Bacon called one of his great philosophical works

The scaling-ladder of the intelligence.

Shakespeare has:

Northumberland, thou ladder, wherewithal

The mounting Bolingbroke ascends my throne.'

Bacon says:

It is the wisdom of crocodiles that shed tears when they would devour."
Shakespeare says:

Gloster's show

Beguiles him, as the mournful crocodile
With sorrow snares relenting passengers.'

Says Bacon:

The axe should be put to the root of the tree.'

Says Shakespeare:

We set the axe to thy usurping root."

But the field of labor in this direction is simply boundless. One whose memory is stored with the expressions found in the two sets of writings cannot open either one without being vividly reminded of the other. Both writers, if we are to consider them, for the sake of argument, as two persons, thought in the same way; the cast of mind in each was figurative and metaphorical; both vivified the driest details with the electricity of the imagination, weaving it through them like lightning among the clouds; and each, as I have shown, was very much in the habit of repeating himself, and thus reiterated the same figures of speech time and again.

WE

CHAPTER III.

IDENTICAL OPINIONS.

A plague of opinion! A man may wear it on both sides like a leather jerkin.

Troilus and Cressida, iii,3.

E come now to another group of parallelisms-those of thoughts, opinions or beliefs, where the identity is not in the expression, but in the underlying conception.

We find that both writers had great purposes or intentions of working for immortality; the one figuring his works as "banks or mounts," great earthworks, as it were; the other as great foundations or "bases" on which the future might build.

Bacon says:

I resolved to spend my time wholly in writing, and to put forth that poor talent or half talent, or what it is, that God hath given me, not, as heretofore, to particular exchanges, but to banks or mounts of perpetuity, which will not break.'

Shakespeare says:

Were it aught to me I bore the canopy,

With my extern the outward honoring,

Or laid great bases for eternity,

Which prove more short than waste or ruining.'

Here the same idea runs through both expressions—“banks of perpetuity" and "bases for eternity."

Both believed that a wise government should be omniscient. Bacon says:

So unto princes and states, especially towards wise senators and councils, the natures and dispositions of the people, their conditions and necessities, their factions and combinations, their animosities and discontents, ought to be, in regard to the variety of their intelligence, the wisdom of their observations and the height of their station where they keep sentinel, in great part clear and transparent.'

Shakespeare says:

The providence that's in a watchful state
Knows almost every grain of Plutus' gold;
Finds bottom in the uncomprehensive deeps;

Touching a Holy War.

* Sonnet cxxv.

Advancement of Learning, book ii.

Keeps place with thought, and, almost like the gods,
Does thoughts unveil in their dumb cradles.

There is a mystery (with whom relation

Durst never meddle) in the soul of state;

Which hath an operation more divine

Than breath, or pen, can give expression to.1

Both had noted that envy eats into the spirits and the very body of a man.

Bacon says:

Love and envy do make a man pine, which other affections do not, because they are not so continual.?

Such men in other men's calamities are, as it were, in season, and are ever on the loading part.3

Envy is the worst of all passions, and feedeth upon the spirits, and they again upon the body.*

Shakespeare says:

Yond' Cassius has a lean and hungry look:
Such men as he be never at heart's ease
Whiles they behold a greater than themselves."

Bacon says:

Both speak of hope as a medicine of the mind.
To make hope the antidote of human diseases.*

And again:

And as Aristotle saith, "That young men may be happy but not otherwise but by hope."

Shakespeare says:

The miserable have no other medicine
But only hope.

Both had observed the shriveling of parchment in heat. Bacon says:

The parts of wood split and contract, skins become shriveled, and not only that, but if the spirit be emitted suddenly by the heat of the fire, become so hastily contracted as to twist and roll themselves up."

Shakespeare uses the same fact as the basis of a striking comparison, as to King John, dying of poison:

There is so hot a summer in my bosom,
That all my bowels crumble up to dust:
I am a scribbled form, drawn with a pen
Upon a parchment; and against this fire
Do I shrink up.10

Troilus and Cressida, iii, 3.

Essay Of Entry,

Essay Of Goodness.

History of Life and Death.
* Julius Cæsar, i, 2.
Med. Sacra.

10 King John, V, 7.

Advancement of Learning.

* Measure for Measure, iii, 1. • Novum Organum, book ii.

We find both dwelling upon the fact that a shrewd mind will Bacon says:

turn even disadvantages to use.

Excellent wits will make use of every little thing.

Falstaff says:

It is no matter if I do halt; I have the wars for my color, and my pension shall seem the more reasonable. A good wit will make use of anything. I will turn diseases to commodity."

Both had observed that sounds are heard better at night than by day. Bacon says:

Sounds are better heard, and farther off, in the evening or in the night, than at the noon or in the day. . . . But when the air is more thick, as in the night, the sound spendeth and spreadeth. As for the night, it is true also that the general silence helpeth.3

Shakespeare says:

And again:

Soft stillness and the night
Become the touches of sweet harmony.

Nerissa. It is your music, madam, of the house.
Portia. Nothing is good, I see, without respect;
Methinks it sounds much sweeter than by day.

In the following it appears that the same observation had occurred to both in another instance.

Bacon says:

Anger suppressed is also a kind of vexation, and causeth the spirit to feed upon the juices of the body; but let loose and breaking forth it helpeth.

Shakespeare says:

The grief that will not speak
Whispers the o'erfraught heart and bids it break.'

And again:

The heart hath treble wrong

When it is barred the aidance of the tongue.

Both allude to the same curious belief. Bacon says:

The heavens turn about in a most rapid motion, without noise to us perceived; though in some dreams they have been said to make an excellent music.

1 Bacon's letter to Sir Foulke Greville, written in the name of the Earl of Essex — Life and

Shakespeare idealizes dreams thus:

There's not the smallest orb which thou beholdest

But in his motion like an angel sings,

Still quiring to the young-eyed cherubims.'

And here we find both drawing the same distinction between the approbation of the wise and the foolish.

Hamlet says to the players:

Now this, overdone, or come tardy off, though it make the unskillful laugh, cannot but make the judicious grieve; the censure of the which one must, in your allowance, o'er-weigh a whole theater of others."

Bacon says:

So it may be said of ostentation, "Boldly sound your own praises, and some of it will stick." It will stick in the more ignorant and the populace, though men of wisdom may smile at it; and the reputation won with many will amply countervail the disdain of a few.3

This conclusion is, of course, ironical.

Bacon compares the earth to an ant-hill, with the men,

Like ants, crawling up and down. Some carry corn and some carry their young, and some go empty, and all—to and fro- a little heap of dust

And we find the same thought in Hamlet:

What should such fellows as I do crawling between earth and heaven." Here the word crawling expresses the thought of something vermin-like, insect-like, and the comparison of the whole ant-hill of the crawling world to "a little heap of dust" was in Bacon's mind when he wrote:

What a piece of work is man! . . . And yet to me what is this quintessence of dust?

Both had noticed the servility of the creatures that fawn on power. Bacon says:

Such instruments as are never failing about princes, which spy into their humors and conceits and second them; and not only second them, but in seconding increase them; yea, and many times without their knowledge pursue them farther than themselves would."

Shakespeare puts these words into the mouth of King John:

Hamlet, iii, 2.

It is the curse of kings to be attended

By slaves that take their humor for a warrant

To break within the bloody house of life;

Merchant of Venice, v, 1.

De Augmentis, book viii, p. 281.

AAdvancement of Learning, book 1.
Hamlet, iii, 1.

Letter to Essex, Oct. 4, 1596.