Mtn of 
 
 EDITED BY JOHN MORLEY 
 VOL. XIII 
 
 BACON 
 
 BUNYAN 
 
 BENTLEY
 
 BACON 
 
 BY R W. CHUECH 
 
 BUNYAN 
 
 BY J. A. FEOUDE 
 
 BENTLEY 
 
 BY E. C. JEBB 
 
 Eontion 
 
 MACMILLAN AND CO. 
 
 AND NEW YORK 
 1895
 
 of 
 
 EDITED BY JOHN MORLEY 
 
 BACON
 
 BACON 
 
 BY 
 
 E. W. CHURCH, 
 
 DEAN OF ST. PAUL'S, 
 HONORARY FELLOW OF ORIEL COLLEGE 
 
 H0nt0n: 
 MACMILLAN AND CO. 
 
 AND NEW YORK 
 1892 
 
 The Bight of Translation and Reproduction is Reserved,
 
 First printed 1884 ; Reprinted 1886, 1889, 1892 
 Library Edition {Globe &vo) 1888
 
 PEEFACE. 
 
 IN preparing this sketch it is needless to say how 
 deeply I am indebted to Mr. Spedding and Mr. Ellis, 
 the last editors of Bacon's writings, the very able and 
 painstaking commentators, the one on Bacon's life, the 
 other on his philosophy. It is impossible to overstate 
 the affectionate care and high intelligence and honesty 
 with which Mr. Spedding has brought together and 
 arranged the materials for an estimate of Bacon's char- 
 acter. In the result, in spite of the force and ingenuity 
 of much of his pleading, I find myself most reluctantly 
 obliged to differ from him; it seems to me to be a 
 case where the French saying, cited by Bacon, in 
 one of his commonplace books, holds good "Pur 
 trop se ddbattre, la vtritt se perd." 1 But this does not 
 diminish the debt of gratitude which all who are in- 
 terested about Bacon must owe to Mr. Spedding. I 
 wish also to acknowledge the assistance which I have 
 received from Mr. Gardiner's History of England and 
 Mr. Fowler's edition of the Novum Organum : and not 
 least from M. de Re"musat's work on Bacon, which seems 
 to me the most complete and the most just estimate 
 
 1 Promus: edited by Mrs. H. Pott, p. 475. 
 
 2066284
 
 vi PREFACE. 
 
 both of Bacon's character and work, which has yet 
 appeared ; though even in this clear and dispassionate 
 survey we are reminded by some misconceptions, strange 
 in M. de Eemusat, how what one nation takes for granted 
 is incomprehensible to its neighbour, and what a gap 
 there is still, even in matters of philosophy and literature, 
 between the whole Continent and ourselves : 
 
 " Penitus toto divisos orbe Britannos."
 
 CONTENTS. 
 
 CHAPTER I. 
 EARLY LIFE 
 
 CHAPTER II. 
 BACON AND ELIZABETH .28 
 
 CHAPTER III. 
 BACON AND JAMES 1 58 
 
 CHAPTER IV. 
 BACON SOLICITOR-GENERAL . . . . . .81 
 
 CHAPTER V. 
 BACON ATTORNEY-GENERAL AND CHANCELLOR . . . 100 
 
 CHAPTER VI. 
 BACON'S FALL .124
 
 CONTENTS. 
 
 CHAPTER VII. PAGE 
 
 BACON'S LAST YEAES 1621-1626 - 156 
 
 CHAPTER VIII. 
 
 177 
 
 BACON'S PHILOSOPHY 
 
 CHAPTER IX. 
 BACON AS A WRITER
 
 BACON. 
 
 CHAPTEE I. 
 
 EARLY LIFE. 
 
 THE life of Francis Bacon is one which it is a pain to 
 write or to read. It is the life of a man endowed with 
 as rare a combination of noble gifts as ever was be- 
 stowed on a human intellect ; the life of one with whom 
 the whole purpose of living and of every day's work was 
 to do great things to enlighten and elevate his race, to 
 enrich it with new powers, to lay up in store for all 
 ages to come a source of blessings which should never 
 fail or dry up ; it was the life of a man who had high 
 thoughts of the ends and methods of law and govern- 
 ment, and with whom the general and public good was 
 regarded as the standard by which the use of public 
 power was to be measured ; the life of a man who had 
 struggled hard and successfully for the material pros- 
 perity and opulence which makes work easy and gives a 
 man room and force for carrying out his purposes. All 
 his life long his first and never-sleeping passion was the 
 romantic and splendid ambition after knowledge, for the 
 conquest of nature and for the service of man ; gather- 
 ing up in himself the spirit and longings and efforts of
 
 2 BACON. [CHAP. 
 
 all discoverers and inventors of the arts, as they are 
 symbolised in the mythical Prometheus. He rose to 
 the highest place and honour ; and yet that place and 
 honour were but the fringe and adornment of all that 
 made him great. It is difficult to imagine a grander 
 and more magnificent career ; and his name ranks 
 among the few chosen examples of human achievement. 
 And yet it was not only an unhappy life ; it was a poor 
 life. We expect that such an overwhelming weight of 
 glory should be borne up by a character corresponding 
 to it in strength and nobleness. But that is not what 
 we find. No one ever had a greater idea of what he 
 was made for, or was fired with a greater desire to 
 devote himself to it. He was all this. And yet being 
 all this, seeing deep into man's worth, his capacities, his 
 greatness, his weakness, his sins, he was not true to 
 what he knew. He cringed to such a man as Bucking- 
 ham. He sold himself to the corrupt and ignominious 
 Government of James I. He was willing to be employed 
 to hunt to death a friend like Essex, guilty, deeply 
 guilty to the State, but to Bacon the most loving and 
 generous of benefactors. With his eyes open he gave him- 
 self up without resistance to a system unworthy of him ; 
 he would not see what was evil in it, and chose to call its 
 evil good ; and he was its first and most signal victim. 
 
 Bacon has been judged with merciless severity. But 
 he has also been defended by an advocate whose name 
 alone is almost a guarantee for the justness of the cause 
 which he takes up, and the innocency of the client for 
 whom he argues. Mr. Spedding devoted nearly a life- 
 time and all the resources of a fine intellect and an 
 earnest conviction to make us revere as well as admire
 
 i.] EARLY LIFE. 3 
 
 Eacon. But it is vain. It is vain to fight against the 
 facts of his life : his words, his letters. " Men are 
 made up," says a keen observer, " of professions, gifts 
 and talents; and also of themselves." 1 With all his 
 greatness, his splendid genius, his magnificent ideas, his 
 enthusiasm for truth, his passion to be the benefactor 
 of his kind, with all the charm that made him loved by 
 good and worthy friends, amiable, courteous, patient, 
 delightful as a companion, ready to take any trouble, 
 there was in Bacon's "self" a deep and fatal flaw. He 
 was a pleaser of men. There was in him that subtle 
 fault, noted and named both by philosophy and religion, 
 in the a/aeo-KOS of Aristotle, the avtfptoTra/Deo-KOs of St. 
 Paul, which is more common than it is pleasant to think, 
 even in good people, but which if it becomes dominant 
 in a character is ruinous to truth and power. He was 
 one of the men, there are many of them, who are unable 
 to release their imagination from the impression of 
 present and immediate power, face to face with them- 
 selves. It seems as if he carried into conduct the lead- 
 ing rule of his philosophy of nature, parendo vincttur. 
 In both worlds, moral and physical, he felt himself 
 encompassed by vast forces, irresistible by direct opposi- 
 tion. Men whom he wanted to bring round to his 
 purposes were as strange, as refractory, as obstinate, 
 as impenetrable as the phenomena of the natural world. 
 It was no use attacking in front and by a direct trial of 
 strength people like Elizabeth or Cecil or James : he 
 might as well think of forcing some natural power in 
 defiance of natural law. The first word of his teaching 
 about nature is that she must be won by observation of 
 
 1 Dr. Mozley.
 
 4 BACON. [CHAP. 
 
 her tendencies and demands ; the same radical disposi- 
 tion of temper reveals itself in his dealings with men ; 
 they, too, must be won by yielding to them, by adapting 
 himself to their moods and ends ; by spying into the 
 drift of their humour, by subtly and pliantly falling in 
 with it, by circuitous and indirect processes, the fruit 
 of vigilance and patient thought. He thought to direct, 
 while submitting apparently to be directed. But he 
 mistook his strength. Nature and man are different 
 powers and under different laws. He chose to please 
 man, and not to follow what his soul must have told 
 him was the better way. He wanted, in his dealings 
 with men, that sincerity on which he insisted so strongly 
 in his dealings with nature and knowledge. And the 
 ruin of a great life was the consequence. 
 
 Francis Bacon was born in London on the 22d of 
 January 1 5|^, three years before Galileo. He was born 
 at York House, in the Strand; the house which, though 
 it belonged to the Archbishops of York, had been lately 
 tenanted by Lord Keepers and Lord Chancellors, in 
 which Bacon himself afterwards lived as Lord Chancellor, 
 and which passed after his fall into the hands of the 
 Duke of Buckingham, who has left his mark in the 
 Water Gate which is now seen, far from the river, in the 
 garden of the Thames Embankment. His father was 
 Sir Nicholas Bacon, Elizabeth's first Lord Keeper, the 
 fragment of whose effigy in the Crypt of St. Paul's is 
 one of the few relics of the old Cathedral before the fire. 
 His uncle by marriage was that William Cecil who was 
 to be Lord Burghley. His mother, the sister of Lady 
 Cecil, was one of the daughters of Sir Antony Cook, a 
 person deep in the confidence of the reforming party,
 
 i.] EARLY LIFE. 5 
 
 who had been tutor of Edward VI. She was a remark- 
 able woman, highly accomplished after the fashion of 
 the ladies of her party, and as would become her father's 
 daughter and the austere and laborious family to which 
 she belonged. She was "exquisitely skilled in the 
 Greek and Latin tongues ;" she was passionately religious 
 according to the uncompromising religion which the 
 exiles had brought back with them from Geneva, Strass- 
 burg, and Zurich, and which saw in Calvin's theology a 
 solution of all the difficulties, and in his discipline a 
 remedy for all the evils, of mankind. This means that 
 his boyhood from the first was passed among the high 
 places of the world at one of the greatest crises of 
 English history in the very centre and focus of its 
 agitations. He was brought up among the chiefs and 
 leaders of the rising religion, in the houses of the greatest 
 and most powerful persons of the State, and naturally, as 
 their child, at times in the Court of the Queen, who 
 joked with him, and called him " her young Lord 
 Keeper." It means also that the religious atmosphere 
 in which he was brought up was that of the nascent 
 and aggressive Puritanism, which was not satisfied with 
 the compromises of the Elizabethan Reformation, and 
 which saw in the moral poverty and incapacity of many 
 of its chiefs a proof against the great traditional system 
 of the Church which Elizabeth was loath to part with, 
 and which, in spite of all its present and inevit- 
 able shortcomings, her political sagacity taught her to 
 reverence and trust. 
 
 At the age of twelve he was sent to Cambridge, and 
 put under Whitgift at Trinity. It is a question which 
 recurs continually to readers about those times and their
 
 6 BACON. [CHAP. 
 
 precocious boys, what boys were then 1 ? For whatever 
 was the learning of the universities, these boys took 
 their place with men and consorted with them, sharing 
 such knowledge as men had, and performing exercises 
 and hearing lectures according to the standard of men. 
 Grotius at eleven was the pupil and companion of 
 Scaliger and the learned band of Leyden; at fourteen 
 he was part of the company which went with the 
 ambassadors of the States -General to Henry IV. ; at 
 sixteen, he was called to the bar, he published an out- 
 of - the - way Latin writer, Martianus Capella, with a 
 learned commentary, and he was the correspondent of 
 De Thou. When Bacon was hardly sixteen he was 
 admitted to the Society of " Ancients " of Gray's Inn, 
 and he went in the household of Sir Amyas Paulet, the 
 Queen's Ambassador, to France. He thus spent two 
 years in France, not in Paris alone, but *at Blois, Tours, 
 and Poitiers. If this was precocious, there is no indica- 
 tion that it was thought precocious. It only meant that 
 clever and promising boys were earlier associated with 
 men in important business than is customary now. The 
 old and the young heads began to work together sooner. 
 Perhaps they felt that there was less time to spare. 
 In spite of instances of longevity, life was shorter for 
 the average of busy men, for the conditions of life were 
 worse. 
 
 Two recollections only have been preserved of his 
 early years. One is that, as he told his chaplain, Dr. 
 Rawley, late in life, he had discovered, as far back as 
 his Cambridge days, the " unfruitfulness " of Aristotle's 
 method. It is easy to make too much of this. It is 
 not uncommon for undergraduates to criticise their text-
 
 i.] EARLY LIFE. 7 
 
 books : it was the fashion with clever men, as, for 
 instance, Montaigne, to talk against Aristotle without 
 knowing anything about him : it is not uncommon for 
 men who have worked out a great idea to find traces of 
 it, on precarious grounds, in their boyish thinking. Still, 
 it is worth noting that Bacon himself believed that his 
 fundamental quarrel with Aristotle had begun with the 
 first efforts of thought, and that this is the one recollec- 
 tion remaining of his early tendency in speculation. 
 The other is more trustworthy, and exhibits that in- 
 ventiveness which was characteristic of his mind. He 
 tells us in the De Augmentis that when he was in France 
 he occupied himself with devising an improved system 
 of cypher -writing a thing of daily and indispensable 
 use for rival statesmen and rival intriguers. But the 
 investigation, with its call on the calculating and com- 
 bining faculties, would also interest him, as an example 
 of the discovery of new powers by the human mind. 
 
 In the beginning of 1579 Bacon, at eighteen, was 
 called home by his father's death. This was a great 
 blow to his prospects. His father had not accom- 
 plished what he had intended for him, and Francis 
 Bacon was left with only a younger son's "narrow 
 portion." What was worse, he lost one whose credit 
 would have served him in high places. He entered 
 on life, not as he might have expected, independent 
 and with court favour on his side, but with his very 
 livelihood to gain a competitor at the bottom of 
 the ladder for patronage and countenance. This great 
 change in his fortunes told very unfavourably on his 
 happiness, his usefulness, and, it must be added, on his 
 character. He accepted it, indeed, manfully, and at
 
 8 BACON. [CHAP. 
 
 once threw himself into the study of the law as the 
 profession by which he was to live. But the laAv, 
 though it was the only path open to him, was not the 
 one which suited his genius, or his object in life. To 
 the last he worked hard and faithfully, but with doubt- 
 ful reputation as to his success, and certainly against 
 the grain. And this was not the worst. To make up 
 for the loss of that start in life of which his father's 
 untimely death had deprived him, he became, for almost 
 the rest of his life, the most importunate and most 
 untiring of suitors. 
 
 In 1579 or 1580 Bacon took up his abode at 
 Gray's Inn, which for a long time was his home. He 
 went through the various steps of his profession. He 
 began, what he never discontinued, his earnest and 
 humble appeals to his relative the great Lord Burghley, 
 to employ him in the Queen's service, or to put him in 
 some place of independence : through Lord Burghley's 
 favour he seems to have been pushed on at his Inn, 
 where, in 1586, he was a Bencher; and in 1584 he came 
 into Parliament for Melcombe Eegis. He took some 
 small part in Parliament : but the only record of his 
 speeches is contained in a surly note of Recorder Fleet- 
 wood, who writes as an old member might do of a young 
 one talking nonsense. He sat again for Liverpool in 
 the year of the Armada (1588), and his name begins to 
 appear in the proceedings. These early years, we knoAv, 
 were busy ones. In them Bacon laid the foundation of 
 lus observations and judgments on men and affairs ; and 
 in them the great purpose and work of his life was con- 
 ceived and shaped. But they are more obscure years 
 than might have been expected in the case of a man of
 
 i.] EARLY LIFE. 9 
 
 Bacon's genius and family, and of such eager and un- 
 concealed desire to rise and be at work. No doubt he 
 was often pinched in his means ; his health was weak, 
 and he was delicate and fastidious in his care of it: 
 plunged in work, he lived very much as a recluse in his 
 chambers, and was thought to be reserved, and what 
 those who disliked him called arrogant. But Bacon was 
 ambitious ambitious, in the first place, of the Queen's 
 notice and favour. He was versatile, brilliant, courtly, 
 besides being his father's son; and considering how 
 rapidly bold and brilliant men were able to push their 
 way and take the Queen's favour by storm, it seems 
 strange that Bacon should have remained fixedly in the 
 shade. Something must have kept him back Burghley 
 was not the man to neglect a useful instrument with 
 such good will to serve him. But all that Mr. Spedding's 
 industry and profound interest in the subject has brought 
 together throws but an uncertain light on Bacon's long 
 disappointment. Was it the rooted misgiving of a man 
 of affairs like Burghley at that passionate contempt of 
 all existing knowledge and that undoubting confidence 
 in his own power to make men know, as they never had 
 known, which Bacon was even now professing ? Or was 
 it something soft and over-obsequious in character which 
 made the uncle, who knew well what men he wanted, 
 disinclined to encourage and employ the nephew? 
 Was Francis not hard enough, not narrow enough, too 
 full of ideas, too much alive to the shakiness of current 
 doctrines and arguments on religion and policy? Was 
 he too open to new impressions, made by objections or 
 rival views 1 Or did he show signs of wanting backbone 
 to stand amid difficulties and threatening prospects 1
 
 10 BACON. [CHAP. 
 
 Did Burghley see something in him of the pliability 
 which he could remember as the serviceable quality of 
 his own young days which suited those days of rapid 
 change, but not days when change was supposed to be 
 over, and when the qualities which were wanted were 
 those which resist and defy it 1 The only thing that is 
 clear is that Burghley, in spite of Bacon's continual 
 applications, abstained to the last from advancing his 
 fortunes. 
 
 Whether employed by government or not, Bacon 
 began at this time to prepare those carefully-written 
 papers on the public affairs of the day, of which he has 
 left a good many. In our day they would have been 
 pamphlets or magazine articles. In his they were circu- 
 lated in manuscript, and only occasionally printed. The 
 first of any importance is a letter of advice to the Queen, 
 about the year 1585, on the policy to be followed with 
 a view to keeping in check the Roman Catholic interest 
 at home and abroad. It is calm, sagacious, and, according 
 to the fashion of the age, slightly Machiavellian. But the 
 first subject on which Bacon exhibited his characteristic 
 qualities, his appreciation of facts, his balance of thought, 
 and his power, when not personally committed, of stand- 
 ing aloof from the ordinary prejudices and assumptions 
 of men round him, was the religious condition and pros- 
 pects of the English Church. Bacon had been brought 
 up in a Puritan household of the straitest sect. His 
 mother was an earnest, severe, and intolerant Calvinist, 
 deep in the interests and cause of her party, bitterly re- 
 senting all attempts to keep in order its pretensions. 
 She was a masterful woman, claiming to meddle with her 
 brother-in-law's policy, and though a most affectionate
 
 i.] EAKLY LIFE. 11 
 
 mother she was a woman of violent and ungovernable 
 temper. Her letters to her son Antony, whom she loved 
 passionately, but whom she suspected of keeping dan- 
 gerous and papistical company, show us the imperious 
 spirit in which she claimed to interfere with her sons ; 
 and they show also that in Francis she did not find 
 all the deference which she looked for. Eecommend- 
 ing Antony to frequent "the religious exercises of 
 the sincerer sort," she warns him not to follow his 
 brother's advice or example. Antony was advised to 
 use prayer twice a day with his servants. "Your 
 brother," she adds, " is too negligent therein." She is 
 anxious about Antony's health, and warns him not to 
 fall into his brother's ill-ordered habits ; " I verily think 
 your brother's weak stomach to digest hath been much 
 caused and confirmed by untimely going to bed, and then 
 musing nescio quid when he should sleep, and then in con- 
 sequent by late rising and long lying in bed ; whereby 
 his men are made slothful and himself continueth 
 sickly. But my sons haste not to hearken to their 
 mother's good counsel in time to prevent." It seems 
 clear that Francis Bacon had shown his mother that not 
 only in the care of his health, but in his judgment on 
 religious matters, he meant to go his own way. Mr. 
 Spedding thinks that she must have had much influence 
 on him : it seems more likely that he resented her inter- 
 ference, and that the hard and narrow arrogance which 
 she read into the Gospel produced in him a strong reac- 
 tion. Bacon was obsequious to the tyranny of power, but 
 he was never inclined to bow to the tyranny of opinion ; 
 and the tyranny of Puritan infallibility was the last 
 tiling to which he was likely to submit. His mother
 
 12 BACON. - [CHAP. 
 
 would have wished him to sit under Cartwright and 
 Travers. The friend of his choice was the Anglican 
 preacher, Dr. Andrewes, to whom he submitted all his 
 works, and whom he called his "inquisitor general;" 
 and he was proud to sign himself the pupil of Whitgift, 
 and to write for him the archbishop of whom Lady 
 Bacon wrote to her son Antony, veiling the dangerous 
 sentiment in Greek, " that he was the ruin of the church, 
 for he loved his own glory more than Christ's." 
 
 Certainly, in the remarkable paper on Controversies in 
 tlie Church (1589), Bacon had ceased to feel or to speak as 
 a Puritan. The paper is an attempt to compose the con- 
 troversy by pointing out the mistakes in judgment, in 
 temper, and in method on both sides. It is entirely unlike 
 what a Puritan would have written : it is too moderate, 
 too tolerant, too neutral, though like most essays of 
 conciliation it is open to the rejoinder from both sides 
 certainly from the Puritan that it begs the question by 
 assuming the unimportance of the matters about which 
 each contended with so much zeal. It is the confirmation, 
 but also the complement, and in some ways the cor- 
 rection of Hooker's contemporary view of the quarrel 
 which was threatening the life of the English Church, 
 and not even Hooker could be so comprehensive and so 
 fair. For Hooker had to defend much that was inde- 
 fensible : he had to defend a great traditional system, 
 just convulsed by a most tremendous shock a shock 
 and alteration, as Bacon says, "the greatest and most 
 dangerous that can be in a State," in which old clues and 
 habits and rules were confused and all but lost ; in which 
 a frightful amount of personal incapacity and worthless- 
 ness hud, from sheer want of men. risen to the high
 
 i.] EARLY LIFE. 13 
 
 places of the Church ; and in which force and violence, 
 sometimes of the most hateful kind, had come to be 
 accepted as ordinary instruments in the government of 
 souls. Hooker felt too strongly the unfairness, the folly, 
 the intolerant aggressiveness, the malignity of his 
 opponents, he was too much alive to the wrongs in- 
 flicted by them on his own side, and to the incredible 
 absurdity of their arguments, to do justice to what was 
 only too real in the charges and complaints of those 
 opponents. But Bacon came from the very heart of the 
 Puritan camp. He had seen the inside of Puritanism 
 its best as well as its worst side. He witnesses to the 
 humility, the conscientiousness, the labour, the learning, 
 the hatred of sin and wrong, of many of its preachers. 
 He had heard, and heard with sympathy, all that could 
 be urged against the bishops' administration, and against 
 a system of legal oppression in the name of the Church. 
 Where religious elements were so confusedly mixed, and 
 whore each side had apparently so much to urge on behalf 
 of its claims, he saw the deep mistake of loftily ignoring 
 facts, and of want of patience and forbearance with those 
 who were scandalised at abuses, while the abuses, in some 
 cases monstrous, were tolerated and turned to profit. 
 Towards the bishops and their policy, though his lan- 
 guage is very respectful, for the government was impli- 
 cated, he is very severe. They punish and restrain, but 
 they do not themselves mend their ways or supply what 
 was wanting ; and theirs are " iiijurice potentiomm" "in- 
 juries come from them that have the upper hand." But 
 Hooker himself did not put his finger more truly and more 
 surely on the real mischief of the Puritan movement: 
 on the immense outbreak in it of unreasonable party
 
 1 4 BACON. [CHAP. 
 
 spirit and visible personal ambition, "these are the 
 true successors of Diotrephes and not my lord bishops : " 
 
 on the gradual development of the Puritan theory till 
 
 it came at last to claim a supremacy as unquestionable 
 and intolerant as that of the Papacy : on the servile 
 affectation of the fashions of Geneva and Strassburg : on 
 the poverty and foolishness of much of the Puritan teach- 
 ing its inability to satisfy the great questions which it 
 raised in the soul, its unworthy dealing with scripture 
 "naked examples, conceited inferences, and forced 
 allusions, which mine into all certainty of religion "- 
 " the word, the bread of life, they toss up and down, 
 they break it not:" on their undervaluing of moral worth, 
 if it did not speak in their phraseology " as they cen- 
 sure virtuous men by the names of civil and moral, so do 
 they censure men truly and godly wise, who see into the 
 vanity of their assertions, by the name of politiques ; 
 saying that their wisdom is but carnal and savouring of 
 man's brain." Bacon saw that the Puritans were aiming 
 at a tyranny, which, if they established it, would be more 
 comprehensive, more searching, and more cruel than that 
 of the older systems ; but he thought it a remote and 
 improbable danger, and that they might safely be tole- 
 rated for the work they did in education and preaching, 
 "because the work of exhortation doth' chiefly rest upon 
 these men, and they have a zeal and hate of sin." But he 
 ends by warning them lest " that be true which one of 
 their adversaries said, that they have but tivo small wants 
 knowledge and love." One complaint that he makes of 
 them is a curious instance of the changes of feeling, or at 
 least of language, on moral subjects. He accuses them 
 of "having pronounced generally, and without difference,
 
 i.] EARLY LIFE. 15 
 
 all untruths unlawful," forgetful of the Egyptian mid- 
 wives and Rahab, and Solomon, and even of Him " who, 
 the more to touch the hearts of the disciples with a holy 
 dalliance, made as though he would have passed Em- 
 maus." He is thinking of their failure to apply a 
 principle which was characteristic of his mode of 
 thought, that even a statement about a virtue like veracity 
 " hath limit as all things else have : " but it is odd to 
 find Bacon bringing against the Puritans the converse of 
 the charge which his age, and Pascal afterwards, brought 
 against the Jesuits. The essay, besides being a picture 
 of the times as regards religion, is an example of what 
 was to be Bacon's characteristic strength and weakness : 
 his strength, in lifting up a subject, which had been 
 degraded by mean and wrangling disputations, into a 
 higher and larger light, and bringing to bear on it great 
 principles and the results of the best human wisdom and 
 experience, expressed in weighty and pregnant maxims ; 
 his weakness, in forgetting, as, in spite of his philosophy, 
 he so often did, that the grandest major premisses need 
 well-proved and ascertained minors, and that the enuncia- 
 tion of a principle is not the same thing as the appli- 
 cation of it. Doubtless there is truth in his closing 
 words ; but each party would have made the comment 
 that what he had to prove, and had not proved, was that 
 by following his counsel they would "love the whole 
 better than a part." 
 
 "Let them not fear . . . the fond calumny of neutrality : but 
 let them know that is true which is said by a wise man, that 
 neuters in contentions are either better or worse than either side. 
 These tilings have I in all sincerity and simplicity set down touch- 
 ing t lie controversies which now trouble the Church of England: 
 and that without all art and insinuation, and therefore not like to
 
 16 BACON. [CHAP. 
 
 be grateful to either part. Notwithstanding, I trust what has been 
 said shall find a correspondence in their minds which are not em- 
 barked in partiality, and which love the whole better than apart." 
 
 Up to this time, though Bacon had showed himself 
 capable of taking a broad and calm view of questions 
 which it was the fashion among good men, and men 
 who were in possession of the popular ear, to treat with 
 narrowness and heat, there was nothing to disclose his 
 deeper thoughts nothing foreshadowed the purpose 
 which was to fill his life. He had, indeed, at the age of 
 twenty -five, written a " youthful " philosophical essay, to 
 which he gave the pompous title " Temporis Partus Maxi- 
 mus" " the Greatest Birth of Time." But he was thirty- 
 one when we first find an indication of the great idea and 
 the great projects which were to make his name famous. 
 This indication is contained in an earnest appeal to Lord 
 Burghley for some help which should not be illusory. 
 Its words are distinct and far-reaching ; and they are the 
 first words from him which tell us what was in his heart. 
 The letter has the interest to us of the first announce- 
 ment of a promise which, to ordinary minds, must have 
 appeared visionary and extravagant, but which was so 
 splendidly fulfilled ; the first distant sight of that sea of 
 knowledge which henceforth was opened to mankind, 
 but on which no man, as he thought, had yet entered. 
 It contains the famous avowal " / have taken all know- 
 ledge to be my province " made in the confidence born of 
 long and silent meditations and questionings, but made 
 in a simple good faith which is as far as possible from 
 vain boastfulness. 
 
