therefore (before Him with whom all things are present), the Lamb of God was shown before all worlds." For the rest, there is little individuality in Bacon's Confession. The origin of Evil, instead of being admitted to be inscrutable, is more freely than luminously spoken of to this effect: "He made all things in their estate good, and removed from Himself the beginning of all evil and vanity into the liberty of the creature." God created the constant Laws of Nature, which, however, have had three changes, viz. 1st, when "the matter of heaven and earth was created without forms;" 2nd, after each of the six days; 3rd, at the curse and there will be a fourth change at the end of the world.

The soul of man was not produced by heaven or earth, but breathed immediately from God, so that the ways and proceedings of God with spirits are not included in Nature, that is, in the laws of heaven and earth. Adam's sin consisted in "presuming to imagine the commandments and prohibitions of God were not the rules of Good and Evil, but that Good and Evil had their own principles and beginnings." Jesus Christ was the Word, not taking flesh, but made flesh, "so as the Eternal Son of God and the ever-blessed Son of Mary was one person; so one as the Blessed Virgin may be truly and catholicly called Deipara, the Mother of God." Christ having man's flesh, and man having Christ's spirit, there is an open passage and mutual imputation; whereby sin and wrath are conveyed to Christ from man, and merit and life are conveyed to man from Christ. After the souls of those that die in the Lord have passed from their present blessed rest into the further revelation of glory at the Last Day, the glory of the Saints shall then be full, and the Kingdom shall be given up to God the Father, from which time all things shall continue for ever in that being and state which they shall then receive.1

In the Meditationes Sacrae (published with the first edition of the Essays in 1597) there are several thoughts which may be found embodied in Bacon's later works. Among these is the statement (repeated in the Advancement of Learning) that in order to improve the vicious we must know vices:

"There are neither teeth, nor stings, nor venom, nor wreaths and folds of serpents, which ought not to be all known, and, as far as examination doth lead, tried; neither let any man here fear infection or pollution; for the sun entereth into sinks and is not defiled." There are three kinds of

1 Spedding, Works, vii. 215-226.

2 Ibid, vii. 227-242.

imposture in Religion; 1st, the formal or scholastic theology of those who, as soon as they get any subject matter, straightway make an art of it; 2nd, the accumulation of legends; 3rd, mystical use of high-sounding phrases, allegories, and allusions. Heresies spring from two sources, either from not knowing the Scriptures, or from not knowing the power of God; for the Scriptures reveal God's will, the Universe God's power. The former error breeds Superstition; the latter, Atheism. What the shell is to the kernel, what the Ark was to the Tables of the Law, that is the Church to the Scriptures.

Next to the importance attached by Bacon to the Bible as the only source of Unity, his denunciation of " terrestrial hope claims principal attention. Himself one of the most sanguine and hopeful of mankind, Bacon would banish hope from all matters relating to life on earth, and relegate it to expectations of heaven. About earthly matters men should not hope, but only entertain reasonable anticipations. Idly do the poets fable that Hope was left in Pandora's casket to be the antidote against all diseases; rather it was itself the worst disease of all, making the mind, "light, frothy, unequal, wandering.... . . By how much purer is the sense of things present, without infection or tincture of imagination, by so much wiser and better is the soul." To the same tenour run the remarks on Hope in the Essays: it is a habit by which rulers can deceive the seditious into peace: "the politic and artificial nourishing and entertaining of hopes, and carrying men from hopes to hopes, is one of the best antidotes against the poison of discontentments."1 Perhaps the most characteristic and doubtful of the dicta in the Meditations is the passage in the section on Heresies, where he asserts that those heresies are worst which deny God's power: "for in civil government also it is a more atrocious thing to deny the power and majesty of the Prince than to slander his reputation;" the inference from which seems to be that it is a greater sin to deny God's power than to deny His goodness, and that he who worships a non-omnipotent Being of goodness is morally worse than the worshipper of an omnipotent Satan.

The Translation of certain Psalms into English Verse was made, like the collection of Apophthegms, during a period of illness in 1624.2 The fact that he not only dedicated these

1 Essays, xxv. 186.

2 Spedding, Works, vii. 263-286.

translations to his friend George Herbert but actually published them in the same year, appears to require explanation. Mr. Spedding thinks it possible that "he owed money to his printer and bookseller, and if such trifles as these would help to pay it, he had no objection to their being used for the purpose." There are probably few data for determining the value of an author's profits in the early part of the seventeenth century; but it seems unlikely that a little pamphlet for it contains no more than seven Psalms, and can hardly claim to be called a book— could have gone far in the direction of paying the printer's bill for the author of such abstruse works as the Novum Organum and subsequent Latin works. Perhaps he may have published them as a kind of thank offering for his recovery. In any case the publication is a proof that he thought well of his verses; and the reader may be naturally curious to see what kind of verse was written and approved by one who in old days called himself a "concealed poet," 1 and who wrote magnificent prose in almost every conceivable style.

