A tree was first the instrument of strife,
Where Eve to sin her soul did prostitute;
A tree is now the instrument of life,

Though ill that trunk and this fair body suit;
Ah! fatal tree, and yet O blessed fruit!

That death to Him, this life to us doth give;
Strange is the cure, when things past cure revive,
And the Physician dies to make his patient live.
Sweet Eden was the arbour of delight,

Yet in his honey flowers our poison blew;
Sad Gethsemane, the bower of baleful night,
Where Christ a health of poison for us drew,
Yet all our honey in that poison grew:

So we from sweetest flowers could suck our bane,
And Christ from bitter venom could again
Extract life out of death, and pleasure out of pain.

A man was first the author of our fall,
A Man is now the author of our rise;
A garden was the place we finished,

A garden is the place He pays our price:
And the old serpent with a new device,
Hath found a way himself for to beguile;
So he, that all men tangled in his wile,

Is now by one Man caught, beguiled with his own guile.
The dewy night had with her frosty shade
Immantled all the world, and the stiff ground
Sparkled in ice; only the Lord that made

All for Himself, Himself dissolved found,
Sweet without heat, and bled without a wound;
Of heaven and earth, and God and man forlore,
Thrice begging help of those whose sins he bore,
And thrice denied of one, not to deny had swore.

FRANCIS BACON, 1561-1626.

FRANCIS BACON, Viscount of St. Albans,1 and Lord High Chancellor of England, was born in London, January 22, 1561. He was the son of Sir Nicholas Bacon, Lord Keeper of the great seal. He entered Cambridge at the early age of thirteen, and after spending four years there, where he was distinguished for his zealous application to study, and for the extraordinary maturity of his understanding, he went abroad and travelled in France. But his father dying suddenly in 1579, and leaving but very little property, he

This is a town in Hertfordshire, famous for the two battles fought in 1455 and 1461 between the two rival houses of York and Lancaster. It was anciently called Verulam, whence Bacon's subsequent title of honor, Baron Verulam.

hastily returned to England, and prosecuted the study of the law. He did not, however, neglect philosophy, for not far from this period he planned his great work, "The Instauration of the Sciences." In 1590 he obtained the post of Counsel Extraordinary to the Queen, and three years after he had a seat in Parliament from Middlesex. On the accession of James I. new honors awaited him. He was knighted in 1603. In 1607 he married Alice, daughter of Benedict Barnham, Esq., alderman of London, by whom he had a considerable fortune, but no children. In subsequent years he obtained successively the offices of king's counsel, solicitor general, and attorney general. In 1617 the king presented the great seal to him; in 1618 he obtained the title of Lord High Chancellor of England, and about six months after the title of Baron of Verulam, which title gave place in the following year to that of Viscount of St. Albans. But a "nipping frost" was soon to kill these buds of honor: his fall and disgrace were at hand. In 1621 a parliamentary inquiry was instituted into his conduct as judge, which ended in his condemnation and disgrace, for having received numerous presents or bribes from parties whose cases were brought before him for decision. He fully confessed to the twenty-three articles of fraud, deceit, mal-practice and corruption which were laid to his charge; and when waited on by a committee of the House of Lords, appointed to inquire whether the confession was subscribed by himself, he answered, "It is my hand, my act, my heart: I beseech your lordships to be merciful to a broken reed." He was fined £40,000; sent prisoner to the Tower; and declared incapable of any office or employment in the state. After a short confinement he was released, and in 1625 obtained a full pardon. He died on the 9th of April, 1626.

The following are the most important works of this wonderful man : First, his " Essays or Councils, Civil and Moral." No book contains a greater fund of useful knowledge, or displays a more intimate acquaintance with human life and manners. 'It may be read," says the great Scotch philosopher, Dugald Stewart, "from beginning to end in a few hours, and yet, after the twentieth perusal, one seldom fails to remark in it something overlooked before."

2. "The Proficience and Advancement of Learning." This forms the first part of his great work afterwards published under the title of Instauratio Scientiarum, "The Reform in the Study of the Sciences." It is divided into two books: the first chiefly considers the objections to learning, and points out the many impediments to its progress: the second, the distribution of knowledge, which he divides into three parts. "The parts of human learning," says he, "have reference to the three parts of man's understanding, which is the seat of learning: History to his Memory, Poesy to his Imagination, and Philosophy to his Reason." He gives also a full genealogical table of knowledge, agreeably to this distribution. This is a work of vast learning.

3. His celebrated treatise "Of the Wisdom and Learning of the Ancients." The object of this is to show that all the allegories and fables of antiquity have some concealed meaning, which had never been sufficiently

explained. In the interpretation of these ancient mysteries he has displayed his remarkable sagacity and penetration, besides interspersing throughout various important observations on collateral subjects.

name,

4. The Novum Organum, or "New Instrument," or "Method of Studying the Sciences." This is the great work which has immortalized his and placed him at the head of the philosophic world, as THE FATHER OF THE INDUCTIVE PHILOSOPHY. The great Greek philosopher, Aristotle, called his philosophical work the “ Organum." The "Method" which he adopted in scientific inquiries was rather to frame systems and lay down principles, and then to seek or make things conform thereto. But Lord Bacon, in his "New Method," insists upon the duty of carefully ascertaining facts in the first place, and then reasoning upon them towards conclusions. "Man," he says, "who is the servant and interpreter of nature, can act and understand no further than he has, either in operation or in contemplation, observed of the method and order of nature." And again, "Men have sought to make a world from their own conceptions, and to draw from their own minds all the materials which they employed: but if, instead of doing so, they had consulted experience and observation, they would have had facts and not opinions to reason about, and might ultimately have arrived at the knowledge of the laws which govern the material world." Thus Bacon established the method of Induction' as the only true key to the temple of knowledge. "The power and compass," says Professor Playfair, "of a mind which could form such a plan beforehand, and trace not merely the outline, but many of the most minute ramifications of sciences which did not yet exist, must be an object of admiration to all succeeding ages."2