 " MY LORD With as much confidence as mine own honest and 
 faithful devotion unto your service and your honourable correspon-
 
 i.] EARLY LIFE. 17 
 
 donee unto me and my poor estate can breed ill a man, do I com- 
 mend myself unto your Lordship. I wax now somewhat ancient ; 
 one and thirty years is a great deal of sand in the hour glass. My 
 health, I thank God, I find confirmed ; and I do not fear that action 
 shall impair it, because I account my ordinary course of study 
 and meditation to be more painful than most parts of action are. 
 I ever bare a mind (in some middle place that I could discharge) to 
 serve her Majesty, not as a man born under Sol, that loveth honour ; 
 nor under Jupiter, that loveth business (for the contemplative 
 planet carrieth me away wholly) ; but as a man born under an 
 excellent sovereign, that deserveth the dedication of all men's 
 abilities. Besides, I do not find in myself so much self-love, but 
 that the greater parts of my thoughts are to deserve well (if I be 
 able) of my friends, and namely of your Lordship ; who, being the 
 Atlas of this commonwealth, the honour of my house, and the 
 second founder of my poor estate, I am tied by all duties, both of 
 a good patriot and of an unworthy kinsman, and of an obliged 
 servant, to employ whatsoever I am to do you service. Again, tho 
 meanness of my estate doth somewhat move me : for, though I 
 cannot accuse myself that I am either prodigal or slothful, yet my 
 health is not to spend, nor my course to get. Lastly, I confess 
 that I have as vast contemplative ends, as I have moderate civil 
 ends : for I have taken all knowledge to be my province ; and if 
 I could purge it of two sorts of rovers, whereof the one with frivo- 
 lous disputations, confutations, and verbosities, tho other with 
 blind experiments and auricular traditions and impostures, hath 
 committed so many spoils, I hope I should bring in industrious 
 observations, grounded conclusions, and profitable inventions and 
 discoveries ; the best state of that province. This, whether it bo 
 curiosity or vain glory, or nature, or (if one take it favourably), 
 philanthropia, is so fixed in my mind as it cannot be removed. 
 And I do easily see, that place of any reasonable countenance doth 
 bring commandment of more wits than of a man's own ; which is the 
 thing I greatly affect. And for your Lordship, perhaps you shall 
 not find more strength and less encounter in any other. And if 
 your Lordship shall find now, or at any time, that I do seek or affect 
 any place whereunto any that is nearer unto your Lordship shall 
 he concurrent, say then that I am a most dishonest man. And if 
 your Lordship will not carry me on, I will not do as Anaxagoras
 
 18 BACON. [CHAP. 
 
 did, who reduced himself with contemplation unto voluntary 
 poverty, but this I will do I will sell the inheritance I have, 
 and purchase some lease of quick revenue, or some office of gain 
 that shall be executed by deputy, and so give over all care of 
 service, and become some sorry book-maker, or a true pioner in that 
 mine of truth, which (he said) lay so deep. This which I have 
 writ unto your Lordship is rather thoughts than words, being set 
 down without all art, disguising, or reservation. Wherein I have 
 done honour both to your Lordship's wisdom, in judging that that 
 will be best believed of your Lordship which is truest, and to your 
 Lordship's good nature, in retaining nothing from you. And even so 
 I wish your Lordship all happiness, and to myself means and 
 occasions to be added to my faithful desire to do you service. From 
 my lodgings at Gray's Inn." 
 
 This letter, to his unsympathetic and' suspicious, but 
 probably not unfriendly relative, is the key to Bacon's 
 plan of life ; which, with numberless changes of form, 
 he followed to the end. That is, a profession, steadily, 
 seriously, and laboriously kept to, in order to provide 
 the means of living ; and beyond that, as the ultimate 
 and real end of his life, the pursuit, in a way un- 
 attempted before, of all possible human knowledge, and 
 of the methods to improve it and make it sure and fruit- 
 ful. And so his life was carried out. On the one hand, 
 it was a continual and pertinacious seeking after govern- 
 ment employment, which could give credit to his name 
 and put money in his pocket attempts by general 
 behaviour, by professional services when the occasion 
 offered, by putting his original and fertile pen at the 
 service of the government, to win confidence, and to 
 overcome the manifest indisposition of those in power 
 to think that a man who cherished the chimera of 
 universal knowledge could be a useful public servant. 
 On the other hand, all the while, in the crises of his
 
 i.] EARLY LIFE. 19 
 
 disappointment or triumph, the one great subject lay 
 next his heart, filling him with fire and passion 
 how really to know, and to teach men to know in- 
 deed, and to use their knowledge so as to command 
 nature ; the great hope to be the reformer and re- 
 storer of knowledge in a more wonderful sense than the 
 world had yet seen in the reformation of learning and 
 religion, and in the spread of civilised order in the great 
 states of the Renaissance time. To this he gave his 
 best and deepest thoughts ; for this he was for ever 
 accumulating, and for ever rearranging and reshaping 
 those masses of observation and inquiry and invention 
 and mental criticism which were to come in as parts 
 of the great design which he had seen in the visions 
 of his imagination, and of which at last he was only 
 able to leave noble fragments, incomplete after number- 
 less recastings. This was not indeed the only, but it 
 was the predominant and governing interest of his life. 
 Whether as solicitor for Court favour or public office ; 
 whether drudging at the work of the law, or manag- 
 ing State prosecutions ; whether writing an oppor- 
 tune pamphlet against Spain or Father Parsons, or in- 
 venting a "device " for his Inn or for Lord Essex to give 
 amusement to Queen Elizabeth ; whether fulfilling his 
 duties as member of Parliament or rising step by step 
 to the highest places in the Council Board and the State ; 
 whether in the pride of success or under the amazement 
 of unexpected and irreparable overthrow, while it 
 seemed as if he was only measuring his strength against 
 the rival ambitions of the day, in the same spirit and 
 with the same object as his competitors, the true motive 
 of all his eagerness and all his labours was not theirs.
 
 20 BACON. [CHAP. 
 
 He wanted to be powerful, and still more to be rich : but 
 he wanted to be so, because without power and without 
 money he could not follow what was to him the only 
 thing worth following on earth a real knowledge of 
 the amazing and hitherto almost unknown world in 
 which he had to live. Bacon, to us, at least, at this 
 distance, who can only judge him from partial and im- 
 perfect knowledge, often seems to fall far short of what 
 a man should be. He was not one of the high-minded 
 and proud searchers after knowledge and truth, like 
 Descartes, who were content to accept a frugal independ- 
 ence so that their time and their thoughts might be their 
 own. Bacon was a man of the world, and wished to live 
 in and with the world. He threatened sometimes retire- 
 ment, but never with any very serious intention. In the 
 Court was his element, and there Avere his hopes. 
 Often there seems little to distinguish him from the 
 ordinary place-hunters, obsequious and 'selfish, of every 
 age; little to distinguish him from the servile and in- 
 sincere flatterers, of whom he himself complains, who 
 crowded the antechambers of the great Queen, content to 
 submit with smiling face and thankful words to the inso- 
 lence of her waywardness and temper, in the hope, more 
 often disappointed than not, of hitting her taste on 
 some lucky occasion, and being rewarded for the accident 
 by a place of gain or honour. Bacon's history, as read 
 in his letters, is not an agreeable one ; after every 
 allowance made for the fashions of language, and the 
 necessities of a suitor, there is too much of insincere 
 profession of disinterestedness, too much of exaggerated 
 profession of admiration and devoted service, too much 
 of disparagement and insinuation against others, for a
 
 i.] EARLY LIFE. . 21 
 
 man who respected himself. He submitted too much to 
 the miserable conditions of rising which he found. But, 
 nevertheless it must be said that it was for no mean ob- 
 ject, for no mere private selfishness or vanity, that he en- 
 dured all this. He strove hard to be a great man and a 
 rich man. But it was that he might have his hands free 
 and strong and well furnished to carry forward the double 
 task of overthrowing ignorance and building up the new 
 and solid knowledge on which his heart was set : that 
 immense conquest of nature on behalf of man which he 
 believed to be possible, and of which he believed him- 
 self to have the key. 
 
 The letter to Lord Burghley did not help him much. 
 He received the reversion of a place, the Clerkship of the 
 Council, which did not become vacant for twenty years. 
 But these years of service declined and place withheld were 
 busy and useful ones. What he was most intent upon, and 
 what occupied his deepest and most serious thought, was 
 unknown to the world round him, and probably not very 
 intelligible to his few intimate friends, such as his brother 
 Antony and Dr. Andrewes. Meanwhile he placed his pen 
 at the disposal of the authorities, and though they regarded 
 him more as a man of study than of practice and experi- 
 ence, they were glad to make use of it. His versatile genius 
 found another employment. Besides his affluence in 
 topics, he had the liveliest fancy and most active imagina- 
 tion. But that he wanted the sense of poetic fitness and 
 melody, he might almost be supposed, with his reach and 
 play of thought, to have been capable, as is maintained 
 in some eccentric modern theories, of writing Shake- 
 speare's plays. No man ever had a more imaginative 
 power of illustration, drawn from the most remote and
 
 22 BACON. [CHAP. 
 
 most unlikely analogies ; analogies often of the quaintest 
 and most unexpected kind, but often also not only feli- 
 citous in application but profound and true. His powers 
 were early called upon for some of those sportive com- 
 positions in which that age delighted on occasions of 
 rejoicing or festival. Three of his contributions to these 
 " devices " have been preserved : two of them composed 
 in honour of the Queen, as " triumphs," offered by Lord 
 Essex, one probably in 1592 and another in 1595; a 
 third for a Gray's Inn revel in 1594. The "devices" 
 themselves were of the common type of the time, ex- 
 travagant, odd, full of awkward allegory and absurd 
 flattery, and running to a prolixity which must make 
 modern lovers of amusement wonder at the patience of 
 those days ; but the " discourses " furnished by Bacon 
 are full of fine observation and brilliant thought and wit 
 and happy illustration, which, fantastic as the general 
 conception is, raises them far above the level of such 
 fugitive trifles. 
 
 Among the fragmentary papers belonging to this time 
 which have come down, not the least curious are those 
 which throw light on his manner of working. While he 
 was following out the great ideas which were to be the 
 basis of his philosophy, he was as busy and as painstaking 
 in fashioning the instruments by which they were to be 
 expressed ; and in these papers we have the records and 
 specimens of this preparation. He was a great collector 
 of sentences, proverbs, quotations, sayings, illustrations, 
 anecdotes, and he seems to have read sometimes, simply 
 to gather phrases and apt words. He jots down at 
 random any good and pointed remark which comes into 
 his thought or his memory ; at another time he groups
 
 i.] EARLY LIFE. 23 
 
 a set of stock quotations with a special drift, bearing 
 on some subject, such as the faults of universities or 
 the habits of lawyers. Nothing is too minute for his 
 notice. He brings together in great profusion mere 
 forms, varied turns of expression, heads and tails of 
 clauses and paragraphs, transitions, connections ; he notes 
 down fashions of compliment, of excuse or repartee, 
 even morning and evening salutations ; he records 
 neat and convenient opening and concluding sentences, 
 ways of speaking more adapted than others to give a 
 special colour or direction to what the speaker or writer 
 has to say all that hook-and-eye work, which seems so 
 trivial and passes so unnoticed as a matter of course, and 
 which yet is often hard to reach, and which makes all the 
 difference between tameness and liveliness, between clear- 
 ness and obscurity all the difference, not merely to the 
 ease and naturalness, but often to the logical force of 
 speech. These collections it was his way to sift and tran- 
 scribe again and again, adding as well as omitting. From 
 one of these, belonging to 1594 and the following years, 
 the Promus of Formularies and Elegancies, Mr. Spedding has 
 given curious extracts ; and the whole collection has been 
 recently edited by Mrs. Henry Pott. Thus it was that he 
 prepared himself for what, as we read it, or as his audi- 
 ence heard it, seems the suggestion or recollection of the 
 moment. Bacon was always, much more careful of the 
 value or aptness of a thought than of its appearing new 
 and original. Of all great writers he least minds repeat- 
 ing himself, perhaps in the very same words ; so that a 
 simile, an illustration, a quotation pleases him, he returns 
 to it he is never tired of it ; it obviously gives him satis- 
 faction to introduce it again and again. These collections
 
 24 BACON. [CHAP. 
 
 of odds and ends illustrate another point in his literary 
 habits. His was a mind keenly sensitive to all analogies 
 and affinities, impatient of a strict and rigid logical groove, 
 but spreading as it were tentacles on all sides in quest of 
 chance prey, and quickened into a whole system of imagi- 
 nation by the electric quiver imparted by a single word, 
 at once the key and symbol of the thinking it had led to. 
 And so he puts down word or phrase, so enigmatical to us 
 who see it by itself, which to him woiild wake up a whole 
 train of ideas, as he remembered the occasion of it how 
 at a certain time and place this word set the whole moving, 
 seemed to breathe new life and shed new light, and has 
 remained the token, meaningless in itself, which reminds 
 him of so much. 
 
 When we come to read his letters, his speeches, his 
 works, we come continually on the results and proofs of 
 this early labour. Some of the most memorable and 
 familiar passages of his writings are to be traced from 
 the storehouses which he filled in these years of prepara- 
 tion. An example of this correspondence between the 
 note-book and the composition is to be seen in a paper 
 belonging to this period, written apparently to form part 
 of a masque, or as he himself calls it, a " Conference of 
 Pleasure," and entitled the Praise of Knowledge. It is 
 interesting because it is the first draught which we have 
 from him of some of the leading ideas and most charac- 
 teristic language about the defects and the improvement 
 of knowledge, which were afterwards embodied in the 
 Advancement and the Novum Organum. The whole spirit 
 and aim of his great reform, is summed up in the follow- 
 ing fine passage : 
 
 "Facility to believe, impatience to doubt, temerity to assever,
 
 i.J EARLY LIFE. 25 
 
 glory to know, doubt to contradict, end to gain, sloth to search, 
 seeking tilings in words, resting in a part of nature, these and the 
 like have been the things which have forbidden the happy match 
 between the mind of man and the nature of things, and in place 
 thereof have married it to vain notions and blind experiments. . . . 
 Therefore, no doubt, the sovereignty of man lieth hid in knowledge: 
 win-rein many things are reserved which kings with their treasures 
 cannot buy nor with their force command ; their spials and intelli- 
 gencers can give no news of them ; their seamen and discoverers 
 cannot sail where they grow. Now we govern nature in opinions, 
 but we are thrall nnto her in necessity ; but if we could be led by 
 her in invention, we should command her in action." 
 
 To the same occasion as the discourse on the Praise 
 of Knowledge belongs, also, one in Praise of the Queen. 
 As one is an early specimen of his manner of writing on 
 philosophy, so this is a specimen of what was equally 
 characteristic of him his political and historical writing. 
 It is, in form, necessarily a panegyric, as high-flown and 
 adulatory as such performances in those days were 
 hound to he. But it is not only flattery. It fixes 
 with true discrimination on the points in Elizabeth's 
 character and reign which were really subjects of admira- 
 tion and homage. Thus of her unquailing spirit at the 
 time of the Spanish invasion : 
 
 "Lastly, see a Queen, that when her realm was to have been 
 invaded by an army the preparation whereof was like the travail 
 of an elephant, the provisions infinite, the setting forth whereof 
 was the terror and wonder of Europe ; it was not seen that her 
 cheer, her fashion, her ordinary manner, was anything altered ; 
 not a cloud of that storm did appear in that countenance wherein 
 peace doth ever shine ; but with excellent assurance and advised 
 security she inspired her council, animated her nobility, re- 
 doubled the courage of her people ; still having this noble 
 apprehension, not only that she would communicate her for- 
 tune with them, but that it was she that would protect them, and
 
 26 BACON. [CHAP. 
 
 not they her ; which she testified by no less demonstration than 
 her presence in camp. Therefore that magnanimity that neither 
 feareth greatness of alteration, nor the vows of conspirators, nor 
 the power of the enemy, is more than heroical. " 
 
 These papers, though he put his best workmanship 
 into them, as he invariably did with whatever he 
 touched, were of an ornamental kind. But he did more 
 serious work. In the year 1592 a pamphlet had been 
 published on the Continent in Latin and English, Ee- 
 sponsio ad Edidum Regince Anglice, with reference to the 
 severe legislation which followed on the Armada, making 
 such charges against the Queen and the Government as it 
 was natural for the Roman Catholic party to make, and 
 making them with the utmost virulence and unscrupu- 
 lousness. It was supposed to be written by the ablest 
 of the Roman pamphleteers, Father Parsons. The 
 Government felt it to be a dangerous indictment ; and 
 Bacon was chosen to write the answer to it. He had 
 additional interest in the matter, for the pamphlet made 
 a special and bitter attack on Burghley, as the person 
 mainly responsible for the Queen's policy. Bacon's 
 reply is long and elaborate, taking up every charge, and 
 reviewing from his own point of view the whole course 
 of the struggle between the Queen and the supporters 
 of the Roman Catholic interest abroad and at home. It 
 cannot be considered an impartial review ; besides that 
 it was written to order, no man in England could then 
 write impartially in that quarrel; but it is not more 
 one-sided and uncandid than the pamphlet which it 
 answers, and Bacon is able to recriminate with effect, 
 and to show gross credulity and looseness of assertion 
 on the part of the Roman Catholic advocate. But reli-
 
 i.J EARLY LIFE. 27 
 
 gion had too much to do with the politics of both sides 
 for either to be able to come into the dispute with clean 
 hands : the Roman Catholics meant much more than 
 toleration, and the sanguinary punishments of the 
 English law against priests and Jesuits were edged 
 by something even keener than the fear of treason. 
 But the paper contains some large surveys of public 
 affairs, which probably no one at that time could write 
 but Bacon. Bacon never liked to waste anything good 
 which he had written; and much of what he had written 
 in the panegyric in Praise of the Queen is made use 
 of again, and transferred with little change to the pages 
 of the Observations on a Libel.
 
 CHAPTER II. 
 
 BACON AND ELIZABETH. 
 
 THE last decade of the century, and almost of Elizabeth's 
 reign (1590-1600), was an eventful one to Bacon's 
 fortunes. In it the vision of his great design disclosed 
 itself more and more to his imagination and hopes, and 
 with more and more irresistible fascination. In it he 
 made his first literary venture, the first edition of his 
 Essays (1597), ten in number, the first-fruits of his 
 early and ever watchful observation of men and affairs. 
 These years, too, saw his first steps in public life, the 
 first efforts to bring him into importance, the first great 
 trials and tests of his character. They saw the begin- 
 ning and they saw the end of his relations with the only 
 friend who, at that time, recognised his genius and his 
 purposes, certainly the only friend who ever pushed his 
 claims ; they saw the growth of a friendship which was 
 to have so tragical a close, and they saw the beginnings 
 and causes of a bitter personal rivalry which was to last 
 through life, and which was to be a potent element 
 hereafter in Bacon's ruin. The friend was the Earl of 
 Essex. The competitor was the ablest, and also the 
 most truculent and unscrupulous of English lawyers, 
 Edward Coke.
 
 CHAP. n.J 1JACON AND ELIZABETH. 29 
 
 AYhile Bacon, in the shade, had been laying the 
 foundations of his philosophy of nature, and vainly suing 
 for legal or political employment, another man had 
 been steadily rising in the Queen's favour and carrying 
 all before him at Court, Eobert Devereux, Lord Essex ; 
 and with Essex Bacon had formed an acquaintance which 
 had ripened into an intimate and affectionate friendship. 
 We commonly think of Essex as a vain and insolent 
 favourite, who did ill the greatest work given him to do 
 the reduction of Ireland; who did it ill from some un- 
 explained reason of spite and mischief ; and who, when 
 called to account for it, broke out into senseless and idle 
 rebellion. This was the end : but he was not always thus. 
 He began life with great gifts and noble ends : he was a 
 serious, modest, and large-minded student both of books 
 and things ; and he turned his studies to full account. 
 He had imagination and love of enterprise, which 
 gave him an insight into Bacon's ideas such as none of 
 Bacon's contemporaries had. He was a man of simple 
 and earnest religion; he sympathised most with the 
 Puritans, because they were serious and because they 
 were hardly used. Those who most condemn him 
 acknowledge his nobleness and generosity of nature. 
 Bacon in after days, when all was over between them, 
 spoke of him as a man always patkntissimus veri; "the 
 more plainly and frankly you shall deal with my lord," 
 he writes elsewhere, "not only in disclosing particulars, 
 but in giving him caveats and admonishing him of any 
 error which in this action he may commit (such is his 
 lordship's nature), the better he will take it." "He 
 must have seemed," says Mr. Spcdding, a little too 
 grandly, "in the eyes of Bacon like the hope of the
 
 30 BACON. [CHAP. 
 
 world." The two men, certainly, became warmly at- 
 tached. Their friendship came to be one of the closest 
 kind, full of mutual services, and of genuine affection 
 on both sides. It was not the relation of a great patron 
 and useful dependant ; it was, what might be expected 
 in the two men, that of affectionate equality. Each man 
 was equally capable of seeing what the other was, and 
 saw it. What Essex's feelings were towards Bacon the 
 results showed. Bacon, in after years, repeatedly claimed 
 to have devoted his whole time and labour to Essex's 
 service. Holding him, he says, to be " the fittest instru- 
 ment to do good to the State, I applied myself to him in 
 a manner which I think rarely happeueth among men ; 
 neglecting the Queen's service, mine own fortune, and, in 
 a sort, my vocation, I did nothing but advise and rumin- 
 ate with myself . . . anything that might concern his lord- 
 ship's honour, fortune, or service." The claim is far too 
 wide. The " Queen's service " had hardly as yet come 
 much in Bacon's way, and he never neglected it when it 
 did come, nor his own fortune or vocation : his letters 
 remain to attest his care in these respects. But, no 
 doubt, Bacon was then as ready to be of use to Essex, 
 the one man who seemed to understand and value him, 
 as Essex was desirous to be of use to Bacon. 
 
 And it seemed as if Essex would have the ability as 
 well as the wish. Essex was, without exception, the 
 most brilliant man who ever appeared at Elizabeth's 
 Court, and it seemed as if he were going to be the most 
 powerful. Leicester was dead. Burghley was growing 
 old, and indisposed for the adventures and levity which, 
 with all her grand power of ruling, Elizabeth loved. She 
 needed a favourite, and Essex was unfortunately marked
 
 ii.] BACON AND ELIZABETH. 31 
 
 out for what she wanted. He had Leicester's fascination 
 without his mean and cruel selfishness. He was as 
 generous, as gallant, as quick to descry all great things 
 in art and life, as Philip Sidney, with more vigour and 
 fitness for active life than Sidney. He had not Kaleigh's 
 sad, dark depths of thought, but he had a daring courage 
 equal to Raleigh's, without Raleigh's cynical contempt 
 for mercy and honour. He had every personal advan- 
 tage requisite for a time when intellect and ready wit, 
 and high -tempered valour, and personal beauty, and 
 skill in affairs, with equal skill in amusements, were ex- 
 pected to go together in the accomplished courtier. 
 And Essex was a man not merely to be courted and 
 admired, to shine and dazzle, but to be loved. Eliza- 
 beth, with her strange and perverse emotional constitu- 
 tion, loved him, if she ever loved any one. Every one 
 who served him. loved him : and he was as much as any 
 one could be in those days, a popular favourite. Under 
 better fortune he might have risen to a great height of 
 character : in Elizabeth's Court he was fated to be 
 ruined. 
 
 For in that Court all the qualities in him which needed 
 control received daily stimulus, and his ardour and 
 high-aiming temper turned into impatience and restless 
 irritability. He had a mistress who was at one time in 
 the humour to be treated as a tender woman, at another 
 as an outrageous flirt, at another as the haughtiest and 
 most imperious of queens : her mood varied, no one 
 could tell how, and it was most dangerous to mistake it. 
 It was part of her pleasure to find in her favourite a 
 spirit as high, a humour as contradictory and determined, 
 as her own : it was the charming contrast to the obsequi-
 
 32 BACON. [CHAP. 
 
 ousness or the prudence of the rest ; but no one could 
 be sure at what unlooked-for moment, and how fiercely, 
 she might resent in earnest a display of what she had 
 herself encouraged. Essex was ruined for all real great- 
 ness by having to suit himself to this bewildering and 
 most unwholesome and degrading waywardness. She 
 taught him to think himself irresistible in opinion and 
 in claims : she amused herself in teaching him how 
 completely he was mistaken. Alternately spoiled and 
 crossed, he learned to be exacting, unreasonable, absurd 
 in his pettish resentments or brooding sullenness. He 
 learned to think that she must be dealt with by the 
 same methods which she herself employed. The effect 
 was not produced in a moment ; it was the result of a 
 courtiership of sixteen years. But it ended in corrupting 
 a noble nature. Essex came to believe that she who 
 cowed others must be frightened herself : that the sting- 
 ing injustice which led a proud man to expect, only to 
 see how he would behave when refused, deserved to be 
 brought to reason by a counter-buffet as rough as her 
 own insolent caprice. He drifted into discontent, into 
 disaffection, into neglect of duty, into questionable 
 schemings for the future of a reign that must shortly 
 end, into criminal methods of guarding himself, of 
 humbling his rivals and regaining influence. A " fatal 
 impatience," as Bacon calls it, gave his rivals an advan- 
 tage which, perhaps in self-defence, they could not fail to 
 take ; and that career, so brilliant, so full of promise of 
 good, ended in misery, in dishonour, in remorse, on the 
 scaffold of the Tower. 
 
 With this attractive and powerful person Bacon's 
 fortunes, in the last years of the century, became more
 
 ii.] BACON AND ELIZABETH. 33 
 
 and more knit up. Bacon was now past thirty, Essex 
 a feAV years younger. In spite of Bacon's apparent 
 advantage and interest at Court, in spite of abilities, 
 which, though his genius was not yet known, his con- 
 temporaries clearly recognised, he was still a struggling 
 and unsuccessful man : ambitious to rise, for no unworthy 
 reasons, but needy, in weak health, with careless and 
 expensive habits, and embarrassed with debt. He had 
 hoped to rise by the favour of the Queen, and for the 
 sake of his father. For some ill-explained reason he was 
 to the last disappointed. Though she used him "for 
 matters of state and revenue," she either did not like 
 him, or did not see in him the servant she wanted to 
 advance. He went on to the last pressing his uncle, Lord 
 Burghley : he applied in the humblest terms, he made 
 himself useful with his pen, he got his mother to write for 
 him ; but Lord Burghley, probably because he thought 
 his nephew more of a man of letters, than a sound lawyer 
 and practical public servant, did not care to bring him 
 forward. From his cousin, Robert Cecil, Bacon received 
 polite words and friendly assurances; Cecil may have 
 undervalued him, or have been jealous of him, or sus- 
 pected him as a friend of Essex : he certainly gave Bacon 
 good reason to think that his words meant nothing. 
 Except Essex, and perhaps his brother Antony the most 
 affectionate and devoted of brothers no one had yet 
 recognised all that Bacon was. Meanwhile time was 
 passing. The vastness, the difficulties, the attractions 
 of that conquest of all knowledge which he dreamed of, 
 were becoming greater every day to his thoughts. The 
 law, without which he could not live, took up time and 
 brought in little. Attendance on the Court was ex- 
 
 D
 
 34 BACON. [CHAP. 
 
 pensive, yet indispensable, if he wished for place. His 
 mother was never very friendly, and thought him 
 absurd and extravagant. Debts increased and creditors 
 grumbled. The outlook was discouraging, when his 
 friendship with Essex opened to him a more hopeful 
 prospect. 
 
