nor is this all. Raleigh had been in the Tower before, in 1592, on a rather delicate matter, in which Mistress Throckmorton, afterward Lady Raleigh, had a share. The injustice of his second imprisonment would naturally recall the first to his mind, equally or still more unjust as he probably thought. To the second he would hardly dare to allude; but what was more likely than that he should find a sort of melancholy pleasure in recalling the first? Now, if Mr. Smith will turn to the second scene of the first act of Measure for Measure (first acted in December 1604, and written therefore in the first year of Raleigh’s imprisonment), he will find an allusion to the unfortunate cause of his first disgrace obvious to the dullest comprehension. The apparently no less obvious allusion in Twelfth Night to Cole’s brutality at Raleigh’s trial cannot, unfortunately, stand, as we know for certain from John Manningham’s Diary that the comedy was played in the Middle Temple Hall in the previous year. But from such evidence as we have given (and, did time and space serve we could add to it) we think a very good case could be made out for Raleigh, and we commend the making of it to Mr. Smith, who seems to have plenty of time to spare on such matters. At any rate if he will not have Shakspeare for the author of these plays, he must really now begin to think of getting some other Simon Pure than Bacon, if within a quarter of a century and more he has been able to find no better warranty for his theory than that he has given us. But we must entreat him to be a little more careful of poor Raleigh, if he discard our suggestion, than he has been of poor Shakspeare, the only evidence of whose existence he has declared to be the date of his death! But perhaps he is only following Plutarch, whom Bacon praises for saying “Surely I had rather a great deal men should say there was no such man at all as Plutarch, than that they should say there was one Plutarch that would eat his children as soon as they were born.”—Saturday Review.
SOME SICILIAN CUSTOMS.
BY E. LYNN LINTON.
Naturally the most important events of human life are birth, marriage, death. Hence we find among all peoples who have emerged from primitive barbarism, ceremonies and customs special to these three supreme circumstances. These ceremonies and customs are of most picturesque observance and most quaint significance in the middle term of civilization;—amongst those who are neither savages not yet blocked out into fair form, nor educated gentlefolk smoothed down to the dead level of European civilization; but who are still in that quasi-mythical and fetichistic state, when usages have a superstitious meaning beyond their social importance, and charms, signs, omens, and incantations abound as the ornamental flourishes to the endorsement of the law.