The following is an extract from the first Psalm, and it does not give us a high notion of Bacon's poetic powers:

"Who never gave to wicked reed 2

A yielding and attentive ear;
Who never sinner's paths did tread,

Nor sat him down in scorner's chair;
But maketh it his whole delight

On law of God to meditate,

And therein spendeth day and night:
That man is in a happy state.

"He shall be like the fruitful tree,
Planted along a running spring,
Which, in due season, constantly

A goodly yield of fruit doth bring:
Whose leaves continue always green,

And are no prey to winter's pow'r :
So shall that man not once be seen
Surprised with an evil hour."

A translation of the ninetieth Psalm is, in parts, far more forcible and rhythmical; but the last of the four following stanzas is both bald and cacophonous :

O Lord, thou art our home, to whom we fly,
And so hast always been from age to age;
Before the hills did intercept the eye,

Or that the frame was up of earthly stage,
One God thou wert, and art, and still shall be;
The line of Time, it doth not measure thee.

"Both death and life obey thy holy lore,

And visit in their turns, as they are sent;
A thousand years with thee they are no more
Than yesterday, which, ere it is, is spent ;

Or as a watch by night, that course doth keep,
And goes, and comes, unwares to them that sleep.

"Thou carriest man away as with a tide;

Then down swim all his thoughts that mounted high:
Much like a mocking dream, that will not bide,
But flies before the sight of waking eye;

Or as the grass, that cannot term obtain
To see the summer come about again.

"Begin thy work, O Lord, in this our age,

Shew it unto thy servants that now live;
But to our children raise it many a stage,
That all the world to thee may glory give.
Our handy-work likewise, as fruitful tree,
Let it, O Lord, blessed, not blasted be."

The translation of the one hundred and fourth Psalm perhaps exhibits Bacon at his best as a versifier, although even here there are occasional declensions from the elevated style, as in the reference to

"the great Leviathan

That makes the seas to seeth like boiling pan."

But of the opening Mr. Spedding says (I think with somewhat excessive praise) that "the heroic couplet could hardly do its work better in the hands of Dryden," and it is, at least, of such merit as to claim a longer extract than the other Psalms :

"Father and King of pow'rs, both high and low,
Whose sounding fame all creatures serve to blow,
My soul shall with the rest strike up thy praise,
And carol of thy works and wondrous ways.

But who can blaze thy beauties, Lord, aright?
They turn the brittle beams of mortal sight.
Upon thy head thou wear'st a glorious crown,
All set with virtues, polish'd with renown:
Thence round about a silver veil doth fall
Of crystal light, mother of colours all.
The compass heaven, smooth without grain or fold,
All set with spangs of glitt'ring stars untold,
And strip'd with golden beams of power unpent,

Is raised up for a removing tent.

1

Vaulted and archèd are his chamber beams
Upon the seas, the waters, and the streams :
The clouds as chariots swift do scour the sky;
The stormy winds upon their wings do fly.
His angels spirits are, that wait his will,
As flames of fire his anger they fulfil.
In the beginning, with a mighty hand,
He made the earth by counterpoise to stand;
Never to move, but to be fixèd still;
Yet hath no pillars but his sacred will.
The earth, as with a veil, once cover'd was,
The waters over-flowèd all the mass :

But upon his rebuke away they fled,

And then the hills began to shew their head;
The vales their hollowed bosoms open'd plain,
The streams ran trembling down the vales again :
And that the earth no more might drowned be,
He set the sea his bounds of liberty;

And though the waves resound, and beat the shore,
Yet it is bridled by his holy lore.

Then did the rivers seek their proper places,

And found their heads, their issues, and their races;
The springs do feed the rivers all the way,
And so the tribute to the sea repay :
Running along through many a pleasant field,
Much fruitfulness unto the earth they yield:
That know the beasts and cattle feeding by,
Which for to slake their thirst do thither hie.
Nay desert grounds the streams do not forsake,
But through the unknown ways their journey take:
The asses wild, that hide in wilderness,

Do thither come, their thirst for to refresh.

The shady trees along their banks do spring,

In which the birds do build, and sit, and sing;