 In the year 1593 the Attorney-General's place was 
 vacant, and Essex, who in that year became a Privy Coim- 
 cillor, determined that Bacon should be Attorney-General. 
 Bacon's reputation as a lawyer was overshadowed by his 
 philosophical and literary pursuits. He was thought 
 young for the office, and he had not yet served in any 
 subordinate place. And there was another man, who 
 was supposed to carry all English law in his head, full 
 of rude force and endless precedents, hard of heart, and 
 voluble of tongue, who also wanted it. An Attorney- 
 General was one who would bring all the resources and 
 hidden subtleties of English law to the service of the 
 Crown, and use them with thorough-going and unflinching 
 resolution against those whom the Crown accused of 
 treason, sedition, or invasion of the prerogative. It is 
 no wonder that the Cecils, and the Queen herself, thought 
 Coke likely to be a more useful public servant than 
 Bacon : it is certain what Coke himself thought about 
 it, and what his estimate was of the man whom Essex 
 was pushing against him. But Essex did not take up 
 his friend's cause in the lukewarm fashion in which 
 Burghley had patronised his nephew. There was no- 
 thing that Essex pursued with greater pertinacity. He 
 importuned the Queen. He risked without scruple 
 offending her. She apparently long shrank from directly 
 refusing his request. The Cecils were for Coke the
 
 ii.] BACON AND ELIZABETH. 35 
 
 " Huddler" as Bacon calls him, in a letter to Essex ; but 
 the appointment was delayed. All through 1593, and 
 until April 1594, the struggle went on. 
 
 When Robert Cecil suggested that Essex should be 
 content with the Solicitor's place for Bacon, "praying 
 him to be well advised, for if his Lordship had spoken 
 of that it might have been of easier digestion to the 
 Queen," he turned round on Cecil 
 
 "Digest me no digesting (said the Earl) ; for the Attorneyship 
 is that I must have for Francis Bacon ; and ill that I will spend 
 my uttermost credit, friendship, and authority against whomsoever, 
 and that whosoever went about to procure it to others, that it 
 should cost both the mediators and the suitors the setting on before 
 they came by it. And this be you assured of, Sir Robert, quoth 
 the Earl, for now do I fully declare myself ; and for your own part, 
 Sir Robert, I do think much and strange both of my Lord your 
 father and you, that can have the mind to seek the preferment of 
 a stranger before so near a kinsman ; namely, considering if you 
 weigh in a balance his parts and sufficiency in any respect with 
 those of his competitor, excepting only four poor years of admit- 
 tance, which Francis Bacon hath more than recompensed with the 
 priority of his reading, in all other respects you shall find no com- 
 parison between them." 
 
 But the Queen's disgust at some very slight show of 
 independence on Bacon's part in Parliament, unforgiven 
 in spite of repeated apologies, together with the influ- 
 ence of the Cecils and the pressure of so formidable 
 and so useful a man as Coke, turned the scale against 
 Essex. In April 1594, Coke was made Attorney. Coke 
 did not forget the pretender to law, as he would think 
 him, who had dared so long to dispute his claims ; and 
 Bacon was deeply wounded. " No man, " he thought, "had 
 ever received a more exquisite disgrace," and he spoke
 
 36 BACON. [CHAP. 
 
 of retiring to Cambridge " to spend the rest of his life 
 in his studies and contemplations." But Essex was not 
 discouraged. He next pressed eagerly for the Solicitor- 
 ship. Again, after much waiting he was foiled. An 
 inferior man was put over Bacon's head. Bacon found 
 that Essex, who could do most things, for some reason 
 could not do this. He himself, too, had pressed his suit 
 with the greatest importunity on the Queen, on Burghley, 
 on Cecil, on every one who could help him; he re- 
 minded the Queen how many years ago it was since he 
 first kissed her hand in her service, and ever since had used 
 his wits to please ; but it was all in vain. For once he lost 
 patience. He was angry with Essex ; the Queen's anger 
 with Essex had, he thought, recoiled on his friend. He 
 was angry with the Queen ; she held his long waiting 
 cheap; she played with him and amused herself with delay; 
 he would go abroad, and he " knew her Majesty's nature, 
 that she neither careth though the whole surname of 
 the Bacons travelled, nor of the Cecils neither." He was 
 very angry with Robert Cecil ; affecting not to believe 
 them, he tells him stories he has heard of his corrupt 
 and underhand dealing. He writes almost a fare- 
 well letter of ceremonious but ambiguous thanks to 
 Lord Burghley, hoping that he would impute any offence 
 that Bacon might have given to the " complexion of a 
 suitor and a tired sea-sick suitor," and speaking despair- 
 ingly of his future success in the law. The humiliations 
 of what a suitor has to go through torment him : " It is 
 my luck," he writes to Cecil, " still to be akin to such 
 things as I neither like in nature nor would willingly 
 meet with in my course, but yet cannot avoid without 
 show of base timorousness or else of unkind or suspicious
 
 ii.] BACON AND ELIZABETH. 37 
 
 strangeness." And to his friend Fulke Greville, he thus 
 unburdens himself : 
 
 "Sm I understand of your pains to have visited me, for which 
 I thank you. My matter is an endless question. I assure you I 
 had said Rcquiescc anima mea ; but I now am otherwise put to my 
 psalter ; Nolite confidere. I dare go no further. Her Majesty had 
 by set speech more than once assured me of her intention to call 
 me to her service, which I could not understand but of the place 
 I had been named to. And now whether invidus homo hoc fecit ; 
 or whether my matter must be an appendix to my Lord of Essex 
 suit ; or whether her Majesty, pretending to prove my ability, 
 meaneth but to take advantage of some errors which, like enough, 
 at one time or other I may commit ; or what is it ; but her Majesty 
 is not ready to despatch it. And what though the Master of the 
 Rolls, and my Lord of Essex, and yourself, and others, think my 
 case without doubt, yet in the meantime I have a hard condition, 
 to stand so that whatsoever service I do to her Majesty, it shall be 
 thought to be but servitium viscatum, lime-twigs and fetches to 
 place myself; and so I shall have envy, not thanks. This is a 
 course to quench all good spirits, and to corrupt every man's 
 nature ; which will, I fear, much hurt her Majesty's service in the 
 end. I have been like a piece of stuff bespoken in the shop ; and 
 if her Majesty will not take me, it may be the selling by parcels 
 will be more gainful. For to be, as I told you, like a child follow- 
 ing a bird, which when he is nearest flieth away and lighteth a 
 little before, and then the child after it again, and so in infinitum, 
 I am weary of it ; as also of wearying my good friends : of whom, 
 nevertheless, I hope in one course or other gratefully to deserve. 
 And so, not forgetting your business, I leave to trouble you with 
 this idle letter ; being but justa et moderate, querimonia ; for indeed 
 I do confess, primus amor will not easily be cast off. And thus 
 again I commend me to you. " 
 
 After one more effort the chase was given up, at least 
 for the moment ; for it was soon resumed. But just now 
 Bacon felt that all the world was against him. He 
 would retire "out of the sunshine into the shade." One
 
 38 BACON. [CHAP. 
 
 friend only encouraged him. He did more. He helped 
 him when Bacon most wanted help, in his straightened 
 and embarrassed "estate." Essex, when he could do 
 nothing more, gave Bacon an estate worth at least 
 1800. Bacon's resolution is recorded in the following 
 letter : 
 
 " IT MAY PLEASE YOUR GOOD LORDSHIP I pray God her Majesty's 
 weighing be not like the weight of a balance ; gravia deorsum levia 
 sursum. But I am as far from being altered in devotion towards 
 her, as I am from distrust that she will be altered in opinion towards 
 me, when she knoweth me better. For myself, I have lost some 
 opinion, some time, and some means ; this is my account ; but then 
 for opinion, it is a blast that goeth and cometh ; for time, it is 
 true it goeth and cometh not ; but yet I have learned that it may 
 be redeemed. For means, I value that most ; and the rather, 
 because I am purposed not to follow the practice of the law (if her 
 Majesty command me in any particular, I shall be ready to do her 
 willing service) ; and my reason is only, because it drinketh too much 
 time, ivhich I have dedicated to better purposes. But even for that 
 point of estate and means, I partly lean to Thales' opinion, That a 
 philosopher may be rich if he will. Thus your Lordship seeth how I 
 comfort myself ; to the increase whereof I would fain please myself 
 to believe that to be true which my Lord Treasurer writeth ; which 
 is, that it is more than a philosopher morally can disgest. But with- 
 out any such high conceit, I esteem it like the pulling out of an 
 aching tooth, which, I remember, when I was a child, and had 
 little philosophy, I was glad of when it was done. For your 
 Lordship, I do think myself more beholding to you than to any 
 man. And I say, I reckon myself as a common (not popular but 
 common) ; and as much as is lawful to be enclosed of a common, so 
 much your Lordship shall be sure to have. Your Lordship's to 
 obey your honourable commands, more settled than ever." 
 
 It may be that, as Bacon afterwards maintained, the 
 closing sentences of this letter implied a significant re- 
 serve of his devotion. But during the brilliant and 
 stormy years of Essex's career which followed, Bacon's
 
 ii.] BACON AND ELIZABETH. 39 
 
 relations to him continued unaltered. Essex pressed 
 Bacon's claims whenever a chance offered. He did his 
 best to get Bacon a rich wife the young widow of Sir 
 Christopher Hatton but in vain. Instead of Bacon 
 she accepted Coke, and became famous afterwards in the 
 great family quarrel, in which Coke and Bacon again 
 found themselves face to face, and which nearly ruined 
 Bacon before the time. Bacon worked for Essex when 
 he was wanted, and gave the advice which a shrewd and 
 cautious friend would give to a man who, by his success 
 and increasing pride and self-confidence, was running 
 into serious dangers, arming against himself deadly foes, 
 and exposing himself to the chances of fortune. Bacon 
 was nervous about Essex's capacity for war, a capacity 
 which perhaps was not proved, even by the most brilliant 
 exploit of the time, the capture of Cadiz, in which Essex 
 foreshadowed the heroic but well -calculated audacities 
 of Nelson and Cochrane, and showed himself as little 
 able as they to bear the intoxication of success, and to 
 work in concert with envious and unfriendly associates. 
 At the end of the year 1596, the year in which Essex 
 had won such reputation at Cadiz, Bacon wrote him a 
 letter of advice and remonstrance. It is a lively picture 
 of the defects and dangers of Essex's behaviour as the 
 Queen's favourite ; and it is a most characteristic and 
 worldly-wise summary of the ways which Bacon would 
 have him take, to cure the one and escape the other. 
 Bacon had, as he says, " good reason to think that the 
 Earl's fortune comprehended his own." And the letter 
 may perhaps be taken as an indirect warning to Essex 
 that Bacon must, at any rate, take care of his own 
 fortune, if the Earl persisted in dangerous courses.
 
 40 BACON. [CHAP. 
 
 Bacon shows how he is to remove the impressions, 
 strong in the Queen's mind, of Essex's defects ; how he 
 is, by due submissions and stratagems, to catch her 
 humour : 
 
 "But whether I counsel you the best, or for the best, duty 
 bindeth me to offer to you my wishes. I said to your Lordship 
 last time, Martha, Martha, attendis ad plurima, unum suffidt ; win 
 the Queen : if this be not the beginning, of any other course I see 
 no end." 
 
 Bacon gives a series of minute directions how Essex 
 is to disarm the Queen's suspicions, and to neutralise 
 the advantage which his rivals take of them ; how he is 
 to remove "the opinion of his nature being opiniastre 
 and not rulable ; " how, avoiding the faults of Leicester 
 and Hatton, he is, as far as he can, to " allege them for 
 authors and patterns." Especially, he must give up that 
 show of soldier-like distinction, which the Queen so dis- 
 liked, and take some quiet post at Court. He must not 
 alarm the Queen by seeking popularity; he must take 
 care of his estate; he must get rid of some of his officers; 
 and he must not be disquieted by other favourites. 
 
 Bacon wished, as he said afterwards, to see him 
 " with a white staff in his hand, as my Lord of Leicester 
 had," an honour and ornament to the Court in the eyes 
 of the people and foreign ambassadors. But Essex was 
 not fit for the part which Bacon urged upon him, that 
 of an obsequious and vigilant observer of the Queen's 
 moods and humours. As time went on, things became 
 more and more difficult between him and his strange 
 mistress : and there were never wanting men who, like 
 Cecil and Raleigh, for good and bad reasons, feared and 
 hated Essex, and who had the craft and the skill to
 
 ii.] BACON AND ELIZABETH. 41 
 
 make the most of his inexcusable errors. At last he 
 allowed himself, from ambition, from the spirit of contra- 
 diction, from the blind passion for doing what he thought 
 would show defiance to his enemies, to be tempted into 
 the Irish campaign of 1599. Bacon at a later time 
 claimed credit for having foreseen and foretold its issue. 
 " I did as plainly see his overthrow, chained as it were 
 by destiny to that journey, as it is possible for any man 
 to ground a judgment on future contingents." He 
 warned Essex, so he thought in after years, of the 
 difficulty of the work; he warned him that he would 
 leave the Queen in the hands of his enemies : " It 
 would be ill for her, ill for him, ill for the State." "I 
 am sure," he adds, "I never in anything in my life 
 dealt with him in like earnestness by speech, by writing, 
 and by all the means I could devise." But Bacon's 
 memory was mistaken. We have his letters. When 
 Essex went to Ireland, Bacon wrote only in the 
 language of sanguine hope : so little did he see " over- 
 throw chained by destiny to that journey," that "some 
 good spirit led his pen to presage to his Lordship 
 success : " he saw in the enterprise a great occasion of 
 honour to his friend : he gave prudent counsels, but he 
 looked forward confidently to Essex being as "fatal a 
 captain to that war, as Africanus was to the war of Car- 
 thage." Indeed, however anxious he may have been, he 
 could not have foreseen Essex's unaccountable and to 
 this day unintelligible failure. But failure was the end, 
 from whatever cause ; failure, disgraceful and complete. 
 Then followed wild and guilty but abortive projects for 
 retrieving his failure, by using his power in Ireland to 
 make himself formidable to his enemies at Court, and
 
 42 BACON". [CHAP. 
 
 even to the Queen herself. He intrigued with Tyrone : 
 he intrigued with James of Scotland : he plunged into 
 a whirl of angry and baseless projects, which came to 
 nothing the moment they were discussed How empty 
 and idle they were was shown by his return against 
 orders to tell his own story at Nonsuch, and by thus 
 placing himself alone and undeniably in the wrong, in 
 the power of the hostile Council. Of course it was not 
 to be thought of that Cecil should not use his advan- 
 tage in the game. It was too early, irritated though the 
 Queen was, to strike the final blow. But it is impossible 
 not to see, looking back over the miserable history, that 
 Essex was treated in a way which was certain, sooner 
 or later, to make him, being what he was, plunge into a 
 fatal and irretrievable mistake. He was treated as a 
 cat treats a mouse : he was worried, confined, disgraced, 
 publicly reprimanded, brought just within verge of the 
 charge of treason, but not quite, just enough to discredit 
 and alarm him, but to leave him still a certain amount 
 of play. He was made to see that the Queen's favour 
 was not quite hopeless ; but that nothing but the most 
 absolute and unreserved humiliation could recover it. 
 It was plain to any one who knew Essex that this 
 treatment would drive Essex to madness. " These same 
 gradations of yours " so Bacon represents himself ex- 
 postulating with the Queen on her caprices " are fitter 
 to corrupt than to correct any mind of greatness." 
 They made Essex desperate ; he became frightened for 
 his life, and he had reason to be so, though not in the 
 way which he feared. At length came the stupid and 
 ridiculous outbreak of the 8th of February yf^y, a 
 plot to seize the palace and raise the city against the
 
 ii.] BACON AND ELIZABETH. 43 
 
 ministers, by the help of a few gentlemen armed only 
 with their rapiers. As Bacon himself told the Queen, 
 "if some base and cruel -minded persons had entered 
 into such an action, it might have caused much blow 
 and combustion; but it appeared well that they were 
 such as knew not how to play the malefactors ! " But 
 it was sufficient to bring Essex within the doom of 
 treason. 
 
 Essex knew well what the stake was. He lost it, 
 and deserved to lose it, little as his enemies deserved to 
 win it ; for they, too, were doing what would have cost 
 them their heads if Elizabeth had known it, correspond- 
 ing, as Essex was accused of doing, with Scotland about 
 the succession, and possibly with Spain. But they 
 were playing cautiously and craftily ; he with bungling 
 passion. He had been so long accustomed to power and 
 place, that he could not endure that rivals should keep 
 him out of it. They were content to have their own 
 way, while affecting to be the humblest of servants : he 
 would be nothing less than a Mayor of the Palace. He 
 was guilty of a great public crime, as every man is who 
 appeals to arms for anything short of the most sacred 
 cause. He was bringing into England, which had settled 
 down into peaceable ways, an imitation of the violent 
 methods of France and the Guises. But the crime as 
 well as the penalty belonged to the age, and crimes 
 legally said to be against the State mean morally very 
 different things according to the state of society and 
 opinion. It is an unfairness verging on the ridiculous, 
 when the ground is elaborately laid for keeping up the 
 impression that Essex was preparing a real treason 
 against the Queen like that of Norfolk. It was a treason
 
 44 BACON. [CHAP. 
 
 of the same sort and order as that for which Northum- 
 berland sent Somerset to the block : the treason of being 
 an unsuccessful rival 
 
 Meanwhile Bacon had been getting gradually into 
 the unofficial employ of the Government. He had be- 
 come one of the "Learned Counsel," lawyers with sub- 
 ordinate and intermittent work, used when wanted, but 
 without patent or salary, and not ranking with the 
 regular law officers. The Government had found him 
 useful in affairs of the revenue, in framing interrogatories 
 for prisoners in the Tower, in drawing up reports of 
 plots against the Queen. He did not in this way earn 
 enough to support himself; but he had thus come to 
 have some degree of access to the Queen, which he 
 represents as being familiar and confidential, though he 
 still perceived, as he says himself, that she did not like 
 him. At the first news of Essex's return to England, 
 Bacon greeted him : 
 
 "MY LORD Conceiving that your Lordship came now up in 
 the person of a good servant to see your sovereign mistress, which 
 kind of compliments are many times instar magnorum meritonim, 
 and therefore it would be hard for me to find you, I have com- 
 mitted to this poor paper the humble salutations of him that is 
 more yours than any man's, and more yours than any man. To 
 these salutations I add a due and joyful gratulation, confessing 
 that your Lordship, in your last conference with me before your 
 journey, spake not in vain, God making it good, That you trusted 
 we should say Quis putasset ! Which as it is found true in a happy 
 sense, so I wish you do not find another Quis putasset in the manner 
 of taking this so great a service. But I hope it is, as he said, 
 Nubecula cst, cito transibit, and that your Lordship's wisdom and 
 obsequious circumspection and patience will turn all to the best. 
 So referring all to some time that I may attend you, I commit you 
 to God's best preservation. "
 
 ii.] BACON AND ELIZABETH. 45 
 
 But when Essex's conduct in Ireland had to be dealt 
 with, Bacon's services were called for ; and from this time 
 his relations towards Essex were altered. Every one, no 
 one better than the Queen herself, knew all that he 
 owed to Essex. It is strangely illustrative of the time, 
 that especially as Bacon held so subordinate a position, 
 he should have been required, and should have been 
 trusted, to act against his only and most generous bene- 
 factor. It is strange, too, that however 'great his loyalty 
 to the Queen, however much and sincerely he might con- 
 demn his friend's conduct, he should think it possible 
 to accept the task. He says that he made some remon- 
 strance ; and he says, no doubt truly, that during the 
 first stage of the business he used the ambiguous 
 position in which he was placed to soften Essex's in- 
 evitable punishment, and to bring about a reconciliation 
 between him and the Queen. But he was required, as 
 the Queen's lawyer, to set forth in public Essex's offences ; 
 and he admits that he did so "not over tenderly." Yet all 
 this, even if we have misgivings about it, is intelligible. If 
 he had declined, he could not, p'erhaps, have done the ser- 
 vice which he assures us that he tried to do to Essex ; and 
 it is certain that he would have had to reckon with the 
 terrible lady who in her old age still ruled England from 
 the throne of Henry VIII. , and who had certainly no great 
 love for Bacon himself. She had already shown him in a 
 much smaller matter what was the forfeit to be paid for 
 any resistance to her will. All the hopes of his life must 
 perish ; all the grudging and suspicious favours which he 
 had won with such unremitting toil and patient waiting 
 would be sacrificed, and he would henceforth live under 
 the wrath of those who never forgave. And whatever he
 
 46 BACON. [CHAP. 
 
 did for himself, he believed that he was serving Essex. 
 His scheming imagination and his indefatigable pen 
 were at work. He tried strange indirect methods ; he 
 invented a correspondence between his brother and 
 Essex, which was to fall into the Queen's hands in order 
 to soften her wrath and show her Essex's most secret 
 feelings. When the Queen proposed to dine with him 
 at his lodge in Twickenham Park, " though I profess 
 not to be a poet," he " prepared a sonnet tending and 
 alluding to draw on her Majesty's reconcilement to my 
 Lord." It was an awkward thing for one who had been 
 so intimate with Essex to be so deep in the counsels of 
 those who hated him. He complains that many people 
 thought him ungrateful and disloyal to his friend, and 
 that stories circulated to his disadvantage, as if he were 
 poisoning the Queen's ear against Essex. But he might 
 argue fairly enough that, wilful and wrong-headed as Essex 
 had been, it was the best that he could now do for him ; and 
 as long as it was only a question of Essex's disgrace and 
 enforced absence from Court, Bacon could not be bound 
 to give up the prospects 'of his life, indeed, his public 
 duty as a subordinate servant of government, on account 
 of his friend's inexcusable and dangerous follies. Essex 
 did not see it so, and in the subjoined correspondence 
 had the advantage ; but Bacon's position, though a higher 
 one might be imagined, where men had been such friends 
 as these two men had been, is quite a defensible one : 
 
 " MY LORD No man can better expound my doings than your 
 Lordship, which maketh me need to say the less. Only I humbly 
 pray you to believe that I aspire to the conscience and commendation 
 first of bonus civis, which with us is a good and true servant to the 
 Queen, and next of bonus vir, that is an honest man. I desire your
 
 H.] BACON AND ELIZABETH. 47 
 
 Lordship also to think that though I confess I love some things much 
 better than I love your Lordship, as the Queen's service, her quiet 
 and contentment, her honour, her favour, the good of my country, 
 and the like, yet I love few persons better than yourself, both for 
 gratitude's sake and for your own virtues, which cannot hurt but 
 by accident or abuse. Of which my good affection I was ever ready 
 and am ready to yield testimony by any good offices, but with such 
 reservations as yourself cannot but allow : for as I was ever sorry 
 that your Lordship should fly with waxen wings, doubting Icarus' 
 fortune, so for the growing up of your own feathers, specially 
 ostrich's, or any other save of a bird of prey, no man shall be more 
 glad. And this is the axletree whereupon I have turned and shall 
 turn, which to signify to you, though I think you are of yourself per- 
 suaded as much, is the cause of my writing ; and so I commend 
 your Lordship to God's goodness. From Gray's Inn, this 20th 
 day of July, 1600. 
 
 " Your Lordship's most humbly, 
 
 "Fn. BACON." 
 
 To this letter Essex returned an answer of dignified 
 reserve, such as Bacon might himself have dictated. 
 
 "MR. BACON I can neither expound nor censure your late 
 actions : being ignorant of all of them, save one ; and having directed 
 my sight inward only, to examine myself. You do pray me to believe 
 that you only aspire to the conscience and commendation of bonus 
 civis and bonus vir ; and I do faithfully assure you, that while that 
 is your ambition (though your course be active and mine contem- 
 plative), yet we shall both convenire in eodem tertio and convenire 
 inter nosipsos. Your profession of affection and offer of good offices 
 are welcome to me. For answer to them I will say but this, that 
 you have believed I have been kind to you, and you may believe 
 that I cannot be other, either upon humour or my own election. I 
 am a stranger to all poetical conceits, or else I should say somewhat 
 of your poetical example. But this I must say, that I never flew 
 with other wings than desire to merit and confidence in my Sove- 
 reign's favour ; and when one of these wings failed me I would 
 light nowhere but at my Sovereign's feet, though she suffered me 
 to be bruised with my fall. And till her Majesty, that knows I 
 was never bird of prey, finds it to agree with her will and her
 
 48 BACON. [CHAP. 
 
 service that my wings should be imped again, I have committed 
 myself to the mire. No power but my God's and my Sovereign's 
 can alter this resolution of 
 
 ' ' Your retired friend, 
 
 " ESSEX." 
 
 But after Essex's mad attempt in the city a new state 
 of things arose. The inevitable result was a trial for high 
 treason, a trial of which no one could doubt the purpose 
 and end. The examination o accomplices revealed 
 speeches, proposals, projects, not very intelligible to us 
 in the still imperfectly understood game of intrigue that 
 was going on among all parties at the end of Elizabeth's 
 reign, but quite enough to place Essex at the mercy of 
 the Government and the offended Queen. " The new in- 
 formation," says Mr. Spedding, "had been immediately 
 communicated to Coke and Bacon." Coke, as Attorney- 
 General, of course conducted the prosecution ; and the 
 next prominent person on the side of the Crown was not 
 the Solicitor, or any other regular law officer, but Bacon, 
 though holding the very subordinate place of one of the 
 "Learned Counsel." 
 
