Of Bacon's relations with Essex we never had but one opinion. All the testimony brought forward to convict Bacon of treachery to Essex seemed to us inconclusive. The facts, as stated by Macaulay and Lord Campbell, do not sustain their harsh judgment. A parallel may be found in the present political condition of our own country. Let us suppose Senator Toombs so fortunate as to have had a wise counsellor, who for ten years had borne to him the same relation which Bacon bore to Essex. Let us suppose that it was understood between them that both were in favor of the Union and the Constitution, and that nothing was to be done to forward the triumph of their party which was not strictly legal. Then let us suppose that Mr. Toombs, from the impulses of caprice and passion, had secretly established relations with desperate disunionists, and had thus put in jeopardy not only the interests, but the lives, of those who were equally his friends and the friends of the Constitution. Let us further suppose that he had suddenly placed himself at the head of an armed force to overturn the United States government at Washington, while he was still a Senator from Georgia, sworn to support the Constitution of the United States, and that his cheated friend and counsellor had just left the President of the United States, after a long conference, in which he had attempted to show, to an incredulous listener, that Senator Toombs was a devoted friend to the Union, though dissatisfied with some of the members of the Administration. This is a very faint illustration of the political relations between Essex and Bacon, admitting the generally received facts on which Bacon is execrated as false to his friend. Mr. Dixon adduces new facts which completely justify Bacon's conduct. If Bacon, like Essex, had been ruled by his passions, he would have been a far fiercer denouncer of Essex's treason. He had every reason to be enraged. He was a wise man duped by a foolish one. He was in danger of being implicated in a treason which he abhorred, through the perfidy of a man who was generally considered as his friend and patron, and who was supposed to act from his advice. As Bacon doubtless knew what we now for the first time know, every candid reader must be surprised at the moderation of his course. Essex would not have hesitated to shoot or stab Bacon, had Bacon behaved to him as he had behaved to Bacon. But we pardon, it seems, the most hateful and horrible selfishness which springs from the passions; our moral condemnation is reserved for that faint form of selfishness which may be suspected to have its source in the intellect.
In regard to the other charges against Bacon, we think that Mr. Dixon has brought forward evidence which must materially modify the current opinions of Bacon's personal character. He has proved that Bacon, as a practical statesman, was in advance of his age, rather than behind it. He has proved that his philosophy penetrated his politics, and that he gave wise advice, and recommended large, liberal, and humane measures to a generation which could not appreciate them. He has proved that he did everything that a man in his situation could do for the cause of truth and justice which did not necessitate his retirement from public life. The abuses by which he may have profited he not only did not defend, but tried to reform. Among the statesmen of his day he appears not only intellectually superior, but conventionally respectable,—a fact which would seem to be established by the bare statement, that he died wretchedly poor, while most of them died enormously rich.
But Mr. Dixon, in his advocacy of Bacon, overlooks the circumstance, that no man could hold high office under James I., without complying with abuses calculated to damage his reputation with posterity. We have no doubt that Bacon's compliance was connected with considerations which Mr. Dixon entirely ignores. Far from discriminating between Bacon the philosopher and Bacon the politician, we have always thought that they were intimately connected. Bacon's Method, the thing on which, as a philosopher, he especially prided himself, was defective. It left out that power by which all discoveries have since his time been made, namely, scientific genius. Its successful working depended on an immense collection of facts, which no individual, and no society of individuals, could possibly make. He himself was never weary of asserting that the Method could never produce its beneficent effects, unless it were assisted by the revenues of a nation. Of the course which physical science really followed he had no prevision. Copernicus, Kepler, Galileo, Gilbert, he never appreciated. He was an intellectual autocrat, who had matured his own scheme of interpreting Nature, and thought, that, if it were systematically carried out, the inmost secrets of Nature could he mastered. His desire to be Lord Chancellor of England was subsidiary to his larger desire to be Lord Chancellor of Nature herself. He hoped, by managing James and Buckingham, to flatter them into aiding, by the revenues of the State, his grand philosophical scheme. Combine the facts which Mr. Dixon has disinterred with the facts which every thoughtful reader of Bacon's philosophical works already knows, and the vindication of Bacon as a man is complete.
We are inclined to think that he failed in both of the objects of his highest ambition. His philosophic Method is demonstrably a failure; his attempt to convert James and Buckingham to his views resulted in his own unjust disgrace with contemporaries and posterity. The truth is, that, cool, serene, comprehensive, and unimpassioned as he appears, he was from his youth actuated by a fanaticism which seems less intense than the fanaticism of a man like Cromwell only because it was infinitely more broad. Had he succeeded in the design he proposed to himself, his intellectual domination would not be confined to England, or the kingdoms of the civilized world, but would be commensurate with the whole domain of Nature and man.
