favorite metaphor in both, and only one of innumerable similitudes of like or even much stronger kind in these writings, it may come to have some significance. In the Dedication to the "Rape of Lucrece," the writer says: "What I have done is yours, what I have to do is yours; being part in all I have devoted yours; a declaration which is at least consistent enough with the plan of the supposed arrangement.

CHAPTER III.

FURTHER PROOFS.

"Now for the Athenian question; you discourse well, Quid igitur agendum est ? I will shoot my fool's bolt, since you will have it so."- BACON TO ESSEX (1598).

"Orl. You are the better at proverbs, by how much-A fool's bolt is soon shot."— Henry V., Act III. Sc. 7, (1599).

§ 1. PARALLEL WORKS.

FRANCIS BACON was engaged, during the same period and afterwards, in writing and publishing works in prose on kindred and parallel subjects, as for instance, in particular, his Masques, the Essays, the Fable of Cupid, the Wisdom of the Ancients, the New Atlantis, the Happy Memory, the Discourse in Praise of the Queen, the Characters of Julius and Augustus Cæsar, the Histories of Henry VII. and Henry VIII., the Advancement of Learning, his Speeches, and the Great Instauration of Science and Philosophy; indeed, the whole of his works may come into the comparison, not excepting the Novum Organum itself. He was sounding all the depths and hidden mysteries of Nature, threading the labyrinth of all philosophy, and scaling with ladders the heights of the empyrean. A critical comparison of these writings with the plays and poems in question, it is firmly believed, will be sufficient to satisfy any reasonable mind, at all competent to judge of such a matter, not merely of that general resemblance which has been long ago frequently observed, and always attributed to the common usage and style of that age, but of such close similitudes in the thought, style, and diction as to leave no room for doubt of the absolute identity of the

authorship. The Essays, the Wisdom of the Ancients, the Letters, the Advancement of Learning, the Henry VII., and the New Atlantis, especially, abound in parallel topics, similar peculiarities of idea, like diction, and identical expressions; and the same solidity, brevity, and beauty of style and manner, and a like power of imagination, pervades them all. It is scarcely possible to doubt, for instance, that the Essay on Masques and Triumphs came from the same mind as Hamlet's instructions to the players, nor that the "Winter's Tale" came from the same source as the Essay on Gardens.

The "New Atlantis was written as one of his feigned histories, or natural stories, or types and models, and with a main purpose of illustrating the new doctrines and methods, which the author was endeavoring to institute, and to present, as it were, a model of his idea of a College of the Universal Science. It is said to have given origin to the Royal Society of London, which is, however, an institution of somewhat different kind and scope.

On a general comparison of this work with the "Tempest," the similitude of the one to the other, in many points. of the story, the leading ideas, the scene and conception of the whole, is very evident; and some parts of it may be traced in the "Timon of Athens." Like the island of Atlantis, Prospero's isle is situated afar off in the midst of the ocean, somewhere near "the still vex'd Bermoothes," but hitherto remote from all visitation of civilized men. Prospero, in his "full poor cell," where all the mysteries of science and the secrets of Nature are unfolded to him, attended by his master-spirit, Ariel, the genius of knowledge, is but another Solomon, with "an aspect as if he pitied men," in his House or College of the Six Days Works, in the island of Atlantis. Prospero, like Democritus and Anaxagoras, seems to have believed that “the truth of nature lieth hid in certain deep mines and caves,"

1 Adv. of Learning, Works (Mont.), II. 131.

"1

and his oracles, like those delivered to the Indian Prince in the Masque, came out of "one of the holiest vaults";1 as Polonius says, in the play: —

"If circumstances lead me, I will find

Where truth is hid, though it were hid indeed

Within the centre." - Hamlet, Act II. Sc. 2.

Bacon frequently alludes to that "feigned supposition that Plato maketh of the cave." 2 Indeed, the cave, as we know, was a traditional source of the divinest wisdom with the ancient philosophers and poets. Plato takes his disciple into a dark cave, in order to bring to light some of the abstrusest doctrines and innermost secrets of his divine philosophy. Tasso's learned magician, Ubaldo, who was born a Pagan, but was regenerated by divine grace, also had his secret seat in a hidden cave, wherein he was yet not far from heaven; nor were his wonderful works done in virtue of infernal spirits, but of the study of Nature: :

"Ma spiando men vo da lor vestigi,

Qual in se virtu celi o l'erba o'l fonte:
E gli altri arcani di Natura ignoti
Contemplo, e delle stelle i varii moti.

XLIII. Perocche no ognor lunge dal' cielo
Tra sotterranei chiostri e la mia stanza."

Giur. Lib. XIV. 42-3.

In the conception of Caliban, the author clearly intends to shadow forth his views of the savage island races, ethnologically considered, and he discloses the idea, which was doubtless Bacon's opinion, as it was that of Plato, that these savages were indigenous to the soil on which they were found, and that the races of men, like the rest of the animal kingdom, were created in distinct centres, or had a separate development, on different continents, and on a graduated scale of ascending types of form, rising by degrees, 1 Masque; Spedding's Letters and Life, I. 388. 2 Adv. of Learning, Bk. II.

1

in the course of "a length and infinity of time," 1 from apes to savages, and from savages to the higher types of civilized men; as the science of paleontology now more clearly demonstrates, according to the principles of zoölogy, and according to the Transcendental Architectonic of the Divine Idea; of all which he had been able to obtain something more than a mere hint even from Plato. And so he writes down Caliban

"A devil, a born devil, on whose nature

Nurture can never stick."- Tempest, Act IV. Sc. 1.

66

The "Midsummer-Night's Dream" is a work somewhat like in character, in which the writer evidently means to exhibit, not merely the invisible spirit of Nature under various forms of fable, but also the first dawnings of a human intelligence, even in the lower animals, and the effect of Orpheus' music and "universal philosophy" upon them, when they all stood about him gently and sociably, as in a theatre, listening only to the concords of his lyre," which could "draw the wild beasts and the woods"; - for "Orpheus himself, a man admirable and truly divine, who being master of all harmony, subdued and drew all things after him by sweet and gentle measures, may pass by an easy metaphor for philosophy personified"; 2-and also the universal nature of love, after the accounts which Bacon says are "given by the poets of Cupid or Love," which are not properly applicable to the same person," the ancient Cupid being different from the younger Cupid, the son of Venus; "yet the discrepancy is such that one may see where the confusion is and where the similitude, and reject the one and receive the other." says to "Bottom with an ass' head,”.

66

1 Plato.

And so Titania

"I'll give thee fairies to attend on thee;
And they shall fetch thee jewels from the deep,
And sing while thou on pressed flowers doth sleep:

2 Wisd. of the Anc. (Orpheus), Works (Boston), XIII. 110.
8 Ibid. (Cupid), 122.