 It does not appear that he thought it strange, that he 
 showed any pain or reluctance, that he sought to be ex- 
 cused. He took it as a matter of course. The part 
 assigned to Bacon in the prosecution was as important as 
 that of Coke : and he played it more skilfully and effect- 
 ively. Trials in those days were confused affairs, often 
 passing into a mere wrangle between the judges, lawyers, 
 and lookers-on, and the prisoner at the bar. It was so 
 in this case. Coke is said to have blundered in his way 
 of presenting the evidence, and to have been led away 
 from the point into an altercation with Essex. Probably
 
 n.] BACON AND ELIZABETH. 49 
 
 it really did not much matter : but the trial was getting 
 out of its course and inclining in favour of the prisoner, 
 till Bacon Mr. Spedding thinks, out of his regular 
 turn stepped forward and retrieved matters. This is 
 Mr. Spedding's account of what Bacon said and did : 
 
 " By this time the argument had drifted so faraway from the point 
 that it must have been difficult for a listener to remember what it 
 was that the prisoners were charged with, or how much of the 
 charge had been proved. And Coke, who was all this time the sole 
 speaker on behalf of the Crown, was still following each fresh topic 
 that rose before him, without the sign of an intention or the inti- 
 mation of a wish to return to the main question and reform the 
 broken ranks of his evidence. Luckily he seems to have been now 
 at a loss what point to take next, and the pause gave Bacon an 
 opportunity of rising. It can hardly have been in pursuance of 
 previous arrangements ; for though it was customary in those days 
 to distribute the evidence into parts and to assign several parts tc? 
 several counsel, there had been no appearance as yet of any part 
 being concluded. It is probable that the course of the trial had 
 upset previous arrangements and confused the parts. At any rate 
 so it was, however it came to pass, that when Cecil and Essex had 
 at last finished their expostulation and parted with charitable 
 prayers, each that the other might be forgiven, then (says 
 our reporter) Mr. Bacon entered into a speech much after this 
 fashion : 
 
 " ' In speaking of this late and horrible rebellion which hath been 
 in the eyes and ears of all men, I shall save myself much labour in 
 opening and enforcing the points thereof, insomuch as I speak not 
 before a country jury of ignorant men, but before a most honourable 
 assembly of the greatest Peers of the land, whose wisdoms conceive 
 far more than my tongue can utter ; yet with your gracious and 
 honourable favours I will presume, if not for information of your 
 Honours, yet for the discharge of my duty, to say thus much. No 
 man can be ignorant, that knows matters of former ages, and all 
 history makes it plain, that there was never any traitor heard of 
 that durst directly attempt the seat of his liege prince but lie 
 always coloured his practices with some plausible pretence. For 
 God hath imprinted such a majesty in the face of a prince that no 
 
 E
 
 50 BACON. [CHAP. 
 
 private man dare approach the person of his sovereign with a 
 traitorous intent. And therefore they run another side course, 
 oblique ct d latcre : some to reform corruptions of the State and 
 religion ; some to reduce the ancient liberties and customs pre- 
 tended to be lost and worn out ; some to remove those persons that 
 being in high places make themselves subject to envy ; but all of 
 them aim at the overthrow of the State and destruction of the pre- 
 sent rulers. And this likewise is the use of those that work mis- 
 chief of another quality ; as Cain, that first murderer, took up an 
 excuse for his fact, shaming to outface it with impudency, thus 
 the Earl made his colour the severing some great men and coun- 
 cillors from her Majesty's favour, and the fear he stood in of his 
 pretended enemies lest they should murder him in his house. There- 
 fore he saith he was compelled to fly into the City for succour and 
 assistance ; not much unlike Eisistratus, of whom it was so anciently 
 written how he gashed and wounded himself, and in that sort ran 
 crying into Athens that his life was sought and like to have been 
 taken away ; thinking to have moved the people to have pitied 
 him and taken his part by such counterfeited harm and danger ; 
 whereas his aim and drift was to take the government of the city 
 into his hands and alter the form thereof. With like pretences of 
 dangers and assaults the Earl of Essex entered the City of London 
 and passed through the bowels thereof, blanching rumours that he 
 should have been murdered and that the State was sold ; whereas 
 he had no such enemies, no such dangers : persuading themselves 
 that if they could prevail all would have done well. But now 
 magna scelera terminantur in hceresin : for you, my Lord, should 
 know that though princes give their subjects cause of discontent, 
 though they take away the honours they have heaped upon them, 
 though they bring them to a lower estate than they raised them 
 from, yet ought they not to be so forgetful of their allegiance that 
 they should enter into any undutiful act ; much less upon rebellion, 
 as you, my Lord, have done. All whatsoever you have or can say in 
 answer hereof are but shadows. And therefore methinks it were 
 best for you to confess, not to justify.' " 
 
 Essex was provoked by Bacon's incredulous sneer 
 about enemies and dangers "I call forth Mr. Bacon 
 against Mr. Bacon," and referred to the letters which
 
 ii.] BACON AND ELIZABETH. 51 
 
 Bacon had written in his name, and in which these dan- 
 gerous enmities were taken for granted. Bacon, in 
 answer, repeated what he said so often " That he had 
 spent more time in vain in studying how to make the 
 Earl a good servant to the Queen and State, than he had 
 done in anything else." Once more Coke got the pro- 
 ceedings into a tangle, and once more Bacon came for- 
 ward to repair the miscarriage of his leader. 
 
 " ' I have never yet seen in any case such favour shown to any 
 prisoner ; so many digressions, such delivering of evidence by frac- 
 tious, and so silly a defence of such great and notorious treasons. 
 May it please your Grace, you have seen how weakly he hath 
 shadowed his purpose and how slenderly he hath answered the 
 objections against him. But, my Lord, I doubt the variety of 
 matters and the many digressions may minister occasion of forget- 
 fulness, and may have severed the judgments of the Lords ; and 
 therefore I hold it necessary briefly to recite the Judges' opinions. ' 
 
 ' ' That being done, he proceeded to this effect : 
 
 " ' Now put the case that the Earl of Essex's intents were, as he 
 would have it believed, to go only as a suppliant to her Majesty. 
 Shall their petitions be presented by armed petitioners ? This must 
 needs bring loss of property to the prince. Neither is it any point 
 of law, as my Lord of Southampton would have it believed, that 
 condemns them of treason. To take secret counsel, to execute it, to 
 run together in numbers armed with weapons, what can be the 
 excuse ? Warned by the Lord Keeper, by a herald, and yet persist ! 
 Will any simple man take this to be less than treason ? ' 
 
 "The Earl of Essex answered that if he had purposed anything 
 against others than those his private enemies, he would not have 
 stirred with so slender a company. Whereunto Mr. Bacon an- 
 swered : 
 
 " ' It was not the company you carried with you but the assist- 
 ance you hoped for in the City which you trusted unto. The Duko 
 of (luise thrust himself into the streets of Paris on the day of the 
 Barricades in his doublet and hose, attended only with eight gentle- 
 men, and found that help in the city which (thanks be to God) you 
 failed of here. And what followed ? The King was forced to put him-
 
 52 BACON. [CHAP. 
 
 self into a pilgrim's weeds, and in that disguise to steal away to scape 
 their fury. Even such was my Lord's confidence too, and his pre- 
 tence the same an all-hail and a kiss to the City. But the end 
 was treason, as hath been sufficiently proved. But when he had 
 once delivered and engaged himself so far into that which the 
 shallowness of his conceit could not accomplish as he expected, the 
 Queen for her defence taking arms against him, he was glad to yield 
 himself ; and thinking to colour his practices, turned his pretexts, 
 and alleged the occasion thereof to proceed from a private quarrel. ' 
 " To this " (adds the reporter) " the Earl answered little. Nor 
 was anything said afterwards by either of the prisoners, either in 
 the thrust-and -parry dialogue with Coke that followed, or when 
 they spoke at large to the question why judgment should not be 
 pronounced, which at all altered the complexion of the case. They 
 were both found guilty and sentence passed in the usual form. " 
 
 Bacon's legal position was so subordinate a place that 
 there must have been a special reason for his employ- 
 ment. It is difficult to avoid the conclusion that, on the 
 part of the Government, Bacon was thus used for the very 
 reason that he had been the friend of Essex. He was 
 not commonly called upon in such prosecutions. He 
 was not employed by Cecil in the Winchester trials of 
 Raleigh, Grey, and Cobham, three years afterwards, nor 
 in those connected with the Gunpowder Plot. He was 
 called upon now because no one could so much damage 
 Essex; and this last proof of his ready service was required 
 by those whose favour, since Essex had gone hopelessly 
 wrong, he had been diligently seeking. And Bacon 
 acquiesced in the demand, apparently without surprise. 
 No record remains to show that he felt any difficulty in 
 playing his part. He had persuaded himself that his 
 public duty, his duty as a good citizen to the Queen and 
 the commonwealth, demanded of him that he should obey 
 the call to do his best to bring a traitor to punishment.
 
 ii.] BACON AND ELIZABETH. 53 
 
 Public duty has claims on a man as well as friend- 
 ship, and in many conceivable cases, claims paramount to 
 those of friendship. And yet friendship, too, has claims, 
 at least on a man's memory. Essex had been a dear 
 friend, if words could mean anything. He had done 
 more than any man had done for Bacon, generously and 
 nobly, and Bacon had acknowledged it in the amplest 
 terms. Only a year before he had written, " I am as 
 much yours as any man's, and as much yours as any man." 
 It is not, and it was not, a question of Essex's guilt. It 
 may be a question whether the whole matter was not 
 exaggerated as to its purpose, as it certainly was as to its 
 real danger and mischief. We at least know that his 
 rivals dabbled in intrigue and foolish speeches as well as 
 he ; that little more than two years afterwards Ealeigh 
 and Grey and Cobham were condemned for treason in 
 much the same fashion as he was; that Cecil to the end 
 of his days with whatever purpose was a pensioner of 
 Spain. The question was not whether Essex was guilty. 
 The question for Bacon was, whether it was becoming in 
 him, having been what he had been to Essex, to take a 
 leading part in proceedings which were to end in his 
 ruin and death. He was not a judge. He was not a 
 regular law officer like Coke. His only employment had 
 been casual and occasional He might, most naturally, on 
 the score of his old friendship, have asked to be excused. 
 Condemning, as he did, his friend's guilt and folly, he 
 might have refused to take part in a cause of blood, in 
 which his best friend must perish. He might honestly 
 have given up Essex as incorrigible, and have retired to 
 stand apart in sorrow and silence while the inevitable 
 tragedy was played out. The only answer to this
 
 54 BACON. [CHAP. 
 
 is, that to have declined would have incurred the 
 Queen's displeasure : he would have forfeited any 
 chance of advancement; nay, closely connected as he 
 had been with Essex, he might have been involved in 
 his friend's ruin. But inferior men have marred their 
 fortunes by standing by their friends in not undeserved 
 trouble, and no one knew better than Bacon what was 
 worthy and noble in human action. The choice lay be- 
 fore him. He seems hardly to have gone through any 
 struggle. He persuaded himself that he could not help 
 himself, under the constraint of his duty to the Queen : 
 and he did his best to get Essex condemned. 
 
 And this was not all. The death of Essex was a 
 shock to the popularity of Elizabeth greater than any- 
 thing that had happened in her long reign. Bacon's 
 name also had come into men's mouths as that of a 
 time-server, who played fast and loose with Essex and 
 his enemies, and who, when he had got what he could 
 from Essex, turned to see what he could get from those 
 who put him to death. A justification of the whole 
 affair was felt to be necessary ; and Bacon was fixed upon 
 for the distinction and the dishonour of doing it. No 
 one could tell the story so well, and it was felt that he 
 would not shrink from it. Nor did he. In cold blood 
 he sat down to blacken Essex, using his intimate personal 
 knowledge of the past to strengthen his statements 
 against a friend who was in his grave, and for whom 
 none could answer but Bacon himself. It is a well- 
 compacted and forcible account of Essex's misdoings, on 
 which of course the colour of deliberate and dangerous 
 treason was placed. Much of it, no doubt, was true ; 
 but even of the facts, and much more of the colour, there
 
 ii.] BACON AND ELIZABETH. 55 
 
 was no check to be had, and it is certain that it was an 
 object to the Government to make out the worst. It 
 is characteristic that Bacon records that he did not lose 
 sight of the claims of courtesy, and studiously spoke of 
 "my Lord of Essex" in the draft submitted for correc- 
 tion to the Queen ; but she was more unceremonious, 
 and insisted that the "rebel" should be spoken of simply 
 as "Essex." 
 
 After a business of this kind, fines and forfeitures 
 flowed in abundantly, and were " usually bestowed on de- 
 serving servants or favoured suitors by way of reward ; " 
 and Bacon came in for his share. Out of one of the 
 fines he received 1200. "The Queen hath done some- 
 thing for me," he writes to a friendly creditor, " though 
 not in the proportion I had hoped," and he afterwards 
 asked for something more. It was rather under the 
 value of Essex's gift to him in 1594. But she still 
 refused him all promotion. He was without an official 
 place in the Queen's service, and he never was allowed 
 to have it. It is clear that the "Declaration of the 
 Treason of the Earl of Essex," if it justified the Govern- 
 ment, did not remove the odium which had fallen on 
 Bacon. Mr. Spedding says that he can find no signs of 
 it. The proof of it is found in the " Apology " which 
 Bacon found it expedient to write after Elizabeth's death 
 and early in James's reign. He found that the recollec- 
 tion of the way in which he had dealt with his friend 
 hung heavy upon him : men hesitated to trust him in 
 spite of his now recognised ability. Accordingly, he 
 drew up an apology, which he addressed to Lord 
 Mountjoy, the friend, in reality half the accomplice, of 
 Essex, in his wild, ill-defined plan for putting pressure
 
 56 BACON. [CHAP. 
 
 on Elizabeth. It is a clear, able, of course ex parte state- 
 ment of the doings of the three chief actors, two of whom 
 could no longer answer for themselves, or correct and 
 contradict the third. It represents the Queen as implac- 
 able and cruel, Essex as incorrigibly and outrageously 
 wilful, proud, and undutiful, Bacon himself as using 
 every effort and device to appease the Queen's anger 
 and suspiciousness, and to bring Essex to a wiser and 
 humbler mind. The picture is indeed a vivid one, and 
 full of dramatic force, of an unrelenting and merciless 
 mistress bent on breaking and bowing down to the dust 
 the haughty spirit of a once - loved but rebellious 
 favourite, whom, though he has deeply offended, she 
 yet wishes to bring once more under her yoke ; and of 
 the calm, keen-witted looker-on, watching the dangerous 
 game, not without personal interest, but with undis- 
 turbed presence of mind, and doing his best to avert an 
 irreparable and fatal breach. How far he honestly did 
 his best for his misguided friend we can only know from 
 his own report ; but there is no reason to think that he 
 did Essex ill service, though he notices in passing an 
 allegation that the Queen in one of her angry fits had 
 charged him with this. But his interest clearly was 
 to make up the quarrel between the Queen and 
 Essex Bacon would have been a greater man with 
 both of them if he had been able to do so. He had 
 been too deeply in Essex's intimacy to make his new 
 position of mediator, with a strong bias on the Queen's 
 side, quite safe and easy for a man of honourable mind ; 
 but a cool-judging and prudent man may well have 
 acted as he represents himself acting without forgetting 
 what he owed to his friend. Till the last great moment
 
 ii.] BACON AND ELIZABETH. 57 
 
 of trial there is a good deal to be said for Bacon : a man 
 keenly alive to Essex's faults, with a strong sense of 
 what he owed to the Queen and the State, and with his 
 own reasonable chances of rising greatly prejudiced by 
 Essex's folly. But at length came the crisis which 
 showed the man, and threw light on all that had passed 
 before, when he was picked out. out of his regular 
 place, to be charged with the task of bringing home the 
 capital charge against Essex. He does not say he 
 hesitated. He does not say that he asked to be excused 
 the terrible office. He did not flinch as the minister of 
 vengeance for those who required that Essex should die. 
 He did his work, we are told by his admiring biographer, 
 better than Coke, and repaired the blunders of the 
 prosecution. He passes over very shortly this part of 
 the business : " it was laid upon me with the rest of my 
 fellows ; " yet it is the knot and key of the whole, as 
 far as his own character is concerned. Bacon had his 
 public duty : his public duty may have compelled him 
 to stand apart from Essex. But it was his interest, it was 
 no part of his public duty, which required him to accept 
 the task of accuser of his friend, and in his friend's direst 
 need calmly to drive home a well-directed stroke that 
 should extinguish chances and hopes, and make his ruin 
 certain. No one who reads his anxious letters about 
 preferment and the Queen's favour, about . his disap- 
 pointed hopes, about his straitened means and distress 
 for money, about his difficulties with his creditors he 
 was twice arrested for debt can doubt that the question 
 was between his own prospects and his friend ; and that 
 to his own interest he sacrificed his friend and his own 
 honour.
 
 CHAPTER III. 
 
 BACON AND JAMES I. 
 
 BACON'S life was a double one. There was the life of 
 high thinking, of disinterested aims, of genuine enthu- 
 siasm, of genuine desire to delight and benefit mankind, 
 by opening new paths to wonder and knowledge and 
 power. And there was the put on and worldly life, 
 the life of supposed necessities for the provision of 
 daily bread, the life of ambition and self-seeking, which 
 he followed, not without interest and satisfaction, but at 
 bottom because he thought he must must be a great 
 man, must be rich, must live in the favour of the great, 
 because without it his great designs could not be 
 accomplished. His original plan of life was disclosed 
 in his letter to Lord Burghley : to get some office with 
 an assured income and not much work, and then to 
 devote the best of his time to his own subjects. But 
 this, if it was really his plan, was gradually changed : 
 first, because he could not get such a place ; and next 
 because his connection with Essex, the efforts to gain 
 him the Attorney's place, and the use which the Queen 
 made of him after Essex could do no more for him, 
 drew him more and more into public work, and specially 
 the career of the law. We know that he would not by
 
 CHAP, in.] BACON AND JAMES I. 59 
 
 preference have chosen the law, and did not feel that his 
 vocation lay that way. But it was the only way open 
 to him for mending his fortunes. And so the two lives 
 went on side by side, the worldly one he would have 
 said, the practical one often interfering with the life 
 of thought and discovery, and partly obscuring it, but 
 yet always leaving it paramount in his own mind. His 
 dearest and most cherished ideas, the thoughts with 
 which he was most at home and happiest, his deepest 
 and truest ambitions, were those of an enthusiastic and 
 romantic believer in a great discovery just within his 
 grasp. They were such as the dreams and visions of 
 his great Franciscan namesake, and of the imaginative 
 seekers after knowledge in the middle ages, real or mythi- 
 cal, Albert the Great, Cornelius Agrippa, Dr. Faustus ; 
 they were the eager undoubting hopes of the physical 
 students in Italy and England in his own time, Gior- 
 dano Bruno, Telesio, Campanella, Gilbert, Galileo, or 
 the founders of the Italian prototype of " Solomon's 
 House " in the New Atlantis, the precursor of our Royal 
 Societies, the Academy of the Lincei at Rome. Among 
 these meditations was his inner life. But however he 
 may have originally planned his course, and though at times 
 under the influence of disappointment he threatened to re- 
 tire to Cambridge or to travel abroad, he had bound him- 
 self fast to public life, and soon ceased to think of quitting 
 it. And he had a real taste for it, for its shows, its prizes, 
 for the laws and turns of the game, for its debates and 
 vicissitudes. He was no mere idealist or recluse to 
 undervalue or despise the real grandeur of the world. 
 He took the keenest interest in the nature and ways of 
 mankind ; he liked to observe, to generalise in shrewd
 
 60 BACON. [CHAP. 
 
 and sometimes cynical epigrams. He liked to apply his 
 powerful and fertile intellect to the practical problems 
 of society and government, to their curious anomalies, 
 to their paradoxical phenomena ; he liked to address 
 himself, either as an expounder or a reformer, to the 
 principles and entanglements of English law; he aspired, 
 both as a lecturer and a legislator, to improve and 
 simplify it. It was not beyond his hopes to shape a 
 policy, to improve administration, to become powerful 
 by bringing his sagacity and largeness of thought to the 
 service of the State, in reconciling conflicting forces, in 
 mediating between jealous parties and dangerous claims. 
 And he liked to enter into the humours of a Court ; to 
 devote his brilliant imagination and affluence of inven- 
 tion either to devising a pageant which should throw 
 all others into the shade, or a compromise which should 
 get great persons out of some difficulty of temper or 
 pique. 
 
 In all these things he was as industrious, as laborious, 
 as calmly persevering and tenacious, as he was in his 
 pursuit of his philosophical speculations. He was a com- 
 pound of the most adventurous and most diversified 
 ambition, with a placid and patient temper, such as we 
 commonly associate with moderate desires and the love of 
 retirement and an easy life. To imagine and dare any- 
 thing, and never to let go the object of his pursuit, is one 
 side of him ; on the other, he is obsequiously desirous to 
 please and fearful of giving offence, the humblest and 
 most grateful and also the most importunate of suitors, 
 ready to bide his time with an even cheerfulness of spirit, 
 which yet it was not safe to provoke by ill offices and 
 the wish to thwart him. He never misses a chance of
 
 in.] BACON AND JAMES I. 61 
 
 proffering his services : he never lets pass an opportunity 
 of recommending himself to those who could help him. 
 He is so bent on natural knowledge that we have a sense 
 of incongruity when we see him engaging in politics as 
 if he had no other interest. He throws himself with 
 such zest into the language of the moralist, the theo- 
 logian, the historian, that we forget we have before us 
 the author of a new departure in physical inquiry, and 
 the unwearied compiler of tables of natural history. 
 When he is a lawyer, he seems only a lawyer. If he had 
 not been the author of the Instauratio, his life would not 
 have looked very different from that of any other of the 
 shrewd and supple lawyers who hung on to the Tudor 
 and Stuart Courts, and who unscrupulously pushed their 
 way to preferment. He claimed to be, in spite of the 
 misgivings of Elizabeth and her ministers, as devoted to 
 public work and as capable of it as any of them. He 
 was ready for anything, for any amount of business, 
 ready, as in everything, to take infinite trouble about it. 
 The law, if he did not like it, was yet no by-work with 
 him ; he was as truly ambitious as the men with whom 
 he maintained so keen and for long so unsuccessful a 
 rivalry. He felt bitterly the disappointment of seeing 
 men like Coke and Fleming and Doddridge and Hobart 
 pass before him ; he could not, if he had been only a 
 lawyer, have coveted more eagerly the places, refused to 
 him, which they got ; only, he had besides a whole train 
 of purposes, an inner and supreme ambition, of which 
 they knew nothing. And with all this, there is no 
 apparent consciousness of these manifold and varied 
 interests. He never affected to conceal from himself his 
 superiority to other men in his aims and in the grasp of
 
 62 BACON. [CHAP. 
 
 his intelligence. But there is no trace that he prided 
 himself on the variety and versatility of these powers, or 
 that he even distinctly realised to himself that it was 
 anything remarkable that he should have so many dis- 
 similar objects and be able so readily to pursue them in 
 such different directions. 
 
 It is doubtful whether, as long as Elizabeth lived, 
 Bacon could ever have risen above his position among 
 the " Learned Counsel," an office without patent or salary 
 or regular employment. She used him, and he was willing 
 to be used ; but he plainly did not appear in her eyes to 
 be the kind of man who would suit her in the more 
 prominent posts of her Government. Unusual and 
 original ability is apt, till it is generally recognised, to 
 carry with it suspicion and mistrust, as to its being really 
 all that it seems to be. Perhaps she thought of the possi- 
 bility of his flying out unexpectedly at some inconvenient 
 pinch, and attempting to serve her interests, not in her 
 way, but in his own ; perhaps she distrusted in business 
 and state affairs so brilliant a discourser, whose heart was 
 known, first and above all, to be set on great dreams of 
 knowledge ; perhaps those interviews with her in which 
 he describes the counsels which he laid before her, and 
 in which his shrewdness and foresight are conspicuous, 
 may not have been so welcome to her as he imagined ; 
 perhaps, it is not impossible, that he may have been too 
 compliant for her capricious taste, and too visibly anxious 
 to please. Perhaps, too, she could not forget, in spite of 
 what had happened, that he had been the friend, and not 
 the very generous friend, of Essex. But, except as to a 
 share of the forfeitures, with which he was not satisfied, 
 his fortunes did not rise under Elizabeth.
 
 in.] BACON AND JAMES I. 63 
 
 Whatever may have been the Queen's feelings towards 
 him, there is no doubt that one powerful influence, which 
 lasted into the reign of James, was steadily adverse 
 to his advancement. Burghley had been strangely 
 niggardly in what he did to help his brilliant nephew ; 
 he was going off the scene, and probably did not care to 
 trouble himself about a younger and uncongenial aspirant 
 to service. But his place was taken by his son, Robert 
 Cecil ; and Cecil might naturally have been expected to' 
 welcome the co-operation of one of his own family, who 
 was foremost among the rising men of Cecil's own genera- 
 tion, and who certainly was most desirous to do him ser- 
 vice. But it is plain that he early made up his mind to keep 
 Bacon in the background. It is easy to imagine reasons, 
 though the apparent shortsightedness of the policy may 
 surprise us ; but Cecil was too reticent and self-controlled 
 a man to let his reasons appear, and his words, in answer 
 to his cousin's applications for his assistance, were always 
 kind, encouraging, and vague. But we must judge by 
 the event, and that makes it clear that Cecil did not 
 care to see Bacon in high position. Nothing can ac- 
 count for Bacon's strange failure for so long a time to 
 reach his due place in the public service but the secret 
 hostility, whatever may have been the cause, of Cecil. 
 
 There was also another difficulty. Coke was the great 
 lawyer of the day, a man whom the Government could 
 not dispense with, and whom it was dangerous to offend. 
 And Coke thoroughly disliked Bacon. He thought 
 lightly of his law, and he despised his refinement and his 
 passion for knowledge. He cannot but have resented 
 the impertinence, as he must have thought it, of Bacon 
 having been for a whole year his rival for office. It is
 
 64 BACON. [CHAP. 
 
 possible that if people then agreed with Mr. Spedding's 
 opinion as to the management of Essex's trial, he may 
 have been irritated by jealousy ; but a couple of months 
 after the trial (April 29, 1601) Bacon sent to Cecil, with 
 a letter of complaint, the following account of a scene in 
 Court between Coke and himself : 
 
 " A true remembrance of the abuse I received of Mr. Attorney-General 
 publicly in the Exchequer the first day of term ; for the truth 
 whereof I refer myself to all that were present. 
 
 " I moved to have a reseizure of the lands of Geo. Moore, a re- 
 lapsed recusant, a fugitive and a practising traytor ; and showed 
 better matter for the Queen against the discharge by plea, which is 
 ever with a salvo jure. And this I did in as gentle and reasonable 
 terms as might be. 
 
 "Mr. Attorney kindled at it, and said, ' Mr. Bacon, if you have 
 any tooth against me pluck it out ; for it will do you more hurt than 
 all the teeth in your head will do you good. ' I answered coldly in 
 these very words : 'Mr. Attorney, I respect you; I fear you not; 
 and the less you speak of your own greatness, the more I will think 
 of it.' 
 
 "He replied, '/ think scorn to stand upon terms of greatness toivards 
 you, who are less than little; less than the least;' and other such 
 strange light terms he gave me, with that insulting which cannot 
 be expressed. 
 
 "Herewith stirred, yet I said no more but this : 'Mr. Attorney, 
 do not depress me so far ; for I have been your better, and may be 
 again, when it please the Queen. ' 
 
 "With this he spake, neither I nor himself could tell what, as 
 if he had been born Attorney-General ; and in the end bade me not 
 meddle with the Queen's business, but with mine own ; and that I 
 was unsworn, etc. I told him, sworn or unsworn was all one to 
 an honest man ; and that I ever set my service first, and myself 
 second ; and wished to God that he would do the like. 
 
 " Then he said, it were good to clap a cap. ultegatum upon my 
 back ! To which I only said he could not ; and that he was at fault, 
 for he hunted upon an old scent. He gave me a number of dis-
 
 HI.] BACON AND JAMES I. 65 
 
 graceful words besides ; which I answered with silence, and showing 
 that I was not moved with them." 
 
 The threat of the capias ultegatum was probably in 
 reference to the arrest of Bacon for debt in September 
 1593. After this, we are not surprised at Bacon writing 
 to Coke, " who take to yourself a liberty to disgrace and 
 disable my law, my experience, my discretion," that, 
 " since I missed the Solicitor's place (the rather I think 
 by your means) I cannot expect that you and I shall ever 
 serve as Attorney and Solicitor together, but either serve 
 with another on your remove, or step into some other 
 course." And Coke, no doubt, took care that it should 
 be so. Cecil, too, may possibly have thought that Bacon 
 gave no proof of his fitness for affairs in thus bringing 
 before him a squabble in which both parties lost their 
 tempers. 
 
 Bacon was not behind the rest of the world in " the 
 posting of men of good quality towards the King ;" in the 
 rush which followed the Queen's death, of those who were 
 eager to proffer their services to James, for whose peace- 
 ful accession Cecil had so skilfully prepared the way. 
 He wrote to every one who, he thought, could help him : 
 to Cecil, and to Cecil's man " I pray you, as you find 
 time let him know that he is the personage in the State 
 which I love most ; " to Northumberland, " If I may be 
 of any use to your Lordship, by my head, tongue, pen, 
 means, or friends, I humbly pray you to hold me your 
 own ; " to the King's Scotch friends and servants, even to 
 Southampton, the friend of Essex, who had been shut up 
 in the Tower since his condemnation with Essex, and 
 who was now released. "This great change," Bacon 
 assured him, " hath wrought in me no other change 
 
 F
 
 66 BACON. [CHAP. 
 
 towards your Lordship than this, that I may safely be now 
 that which I truly was before." Bacon found in after 
 years that Southampton was not so easily conciliated. 
 But at present Bacon was hopeful : " In mine own par- 
 ticular," he writes, "I have many comforts and assur- 
 ances ; but in mine own opinion the chief is, that the 
 canvassing world is gone, and the desermng world is 
 come." He asks to be recommended to the King " I 
 commend myself to your love and to the well-using of 
 my name, as well in repressing and answering for me, 
 if there be any biting or nibbling at it in that place, as 
 in impressing a good conceit and opinion of me, chiefly 
 in the King, as otherwise in that Court." His pen had 
 been used under the government of the Queen, and he 
 had offered a draft of a proclamation to the King's 
 advisers. But though he obtained an interview with the 
 King, James's arrival in England brought no immediate 
 prospect of improvement in Bacon's fortunes. Indeed, his 
 name was at first inadvertently passed over in the list of 
 Queen's servants who were to retain their places. The 
 first thing we hear of is his arrest a second time for 
 debt, and his letters of thanks to Cecil, who had rendered 
 him assistance, are written in deep depression. 
 