We are so grateful to Mr. Dixon for what he has done, that we are not disposed to quarrel with him for what he has left undone. He has added such a mass of incontrovertible facts to the materials which must enter into the future biography of Bacon, that his book cannot fail to exact cordial praise from the most captious critics. Bacon, in his aspirations and purposes, was a very much greater man than he appears in Mr. Dixon's biography; but still to Mr. Dixon belongs the credit of rescuing his personal reputation from undeserved ignominy. If we add to this his vivid pictures of the persons and events of the Elizabethan age, and his bright, sharp, and brief way of flashing his convictions and discoveries on the mind of the reader, we indicate merits which will make his volume generally and justly popular. The letters of Lady Ann Bacon, the mother of the philosopher and statesman-letters for which we are indebted to Mr. Dixon's exhaustive research—would alone be sufficient to justify the publication of his interesting book.
Autobiography of Dr. Alexander Carlyle, Minister of Inveresk. With Memorials of the Men and Events of his Time. Boston: Ticknor & Fields. 12mo. pp. 480.
Who was he? and what was he like?—Sir Walter Scott answered these interrogatories more than thirty years ago, in this wise. He says, in his "Review of the Life and Works of John Home,"—"Dr. Carlyle was, for a long period, clergyman of Musselburgh; his character was as excellent as his conversation was amusing and instructive; his person and countenance, even at a very advanced age, were so lofty and commanding, as to strike every artist with his resemblance to the Jupiter Tonans of the Pantheon."
Sixty years ago, this old Scottish clergyman sat down, one January day, in Musselburgh, and began to write his "Autobiography." He had lived seventy-nine years among scenes of great interest, and had known men of remarkable genius. He wrote and died. The manuscript he left has been often read and enjoyed by clever men and women, who in their turn have gone to the churchyard to sleep with the venerable old man the story of whose life they had perused. Sir Walter himself once caught a glimpse of the time-stained sheets. All are now dead who could by any chance he pained by the publication of facts in which their relatives look part long years ago. So the world has now another volume to add to the store of biography, and the future historian will have another treasury of facts from which to illumine his pages.
Himself the son of a clergyman, Alexander Carlyle had a good school-drilling in Prestonpans, where he was born. One of the stories of his childhood is very amusing, inasmuch as it pictures a dozen old women listening to young Alexander, aged six, who reads the Song of Solomon to them in a graveyard, he all the while perched on a tombstone. My Lord Grange was the principal man in Prestonpans parish; and Master Carlyle, with his excellent father, had great reverence for the patron who had been the cause of the family's transplantation from Annandale. My Lady was a very lively person, daughter of the man who shot President Lockhart in the dark because he had infuriated him in an arbitration case in the court. This great family attracted the boyish wonder of young Carlyle, and some of the gossiping stories that he heard in his father's house made his juvenile ears tingle. Poor Lady Grange! Quarrelling with her husband one day, on his return from London, where pretty Fanny Lindsay, who kept a coffee-house in the Haymarket, had bewitched him, she never knew peace again. Her temper, never very soothing or placable, got entire possession of her life, and she rained stormy gusts of passion on her guilty lord. He trembled and endured, till he found a razor concealed under his wife's pillow, and then he determined to remove his violent helpmeet to a safe seclusion. By main force, with the aid of accomplices, he seized the lady in his house in Edinburgh, and bore her through Stirling to the Highlands. Thence she was taken to St. Kilda's desolate island, far off in the Western Ocean, and there kept for the remainder of her days, scantily furnished with only the coarsest fare. Her condition was most wretched to the last. In those days, licentiousness and religious enthusiasm were not incompatible associates, and Lord Grange frequently spent his evenings with the Minister of Prestonpans, praying, and settling high points of Calvinism with the old pastor. Good Mrs. Carlyle used to complain that they did not part without wine, and that late hours were consequent upon the claret they liberally imbibed after their pious discussions.
Dr. Doddridge's famous Colonel Gardiner came to reside in Minister Carlyle's parish, and told the story of his remarkable conversion, with his own lips, to the clergyman. The hook which turned him from his wicked career was Gurnall's "Christian Armor," a volume placed many years before, by a mother's hand, in his trunk, and until then neglected. Young Carlyle hoard Gardiner tell the story of his change of life several times to different sets of people, and he thought Doddridge had marred the tale by introducing the incident of a blaze of light, which the Colonel himself never spoke of having seen, when he related his conversion.