And when I cannot live any longer I will do as I may; that is my rest, that is the rendezvous of it.5 There is a lively, jocund, and, as I may say, a dancing age.1 Shakespeare: The jocund day Stands tiptoe on the misty mountain top.13 The quotation from Bacon gives us the complete image that was in the mind of the poet:- the dawn was dancing on the moun tain top. Bacon says: -- For it is a dull thing to tire, and, as we say, to jade anything too far.14 1 Sonnet, 23d Henry VI., ii, 5. 3 Letter to Lord Burleigh, 1580. 1st Henry IV., iv, 1. Henry V., ii, 1. Advancement of Learning, book ii. "Midsummer Night's Dream, V, 1. Titus Andronicus, V, 3. Essay Of Suspicion. 10 Lear, i, 4. 11 Henry VIII., ii, 1. 12 Wisdom of the Ancients - Pan. 13 Romeo and Juliet, iii, 5. 14 Essay Of Discourse. Shakespeare says: To let imagination jade me.1 Speaking of a young man overthrown and dying, Bacon says: The flower of virtue cropped with sudden chance.? Shakespeare speaks of A fresh, uncropped flower.3 Comparing her son to the violets that "strew the green lap of the spring," the Duchess says to him: Well, bear you well in this new spring of time, Speaking of the history of an event, Bacon says: Shakespeare says: Muffle your false love." Love whose view is muffled still." Bacon says: The King resolved to make this business of Naples as a wrench and means of peace. 8 Shakespeare says: May catch a wrench.9 A noble nature Wrenching the true cause the false way.10 Bacon says: The corruption and ambition of the times did prick him forward." Our fear of Spain, which hath been the spur to this rigor.12 Honor pricks me on. Yea, but how if honor prick me off when I come on.15 Falstaff complains on the battle-field that his bowels are "as hot as molten lead." Bacon, speaking of the horror of Essex when he found that the city would not sustain his attempted insurrection, graphically says: So, as being extremely appalled, as divers that happened to see him then might visibly perceive in his face and countenance, and almost molten with sweat, though without any cause of bodily labor, but only by the perplexity and horror of his mind.' What a dramatical command of language does this sentence exhibit! While my book is being printed, Mr. J. G. Bronson, of Chicago, calls my attention to the following parallelism. In a letter of "Sir Francis Walsingham, Secretary, to Monsieur Critoy, Secretary of France," said by Mr. Spedding to have been written by Bacon, we find: But contrariwise her Majesty, not liking to make windows into men's hearts and secret thoughts, except the abundance of them did overflow into overt and express acts or affirmations, etc. While in the Shakespeare sonnets we have this precisely parallel thought: For through the painter must you see his skill, That hath his windows glazed with thine eyes. Yet eyes this cunning want to grace their art; They draw but what they see, know not the heart.2 Here we have not only the same thought, but the same conclusion: that the heart can only be read by its acts. Bacon says: And there used to shuffle up a summary proceeding, by examination.3 I am fain to shuffle, to hedge and to lurch.5 Your life, good master, Must shuffle for itself.1 When we have shuffled off this mortal coil. Shuffle her away.3 And here, as illustrating the scholarly acquirements of the writer of the Plays, and his tendency to enrich the English language by the creation of new words, I would refer to two instances, which, although I have observed no parallels for them in Bacon's writings, are curious enough to be noted here: Dost thou infamonize me among potentates.* As he had been incorpsed and demi-natured.5 And here we have a very unusual word used by both - used only once, I think, by either of them. I could give many more instances of this use in the two bodies of writings of the same quaint and unusual words, did I not fear to offend the patience of the reader and extend this book beyond all reasonable proportions. I regret that I am not where I could have access to authorities which would show how many of these strange words appeared for the first time, in the history of our language, in the Bacon and Shakespeare writings. But this will constitute a work for scholars hereafter. 1 Cymbeline, V, 5. 2 Hamlet, iii, 1. 3 Merry Wives of Windsor, ii, 2. 4 Love's Labor Lost, v, 2. "Hamlet, iv, 7. Gesta Grayorum-Life and Works, vol. i, 12d Henry VI., v, 3. 8 Letter to the King, 1612. • Othello, i, 3. CHAPTER VIII. IDENTITIES OF CHARACTER. I saw Othello's visage in his mind. Othello, i, 3. CHARACTER, after all, constitutes the man. I do not mean thereby reputation,— for that concerns the opinions of others, and they may or may not be deserved; but those infinite shades of disposition which separate one man from all other men. And as there were never in the world two men who possessed heads of precisely the same shape, so there cannot be two men having precisely the same character. The Creator has a thousand elements which go to make man, and he never puts all of them in any one man; nor does he ever mix a part of them, in his alembic, in the same proportions, for any two men. "In the catalogue we all go for men." Anything, with the human osseous system and flesh on it, is, perforce, a man; but the difference between one man and another may be as wide as that between the primordial cell and the regenerated soul. The writer of the Plays had thought this thought, as he seems to have thought all other thoughts, and he exclaims: Oh, the difference of man and man!! When we seek, however, to institute a comparison between Francis Bacon and the writer of the Plays, we are met by this difficulty: We know, accurately enough, what was the character of Francis Bacon-his life reveals it;—but if we turn to the author of certain dramatic compositions, we are at a loss to know when the man himself speaks and when the character he has created speaks. We are more apt to see the inner nature of the writer in the general frame, moral and purpose of the piece, and in those utterances which burst from him unawares, and which have no necessary connection with the plot or the characters of the play, than in the acts performed in the course of the drama, or in the 1 Lear, iv, 2. |