 " For my purpose or course, I desire to meddle as little as I can 
 in the King's causes, his Majesty now abounding in counsel ; and to 
 follow my private thrift and practice, and to marry with some con- 
 venient advancement. For as for any ambition, I do assure your 
 Honour, mine is quenched. In the Queen's, my excellent Mistress's, 
 time the quorum was small : her service was a kind of freehold, and 
 it was a more solemn time. All those points agreed with my nature 
 and judgement. My ambition now I shall only put upon my pen, 
 whereby I shall be able to maintain memory and merit of the times 
 succeeding.
 
 in.] BACON AND JAMES I. 67 
 
 " Lastly, for this divulged and almost prostituted title of knight- 
 hood, I could without charge, by your Honour's mean, tie content 
 to have it, both because of this late disgrace and because I have 
 three new knights in my mess in Gray's Inn's commons ; and because 
 I have found out an alderman's daughter, an handsome maiden, to 
 my liking." 
 
 Cecil, however, seems to have required that the money 
 should be repaid by the day ; and Bacon only makes a 
 humble request, which, it might be supposed, could have 
 been easily granted. 
 
 " IT MAY PLEASE YOUR GOOD LORDSHIP In answer of your 
 last letter, your money shall be ready before your day : prin- 
 cipal, interest, and costs of suit. So the sheriff promised, when 
 I released errors ; and a Jew takes no more. The rest cannot 
 be forgotten, for I cannot forget your Lordship's dum memor ipse 
 mei : and if there have been aliquid nimis, it shall be amended. 
 And, to be plain with your Lordship, that will quicken me now 
 which slackened me before. Then I thought you might have had 
 more use of me than now I suppose you are like to have. Not but 
 I think the impediment will be rather in my mind than in the matter 
 or times. But to do you service I will come out of my religion at 
 any time. 
 
 ' ' For my knighthood, I wish the manner might be such as might 
 grace me, since the matter will not ; I mean, that I might not be 
 merely gregarious in a troop. The coronation is at hand. It may 
 please your Lordship to let me hear from you speedily. So I con- 
 tinue your Lordship's ever much bouuden, 
 
 "FR. BACOX. 
 
 "From Gorhambury, this 16th of July 1603." 
 
 But it was not done. He " obtained his title, but 
 not in a manner to distinguish him. He was knighted 
 at Whitehall two days before the coronation, but had to 
 share the honour with 300 others." 
 
 It was not quite true that his " ambition was 
 quenched." For the rest of Cecil's life Cecil was the
 
 68 BACON. [CHAP. 
 
 first man at James's Court ; and to the last there was 
 one thing that Bacon would not appear to believe he 
 did not choose to believe that it was Cecil who kept 
 him back from employment and honour. To the last 
 he persisted in assuming that Cecil was the person 
 who would help, if he could, a kinsman devoted to his 
 interests and profoundly conscious of his worth. To 
 the last he commended his cause to Cecil in terms of 
 unstinted affection and confiding hope. It is difficult 
 to judge of the sincerity of such language. The mere 
 customary language of compliment employed by every 
 one at this time was of a kind which to us sounds in- 
 tolerable. It seems as if nothing that ingenuity could 
 devise was too extravagant for an honest man to use, 
 and for a man who respected himself to accept. It 
 must not, indeed, be forgotten that conventionalities, as 
 well as insincerity, differ in their forms in different 
 times ; and that insincerity may lurk behind frank and 
 clear words, when they are the fashion, as much as in 
 what is like mere fulsome adulation. But words mean 
 something, in spite of forms and fashions. When a 
 man of great genius writes his private letters, we wish 
 generally to believe on the whole what he says ; and there 
 are no limits to the esteem, the honour, the confidence, 
 which Bacon continued to the end to express towards 
 Cecil. Bacon appeared to trust him appeared, in spite 
 of continued disappointments, to rely on his goodwill 
 and good offices. But for one reason or another Bacon 
 still remained in the shade. He was left to employ his 
 time as he would, and to work his way by himself. 
 
 He was not idle. He prepared papers which he meant 
 should come before the King, on the pressing subjects of
 
 in.] BACON AND JAMES I. 69 
 
 the day. The Hampton Court conference between the 
 Bishops and the Puritan leaders was at hand, and he 
 drew up a moderating paper on the Pacification of tJie 
 Church. The feeling against him for his conduct to- 
 wards Essex had not died away, and he addressed to 
 Lord Mount joy that Apology concerning the Earl of 
 Essex, so full of interest, so skilfully and forcibly 
 written, so vivid a picture of the Queen's ways with 
 her servants, which has every merit except that of 
 clearing Bacon from the charge of disloyalty to his 
 best friend. The various questions arising out of the 
 relations of the two kingdoms, now united under James, 
 were presenting themselves. They were not of easy 
 solution, and great mischief would follow if they were 
 solved wrongly. Bacon turned his attention to them. 
 He addressed a discourse to the King on the union of 
 the two kingdoms, the first of a series of discussions on 
 the subject which Bacon made peculiarly his own, and 
 which, no doubt, first drew the King's attention and 
 favour to him. 
 
 But for the first year of James's reign he was 
 unnoticed by the King, and he was able to give his 
 attention more freely to the great thought and hope of 
 his life. This time of neglect gave him the opportunity 
 of leisurely calling together and examining the ideas 
 which had long had hold of his mind about the state of 
 human knowledge, about the possibilities of extending 
 it, about the hopes and powers which that new know- 
 ledge opened, and about the methods of realising this 
 great prospect. This, the passion of his life, never 
 asleep even in the hottest days of business, or the 
 most hopeless days of defeat, must have had full play
 
 70 BACON. [CHAP. 
 
 during these days of suspended public employment. He 
 was a man who was not easily satisfied with his attempts 
 to arrange the order and proportions of his plans for 
 mastering that new world of unknown truth, which 
 he held to be within the grasp of man, if he would only 
 dare to seize it ; and he was much given to vary the 
 shape of his work, and to try experiments in composition 
 and even style. He wrote and rewrote. Besides what 
 was finally published, there remains a larger quantity of 
 work which never reached the stage of publication. He 
 repeated over and over again the same thoughts, the 
 same images and characteristic sayings. Among these 
 papers is one which sums up his convictions about the 
 work before him, and the vocation to which he had been 
 called in respect of it. It is in the form of a " Proem " 
 to a treatise on the Interpretation of Nature. It was never 
 used in his published works ; but, as Mr. Spedding says, 
 it has a peculiar value as an authentic statement of what 
 he looked upon as his special business in life. It is 
 this mission which he states to himself in the following 
 paper. It is drawn up in "stately Latin." Mr. 
 Spedding's translation is no unworthy representation of 
 the words of the great Prophet of Knowledge : 
 
 " Believing that I was born for the service of mankind, and 
 regarding the care of the Commonwealth as a kind of common 
 property which, like the air and water, belongs to everybody, I set 
 myself to consider in what way mankind might be best served, and 
 what service I was myself best fitted by nature to perform. 
 
 "Now among all the benefits that could be conferred upon 
 mankind, I found none so great as the discovery of new arts, 
 endowments, and commodities for the bettering of man's life. . . . 
 But if a man could succeed, not in striking out some particular 
 invention, however useful, but in kindling a light in nature a
 
 in.] BACON AND JAMES I. 71 
 
 light that should in its very rising touch and illuminate all the 
 border regions that confine upon the circle of our present knowledge ; 
 and so spreading further and further should presently disclose and 
 bring into sight all that is most hidden and secret in the world, 
 that man (I thought) would be the benefactor indeed of the human 
 race, the propagator of man's empire over the universe, the 
 champion of liberty, the conqueror and subduer of necessities. 
 
 "For myself, I found that I was fitted for nothing so well as 
 for the study of Truth ; as having a mind nimble and versatile 
 enough to catch the resemblances of things (which is the chief 
 point), and at the same time steady enough to fix and distinguish 
 their subtler differences ; as being gifted by nature with desire to 
 seek, patience to doubt, fondness to meditate, slowness to assert, 
 readiness to reconsider, carefulness to dispose and set in order ; and 
 as being a man that neither affects what is new nor admires what 
 is old, and that hates every kind of imposture. So I thought my 
 nature had a kind of familiarity and relationship with Truth. 
 
 "Nevertheless, because my birth and education had seasoned 
 me in business of State ; and because opinions (so young as I was) 
 would sometimes stagger me ; and because I thought that a man's 
 own country has some special claims upon him more than the rest 
 of the world ; and because I hoped that, if I rose to any place of 
 honour in the State, I should have a larger command of industry 
 and ability to help me in my work ; for these reasons I both 
 applied myself to acquire the arts of civil life, and commended my 
 service, so far as in modesty and honesty I might, to the favour of 
 such friends as had any influence. In which also I had another 
 motive : for I felt that those things I have spoken of be they great 
 or small reach no further than the condition and ciilture of this 
 mortal life ; and I was not without hope (the condition of religion 
 being at that time not very prosperous) that if I came to hold office 
 in the State, I might get something done too for the good of men's 
 souls. When I found, however, that my zeal was mistaken for 
 ambition, and my life had already reached the turning-point, and 
 my breaking health reminded me how ill I could afford to be so 
 slow, and I reflected moreover that in leaving undone the good that 
 I could do by myself alone, and applying myself to that which 
 could not be done without the help and consent of others, I was by 
 no means discharging the duty that lay upon me, I put all those
 
 72 BACON. [CHAP. 
 
 thoughts aside, and (in pursuance of my old determination) betook 
 myself wholly to this work. Nor am I discouraged from it because 
 I see signs in the times of the decline and overthrow of that know- 
 ledge and erudition which is now in use. Not that I apprehend 
 any more barbarian invasions (unless possibly the Spanish empire 
 should recover its strength, and having crashed other nations by 
 arms should itself sink under its own weight) : but the civil wars 
 which may be expected, I think (judging from certain fashions 
 which have come in of late), to spread through many countries 
 together with the malignity of sects, and those compendious arti- 
 fices and devices which have crept into the place of solid 
 erudition seem to portend for literature and the sciences a 
 tempest not less fatal, and one against which the Printing office 
 will be no effectual security. And no doubt but that fair-weather 
 learning which is nursed by leisure, blossoms under reward and 
 praise, which cannot withstand the shock of opinion, and is liable 
 to be abused by tricks and quackery, will sink under such impedi- 
 ments as these. Far otherwise is it with that knowledge, whose 
 dignity is maintained by works of utility and power. For the 
 injuries, therefore, which should proceed from the times, I am not 
 afraid of them ; and for the injuries which proceed from men, I am 
 not concerned. For if any one charge me with seeking to be wise 
 over-much, I answer simply that modesty and civil respect are fit 
 for civil matters ; in contemplations nothing is to be respected but 
 Truth. If any one call on me for works, and that presently ; I tell 
 him frankly, without any imposture at all, that for me a man 
 not old, of weak health, my hands full of civil business, entering 
 without guide or light upon an argument of all others the most 
 obscure, I hold it enough to have constructed the machine, though 
 I may not succeed in setting it on work. ... If, again, any one ask 
 me, not indeed for actual works, yet for definite promises and fore- 
 casts of the works that are to be, I would have him know that the 
 knowledge which we now possess will not teach a man even what 
 to wish. Lastly though this is a matter of less moment if any 
 of our politicians, who use to make their calculations and con- 
 jectures according to persons and precedents, must needs interpose 
 his judgment in a thing of this nature, I would but remind him 
 how (according to the ancient fable) the lame man keeping the 
 course won the race of the swift man who left it ; and that there is
 
 in.] BACON AND JAMES I. 73 
 
 no thought to be taken about precedents, for the thing is without 
 precedent. 
 
 "For myself, my heart is not set upon any of those things 
 which depend upon external accidents. I am not hunting for 
 fame : I have no desire to found a sect, after the fashion of 
 heresiarchs ; and to look for any private gain from such an un- 
 dertaking as this, I count both ridiculous and base. Enough for 
 me the consciousness of well-deserving, and those real and effectual 
 results with which Fortune itself cannot interfere." 
 
 In 1604 James's first Parliament met, and with it 
 Bacon returned to an industrious public life, which was 
 not to be interrupted till it finally came to an end with 
 his strange and irretrievable fall. The opportunity had 
 come ; and Bacon, patient, vigilant, and conscious of 
 great powers and indefatigable energy, fully aware of all 
 the conditions of the time, pushed at once to the front 
 in the House of Commons. He lost no time in showing 
 that he meant to make himself felt. The House of Com- 
 mons had no sooner met than it was involved in a contest 
 with the Chancery, with the Lords, and finally with the 
 King himself, about its privileges in this case, its exclu- 
 sive right to judge of the returns of its members. Bacon's 
 time was come for showing the King both that he was 
 willing to do him service, and that he was worth being 
 employed. He took a leading part in the discussions, 
 and was trusted by the House as their spokesman and 
 reporter in the various conferences. The King, in his 
 overweening confidence in his absolute prerogative, had, 
 indeed, got himself into serious difficulty ; for the privi- 
 lege was one which it was impossible for the Commons 
 to give up. But Bacon led the House to agree to an 
 arrangement which saved their rights ; and under a 
 cloud of words of extravagant flattery, he put the King in
 
 74 BACON. [CHAP. 
 
 good humour, and elicited from him the spontaneous 
 proposal of a compromise which ended a very dangerous 
 dispute. " The King's voice," said Bacon, in his report 
 to the House, " was the voice of God in man, the good 
 spirit of God in the mouth of man : I do not say the 
 voice of God, and not of man : I am not one of Herod's 
 flatterers : a curse fell upon him that said it, a curse on 
 him that suffered it. We might say, as was said to 
 Solomon, "We are glad King that we give account to 
 you, because you discern what is spoken." 
 
 The course of this Parliament, in which Bacon was 
 active and prominent, showed the King, probably for the 
 first time, what Bacon was. The session was not so 
 stormy as some of the later ones ; but occasions arose 
 which revealed to the King and to . the House of Com- 
 mons the deeply discordant assumptions and purposes by 
 which each party was influenced, and which brought out 
 Bacon's powers of adjusting difficulties and harmonising 
 claims. He never wavered in his loyalty to his own 
 House, where it is clear that his authority was great. 
 But there was no limit to the submission and reverence 
 which he expressed to the King, and, indeed, to his 
 desire to bring about what the King desired, as far as it 
 could be safely done. Dealing with the Commons, his 
 policy was " to be content with the substance and not to 
 stand on the form." Dealing with the King, he was 
 forward to recognise all that James wanted recognised 
 of his kingcraft and his absolute sovereignty. Bacon 
 assailed with a force and keenness, which showed what he 
 could do as an opponent, the amazing and intolerable 
 grievances arising out of the survival of such feudal cus- 
 toms as Wardship and Purveyance ; customs which made
 
 in.] BACON AND JAMESTl. 75 
 
 over a man's eldest son and property, during a minority, 
 to the keeping of the King, that is, to a King's favourite, 
 and allowed the King's servants to cut down a man's 
 timber before the windows of his house. But he urged 
 that these grievances should be taken aw ay with the utmost 
 tenderness for the King's honour and the King's purse. 
 In the great and troublesome questions relating to the 
 Union he took care to be fully prepared. He was equally 
 strong on points of certain and substantial importance, 
 equally quick to suggest accommodations where nothing 
 substantial was touched. His attitude was one of friendly 
 and respectful independence. It was not misunderstood 
 by the King. Bacon, who had hitherto been an unsworn 
 and unpaid member of the Learned Counsel, now received 
 his office by patent, with a small salary, and he was 
 charged with the grave business of preparing the work 
 for the Commissioners for the Union of the Kingdoms, in 
 which, when the Commission met, he took a foremost and 
 successful part. 
 
 But the Parliament before which their report was to 
 be laid did not meet till ten months after the work of 
 the Commission was done (Dec. 1604 Nov. 1605). For 
 nearly another year Bacon had no public work. The leisure 
 was used for his own objects. He was interested in his- 
 tory in a degree only second to his interest in nature ; 
 indeed, but for the engrossing claims of his philosophy 
 of nature, he might have been the first and one of the 
 greatest of our historians. He addressed a letter to the 
 Chancellor Ellesmere on the deficiencies of British his- 
 tory, and on the opportunities which offered for supplying 
 them. He himself could at present do nothing; "but 
 because there be so many good painters, both for hand
 
 76 BACON. [CHAP. 
 
 and colours, it needeth but encouragement and instruc- 
 tions to give life and light unto it." But he mistook, in 
 this as in other instances, the way in which such things 
 are done. Men do not accomplish such things to order, 
 but because their souls compel them, as he himself was 
 building up his great philosophical structure, in the midst 
 of his ambition and disappointment. And this interval 
 of quiet enabled him to bring out his first public appeal 
 on the subject which most filled his mind. He com- 
 pleted in English the Two Books of the Advancement of 
 Knowledge, which were published at a book shop at the 
 gateway of Gray's Inn in Holborn (Oct. 1605). He in- 
 tended that it should be published in Latin also ; but he 
 was dissatisfied with the ornate translation sent him from 
 Cambridge, and probably he was in a hurry to get the book 
 out. It was dedicated to the King, not merely by way 
 of compliment, but with the serious hope that his interest 
 might be awakened in the subjects which were nearest 
 Bacon's heart. Like other of Bacon's hopes, it was dis- 
 appointed. The King's studies and the King's humours 
 were not of the kind to make him care for Bacon's visions 
 of the future, or his eager desire to begin at once a novel 
 method of investigating the facts and laws of nature; 
 and the appeal to him fell dead. Bacon sent the book 
 about to his friends with explanatory letters. To Sir 
 T. Bodley he writes: 
 
 "I think no man may more truly say with the Psalm, Multum 
 incolafuit anima mea [Ps. 120] than myself. For I do confess since 
 I was of any understanding, my mind hath in effect been absent 
 from that I have done ; and in absence are many errors which I 
 willingly acknowledge : and among them, this great one which led 
 the rest ; that knowing myself by inward calling to be fitter to 
 hold a book than to play a part, I have led my life in civil causes,
 
 in.] BACON AND JAMES I. 77 
 
 for which I was not very fit by nature, and more unfit by the pre- 
 occupation of my mind. Therefore, calling myself home, I have 
 now enjoyed myself ; whereof likewise I desire to make the world 
 partaker. " 
 
 To Lord Salisbury, in a note of elaborate compliment, 
 he describes his purpose by an image which he repeats 
 more than once. "I shall content myself to awake 
 better spirits, like a bell-ringer, which is first up to call 
 others to church." But the two friends whose judgment 
 he chiefly valued, and who, as on other occasions, were 
 taken into his most intimate literary confidence, were 
 Bishop Andrewes, his "inquisitor," and Toby Matthews, 
 a son of the Archbishop of York, who had become a 
 Roman Catholic, and lived in Italy, seeing a good deal 
 of learned men there, apparently the most trusted of all 
 Bacon's friends. 
 
 When Parliament met again in November 1605, the 
 Gunpowder Plot and its consequences filled all minds. 
 Bacon was not employed about it by Government, and 
 his work in the House was confined to carrying on 
 matters left unfinished from the previous session. On 
 the rumour of legal promotions and vacancies Bacon once 
 more applied to Salisbury for the Solicitorship (March 
 1606). But no changes were made, and Bacon was "still 
 next the door." In May 1606 he did what had for some 
 time been in his thoughts : he married ; not the lady 
 whom Essex had tried to win for him, that Lady Hatton 
 who became the wife of his rival Coke, but one whom 
 Salisbury helped him to gain, an alderman's daughter, 
 Alice Barnham, "an handsome maiden," with some money 
 and a disagreeable mother, by her second marriage, Lady 
 Packington. Bacon's curious love of pomp amused the
 
 78 BACON. [CHAP. 
 
 gossips of the day. " Sir Francis Bacon," writes Carleton 
 to Chamberlain, " was married yesterday to his young 
 wench, in Maribone Chapel. He was clad from top to 
 toe in purple, and hath made himself and his wife such 
 store of raiments of cloth of silver and gold that it draws 
 deep into her portion." Of his married life we hear next 
 to nothing : in his Essay on Marriage, he is not enthusi- 
 astic in its praise ; almost the only thing we know is that 
 in his will, twenty years afterwards, he showed his dis- 
 satisfaction with his wife, who after his death married 
 again. But it gave him an additional reason, and an 
 additional plea, for pressing for preferment : and in the 
 summer of 1606 the opening came. Coke was made 
 Chief-Justice of the Common Pleas, leaving the Attorney's 
 place vacant. A favourite of Salisbury's, Hobart, became 
 Attorney, and Bacon hoped for some arrangement by 
 which the Solicitor Doddridge might be otherwise pro- 
 vided for, and he himself become Solicitor. Hopeful as 
 he was, and patient of disappointments, and of what other 
 men would have thought injustice and faithlessness, he 
 felt keenly both the disgrace and the inconvenience of 
 so often expecting place, and being so often passed over. 
 While the question was pending, he wrote to the King, 
 the Chancellor, and Salisbury. His letter to the King is 
 a record in his own words of his public services. To the 
 Chancellor, whom he believed to be his supporter, he 
 represented the discredit which he suffered " he was a 
 common gaze and a speech;" "the little reputation which 
 by his industry he gathered, being scattered and taken 
 away by continual disgraces, every new man coming 
 above me;" and his wife and his wife's friends were 
 making him feel it. The letters show what Bacon
 
 in.] BACON AND JAMES I. 79 
 
 thought to be his claims, and how hard lie found it to 
 get them recognised. To the Chancellor he urged, 
 among other things, that time was slipping by : 
 
 " I humbly pray your Lordship to consider that time groweth 
 precious with me, and that a married man is seven years elder 
 in his thoughts the first day. . . . And were it not to satisfy my 
 wife's friends, and to get myself out of being a common gaze and a 
 speech, I protest before God I would never speak word for it. But 
 to conclude, as my honourable Lady your wife was some mean to 
 make me to change the name of another, so if it please you to help 
 me to change my own name, I can be but more and more boundeu 
 to you ; and I am much deceived if your Lordship find not the 
 King well inclined, and my Lord of Salisbury forward and affec- 
 tionate." 
 
 To Salisbury he writes : 
 
 ' ' I may say to your Lordship, in the confidence of your poor 
 kinsman, and of a man by you advanced, Tu idem fer opem, 
 qui spem dedisti ; for I am sure it was not possible for any living 
 man to have received from another more significant and com- 
 fortable words of hope ; your Lordship being pleased to tell me, 
 during the course of my last service, that you would raise me ; 
 and that when you had resolved to raise a man, you were more care- 
 ful of him than himself ; and that what you had done for me in my 
 marriage was a benefit to me, but of no use to your Lordship. . . . 
 And I know, and all the world knoweth, that your Lordship is no 
 dealer of holy water, but noble and real ; and on my part I am of 
 a sure ground that I have committed nothing that may deserve 
 alteration. And therefore my hope is your Lordship will finish a 
 good work, and consider that time groweth precious with me, and 
 that I am now vergcntibiis annis. And although I know your for- 
 tune is not to need an hundred such as I am, yet I shall be ever 
 ready to give you my best and first fruits, and to supply (as much 
 as in me lieth) worthiness by thankfulness." 
 
 Still the powers were deaf to his appeals ; at any rate 
 he had to be content with another promise. Consider-
 
 80 BACON. [CHAP. in. 
 
 ing the ability which he had shown in Parliament, the 
 wisdom and zeal with which he had supported the 
 Government, and the important position which he held 
 in the House of Commons, the neglect of him is unin- 
 telligible, except on two suppositions : that the Govern- 
 ment, that is Cecil, were afraid of anything but the mere 
 routine of law, as represented by such men as Hobart 
 and Doddridge ; or that Coke's hostility to him was un- 
 abated, and Coke still too important to be offended. 
 
 Bacon returned to work when the Parliament met, 
 November 1606. The questions arising out of the Union, 
 the question of naturalisation, its grounds and limits, the 
 position of Scotchmen born before or since the King's 
 accession, the Antenati and Postnati, the question of a 
 union of laws, with its consequences, were discussed with 
 great keenness and much jealous feeling. On the ques- 
 tion of naturalisation Bacon took the liberal and larger 
 view. The immediate union of laws he opposed as 
 premature. He was a willing servant of the House, 
 and the House readily made use of him. He reported 
 the result of conferences, even when his own opinion 
 was adverse to that of the House. And he reported 
 the speeches of such persons as Lord Salisbury, probably 
 throwing into them both form and matter of his own. 
 At length, "silently, on the 25th of June," 1607, he 
 was appointed Solicitor -General. He was then forty- 
 seven. 
 
 "It was also probably about this time," writes Mr. 
 Spedding, "that Bacon finally settled the plan of his 
 ' Great Instauration,' and began to call it by that name."
 
 CHAPTER IV. 
 
 BACON SOLICITOR-GENERAL. 
 
 THE great thinker and idealist, the great seer of a world 
 of knowledge to which the men of his own generation 
 were blind, and which they could not, even with his 
 help, imagine a possible one, had now won the first step 
 in that long and toilsome ascent to success in life, in 
 which for fourteen years he had been baffled. He had 
 made himself, for good and for evil, a servant of the 
 Government of James I. He was prepared to discharge 
 with zeal and care all his duties. He was prepared to 
 perform all the services which that Government might 
 claim from its servants. He had sought, he had pas- 
 sionately pressed to be admitted within that circle in 
 which the will of the King was the supreme law ; after 
 that, it would have been ruin to have withdrawn or 
 resisted; but it does not appear that the thought or 
 wish to resist or withdraw ever presented itself ; he had 
 thoroughly convinced himself that in doing what the 
 King required he was doing the part of a good citizen 
 and a faithful servant of the State and Commonwealth. 
 The two lives, the two currents of purpose and effort, were 
 still there. Behind all the wrangle of the courts and the 
 devising of questionable legal subtleties to support some 
 
 G
 
 82 BACON. [CHAP. 
 
 unconstitutional encroachment, or to outflank the defence 
 of some obnoxious prisoner, the high philosophical medi- 
 tations still went on ; the remembrance of their sweetness 
 and grandeur wrung more than once from the jaded 
 lawyer or the baffled counsellor the complaint, in words 
 which had a great charm for him, Multum incola fuit 
 anima mea, " My soul hath long dwelt," where it would 
 not be. But opinion, and ambition, and the immense 
 convenience of being great, and rich, and powerful, and 
 the supposed necessities of his condition, were too strong 
 even for his longings to be the interpreter and the ser- 
 vant of nature. There is no trace of the faintest reluc- 
 tance on his part to be the willing minister of a court of 
 which not only the principal figure, but the arbiter and 
 governing spirit, was to be George Villiers, Duke of 
 Buckingham. 
 