Such is a brief and meagre view of the wonderful intellectual powers of this extraordinary man. He was not insensible of the value of his labors, for his last will contains this remarkable passage, My name and memory

66

I leave to foreign nations and to my own country after some time is passed over. But alas! from his lamentable deficiency in high moral principle, and self-respect, the line of Pope, as terse as it is true, will ever be attached to his name, whenever and wherever mentioned,

Men have entered into a desire of learning and knowledge sometimes upon a natural curiosity and inquisitive appetite; sometimes to entertain their minds with variety and delight;

This is called the Inductive system, from the Latin inductio," a leading ," from particular facts to general conclusions.

up,"

2 The best edition of Bacon is that by Basil Montagu, 17 vols. Svo. See also a very able article in the Edinburgh Review, by Macaulay, July, 1837. Also, two in the Retrospective, iii. 141, and iv. 280.

sometimes for ornament and reputation; and sometimes to enable them to victory of wit and contradiction; and most times for lucre and profession; and seldom sincerely to give a true account of their gift of reason to the benefit and use of man. As if there were sought in knowledge a couch whereupon to rest a searching and restless spirit; or a terrace for a wandering and variable mind to walk up and down with a fair prospect; or a tower of state for a proud mind to raise itself upon; or a fort or commanding ground for strife and contention; or a shop for profit or sale; and not a rich store-house for the glory of the Creator, and the relief of man's estate.

PRESERVATION OF KNOWLEDGE.

As water, whether it be the dew of heaven or the springs of the earth, doth scatter and lose itself in the ground, except it be collected into some receptacle, where it may, by union, comfort and sustain itself; and, for that cause, the industry of man hath framed and made spring-heads, conduits, cisterns, and pools; which men have accustomed likewise to beautify and adorn with accomplishments of magnificence and state, as well as of use and necessity: so knowledge, whether it descend from divine inspiration or spring from human sense, would soon perish and vanish to oblivion, if it were not preserved in books, traditions, conferences, and places appointed, as universities, colleges, and schools for the receipt and comforting the

same.

PLEASURE OF KNOWLEDGE.

The pleasure and delight of knowledge and learning far surpasseth all other in nature; for shall the pleasures of the affections so exceed the pleasures of the senses, as much as the obtaining of desire or victory exceedeth a song or a dinner? and must not, of consequence, the pleasures of the intellect or understanding exceed the pleasures of the affections? We see in all other pleasures there is a satiety, and after they be used, their verdure departeth;' which showeth well they be but deceits of pleasure, and not pleasure, and that it was the novelty which pleased and not the quality; and therefore we see that voluptuous men turn friars, and ambitious princes turn melancholy; but of knowledge' there is no satiety, but satisfaction

"Heaven and earth may pass away, but my words will not pass away." 2 A perpetual feast of nectar'd sweets, Where no crude surfeit reigns.

COMUS.

and appetite are perpetually interchangeable; and therefore appeareth to be good, in itself simply, without fallacy or accident.

THE USES OF KNOWLEDGE.

Learning taketh away the wildness, and barbarism, and fierceness of men's minds: though a little superficial learning doth rather work a contrary effect. It taketh away all levity, temerity, and insolency, by copious suggestion of all doubts and difficulties, and acquainting the mind to balance reasons on both sides, and to turn back the first offers and conceits of the kind, and to accept of nothing but examined and tried. It taketh away vain admiration of any thing, which is the root of all weakness: for all things are admired, either because they are new, or because they are great. For novelty, no man wadeth in learning or contemplation thoroughly, but will find that printed in his heart, "I know nothing." Neither can any man marvel at the play of puppets, that goeth behind the curtain, and adviseth well of the motion. And for magnitude, as Alexander the Great, after that he was used to great armies, and the great conquests of the spacious provinces in Asia, when he received letters out of Greece, of some fights and services there, which were commonly for a passage, or a fort, or some walled town at the most, he said, "It seemed to him, that he was advertised of the battle of the frogs and the mice, that the old tales went of." So certainly, if a man meditate upon the universal frame of nature, the earth with men upon it, the divineness of souls excepted, will not seem much other than an ant-hill, where some ants carry corn, and some carry their young, and some go empty, and all to and fro a little heap of dust. It taketh away or mitigateth fear of death, or adverse fortune; which is one of the greatest impediments of virtue, and imperfections of manners. For if a man's mind be deeply seasoned with the consideration of the mortality and corruptible nature of things, he will easily concur with Epictetus, who went forth one day, and saw a woman weeping for her pitcher of earth that was broken; and went forth the next day, and saw a woman weeping for her son that was dead; and thereupon said, "Yesterday I saw a fragile thing broken, to-day I have seen a mortal thing die." And therefore Virgil did excellently and profoundly couple the knowledge of causes, and the conquest of all fears together.

It were too long to go over the particular remedies which