Shakespeare has it, speaking of old age:

Oh! time's extremity,

Hast thou so cracked and splitted my poor tongue.1

And again he says:

The middle of youth thou never knowest, but the extremity of both ends.?

This is certainly a most remarkable series of coincidences of thought and expressions; and, as I said before, they occur not in the ordinary words of our language, the common bases of speech, without which we cannot construct sentences or communicate with each other, but in unusual, metaphorical, poetical thoughts; or in ordinary words employed in extraordinary and figurative senses.

Thus it is nothing to find Bacon and Shakespeare using such words as day and dead, but it is very significant when we find both writers using them in connection with the same curious and abstruse thought, to-wit: that individuals metaphorically die daily. So the use of the word blood by both proves nothing, for they could scarcely have written for any length of time without employing it; but when we find it used by both authors in the sense of the

1 Comedy of Errors, v, 1. Timon of Athens, iv, 3. As You Like It, ii, 7.

Romeo and Juliet, ii, 3. 5 Richard III., ii, 2.

essential principle of a thing, as the blood of virtue, the blood of malice, it is more than a verbal coincidence: it proves an identity in the mode of thinking. So the occurrence in both of the words death and banquet means nothing; but the expression, a banquet of death, a feast of death, is a poetical conception of an unusual character. The words soul and shake, and even shuffle, might be found in the writings of all Bacon's contemporaries, but we will look in vain in any of them, except Shakespeare, for a description of death as the shaking off of the flesh, or the shuffling off of the mortal coil, to-wit, the flesh.

Το my mind there is even more in these resemblances of modes of thought, which indicate the same construction and constitution of the mind, and the same way of receiving and digesting and putting forth a fact, not as a mere bare, dead fact, but enrobed and enfleshed in a vital metaphor, than in the similarity of thoughts, such as our crying when we come into the world, and the return of man in old age to mere infancy and second childishness; for these are things which, if once heard from the stage, might have been perpetuated in such a mind as that of Bacon.

This essay Of Death is entirely Shakespearean. There is the same interfusing of original and profound thought with fancy; the same welding together of the thing itself and the metaphor for it; the same affluence and crowding of ideas; the same compactness and condensation of expression; the same forcing of common words into new meanings; and above all, the same sense of beauty and poetry.

Observe, for instance, that comparison of the soul shut up in an imperfect body, trying, like an excellent musician, to utter itself upon a defective instrument. What could be more beautiful? See the picture of the despairful widows, deposed kings and pensive prisoners, who sit in darkness, burdened with grief and irons, on the shore of Death, waving their hands to the grim tyrant to draw near, watching for the coming of his star, as the wise men looked for the coming of the star of Bethlehem, and wooing the remorseless sisters three to break them off before the hour. Or note the pathos of that comparison (bearing most melancholy application to Bacon's own fate) where he says:

Who can see worse days than he that, while yet living, doth follow at the funeral of his own reputation?

And in the craving for a period of "perpetual rest," which shows itself all through this essay, we catch a glimpse of the melancholy which overwhelmed the soul of him who cried out, through the mouth of Hamlet:

Oh, that this too, too solid flesh would melt,

Thaw and resolve itself into a dew!

Or that the Everlasting had not fixed

His canon 'gainst self-slaughter.

All through the essay it seems to be more than prose. From beginning to end it is a mass of imagery: it is poetry without rhythm. Like a great bird which as it starts to fly runs for a space along the ground, beating the air with its wings and the earth with. its feet, so in this essay we seem to see the pinions of the poet constantly striving to lift him above the barren limitations of prose into the blue ether of untrammeled expression. It comes to us like the rude block out of which he had carved an exquisite statue full of life and grace, to be inserted perchance in some drama, even as we find another marvelous essay on death interjected into Measure for Measure.'

II. THE STYLE OF A BARREN MIND.

As a means of comparison and as an illustration of the wide difference between human brains, I insert the following letter from Lord Coke, who lived in the same age as Bacon, and was, like him, a lawyer, a statesman, a courtier and a politician.