 The first leisure that Bacon had after he was appointed 
 Solicitor he used in a characteristic way. He sat down 
 to make a minute stock-taking of his position and its 
 circumstances. In the summer of 1608 he devoted a 
 week of July to this survey of his life, its objects and 
 its appliances ; and he jotted down, day by day, through 
 the week, from his present reflections, or he transcribed 
 from former note-books, a series of notes in loose order, 
 mostly very rough and not always intelligible, about 
 everything that could now concern him. This curious 
 and intimate record, which he called Commentarius Solutus, 
 was discovered by Mr. Spedding, who not unnaturally 
 had some misgivings about publishing so secret and so 
 ambiguous a record of a man's most private confidences 
 with himself. But there it was, and, as it was known, 
 he no doubt decided wisely in publishing it as it stands ;
 
 iv.] BACON SOLICITOR-GENERAL. 83 
 
 he has done his best to make it intelligible, and he has 
 also done his best to remove any unfavourable impres- 
 sions that might arise from it. It is singularly interest- 
 ing as an evidence of Bacon's way of working, of his 
 watchfulness, his industry, his care in preparing himself 
 long beforehand for possible occasions, his readiness to 
 take any amount of trouble about his present duties, his 
 self-reliant desire for more important and difficult ones. 
 It exhibits his habit of self-observation and self-correction, 
 his care to mend his natural defects of voice, manner, 
 and delivery; it is even more curious in showing him 
 watching his own physical constitution and health, in the 
 most minute details of symptoms and remedies, equally 
 with a scientific and a practical object. It contains his 
 estimate of his income, his expenditure, his debts, sche- 
 dules of lands and jewels, his rules for the economy of 
 his estate, his plans for his new gardens, and terraces, 
 and ponds, and buildings at Gorhambury. He was now a 
 rich man, valuing his property at 24,155 and his in- 
 come at 4975, burdened with a considerable debt, but 
 not more than he might easily look to wipe out. But, 
 besides all these points, there appear the two large in- 
 terests of his life, the reform of philosophy, and his ideal 
 of a great national policy. The "greatness of Britain" 
 was one of his favourite subjects of meditation. He 
 puts down in his notes the outline of what should be 
 aimed at to secure and increase it; it is to make the 
 various forces of the great and growing empire work to- 
 gether in harmonious order, without waste, without 
 jealousy, without encroachment and collision; to unite 
 not only the interests but the sympathies and aims of 
 the Crown with those of the people and Parliament ; and
 
 84 BACON. [CHAP. 
 
 so to make Britain, now in peril from nothing but from 
 the strength of its own discordant elements, that 
 " Monarchy of the West " in reality, which Spain was in 
 show, and, as Bacon always maintained, only in show. 
 The survey of the condition of his philosophical enter- 
 prise takes more space. He notes the stages and points 
 to which his plans have reached ; he indicates, with a 
 favourite quotation or apophthegm "Phis ultra" 
 " ausus vana contemnere " " aditus non nisi sub persona 
 infantis," soon to be familiar to the world in his published 
 writings the lines of argument, sometimes alterna- 
 tive ones, which were before him ; he draws out schemes 
 of inquiry, specimen tables, distinctions and classifica- 
 tions about the subject of Motion, in English interlarded 
 with Latin, or in Latin interlarded with English, of his 
 characteristic and practical sort ; he notes the various 
 sources from which he might look for help and co- 
 operation "of learned men beyond the seas" "to 
 begin first in France to print it " " laying for a place to 
 command wits and pens :" he has his eye on rich and 
 childless bishops, on the enforced idleness of State 
 prisoners in the Tower, like Northumberland and 
 Raleigh, on the great schools and universities, where 
 he might perhaps get hold of some college for " Inven- 
 tors " as we should say, for the endowment of research. 
 These matters fill up a large space of his notes. But 
 his thoughts were also busy about his own advancement. 
 And to these sheets of miscellaneous memoranda Bacon 
 confided not only his occupations and his philosophical 
 and political ideas, but, with a curious innocent unre- 
 serve, the arts and methods which he proposed to use 
 in order to win the favour of the great and to pull
 
 iv.] BACON SOLICITOR-GENERAL. 85 
 
 the reputation of his rivals. He puts down in detail 
 how he is to recommend himself to the King and the 
 King's favourites : 
 
 "To set on foot and maintain access with his Majesty, Dean 
 of the Chapel, May, Murray. Keeping a course of access at the 
 beginning of every term and vacation, with a memorial. To attend 
 some time his repasts, or to fall into a course of familiar discourse. 
 To find means to win a conceit, not open, but private, of being 
 affectionate and assured to the Scotch, and fit to succeed Salisbury 
 in his manage in that kind ; Lord Dunbar, Duke of Lennox, and 
 Daubiny : secret." 
 
 Then, again, of Salisbury : 
 
 ' ' Insinuate myself to become privy to my Lord of Salisbury's 
 estate." "To correspond with Salisbury in a habit of natural but 
 no ways perilous boldness, and in vivacity, invention, care to cast 
 and enterprise (but with due caution), for this manner I judge 
 both in his nature freeth the stands, and in his ends pleaseth him 
 best, and promiseth more use of me. I judge my standing out, and 
 not favoured by Northampton, must needs do me good with Salis- 
 bury, specially comparative to the Attorney." 
 
 The Attorney Hobart filled the place to which Bacon 
 had so long aspired, and which he thought, perhaps 
 reasonably, that he could fill much better. At any rate 
 one of the points to which he recurs frequently in his 
 notes, is to exhort himself to make his own service a 
 continual contrast to the Attorney's ; " to have in mind 
 and use the Attorney's weakness;" enumerating a list 
 of instances. "Too full of cases and distinctions. 
 Nibbling solemnly ; he distinguisheth but apprehends 
 not." " No gift with his pen in proclamations and the 
 like," and at last he draws out in a series of epigrams 
 his view of " Hubbard's disadvantages " : 
 
 1 ' Better at shift than at drift. . . SuUilitas sine acrimonia. . .
 
 86 BACON. [CHAP. 
 
 No power with the judge. . . He will alter a thing but not mend. 
 . . He puts into patents and deeds words not of law but of com- 
 mon sense and discourse. . . Sociable save in profit. . . He doth 
 depopulate mine office ; otherwise called inclose. . . I never 
 knew any one of so good a speech with a worse pen." . . 
 
 Then in a marginal note "Solemn goose. Stately, 
 leastwise nodd (1) crafty. They have made him believe 
 that he is wondrous wise." And, finally, he draws up a 
 paper of counsels and rules for his own conduct, 
 " Custumce aptce ad Indiwduum " which might supply an 
 outline for an essay on the arts of behaviour proper for 
 a rising official; a sequel to the biting irony of the 
 essays on Cunning and Wisdom for a Man's Self. 
 
 "To furnish my L. of S. with ornaments for public speeches. 
 To make him think how he should be reverenced by a Lord 
 Chancellor, if I were ; Princelike. 
 
 "To prepare him for matters to be handled in Council or before 
 the King aforehand, and to show him and yield him the fruits of 
 my care. 
 
 " To take notes in tables, when I attend the Council, and some- 
 times to move out of a memorial shewed and seen. To have par- 
 ticular occasions, fit and graceful and continual, to maintain private 
 speech with every the great persons, and sometimes drawing more 
 than one together. Ex imitatione Alt. This specially in public 
 places, and without care or affectation. At Council table to make 
 good my L. of Salisb. motions and speeches, and for the rest some- 
 times one sometimes another ; chiefly his, that is most earnest and 
 in affection. 
 
 "To suppress at once my speaking, with panting and labour of 
 breath and voice. Not to fall upon the main too sudden, but to 
 induce and intermingle speech of good fashion. To use at once 
 upon entrance given of speech, though abrupt, to compose and 
 draw in myself. To free myself at once from payt. (?) of formality 
 and compliment, though with some show of carelessness, pride, 
 and rudeness." 
 
 (And then follows a long list of matters of business to be at- 
 tended to.)
 
 iv.] BACON SOLICITOR-GENERAL. 87 
 
 These arts of a court were not new ; it was not new 
 for men to observe them in their neighbours and rivals. 
 What was new was the writing them down, with deliber- 
 ate candour, among a man's private memoranda, as things 
 to be done and with the intention of practising them. 
 This of itself, it has been suggested, shows that they 
 were unfamiliar and uncongenial to Bacon ; for a man 
 reminds himself of what he is apt to forget. But a man 
 reminds himself also of what seems to him, at the mo- 
 ment, most important, and what he lays most stress 
 upon. And it is clear that these are the rules, rhetorical 
 and ethical, which Bacon laid down for himself in 
 pursuing the second great object of his life his official 
 advancement; and that, whatever we think of them, 
 they were the means which he deliberately approved. 
 
 As long as Salisbury lived, the distrust which had 
 kept Bacon so long in the shade kept him at a distance 
 from the King's ear, and from influence on his counsels. 
 Salisbury was the one Englishman in whom the King 
 had become accustomed to confide, in his own conscious 
 strangeness to English ways and real dislike and sus- 
 picion of them; Salisbury had an authority which no 
 one else had, both from his relations with James at the 
 end of Elizabeth's reign, and as the representative of 
 her policy and the depositary of its traditions; and if he 
 had lived, things might not, perhaps, have been better in 
 James's government, but many things, probably, would 
 have been different. But while Salisbury was supreme, 
 Bacon, though very alert and zealous, was mainly 
 busied with his official work; and the Solicitor's place 
 had become, as he says, a "mean thing" compared 
 with the Attorney's, and also an extremely laborious
 
 88 BACON. [CHAP. 
 
 place, "one of the painfullest places in the kingdom." 
 Much of it was routine ; but responsible and fatiguing 
 routine. But if he was not in Salisbury's confidence, he 
 was prominent in the House of Commons. The great 
 and pressing subject of the time was the increasing 
 difficulties of the revenue, created partly by the inevit- 
 able changes of a growing state, but much more by the 
 King's incorrigible wastefulness. It was impossible to 
 realise completely the great dream and longing of the 
 Stuart kings and their ministers, to make the Crown 
 independent of parliamentary supplies ; but to dispense 
 with these supplies as much as possible, and to make as 
 much as possible of the revenue permanent, was the 
 continued and fatal policy of the Court. The "Great 
 Contract" a scheme by which, in return for the surren- 
 der by the Crown of certain burdensome and dangerous 
 claims of the Prerogative, the Commons were to assure 
 a large compensating yearly income to the Crown was 
 Salisbury's favourite device during the last two years of 
 his life. It was not a prosperous one. The bargain was 
 an ill-imagined and not very decorous transaction between 
 the King and his people. Both parties were naturally 
 jealous of one another, suspicious of underhand dealing 
 and tacit changes of terms, prompt to resent and take 
 offence, and not easy to pacify when they thought 
 advantage had been taken ; and Salisbury, either by his 
 own fault, or by yielding to the King's canny shiftiness, 
 gave the business a more haggling and huckstering look 
 than it need have had. Bacon, a subordinate of the 
 Government, but a very important person in the Com- 
 mons, did his part, loyally, as it seems, and skilfully in 
 smoothing differences, and keeping awkward questions
 
 iv.] BACON SOLICITOR-GENERAL. 89 
 
 from making their appearance. Thus he tried to stave 
 off the risk of bringing definitely to a point the King's 
 cherished claim to levy " impositions," or custom duties, 
 on merchandise, by virtue of his prerogative a claim 
 which he warned the Commons not to dispute, and 
 which Bacon, maintaining it as legal in theory, did his 
 best to prevent them from discussing, and to persuade 
 them to be content with restraining. Whatever he 
 thought of the "Great Contract," he did what was 
 expected of him in trying to gain for it fair play. But 
 he made time for other things also. He advised, and 
 advised soundly, on the plantation and finance of Ireland. 
 It was a subject in which he took deep interest. A few 
 years later, with only too sure a foresight, he gave the 
 warning, "lest Ireland civil become more dangerous to 
 us than Ireland savage." He advised not soundly in 
 point of law, but curiously in accordance with modern 
 notions about endowments ; though, in this instance, 
 in the famous will case of Thomas Sutton, the founder 
 of the Charter House, his argument probably covered 
 the scheme of a monstrous job in favour of the needy 
 Court. And his own work went on in spite of the 
 pressure of the Solicitor's place. To the first years of 
 his official life belong three very interesting fragments, 
 intended to find a provisional place in the plan of the 
 " Great Instauration." To his friend Toby Matthews, at 
 Florence, he sent in manuscript the great attack on the 
 old teachers of knowledge, which is perhaps the most 
 brilliant, and also the most insolently unjust and un- 
 thinking piece of rhetoric ever composed by him, the 
 liedaryutio Philosophiarum. 
 
 " I send you at this time the only part which hath any harshness ;
 
 90 BACON. [CHAP. 
 
 and yet I framed to myself an opinion, that whosoever allowed well 
 of that preface which you so much commend, will not dislike, or at 
 least ought not to dislike, this other speech of preparation ; for it 
 is written out of the same spirit, and out of the same necessity. 
 Nay it doth more fully lay open that the question between me and 
 the ancients is not of the virtue of the race, but of the Tightness of 
 the way. And to speak truth, it is to the other but as palma to 
 pugnus, part of the same thing more large. . . . Myself am like 
 the miller of Huntingdon, that was wont to pray for peace amongst 
 the willows ; for while the winds blew, the wind-mills wrought, 
 and the water-mill was less customed. So I see that controversies 
 of religion must hinder the advancement of sciences. Let me con- 
 clude with my perpetual wish towards yourself, that the approba- 
 tion of yourself by your own discreet and temperate carriage, may 
 restore you to your country, and your friends to your society. 
 And so I commend you to God's goodness. 
 " Gray's Inn, this 10th of October 1609." 
 
 To Bishop Andrewes he sent, also in manuscript, 
 another piece, belonging to the same plan the deeply 
 impressive treatise called Visa et Cogitata what Francis 
 Bacon had seen of nature and knowledge, and what he 
 had come by meditation to think of what he had seen. 
 The letter is not less interesting than the last, in respect 
 to the writer's purposes, his manner of writing, and his 
 relations to his correspondent. 
 
 " MY VERY GOOD LORD Now your Lordship hath been so long 
 in the church and the palace disputing between kings and popes, 
 methinks you should take pleasure to look into the field, and re- 
 fresh your mind with some matter of philosophy ; though that 
 science be now through age waxed a child again, and left to boys 
 and young men ; and because you were wont to make me believe 
 you took liking to my writings, I send you some of this vacation's 
 fruits ; and thus much more of my mind and purpose. I hasten 
 not to publish ; perishing I would prevent. And I am forced to 
 respect as well my times as the matter. For with me it is thus, 
 and I think with all men in my case, if I bind myself to an argu-
 
 iv.] BACON SOLICITOR-GENERAL. 91 
 
 ment, it loadeth my mind ; but if I rid my mind of the present 
 cogitation, it is rather a recreation. This hath put me into these 
 miscellanies ; which I purpose to suppress, if God give me leave 
 to write a just and perfect volume of philosophy, which I go on 
 with, though slowly. I send not your Lordship too much, lest it 
 may glut you. Now let me tell you what my desire is. If your 
 Lordship be so good now, as when you were the good Dean of West- 
 minster, my request to you is, that not by pricks, but by notes, 
 you would mark unto me whatsoever shall seein unto you either not 
 current in the style, or harsh to credit and opinion, or inconvenient 
 for the person of the writer ; for no man can be judge and party : 
 and when our minds judge by reflection of ourselves, they are more 
 subject to error. And though for the matter itself my judgement 
 be in some things fixed, and not accessible by any man's judgement 
 that goeth not my way, yet even in those things, the admonition 
 of a friend may make me express myself diversly. I would have 
 come to your Lordship, but that I am hastening to my house in 
 the countiy. And so I commend your Lordship to God's good- 
 ness." 
 
 There was yet another production of this time, of 
 which we have a notice from himself in a letter to Toby 
 Matthews, the curious and ingenious little treatise on 
 the Wisdom of the Ancients, " one of the most popular of 
 his works," says Mr. Spedding, " in his own and in the 
 next generation," but of value to us mainly for its quaint 
 poetical colour, and the unexpected turns, like answers 
 to a riddle, given to the ancient fables. When this work 
 was published, it was the third time that he had appeared 
 as an author in print. He thus writes about it and him- 
 self : 
 
 "Mu. MATTHEW I do heartily thank you for your letter of 
 the 24th of August from Salamanca ; and in recompense thereof, I 
 send you a little work of mine that hath begun to pass the world. 
 They tell me my Latin is turned into silver, and become current. 
 Had you been here, you should have boon my inquisitor before it 
 came forth ; but I think the greatest inquisitor in Spain will allow
 
 92 BACON. [CHAP. 
 
 it. ... My great work goeth forward : and, after my manner, I 
 alter ever when I add. So that nothing is finished till all be 
 finished. 
 
 'Prom Gray's Inn, the 17th of February 1610." 
 
 In the autumn of 1611 the Attorney-General was ill, 
 and Bacon reminded both the King and Salisbury of his 
 claim. He was afraid, he writes to the King, with an 
 odd forgetfulness of the persistency and earnestness of 
 his applications, "that by reason of my sloivness to sue, and 
 apprehend occasions upon the sudden, keeping one plain 
 course of painful service, I may in fine dierum be in 
 danger to be neglected and forgotten." The Attorney 
 recovered; but Bacon, on New Year's Tide of 16^, 
 wrote to Salisbury to thank him for his goodwill. It is 
 the last letter of Bacon's to Salisbury which has come 
 down to us. 
 
 "Tr MAY PLEASE YOUR GOOD LORDSHIP I would entreat the 
 new year to answer for the old, in my humble thanks to your Lord- 
 ship, both for many your favours, and chiefly that upon the occa- 
 sion of Mr. Attorney's infirmity I found your Lordship even as I 
 would wish. This doth increase a desire in me to express my thank- 
 ful mind to your Lordship ; hoping that though I find age and 
 decays grow upon me, yet I may have a flash or two of spirit left 
 to do you service. And I do protest before God, without compli- 
 ment or any light vein of mind, that if I knew in what course of 
 life to do you best service, I would take it, and make my thoughts, 
 which now fly to many pieces, be reduced to that center. But all 
 this is no more than I am, which is not much, but yet the entire 
 of him that is " 
 
 In the following May (May 24, 1612) Salisbury died. 
 From this date James passed from government by a 
 minister, who, whatever may have been his faults, was 
 laborious, public-spirited, and a statesman, into his own 
 keeping and into the hands of favourites, who cared only
 
 iv.] BACON SOLICITOR-GENERAL. 93 
 
 for themselves. With Cecil ceased the traditions of the 
 days of Elizabeth and Burghley, in many ways evil and 
 cruel traditions, hut not ignoble and sordid ones ; and 
 James was left without the stay, and also without the 
 check, which Cecil's power had been to him. The field 
 was open for new men and new ways ; the fashions and 
 ideas of the time had altered during the last ten years, 
 and those of the Queen's days had gone out of date. 
 Would the new turn out for the better or the worse ? 
 Bacon, at any rate, saw the significance of the change 
 and the critical eventfulness of the moment. It was his 
 habit of old to send memorials of advice to the heads of 
 the Government, apparently without such suggestions 
 seeming more intrusive or officious than a leading article 
 seems now, and perhaps with much the same effect. It 
 was now a time to do so, if ever; and he was in an 
 official relation to the King which entitled him to proffer 
 advice. He at once prepared to lay his thoughts before 
 the King, and to suggest that he could do far better 
 service than Cecil, and was ready to take his place. 
 The policy of the "Great Contract" had certainly 
 broken down, and the .King, under Cecil's guidance, had 
 certainly not known how to manage an English parlia- 
 ment. In writing to the King, he found it hard to 
 satisfy himself. Several draft letters remain, and it is 
 not certain which of them, if any, was sent. But 
 immediately on Salisbury's death he began, May 29th, 
 a letter in which he said that he had never yet been 
 able to show his affection to the King, " having been as 
 a hawk tied to another's fist ; " and if, " as was said to 
 one that spake great words, Amice, verba tua desiderant 
 omtatem, your Majesty say to me, Bacon, your words
 
 94 BACON. [CHAP. 
 
 require a place to speak them," yet that "place or not 
 place" was with the King. But the draft breaks off 
 abruptly, and with the date of the 31st we have the 
 following : 
 
 "Your Majesty hath lost a great subject and a great servant. 
 But if I should praise him in propriety, I should say that he was 
 a fit man to keep things from growing worse, but no very fit man 
 to reduce things to be much better. For he loved to have the eyes 
 of all Israel a little too much upon himself, and to have all busi- 
 ness still under the hammer, and like clay in the hands of the 
 potter, to mould it as he thought good ; so that he was more in 
 operatione than in opere. And though he had fine passages of 
 action, yet the real conclusions came slowly on. So that although 
 your Majesty hath grave counsellors and worthy persons left, yet 
 you do as it were turn a leaf, wherein if your Majesty shall give a 
 frame and constitution to matters, before you place the persons, in 
 my simple opinion it were not amiss. But the great matter and 
 most instant for the present, is the consideration of a Parliament, 
 for two effects : the one for the supply of your estate, the other for 
 the better knitting of the hearts of your subjects unto your Majesty, 
 according to your infinite merit ; for both which, Parliaments have 
 been and are the antient and honourable remedy. 
 
 " Now because I take myself to have a little skill in that region, 
 as one that ever affected that your Majesty mought in all your 
 causes not only prevail, but prevail with satisfaction of the inner 
 man ; and though no man can say but f was a perfect and peremp- 
 tory royalist, yet every man makes me believe that I was never one 
 hour out of credit with the lower house ; my desire is to know, 
 whether your Majesty will give me leave to meditate and propound 
 unto you some preparative remembrances touching the future Par- 
 liament." 
 
 Whether he sent this or not, he prepared another 
 draft. What had happened in the meanwhile we know 
 not, but Bacon was in a bitter mood, and the letter 
 reveals, for the first time, what was really in Bacon's 
 heart about the "great subject and great servant," of
 
 iv.] BACON SOLICITOR-GENERAL. 95 
 
 whom he had just written so respectfully, and with 
 whom he had been so closely connected for most of his 
 life. The fierceness which had been gathering for years 
 of neglect and hindrance under that placid and patient 
 exterior broke out. He offered himself as Cecil's suc- 
 cessor in business of State. He gave his reason for 
 being hopeful of success. Cecil's bitterest enemy could 
 not have given it more bitterly. 
 
 " My principal end being to do your Majesty service, I crave 
 leave to make at this time to your Majesty this most humble obla- 
 tion of myself. I may truly say with the psalm, Multum incola 
 fuit anima mea ; for my life hath been conversant in things 
 wherein I take little pleasure. Your Majesty may have heard 
 somewhat that my father was an honest man, and somewhat you 
 may have seen of myself, though not to make any true judgement 
 by, because I have hitherto had only potcstatem vcrborum, nor that 
 neither. I was three of my young years bred with an ambassador 
 in France, and since I have been an old truant in the school-house 
 of your council-chamber, though on the second form ; yet longer 
 than any that now sitteth hath been upon the head form. If your 
 Majesty find any aptness in me, or if you find any scarcity in others, 
 whereby you may think it fit for your service to remove me to 
 business of State ; although I have a fair way before me for profit 
 (and by your Majesty's grace and favour for honour and advance- 
 ment), and in a course less exposed to the blasts of fortune, yet now 
 that he is gone, quo vivente virtutibus certissimum exitium, I will 
 be ready as a chessman to be wherever your Majesty's royal hand 
 shall set me. Your Majesty will bear me witness, I have not sud- 
 denly opened myself thus far. I have looked upon others, I see 
 the exceptions, I see the distractions, and I fear Tacitus will be a 
 prophet, magis alii homines quam alii mores. I know mine own 
 heart, and I know not whether God that hath touched my heart 
 with the affection may not touch your royal heart to discern it. 
 Howsoever, I shall at least go on honestly in mine ordinary course, 
 and supply the rest in prayers for you, remaining, etc. " 
 
 This is no hasty outburst. In a later paper on the
 
 96 BACON". [CHAP. 
 
 true way of retrieving the disorders of the King's finances, 
 full of large and wise counsel, after advising the King 
 not to be impatient, and assuring him that a state of 
 debt is not so intolerable " for it is no new thing for 
 the greatest Kings to be in debt," and all the great men 
 of the Court had been in debt without any " manner of 
 diminution of their greatness " he returns to the charge 
 in detail against Salisbury and the Great Contract. 
 
 "My second prayer is, that your Majesty in respect of the 
 hasty freeing of your state would not descend to any means, or 
 degree of means, which carrieth not a symmetry with your Ma- 
 jesty and greatness. He is gone from whom those courses did 
 wholly flow. To have your wants and necessities in particular as 
 it were hanged up in two tablets before the eyes of your lords and 
 commons, to be talked of for four months together ; To have all 
 your courses to help yourself in revenue or profit put into printed 
 books, which were wont to be held arcana imperil : To have such 
 worms of aldermen to lend for ten in the hundred upon good assur- 
 ance, and with such entreaty (?) as if it should save the bark of your 
 fortune : To contract still where mought be had the readiest pay- 
 ment, and not the best bargain : To stir a number of projects for 
 your profit, and then to blast them, and leave your Majesty nothing 
 but the scandal of them : To pretend even carriage between your 
 Majesty's rights and the ease of the people, and to satisfy neither : 
 These courses and others the like I hope are gone with the deviser 
 of them ; which have turned your Majesty to inestimable prejudice." 
 
 And what he thought of saying, but on further con- 
 sideration struck out, was the following. It is no won- 
 der that he struck it out, but it shows what he felt 
 towards Cecil. 
 
 "I protest to God, though I be not superstitious, when I saw 
 your M.'s book against Vorstius and Arminius, and noted your 
 zeal to deliver the majesty of God from the vain and indign com- 
 prehensions of heresy and degenerate philosophy, as you had by 
 your pen formerly endeavoured to deliver kings from the usurpation
 
 iv.] BACON SOLICITOR-GENERAL. 97 
 
 of Rome, perculsit illico animum that God would set shortly upon 
 you some visible favour, ami let me iwt live if I thought not of the 
 tii/.-iny away of that man." 
 
 And from this time onwards he scarcely ever men- 
 tions Cecil's name in his correspondence with James but 
 with words of condemnation, which imply that Cecil's 
 mischievous policy was the result of private ends. Yet 
 this was the man to whom he had written the " New 
 Year's Tide " letter six months before ; a letter which is 
 but an echo to the last of all that he had been accustomed 
 to write to Cecil, when asking assistance or offering 
 congratulation. Cecil had, indeed, little claim on Bacon's 
 gratitude ; he had spoken him fair in public, and no 
 doubt in secret distrusted and thwarted him. But to 
 the last Bacon did not choose to acknowledge this. Had 
 James disclosed something of his dead servant, who left 
 some strange secrets behind him, which showed his un- 
 suspected hostility to Bacon 1 Except on this supposition 
 (but there is nothing to support it), no exaggeration of 
 the liberty allowed to the language of compliment is 
 enough to clear Bacon of an insincerity which is almost 
 inconceivable in any but the meanest tools of power. 
 
 "I assure myself," wrote Bacon to the King, "your 
 Majesty taketh not me for one of a busy nature ; for my 
 estate being free from all difficulties, and I having such a 
 large field for contemplation, as I have partly and shall 
 much more make manifest unto your Majesty and the 
 world, to occupy my thoughts, nothing could make me 
 active but love and affection." So Bacon described his 
 position with questionable accuracy for his estate was not 
 " free from difficulties "in the new time coming. He was 
 still kept out of the inner circle of the Council ; but from 
 
 II
 
 98 BACON. [CHAP. 
 
 the moment of Salisbury's death, he became a much more 
 important person. He still sued for advancement, and 
 still met with disappointment; the " mean men" still rose 
 above him. The lucrative place of Master of the Wards 
 was vacated by Salisbury's death. Bacon was talked of 
 for it, and probably expected it, for he drew up new 
 rules for it, and a speech for the new master ; but the 
 office and the speech went to Sir George Carey. Soon after 
 Sir George Carey died. Bacon'then applied for it through 
 the new favourite, Rochester. " He was so confident of 
 the place that he put most of his men into new cloaks ;" 
 and the world of the day amused itself at his disappoint- 
 ment, when the place was given to another "mean man," 
 Sir Walter Cope, of whom the gossips wrote that if the 
 " last two Treasurers could look out of their graves to see 
 those successors in that place, they would be out of coun- 
 tenance with themselves, and say to the world quantum 
 mutatus." But Bacon's hand and counsel appear more 
 and more in important matters the improvement of 
 the revenue ; the defence of extreme rights of the pre- 
 rogative in the case against Whitelocke ; the great ques- 
 tion of calling a parliament, and of the true and "princely" 
 way of dealing with it. His confidential advice to the 
 King about calling a parliament was marked by his keen 
 perception of the facts of the situation ; it was marked 
 too by his confident reliance on skilful indirect methods 
 and trust in the look of things ; it bears traces also of 
 his bitter feeling against Salisbury, whom he charges with 
 treacherously fomenting the opposition of the last Par- 
 liament. There was no want of worldly wisdom in it ; 
 certainly it was more adapted to James's ideas of state- 
 craft than the simpler plan of Sir Henry Nevill, that the
 
 iv.j BACON SOLICITOR-GENERAL. 99 
 
 King should throw himself frankly on the loyalty and 
 goodwill of Parliament. And thus he came to be on 
 easy terms with James, who was quite capable of under- 
 standing Bacon's resource and nimbleness of wit. In 
 the autumn of 1613, the Chief- Justiceship of the King's 
 Bench became vacant. Bacon at once gave the King 
 reasons for sending Coke from the Common Pleas 
 where he was a check on the prerogative to the 
 King's Bench, where he could do less harm; while 
 Hobart went to the Common Pleas. The promotion was 
 obvious ; but the Common Pleas suited Coke better, 
 and the place was more lucrative. Bacon's advice was 
 followed. Coke, very reluctantly, knowing well who 
 had given it, and why, " not only weeping himself but 
 followed by the tears " of all the Court of Common 
 Pleas, moved up to the higher post. The Attorney 
 Hobart, succeeded ; and Bacon at last became Attorney 
 (October 27, 1613). In Chamberlain's gossip we have 
 an indication, such as occurs only accidentally, of the 
 view of outsiders : " There is a strong apprehension 
 that little good is to be expected by this change, and 
 that Bacon may prove a dangerous instrument."
 
 CHAPTER V. 
 
 BACON ATTORNEY- GENERAL AND CHANCELLOR. 
 
 THUS, at last, at the age of fifty-two, Bacon had gained the 
 place which Essex had tried to get for him at thirty-two. 
 The time of waiting had been a weary one, and it is impos- 
 sible not to see that it had been hurtful to Bacon. A strong 
 and able man, very eager to have a field for his strength 
 and ability, who is kept out of it, as he thinks unfairly, 
 and is driven to an attitude of suppliant dependency in 
 pressing his claim on great persons who amuse him with 
 words, can hardly help suffering in the humiliating pro- 
 cess. It does a man no good to learn to beg, and to 
 have a long training in the art. And further, this long 
 delay kept up the distraction of his mind between the 
 noble work on which his soul was bent, and the necessities 
 of that " civil " or professional and political life by which 
 he had to maintain his estate. All the time that he was 
 " canvassing " (it is his own word) for office, and giving 
 up his time and thoughts to the work which it involved, 
 the great Instauration had to wait his hours of leisure ; 
 and his exclamation, so often repeated, Multum incola 
 fuit anima meaj bears witness to the longings that haunted 
 him in his hours of legal drudgery, or in the service of 
 his not very thankful employers. Not but that he found
 
 CIIAI-. v.] ATTORNEY-GENERAL AND CHANCELLOR. 101 
 
 compensation in the interest of public questions, in the 
 company of the great, in the excitement of state-craft 
 and state employment, in the pomp and enjoyment of 
 court life. He found too much compensation ; it was 
 one of his misfortunes. But his heart was always sound 
 in its allegiance to knowledge ; and if he had been for- 
 tunate enough to have risen earlier to the greatness 
 which he aimed at as a vantage ground for his true work, 
 or if he had had self-control to have dispensed with 
 wealth and position if he had escaped the long necessity 
 of being a persistent and still baffled suitor we might 
 have had as a completed whole what we have now only 
 in great fragments, and we should have been spared the 
 blots which mar a career which ought to have been a 
 noble one. 
 
 The first important matter that happened after Bacon's 
 new appointment was the Essex divorce case, and the 
 marriage of Lady Essex with the favourite whom Cecil's 
 death had left at the height of power, and who from 
 Lord Rochester was now made Earl of Somerset. With 
 the divorce, the beginning of the scandals and tragedies 
 of James's reign, Bacon had nothing to do. At the mar- 
 riage which followed, Bacon presented as his offering a 
 masque, performed by the members of Gray's Inn, of 
 which he bore the charges, and which cost him the 
 enormous sum of 2000. Whether it were to repay his 
 obligations to the Howards, or in lieu of a " fee " to 
 Rochester, who levied toll on all favours from the King, 
 it can hardly be said, as has been suggested, to be a 
 protest against the great abuse of the times, the sale of 
 offices for money ; the " veiy splendid trifle, the Masque 
 of Flowers," was one form of the many extravagant
 
 102 BACON. [CHAP. 
 
 tributes paid but too willingly to high-handed worth- 
 lessness, of which the deeper and darker guilt was to 
 fill all faces with shame tAvo years afterwards. 
 
 As Attorney, Bacon had to take a much more promi- 
 nent part in affairs, legal, criminal, constitutional, ad- 
 ministrative, than he had yet been allowed to have. We 
 know that it was his great object to show how much 
 more active and useful an Attorney he could be than 
 either Coke or Hobart ; and as far as unflagging energy 
 and high ability could make a good public servant, he 
 fully carried out his purpose. In Parliament, the " addled 
 Parliament" of 1614, in which he sat for the Univer- 
 sity of Cambridge, he did his best to reconcile what were 
 fast becoming irreconcilable, the claims and prerogatives 
 of an absolute king, irritable, suspicious, exacting, pro- 
 digal, with the ancient rights and liberties, growing 
 stronger in their demands by being denied, resisted, or 
 outwitted, of the popular element in the State. In the 
 trials, which are so large and disagreeable a part of the 
 history of these years, trials arising out of violent words 
 provoked by the violent acts of power, one of which, 
 Peacham's, became famous, because in the course of it 
 torture was resorted to or trials which witnessed to the 
 corruption of the high society of the day, like the astound- 
 ing series of arraignments and condemnations following on 
 the discoveries relating to Overbury's murder, which had 
 happened just before the Somerset marriage Bacon had 
 to make the best that he could for the cruel and often 
 unequal policy of the Court ; and Bacon must take his 
 share in the responsibility for it. An effort on James's 
 part to stop duelling brought from Bacon a worthier piece 
 of service, in the shape of an earnest and elaborate argu-
 
 v.] ATTORNEY-GENERAL AND CHANCELLOR. 103 
 
 nient against it, full of good sense and good feeling, but 
 hopelessly in advance of the time. On the many ques- 
 tions which touched the prerogative, James found in his 
 Attorney a ready and skilful advocate of his claims, who 
 knew no limit to them, but in the consideration of what 
 was safe and prudent to assert. He was a better and more 
 statesmanlike counsellor, in his unceasing endeavours to 
 reconcile James to the expediency of establishing solid 
 and good relations with his Parliament, and in his advice 
 as to the wise and hopeful ways of dealing with it. 
 Bacon had no sympathy with popular wants and claims ; 
 of popularity, of all that was called popular, he had the 
 deepest suspicion and dislike ; the opinions and the 
 judgment of average men he despised, as a thinker, a 
 politician, and a courtier ; the " malignity of the people " 
 he thought great. " I do not love," he says, " the word 
 people." But he had a high idea of what was worthy of 
 a king, and was due to the public interests, and he saw 
 the folly of the petty acts and haughty words, the use of 
 which James could not resist. In his new office, he once 
 more urged on, and urged in vain, his favourite project 
 for revising, simplifying, and codifying the law. This 
 was a project which would find little favour with Coke, 
 and the crowd of lawyers who venerated him, men whom 
 Bacon viewed with mingled contempt and apprehension 
 both in the courts and in Parliament where they were 
 numerous, and whom he more than once advised the 
 King to bridle and keep " in awe." Bacon presented his 
 scheme to the King in a Proposition, or, as we should call 
 it, a Report. It is very able and interesting ; marked 
 with his characteristic comprehensiveness and sense of 
 practical needs, and with a confidence in his own know-
 
 104 BACON. [CHAP. 
 
 ledge of law which contrasts curiously with the current 
 opinion about it. He speaks with the utmost honour of 
 Coke's work ; but he is not afraid of a comparison with 
 him. "I do assure your Majesty," he says, "I am in 
 good hope, that when Sir Edward Coke's Keports and 
 my Eules and Decisions shall come to posterity, there 
 will be (whatever is now thought) question who was the 
 greater lawyer." But the project, though it was enter- 
 tained and discussed in Parliament, came to nothing. 
 No one really cared about it except Bacon. 
 
 But in these years (1615 and 1616) two things hap- 
 pened of the utmost consequence to him. One was the 
 rise, more extravagant than anything that England had 
 seen for centuries, and in the end more fatal, of the new 
 favourite, who from plain George Villiers became the 
 all-powerful Duke of Buckingham. Bacon, like the rest 
 of the world, saw the necessity of bowing before him ; 
 and Bacon persuaded himself that Villiers was pre-emi- 
 nently endowed with all the gifts and virtues which a 
 man in his place would need. We have a series of his 
 letters to Villiers ; they are of course in the complimen- 
 tary vein which was " expected ; but if their language is 
 only compliment, there is no language left for expressing 
 what a man wishes to be taken for truth. The other 
 matter was the humiliation, by Bacon's means and in his 
 presence, of his old rival Coke. In the dispute about 
 jurisdiction, always slumbering and lately awakened and 
 aggravated by Coke, between the Common Law Courts 
 and the Chancery, Coke had threatened the Chancery 
 with Prsemunire. The King's jealousy took alarm, and 
 the Chief-Justice was called before the Council. There 
 a decree, based on Bacon's advice and probably drawn
 
 v.] ATTORNEY-GENERAL AND CHANCELLOR. 105 
 
 up by him, peremptorily overruled the legal doctrine 
 maintained by the greatest and most self-confident judge 
 whom the English courts had seen. The Chief-Justice 
 had to acquiesce in this reading of the law ; and then, as 
 if such an affront were not enough, Coke was suspended 
 from his office, and, further, enjoined to review and amend 
 his published reports, where they were inconsistent with 
 the view of law which on Bacon's authority the Star 
 Chamber had adopted (June 1616). This he affected to 
 do ; but the corrections were manifestly only colourable ; 
 his explanations of his legal heresies against the preroga- 
 tive, as these heresies were formulated by the Chancellor 
 and Bacon, and presented to him for recantation, were 
 judged insufficient ; and in a decree, prefaced by reasons 
 drawn up by Bacon, in which, besides Coke's errors of 
 law, his "deceit, contempt, and slander of the Govern- 
 ment," his " perpetual turbulent carriage," and his affec- 
 tation of popularity, were noted, he was removed from 
 his office (Nov. 1616). So, for the present, the old rivalry 
 had ended in a triumph for Bacon. Bacon, whom Coke 
 had so long headed in the race, whom he had sneered at 
 as a superficial pretender to law, and whose accomplish- 
 ments and enthusiasm for knowledge he utterly despised, 
 had not only defeated him, but driven him from his seat 
 with dishonour. When we remember what Coke was, 
 what he had thought of Bacon, and how he prized his 
 own unique reputation as a representative of English law, 
 the effects of such a disgrace on a man of his temper 
 cannot easily be exaggerated. 
 
 But for the present Bacon had broken through the 
 spell which had so long kept him back. He won a great 
 deal of the King's confidence, and the King was more
 
 106 BACON. [CHAP. 
 
 and more ready to make use of him, though by no means 
 equally willing to think that Bacon knew better than 
 himself. Bacon's view of the law, and his resources of 
 argument and expression to make it good, could be de- 
 pended upon in the keen struggle to secure and enlarge 
 the prerogative which was now beginning. In this 
 prerogative both James and Bacon saw the safety of 
 the State and the only reasonable hope of good 
 government; but in Bacon's larger and more elevated 
 views of policy, of a policy worthy of a great king, 
 and a king of England, James was not likely to take 
 much interest. The memorials which it was Bacon's 
 habit to present on public affairs were wasted on one 
 who had so little to learn from others, so he thought 
 and so all assured him, about the secrets of empire. 
 Still they were proofs of Bacon's ready mind ; and James, 
 even when he disagreed with Bacon's opinion and argu- 
 ments, was too clever not to see their difference from the 
 work of other men. Bacon rose in favour; and from 
 the first he was on the best of terms with Villiers. He 
 professed to Villiers the most sincere devotion. Accord- 
 ing to his custom he presented him with a letter of wise 
 advice on the duties and behaviour of a favourite. He 
 at once began, and kept up with him to the end, a con- 
 fidential correspondence on matters of public importance. 
 He made it clear that he depended upon Villiers for his 
 own personal prospects, and it had now become the most 
 natural thing that Bacon should look forward to succeed- 
 ing the Lord Chancellor, Ellesmere, who was fast failing. 
 Bacon had already (Feb. 12, 16^), in terms which seem 
 strange to us, but were less strange then, set forth in a 
 letter to the King the reasons why he should be Chan-
 
 v.J ATTORNEY-GENERAL AND CHANCELLOR, 107 
 
 cellor ; criticising justly enough, only that he was a party 
 interested, the qualifications of other possible candidates, 
 Coke, Hobart, and the Archbishop Abbott Coke would 
 be " an overruling nature in an overruling place," and 
 " popular men were no sure mounters for your Majesty's 
 saddle." Hobart was incompetent. As to Abbott, the 
 Chancellor's place required " a whole man," and to have 
 both jurisdiction, spiritual and temporal, "was fit only for 
 a king." The promise that Bacon should have the place 
 came to him three days afterwards through Villiers. He 
 acknowledged it in a burst of gratitude (Feb. 15, 16^-|). 
 " I will now wholly rely on your excellent and happy 
 self. ... I am yours surer to you than my own life. 
 For, as they speak of the Turquois stone in a ring, I will 
 break into twenty pieces before you bear the least fall." 
 They were unconsciously prophetic words. But Elles- 
 mere lasted longer than was expected. It was not till 
 a year after this promise that he resigned. On the 
 7th of March 16-^- Bacon received the seals. He ex- 
 presses his obligations to Villiers, now Lord Buckingham, 
 in the following letter : 
 
 " MY DEAREST LORD It is both in cares and kindness, that small 
 ones float up to the tongue, and great ones sink down into the heart 
 with silence. Therefore I could speak little to your Lordship to-day, 
 neither had I fit time : but I must profess thus much, that in this 
 day's work you are the truest and perfectest mirror and example of 
 firm and generous friendship that ever was in court. And I shall 
 count every day lost, wherein I shall not either study your well 
 doing in thought, or do your name honour in speech, or perform 
 you service in deed. Good my Lord, account and accept me, your 
 most boundeu and devoted friend and servant of all men living, 
 
 "March 7, 1616 (i.e. !}?). FK. BACON, C.S." 
 
 He himself believed the appointment to be a popular
 
 108 BACON. [CHAP. 
 
 one. " I know I am come in," he writes to the King 
 soon after, " with as strong an envy of some particulars, 
 as with the love of the general." On the 7th of May 
 1617 he took his seat in Chancery with unusual pomp 
 and magnificence ; and set forth, in an opening speech, 
 with all his dignity and force, the duties of his great 
 office, and his sense of their obligation. But there was 
 a curious hesitation in treating him as other men were 
 treated in like cases. He was only " Lord Keeper." It- 
 was not till the following January (16^) that he re- 
 ceived the office of Lord Chancellor. It was not till half 
 a year afterwards that he was made a Peer. Then he 
 became Baron Verulam (July 1618), and in January 
 16|f Viscount St. Alban's. 
 
 From this time Bacon must be thought of, first and 
 foremost, as a Judge in the great seat which he had so 
 earnestly sought. It was the place not merely of law, 
 which often tied the judge's hands painfully, but of 
 true justice, when law failed to give it. Bacon's ideas 
 of the duties of a judge were clear and strong, as he 
 showed in various admirable speeches and charges : 
 his duties as regards his own conduct and reputation ; 
 his duties in keeping his subordinates free from the 
 taint of corruption. He was not ignorant of the subtle 
 and unacknowledged ways in which unlawful gains 
 may be covered by custom, and an abuse goes on be- 
 cause men will not choose to look at it. He entered 
 on his office with the full purpose of doing its work 
 better than it had ever been done. He saw where it 
 wanted reforming, and set himself at once to reform. 
 The accumulation and delay of suits had become grievous ; 
 at once he threw his whole energy into the task of
 
 v.] ATTORNEY-GENERAL AND CHANCELLOR. 109 
 
 wiping out the arrears which the bad health of his pre- 
 decessor, and the traditional sluggishness of the court, 
 had heaped up. In exactly three months from his 
 appointment he was able to report that these arrears had 
 been cleared off. "This day" (June 8, 1617), he writes 
 to Buckingham : " I have made even with the business 
 of the kingdom for common justice. Not one cause 
 unheard. The lawyers drawn dry of all the motions 
 they were to make. Not one petition unheard. And 
 this I think could not be said in our time before." 
 
 The performance was splendid, and there is no reason 
 to think that the work so rapidly done was not well 
 done. We are assured that Bacon's decisions were 
 unquestioned and were not complained of. At the same 
 time, before this allegation is accepted as conclusive 
 proof of the public satisfaction, it must be remembered 
 that the question of his administration of justice, which 
 was at last to assume such strange proportions, has never 
 been so thoroughly sifted as, to enable us to pronounce 
 upon it, it should be. The natural tendency of Bacon's 
 mind would undoubtedly be to judge rightly and justly ; 
 but the negative argument of the silence at the time of 
 complainants, in days when it was so dangerous to 
 question authority, and when we have so little evidence 
 of what men said at their firesides, is not enough to show 
 that he never failed. 
 
 But the serious thing is that Bacon subjected himself 
 to two of the most dangerous influences which can act on 
 the mind of a judge the influence of the most powerful 
 and most formidable man in England, and the influence 
 of presents, in money and other gifts. From first to 
 last, he allowed Buckingham, whom no man, as Bacon
 
 110 BACON. [CHAP. 
 
 soon found, could displease except at his own peril, to 
 write letters to him on behalf of suitors whose causes 
 were before him ; and he allowed suitors, not often 
 while the cause was pending, but sometimes even then, 
 to send him directly, or through his servants, large sums 
 of money. Both these things are explained. It would 
 have been characteristic of Bacon to be confident that 
 he could defy temptation : these habits were the fashion 
 of the time, and everybody took them for granted ; 
 Buckingham never asked his good offices beyond what 
 Bacon thought just and right, and asked them rather 
 for the sake of expedition, than to influence his judg- 
 ment. And as to the money presents every office was 
 underpaid ; this was the common way of acknowledging 
 pains and trouble ; it was analogous to a doctor's or a 
 lawyer's fee now. And there is no proof that either 
 influence ever led Bacon to do wrong. This has been said, 
 and said with some degree of force. But if it shows that 
 Bacon was not in this matter below his age, it shows that 
 he was not above it. No one knew better than Bacon 
 that there were no more certain dangers to honesty 
 and justice, than the interference and solicitation of the 
 great, and the old famous pest of bribes, of which all 
 histories and laws were full. And yet on the highest 
 seat of justice in the realm he, the great reformer of its 
 abuses, allowed them to make their customary haunt. 
 He did not mean to do wrong : his conscience was cbar ; 
 he had not given thought to the mischief they must do, 
 sooner or later, to all concerned with the Court of 
 Chancery. With a magnificent carelessness he could 
 afford to run safely a course closely bordering on crime, 
 in which meaner men would sin and be ruined.
 
 v.] ATTORNEY-GENERAL AND CHANCELLOR. ill 
 
 Before six months were over Bacon found on what 
 terms he must stand with Buckingham. By a strange 
 fatality, quite unintentionally, he became dragged into 
 tho thick of the scandalous and grotesque dissensions of 
 the Coke family. The Court was away from London 
 in the North ; and Coke had been trying, not with- 
 out hope of success, to recover the King's favour. 
 Coke was a rich man, and Lady Compton, the mother 
 of the Villiers, thought that Coke's daughter would 
 be a good match for one of her younger sons. It 
 was really a great chance for Coke ; but he haggled 
 about the portion ; and the opportunity, which might 
 perhaps have led to his taking Bacon's place, passed. 
 But he found himself in trouble in other ways ; his 
 friends, especially Secretary Winwood, contrived to bring 
 the matter on again, and he consented to the Villiers's 
 terms. But his wife, the young lady's mother, Lady 
 Hatton, would not hear of it, and a furious quarrel fol- 
 lowed. She carried off her daughter into the country. 
 Coke, with a warrant from Secretary Winwood, which 
 Bacon had refused to give him, pursued her : " with 
 his son, 'Fighting Clem,' and ten or eleven servants, 
 weaponed, in a violent manner, ho repaired to the house 
 where she was remaining, and with a piece of timber or 
 form broke open the door and dragged her along to his 
 coach." Lady Hatton rushed off the same afternoon for 
 help to Bacon. 
 
 A fter an overturn by the way, ' ' at last to my Lord Keeper's 
 they come, but could not have instant access to him for that his 
 people told them he was laid at rest, being not well. Then my 
 La. Hatton desired she might be in the next room where my Lord 
 lay, that she might be the first that [should] speak with him after 
 he was stirring. The door-keeper fulfilled her desire, and in the
 
 112 BACON. [CHAP. 
 
 meantime gave her a chair to rest herself in, and there left her 
 alone ; but not long after, she rose up and bounced against my 
 Lord Keeper's door, and waked him and affrighted him, that he 
 called his men to him ; and they opening the door, she thrust in 
 with them, and desired his Lp. to pardon her boldness, but she 
 was like a cow that had lost her calf, and so justified [herself] and 
 pacified my Lord's anger, and got his warrant and my Lo. Trea- 
 surer's warrant anft others of the Council to fetch her daughter 
 from the father and bring them both to the Council." 
 
 It was a chance that the late Chief-Justice and his 
 wife, with their armed parties, did not meet on the road, 
 in which case "there were like to be strange tragedies." 
 At length the Council compelled both sides to keep 
 the peace, and the young lady was taken for the present 
 out of the hands of her raging parents. Bacon had 
 assiimed that the affair was the result of an intrigue 
 between Winwood and Coke, and that the Court would 
 take part against Coke, a man so deep in disgrace and 
 so outrageously violent. Supposing that he had the ear 
 of Buckingham, he wrote earnestly persuading him to 
 put an end to the business : and in the meantime the 
 Council ordered Coke to be brought before the Star 
 Chamber "for riot and force," to "be heard and sen- 
 tenced as justice shall appertain." They had not the 
 slightest doubt that they were doing what would please 
 the King. A few days after they met, and then they 
 learned the truth. 
 
 "Coke and his friends," writes Chamberlain, "complain of 
 hard measure from some of the greatest at that board, and that he 
 was too much trampled upon with ill language. And our friend 
 \i.e. "Winwood] passed out scot free for the warrant : which the 
 greatest [word illegible] there said was subject to a prcemunire ; 
 and withal told the Lady Compton that they wished well to her 
 and her sons, and would be ready to serve the Earl of Buckingham 
 with all true affection, whereas others did it out of faction and
 
 v.] ATTORNEY-GENERAL AND CHANCELLOR. 113 
 
 ambition : which words glancing directly at our good friend 
 (\Vinwood), he was driven to make his apology ; and to show how 
 it was put upon him from time to time by the Queen and other 
 parties ; and. for conclusion, showed a letter of approbation of all 
 his courses from the King, making the whole table judge what 
 faction and ambition appeared in this carriage. Ad quod non 
 fit it rcsponsum." 
 
 None indeed, but blank faces, and thoughts of what 
 might come next The Council, and Bacon foremost, 
 had made a desperate mistake. " It is evident," as Mr. 
 Spedding says, " that he had not divined Buckingham's 
 feelings on the subject." He was now to learn them. 
 To his utter amazement and alarm he found that the 
 King was strong for the match, and that the proceeding 
 of the Council was condemned at Court as gross mis- 
 conduct. In vain he protested that he was quite willing 
 to forward the match; that in fact he had helped it. 
 Bacon's explanations and his warnings against Coke the 
 King " rejected with some disdain " ; he justified Coke's 
 action ; he charged Bacon with disrespect and ingrati- 
 tude to Buckingham : he put aside his arguments and 
 apologies as worthless or insincere. Such reprimands 
 had not often been addressed, even to inferior servants. 
 Bacon's letters to Buckingham remained at first without 
 notice : when Buckingham answered, he did so with 
 scornful and menacing curtness. Meanwhile Bacon 
 heard from Yelverton how things were going at Court. 
 
 "Sir E. Coke," he wrote, "hath not forborne by any engine to 
 heave at both your Honour and myself, and he works the weightiest 
 instrument, the Earl of Buckingham, who, as I see, sets him as 
 close to him as his shirt, the Earl speaking in Sir Edward's phrase, 
 and as it were menacing in his spirit." 
 
 Buckingham, he went on to say, "did nobly and 
 I
 
 114 BACON. [CHAP. 
 
 plainly tell me he would not secretly bite, but whosoever 
 had had any interest, or tasted of the opposition to his 
 brother's marriage, he would as openly oppose them to 
 their faces, and they should discern what favour he had 
 by the power he would use." The Court, like a pack 
 of dogs, had set upon Bacon. "It is too common in 
 every man's mouth in Court, that your greatness shall 
 be abated, and as your tongue hath been as a razor unto 
 some, so shall theirs be to you." Buckingham said to 
 every one that Bacon had been forgetful of his kindness, 
 and unfaithful to him : " not forbearing in open speech 
 to tax you, as if it were an inveterate custom with you, 
 to be unfaithful unto him, as you were to the Earls of 
 Essex and Somerset." 
 
 All this while Bacon had been clearly in the right 
 He had thrust himself into no business that did not 
 concern him. He had not, as Buckingham accuses 
 him of having done,- " overtroubled " himself with the 
 marriage. He had done his simple duty as a friend, as 
 a councillor, as a judge. He had been honestly zealous 
 for the Villiers's honour, and warned Buckingham of 
 things that were beyond question. He had curbed 
 Coke's scandalous violence, perhaps with no great re- 
 gret, but with manifest reason. But for this, he was 
 now on the very edge of losing his office ; it was clear 
 to him, as it is clear to us, that nothing could save him 
 but absolute submission. He accepted the condition. 
 How this submission was made and received, and with 
 what gratitude he found that he was forgiven, may be 
 seen in the two following letters. Buckingham thus 
 extends his grace to the Lord Keeper, and exhorts him 
 to better behaviour :
 
 v.] ATTORNEY-GENERAL AND CHANCELLOR. 115 
 
 "But his Majesty's direction in answer of your letter hath given 
 me occasion to join hereunto a discovery unto you of mine in- 
 ward thoughts, proceeding upon the discourse you had with me 
 this day. For I do freely confess that your offer of submission 
 unto me, and in writing (if so I would have it), battered so the 
 unkindness that I had conceived in my heart for your behaviour 
 towards me in my absence, as out of the sparks of my old affection 
 toward you I went to sound his Majesty's intention how he means 
 to behave himself towards you, specially in any public meeting ; 
 where I found on the one part his Majesty so little satisfied with 
 your late answer unto him, which he counted (for I protest I use 
 his own terms) confused and childish, and his vigorous resolution 
 on the other part so fixed, that he would put some public exem- 
 plary mark upon you, as I protest the sight of his deep-conceived 
 indignation quenched my passion, making me upon the instant 
 change from the person of a party into a peace-maker ; so as I was 
 forced upon my knees to beg of his Majesty that he would put no 
 public act of disgrace upon you, and, as I dare say, no other 
 person would have been patiently heard in this suit by his Majesty 
 but myself, so did I (though not without difficulty) obtain thus 
 much : that he would not so far disable you from the merit of your 
 future service, as to put any particular mark of disgrace upon your 
 person. Only thus far his Majesty protesteth, that upon the con- 
 science of his office he cannot omit (though laying aside all passion) 
 to give a kingly reprimand at his first sitting in council to so many 
 of his councillors as were then here behind, and were actors in this 
 business, for their ill behaviour in it. Some of the particular errors 
 committed in this business he will name, but without accusing any 
 particular persons by name. 
 