Bacon's language overruns with flowers and verdure: it is literally buried, obscured and darkened by the very efflorescence of his fancy and his imagination. Coke speaks the same English tongue in the same period of development, but his thoughts are as bare, as hard, as soulless and as homely as an English work-house, in the midst of a squalid village-common, a mile distant from a flower or a blade of grass. When we read the utterances of the two men we are reminded of that amusing scene, depicted by the humorous pen of Mark Twain, where Scotty Briggs and the village parson carry on a conversation in which neither can understand a word the other says, though both speak the same tongue; illustrating that in the same language there may be many dialects

1 Act iii, scene 1.

separated as widely from each other as French from German, and depending for their character on the mental constitution of the men who use them. The speech of an English “navvy" does not differ more from the language of Tennyson's Morte d'Arthur than do the writings of Coke from those of Bacon. It will puzzle our readers to find a single Shakespeareanism of thought or expression in a whole volume of Coke's productions.

THE HUMBLE and Direct ANSWER TO THE LAST QUESTION ARISING UPON BAGG's CASE.

It was resolved, that to this court of the King's bench belongeth authority not only to correct errors in judicial proceedings, but other errors and misdemeanors tending to the breach of the peace, or oppression of the subjects, or to the raising of faction or other misgovernment: so that no wrong or injury, either public or private, can be done, but it shall be reformed and punished by law.

Being commanded to explain myself concerning these words, and principally concerning this word, “misgovernment,”—

I answer that the subject-matter of that case concerned the misgovernment of the mayors and other the magistrates of Plymouth.

And I intended for the persons the misgovernment of such inferior magistrates for the matters in committing wrong or injury, either public or private, punishable by law, and therefore the last clause was added, "and so no wrong or injury, either public or private, can be done, but it shall be reformed and punished by law;" and the rule is: "verba intelligenda sunt secundum subjectam materiam.”

And that they and other corporations might know, that factions and other misgovernments amongst them, either by oppression, bribery, unjust disfranchisements, or other wrong or injury, public or private, are to be redressed and punished by law, it was so reported.

But if any scruple remains to clear it, these words may be added, “by inferior magistrates," and so the sense shall be by faction or misgovernment of inferior magistrates, so as no wrong or injury, etc.

All which I most humbly submit to your Majesty's princely judgment.

EDW. COKE,

Now it may be objected that this paper is upon a dry and grave subject, and that Bacon would have written it in much the same style. But if the reader will look back at the quotations I have made from Bacon, in the foregoing pages, he will find that many of them are taken from his law papers and court charges, and his weighty philosophical writings, and yet they are fairly alive with fancy, metaphor and poetry.

CHAPTER II.

IDENTICAL METAPHORS.

Touchstone. For all your writers do consent, that ipse is he;

Now you are not ipse, for I am he.
William. Which he, sir?

As You Like It, v, 1.

OOTH Bacon and Shakespeare reasoned by analogy.

BOTH

When

ever their thoughts encountered an abstruse subject, they compared it with one plain and familiar; whenever they sought to explain mental and spiritual phenomena, they paralleled them with physical phenomena; whenever they would render clear the lofty and great, they called up before the mind's vision the humble and the insignificant. All thoughts ran in parallel lines; no thought stood alone. Hence the writings of both are a mass of similes and comparisons.

I. HUMBLE AND BASE THINGS USED AS COMPARISONS.

We have seen that Bacon and his double were both philosophers, and especially natural philosophers, whose observation took in "the hyssop on the wall, as well as the cedar of Libanus;" and when we come to consider their identity of comparisons, we shall find in both a tendency to use humble and even disgusting things as a basis of metaphor.

We shall see that Bacon was always "puttering in physic," and we find Shakespeare constantly using medical terms and facts in his poetry.

We find, for instance, that both compared the driving-out of evil influences, in the state or mind, to the effect of purgative medicines.

Bacon says:

The King . . . thought . . to proceed with severity against some of the principal conspirators here within the realm; thereby to purge the ill humors in England.'

And again:

Some of the garrison observing this, and having not their minds purged of the late ill blood of hostility."