 "Thus your Lordship seeth the fruits of my natural inclination ; 
 and I protest all this time past it was no small grief unto me to 
 hear the mouth of so many upon this occasion open to load you 
 with innumerable malicious and detracting speeches, as if no 
 music were more pleasing to my ears than to rail of you : which 
 made me rather regret the ill nature of mankind, that like dogs 
 love to set upon him that they see once snatched at. And to con- 
 clude, my Lord, you have hereby a fair occasion so to make good 
 hereafter your reputation by your sincere service to his Majesty, as 
 also by your firm and constant kindness to your friends, as I may
 
 116 BACON. [CHAP. 
 
 (your Lordship's old friend) participate of the comfort and honour 
 that will thereby come to you. Thus I rest at last 
 
 "Your Lordship's faithful friend and servant, 
 
 "G. B." 
 
 " MY EVER BEST LORD, now better than yourself Your Lord- 
 ship's pen, or rather pencil, hath pourtrayed towards me such 
 magnanimity and nobleness and true kindness, as methinketh I 
 see the image of some ancient virtue, and not anything of these 
 times. It is the line of my life, and not the lines of my letter, that 
 must express my thankfulness : wherein if I fail, then God fail me, 
 and make me as miserable as I think myself at this time happy by 
 this reviver, through his Majesty's singular clemency, and your 
 incomparable love and favour. God preserve you, prosper you, 
 and reward you for your kindness to 
 
 ' ' Your raised and infinitely obliged friend and servant, 
 " Sept. 22, 1617. FK. BACON, C.S." 
 
 Thus he had tried his strength with Buckingham. 
 He had found that this, " a little parent-like " manner of 
 advising him, and the doctrine that a true friend " ought 
 rather to go against his mind than his good," was not 
 what Buckingham expected from him. And he never 
 ventured on it again. It is not too much to say that a 
 man who could write as he now did to Buckingham, could 
 not trust himself, in any matter in which Buckingham 
 was interested. 
 
 But the reconciliation was complete, and Bacon took 
 his place more and more as one of the chief persons in 
 the Government James claimed so much to have his 
 own way, and had so little scruple in putting aside, in his 
 superior wisdom, sometimes very curtly, Bacon's or any 
 other person's recommendations, that though his services 
 were great, and were not unrecognised, he never had the 
 power and influence in affairs to which his boundless 
 devotion to the Crown, his grasp of business, and his
 
 v.] ATTORNEY-GENERAL AND CHANCELLOR. 117 
 
 willing industry, ought to have entitled him. He was 
 still a servant, and made to feel it, though a servant in 
 the " first form." It was James and Buckingham who 
 determined the policy of the coimtry, or settled the 
 course to be taken in particular transactions ; when this 
 was settled, it was Bacon's business to carry it through 
 successfully. In this he was like all the other servants 
 of the Crown, and like them, he was satisfied with giving 
 his advice, whether it were taken or not ; but unlike 
 many of them, he was zealous in executing with the 
 utmost vigour and skill the instructions which were 
 given him. Thus he was required to find the legal means 
 for punishing Raleigh ; and, as a matter of duty, he 
 found them. He was required to tell the Government 
 side of the story of Raleigh's crimes and punishment 
 which really was one side of the story, only not by any 
 means the whole; and he told it, as he had told the 
 Government story against Essex, with force, moderation, 
 and good sense. Himself, he never would have made 
 James's miserable blunders about Raleigh ; but the 
 blunders being made, it was his business to do his best 
 to help the King out of them. When Suffolk, the 
 Lord Treasurer, was disgraced and brought before the 
 Star Chamber for corruption and embezzlement in his 
 office, Bacon thought that he was doing no more than 
 his duty in keeping Buckingham informed day by day 
 how the trial was going on ; how he had taken care that 
 Suffolk's submission should not stop it " for all would 
 be but a play on the stage if justice went not on in the 
 right course " how he had taken care that the evidence 
 went well "I will not say I sometinje holp it, as far 
 as was fit for a judge " how " a little to warm the
 
 118 BACON. [CHAP. 
 
 business "... "I spake a word, that he that did draw 
 or milk treasure from Ireland, did not, emulgere, milk 
 money, but blood." This, and other " little things " like 
 it, while he was sitting as a judge to try, if the word 
 may be used, a personal enemy of Buckingham, however 
 bad the case might be against Suffolk, sound strange 
 indeed to us; and not less so when, in reporting the 
 sentence and the various opinions of the Council about 
 it, he, for once, praises Coke for the extravagance of his 
 severity : " Sir Edward Coke did his part. I have not 
 heard him do better ; and began with a fine of 100,000, 
 but the judges first, and most of the rest, reduced it to 
 30,000. I do not dislike that thing passed moderately ; 
 and all things considered, it is not amiss, and might 
 easily have been worse." 
 
 In all this, which would have been perfectly natural 
 from an Attorney-General of the time, Bacon saw but his 
 duty, even as a judge between the Crown and the subject. 
 It was what was expected of those whom the King chose 
 to employ, and whom Buckingham chose to favour. But a 
 worse and more cruel case, illustrating the system which 
 a man like Bacon could think reasonable and honour- 
 able, was the disgrace and punishment of Yelverton, the 
 Attorney -General, the man who had stood by Bacon, 
 and in his defence had faced Buckingham, knowing 
 well Buckingham's dislike of himself, when all the 
 Court turned against Bacon in his quarrel with Coke 
 and Lady Compton. Towards the end of the year 1620, 
 on the eve of a probable meeting of Parliament, there 
 was great questioning about what was to be done about 
 certain patents and monopolies monopolies for making 
 gold and silk thread and for licensing inns and ale-
 
 v.] ATTORNEY-GENERAL AND CHANCELLOR. 119 
 
 houses which were in the hands of Buckingham's 
 brothers and their agents. The monopolies were very 
 unpopular ; there was always doubt as to their legality ; 
 they were enforced oppressively and vexatiously by men 
 like Michell and Mompesson, who acted for the Villiers ; 
 and the profits of them went, for the most part, not into 
 the Exchequer, but into the pockets of the hangers-on of 
 Buckingham. Bacon defended them both in law and 
 policy, arid his defence is thought by Mr. Gardiner to 
 be not without grounds ; but he saw the danger of 
 obstinacy in maintaining what had become so hateful in 
 the country, and strongly recommended that the more 
 indefensible and unpopular patents should be spon- 
 taneously given up, the more so as they were of " no 
 great fruit." But Buckingham's insolent perversity 
 "refused to be convinced." The Council, when the 
 question was before them, decided to maintain them. 
 Bacon, who had rightly voted in the minority, thus 
 explains his own vote to Buckingham: "The King 
 did wisely put it upon and consult, whether the patents 
 were at this time to be removed by Act of Council 
 before Parliament. / opined (bv,t yd someivhat like 
 Ovid's mistress, that strove, but yet as one that would be 
 overcome), tJiat yes ! " But in the various disputes which 
 had arisen about them, Yelverton had shown that he 
 very much disliked the business of defending mono- 
 polies, and sending London citizens to jail for infringing 
 them. He did it, but he did it grudgingly. It was a 
 great offence in a man whom Buckingham had always 
 disliked ; and it is impossible to doubt that what 
 followed was the consequence of his displeasure. 
 
 " In drawing up a new charter for the city of London," writes Mr.
 
 120 BACON. [CHAP. 
 
 Gardiner, Yelverton inserted clauses for which he was unable to 
 produce a warrant. The worst that could be said was that he had, 
 through inadvertence, misunderstood the verbal directions of the 
 King. Although no imputation of corruption was brought against 
 him, yet he was suspended from his office, and prosecuted in the 
 Star Chamber. He was then sentenced to dismissal from his post, 
 to a fine of 4000, and to imprisonment during the Royal pleasure." 
 
 In the management of this business Bacon had the 
 chief part. Yelverton, on his suspension, at once sub- 
 mitted. The obnoxious clauses are not said to have 
 been of serious importance ; but they were new clauses 
 which the King had not sanctioned, and it would be a 
 bad precedent to pass over such unauthorised additions 
 even by an Attorney -General. "I mistook many things," 
 said Yelverton afterwards in words which come back 
 into our minds at a later period, " I was improvident 
 in some things, and too credulous in all things." It 
 might have seemed that dismissal, if not a severe repri- 
 mand, was punishment enough. But the submission 
 was not enough, in Bacon's opinion, "for the King's 
 honour." He dwelt on the greatness of the offence, and 
 the necessity of making a severe example. According 
 to his advice, Yelverton was prosecuted in the Star 
 Chamber. It was not merely a mistake of judgment 
 " Herein," said Bacon, " I note the wisdom of the law of 
 England, which termeth the highest contempt and exces- 
 ses of authority, Misprisions; which (if you take the sound 
 and derivation of the words) is but mistaken ; but if you 
 take the use and acceptation of the word, it is high and 
 heinous contempt and usurpation of authority ; whereof 
 the reason I take to be and the name excellently imposed, 
 for that main mistaking, it is ever joined with contempt ; 
 for he that reveres will not easily mistake ; but he that
 
 v.] ATTORNEY-GENERAL AND CHANCELLOR. 121 
 
 slights, and thinks more of the greatness of his place 
 than of the duty of his place, will soon commit mis- 
 prisions." The day would come when this doctrine 
 would be pressed with ruinous effect against Bacon him- 
 self. But now he expounded with admirable clearness 
 the wrongness of carelessness about warrants and of 
 taking things for granted. He acquitted his former 
 colleague of "corruption of reward"; but "in truth that 
 makes the offence rather divers than less ; " for some 
 offences "are black, and others scarlet, some sordid, 
 some presumptuous." He pronounced his sentence the 
 fine, the imprisonment; "for his place, I declare him 
 unfit for it." "And the next day," says Mr. Spedding, 
 " he reported to Buckingham the result of the proceed- 
 ing," and takes no small credit for his own part in it. 
 
 It Avas thus that the Court used Bacon, and that 
 Bacon submitted to be used. He could have done, if he 
 had been listened to, much nobler service. He had from 
 the first seen, and urged as far as he could, the paramount 
 necessity of retrenchment in the King's profligate expen- 
 diture. Even Buckingham had come to feel the necessity 
 of it at last ; and now that Bacon filled a seat at the 
 Council, and that the prosecution of Suffolk and an in- 
 quiry into the abuses of the Navy had forced on those in 
 power the urgency of economy, there was a chance of 
 something being done to bring order into the confusion 
 of the finances. Retrenchment began at the King's 
 kitchen and the tables of his servants ; an effort was 
 made, not unsuccessfully, to extend it wider, under the 
 direction of Lionel Cranfield, a self-made man of busi- 
 ness from the city ; but with such a Court the task was 
 an impossible one. It was not Bacon's fault, though he
 
 122 BACON. [CHAP. 
 
 sadly mismanaged his own private affairs, that the King's 
 expenditure was not managed soberly and wisely. Nor 
 was it Bacon's fault, as far as advice went, that James 
 was always trying either to evade or to outwit a Parlia- 
 ment which he could not, like the Tudors, overawe. 
 Bacon's uniform counsel had been Look on a Parlia- 
 ment as a certain necessity, but not only as a necessity ; 
 as also a unique and most precious means for uniting 
 the- Crown with the nation, and proving to the world 
 outside how Englishmen love and honour their King, 
 and their King trusts his subjects. Deal with it frankly 
 and nobly as becomes a king, not suspiciously like a 
 huckster in a bargain. Do not be afraid of Parliament. 
 Be skilful in calling it ; but don't attempt to " pack " it. 
 Use all due adroitness and knowledge of human nature, 
 and necessary firmness and majesty, in managing it; 
 keep unruly and mischievous people in their place ; but 
 do not be too anxious to meddle, " let nature work ;" and 
 above all, though of course you want money from it, do 
 not let that appear as the chief or real cause of calling 
 it. Take the lead in legislation. Be ready with some 
 interesting or imposing points of reform or policy, about 
 which you ask your Parliament to take counsel with you. 
 Take care to " frame and have ready some commonwealth 
 bills, that may add respect to the King's government, 
 and acknowledgment of his care ; not wooing bills to 
 make the King and his graces cheap ; but good matter 
 to set the Parliament on work, that an empty stomach 
 do not feed on humour. " So from the first had Bacon 
 always thought ; so he thought when he watched, as a 
 spectator, James's blunders with his first Parliament of 
 1604; so had he earnestly counselled James, when ad-
 
 v.] ATTORNEY-GENERAL AND CHANCELLOR. 123 
 
 mitted to his confidence, as to the Parliaments of 1614 
 and 1615 ; so again, but in vain, as Chancellor, he 
 advised him to meet the Parliament of 1620. It was 
 wise, and from his point of view, honest advice, though 
 there runs all through it too much reliance on appear- 
 ances which were not all that they seemed ; there was 
 too much thought of throwing dust in the eyes of 
 troublesome and inconvenient people. But whatever 
 motives there might have been behind, it would have 
 been well if James had learned from Bacon how to deal 
 with Englishmen. But he could not. " I wonder," said 
 James one day to Gondomar, " that my ancestors should 
 ever have permitted such an institution as the House of 
 Commons to have come into existence. I am a stranger, 
 and found it here when I arrived, so that I am obliged 
 to put up with what I cannot get rid of." James was 
 the only one of our many foreign kings who, to the last, 
 struggled to avoid submitting himself to the conditions 
 of an English throne.
 
 CHAPTER VI 
 
 BACON'S FALL. 
 
 WHEN Parliament met on January 30, 16f-, and Bacon, 
 as Lord Chancellor, set forth in his ceremonial speeches, 
 to the King and to the Speaker, the glories and blessings 
 of James's reign, no man in England had more reason 
 to think himself fortunate. He had reached the age of 
 sixty, and had gained the object of his ambition. More 
 than that, he was conscious that in his great office he 
 was finding full play for his powers, and his high public 
 purposes. He had won greatly on the confidence of the 
 King. He had just received a fresh mark of honour 
 from him ; a few days before he had been raised a step 
 in the peerage, and he was now Viscount St. Alban's. 
 With Buckingham he seemed to be on terms of the 
 most affectionate familiarity, exchanging opinions freely 
 with him on every subject. And Parliament met in 
 good humour. They voted money at once. One of the 
 matters which interested Bacon most the revision of 
 the Statute Book they took up as one of their first 
 measures, and appointed a Select Committee to report 
 upon it. And what, amid the apparent felicity of the 
 time, was of even greater personal happiness to Bacon, 
 the first step of the " Great Instauration " had been
 
 CHAP, vi.] BACON'S FALL. 125 
 
 taken. During the previous autumn, Oct. 12, 1620, the 
 Novum Organum, the first instalment of his vast design, 
 was published, the result of the work of thirty years ; 
 and copies were distributed to great people, among 
 others to Coke. He apprehended no evil ; he had noth- 
 ing to fear, and much to hope from the times. 
 
 His sudden and unexpected fall, so astonishing and 
 so irreparably complete, is one of the strangest events of 
 that still imperfectly comprehended time. There had 
 been, and were still to be, plenty of instances of the 
 downfall of power, as ruinous and even more tragic ; 
 though scarcely any one more pathetic in its surprise 
 and its shame. But it is hard to find one of which 
 so little warning was given, and the causes of which are 
 at once in part so clear, and in part so obscure and un- 
 intelligible. Such disasters had to be reckoned upon as 
 possible chances by any one who ventured into public 
 life. Montaigne advises that the discipline of pain 
 should be part of every boy's education, for the reason 
 that every one in his day might be called upon to under- 
 go the torture. And so every public man, in the England 
 of the Tudors and Stuarts, entered on his career with 
 the perfectly familiar expectation of possibly closing it, 
 it might bo in an honourable and ceremonious fashion, 
 in the Tower and on the scaffold ; just as he had to look 
 forward to the possibility of closing it by smallpox or 
 the plague. So that when disaster came, though it 
 might be unexpected as death is unexpected, it was a 
 turn of things which ought not to take a man by surprise. 
 But some premonitory signs usually gave warning. 
 There was nothing to warn Bacon that the work which 
 he believed he was doing so well would be interrupted.
 
 126 BACON. [CHAP. 
 
 We look in vain for any threatenings of the storm. 
 What the men of his time thought and felt about Bacon 
 it is not easy to ascertain. Appearances are faint aud 
 contradictory ; he himself, though scornful of judges who 
 sought to be " popular," believed that he " came in with 
 the favour of the general ; " that he " had a little popular 
 reputation, which followeth me, whether I will or no." 
 No one, for years, had discharged the duties of his office 
 with greater efficiency. Scarcely a trace remains of any 
 suspicion, previous to the attack upon him, of the justice 
 of his decisions ; no instance was alleged that, in fact, im- 
 pure motives had controlled the strength and lucidity of 
 an intellect which loved to be true and right for the mere 
 pleasure of being so. Nor was there anything in Bacon's 
 political position to make him specially obnoxious above 
 all others of the King's Council. He maintained the 
 highest doctrines of prerogative ; but they were current 
 doctrines, both at the Council board and on the bench ; 
 and they were not discredited nor extinguished by his 
 fall. To be on good terms with James and Buckingham 
 meant a degree of subservience which shocks us now ; 
 but it did not shock people then, and he did not differ 
 from his fellows in regarding it as part of his duty as a 
 public servant of the Crown. No doubt he had enemies 
 some with old grudges like Southampton, who had 
 been condemned with Essex; some like Suffolk, smarting 
 under recent reprimands and the biting edge of Bacon's 
 tongue ; some, like Coke, hating him from constitutional 
 antipathies and the strong antagonism of professional 
 doctrines, for a long course of rivalry, and for mortifying 
 defeats. But there is no appearance of preconcerted 
 efforts among them to bring about his overthrow. He
 
 Vi.] BACON'S FALL. 127 
 
 did not, at the time, seem to be identified with anything 
 dangerous or odious. There was no doubt a good deal 
 of dissatisfaction with Chancery among the common 
 lawyers, because it interfered with their business ; in 
 the public, partly from the traditions of its slowness, 
 partly from its expensiveness, partly because being in- 
 tended for special redress of legal hardship it was sure 
 to disappoint one party to a suit. But Bacon thought 
 that he had reformed Chancery. He had also done a 
 great deal to bring some kind of order, or at least hope- 
 fulness of order, into the King's desperate finances. 
 And he had never set himself against Parliament. On 
 the contrary, he had always been forward to declare that 
 the King could not do without Parliament, and. that 
 Parliament only needed to be dealt with generously, and 
 as " became a King," to be not a danger and hindrance to 
 the Crown, but its most sincere and trustworthy support. 
 What was then to portend danger to Bacon when 
 the Parliament of 16|-- met ? The House of Commons 
 at its meeting was thoroughly loyal and respectful ; it 
 meant to be benedidum et padficum parliamentum, 
 Every one knew that there would be "grievances" 
 which would not be welcome to the Court; but they 
 did not seem likely to touch him. Every one knew that 
 there would be questions raised about unpopular patents 
 and oppressive monopolies, and about their legality ; 
 and it was pretty well agreed upon at Court, that they 
 should be given up as soon as complained of. But 
 Bacon was not implicated more than the Crown lawyers 
 before him, in what all the Crown lawyers had always 
 defended. There was dissatisfaction about the King's 
 extravagance and wastefulness, about his indecision in
 
 128 BACON. [CHAP. 
 
 the cause of the Elector Palatine, about his supposed 
 intrigues with Papistical and tyrannical Spain; but Bacon 
 had nothing to do Avith all this except, as far as he 
 could, to give wise counsel and warning. The person 
 who made the King despised and hated was the splendid 
 and insolent favourite, Buckingham. It might have 
 been thought that the one thing to be set against much 
 that was wrong in the State was the just and enlightened 
 and speedy administration of equity in the Chancery. 
 
 When Parliament met, though nothing seemed to 
 threaten mischief, it met with a sturdy purpose of bring- 
 ing to account certain delinquents whose arrogance and 
 vexations of the subjects had provoked the country, and 
 who. were supposed to shelter themselves under the 
 countenance of Buckingham. Michell and Mompesson 
 were rascals whose misdemeanours might well try the 
 patience of a less spirited body than an English House of 
 Commons. Buckingham could not protect them, and 
 hardly tried to do so. But just as one electric current 
 " induces " another by neighbourhood, so all this deep in- 
 dignation against Buckingham's creatures created a fierce 
 temper of suspicion about corruption all through the public 
 service. Two Committees were early appointed by the 
 House of Commons ; one a Committee on Grievances, 
 such as the monopolies ; the other, a Committee to in- 
 quire into abuses in the Courts of Justice and receive 
 petitions about them. In the course of the proceedings, 
 the question arose in the House as to the authorities or 
 "Referees" who had certified to the legality of the 
 Crown patents or grants which had been so grossly 
 abused ; and among these " referees " were the Lord 
 Chancellor and other high officers, both legal and political.
 
 vi.] BACON'S FALL. 129 
 
 It was the little cloud. But lookers-on like Chamber- 
 lain did not think much of it. " The referees," he wrote 
 on Feb. 29, " who certified the legality of the patents 
 are glanced at, but they are chiefly above the reach of 
 the House ; they attempt so much that they will accom- 
 plish little." Coke, who was now the chief leader in 
 Parliament, began to talk ominously of precedents, and 
 to lay down rules about the power of the House to 
 punish rules which were afterwards found to have no 
 authority for them. Cranfield, the representative of 
 severe economy, insisted that the honour of the King 
 required that the referees, whoever they were, should be 
 called to account. The gathering clouds shifted a little, 
 when the sense of the House seemed to incline to giving 
 up all retrospective action, and to a limitation for the 
 future by statute of the questionable prerogative a 
 limitation which was in fact attempted by a bill thrown 
 out by the Lords. But they gathered again when 
 the Commons determined to bring the whole matter 
 before the House of Lords. The King wrote to warn 
 Bacon of what was coming. The proposed conference 
 was staved off by management for a day or two ; but 
 it could not be averted : and the Lords showed their 
 eagerness for it. And two things by this time, the 
 beginning of March, seemed now to have become clear, 
 first, that under the general attack on the referees was 
 intended a blow against Bacon ; next, that the person 
 whom he had most reason to fear was Sir Edward 
 Coke. 
 
 The storm was growing ; but Bacon was still un- 
 alanncd. though Buckingham had been frightened into 
 throwing the blame on the referees. 
 
 K
 
 130 BACON. [CHAP. 
 
 " I do hear," he writes to Buckingham (dating his letter on March 
 7, ' the day I received the seal'), "from divers of judgement, that 
 to-morrow's conference is like to pass in a calm, as to the referees. 
 Sir Lionel Cranfield, who hath been formerly the trumpet, said 
 yesterday, that he did now incline unto Sir John Walter's opinion 
 and motion not to have the referees meddled with, otherwise than 
 to discount it from the King ; and so not to look back, but to the 
 future. And I do hear almost all men of judgement in the 
 house wish now that way. I woo nobody ; I do but listen, and I 
 have doubt only of Sir Edward Coke, who I wish had some round 
 caveat given him from the King : for your Lordship hath no great 
 power with him. But a word from the King mates him. " 
 
 But Coke's opportunity had come. The House of 
 Commons was disposed for gentler measures. But he 
 was able to make it listen to his harsher counsels, and 
 from this time his hand appears in all that was done. 
 The first conference was a tame and dull one. The 
 spokesmen had been slack in their disagreeable and 
 perhaps dangerous duty. But Coke and his friends 
 took them sharply to task "The heart and tongue 
 of Sir Edward Coke are true relations," said one of his 
 fervent supporters ; " but his pains hath not reaped that 
 harvest of praise that he hath deserved. For the 
 Referees, they are as transcendent delinquents as any 
 other, and sure their souls made a wilful elopement 
 from their bodies when they made these certificates. ' 
 A second conference was held with the Lords, and this 
 time the charge was driven home. The referees were 
 named, the Chancellor at the head of them. When 
 Bacon rose to explain and justify his acts, he was sharply 
 stopped, and reminded that he was transgressing the 
 orders of the House in speaking till the Committees 
 were named to examine the matter. What was even 
 more important, the King had come to the House of
 
 vi.] BACON'S FALL. 131 
 
 Lords (March 10), and frightened, perhaps, about his 
 subsidies, told them "that he was not guilty of those 
 grievances which are now discovered, but that ho 
 grounded his judgement upon others who have misled 
 him." The referees would be attacked, people thought, 
 if the Lower House had courage. 
 
 All this was serious. As things were drifting, it 
 seemed as if Bacon might have to fight the legal question 
 of the prerogative in the form of a criminal charge, and 
 be called upon to answer the accusation of being the 
 minister of a crown which legal language pronounced 
 absolute, and of a King who interpreted legal language 
 to the letter ; and further, to meet his accusers after the 
 King himself had disavowed what his servant had done. 
 What passed between Bacon and the King is confused 
 and uncertain ; but after his speech the King could 
 scarcely have thought of interfering with the inquiry. 
 The proceedings went on ; Committees were named for 
 the several points of inquiry ; and Bacon took part in 
 these arrangements. It was a dangerous position to have 
 to defend himself against an angry House of Commons, 
 led and animated by Coke and Cranfield. But though 
 the storm had rapidly thickened, the charges against 
 the referees were not against him alone. His mistake 
 in law, if it was a mistake, was shared by some of the 
 first lawyers and first councillors in England. There 
 was a battle before him, but not a hopeless one. " Modicce 
 fidei, quare dubitasti," he writes about this time to an 
 anxious friend. 
 
 But in truth the thickening storm had been gathering 
 over his head alone. It was against him that the whole 
 attack was directed ; as soon as it took a different
 
 132 BACON. [CHAP. 
 
 shape, the complaints against the other referees, such 
 as the Chief -Justice, who was now Lord Treasurer, 
 though some attempt was made to press them, were 
 quietly dropped. What was the secret history of these 
 weeks we do not know. But the result of Bacon's ruin 
 was that Buckingham was saved. "As they speak of 
 the Turquois stone in a ring," Bacon had said to Buck- 
 ingham, when he was made Chancellor, " I will break 
 into twenty pieces, before you have the least fall." 
 Without knowing what he pledged himself to, he was 
 taken at his word. 
 
 At length the lightning fell. During the early part 
 of March, while these dangerous questions were mooted 
 about the referees, a Committee, appointed early in the 
 session, had also been sitting on abuses in courts of 
 justice, and as part of their business, an inquiry had 
 been going on into the ways of the subordinate officers 
 of the Court of Chancery. Bacon had early (Feb. 17) 
 sent a message to the Committee courting full inquiry, 
 "willingly consenting that any man might speak 
 anything of his Court." On the 12th of March 
 the chairman, Sir R. Philips, reported that he had 
 in his hands "divers petitions, many frivolous and 
 clamorous, many of weight and consequence." Cran- 
 field, who presided over the Court of Wards, had 
 quarrelled fiercely with the Chancery, where he said 
 there was "neither Law, Equity, or Conscience," and 
 pressed the inquiry, partly, it may be, to screen his own 
 Court, which was found fault with by the lawyers. 
 Some scandalous abuses were brought to light in the 
 Chancery. They showed that " Bacon was at fault in 
 the art of government," and did not know how to keep
 
 vi.] BACON'S FALL. 133 
 
 his servants in order. One of them, John Churchill, an 
 infamous forger of Chancery orders, finding things going 
 hard with him, and " resolved," it is said, " not to sink 
 alone," offered his confessions of all that was going on 
 wrong in the Court But on the 15th of March things 
 took another turn. It was no longer a matter of doubt- 
 ful constitutional law; no longer a question of slack 
 discipline over his officers. To the astonishment, if not 
 of the men of his own day, at least to the unexhausted 
 astonishment of times following, a charge was suddenly 
 reported from the Committee to the Commons against 
 the Lord Chancellor, not of straining the prerogative, or 
 of conniving at his servants' misdoings, but of being 
 himself a corrupt and venal judge. Two suitors charged 
 him with receiving bribes. Bacon was beginning to feel 
 worried and anxious, and he wrote thus to Buckingham. 
 At length he had begun to see the meaning of all these 
 inquiries, and to what they were driving. 
 
 ' ' MY VERY GOOD LORD Your Lordship spake of Purgatory. 
 I am now in it, but my mind ia in a calm ; for my fortune is not 
 my felicity. I know I have clean hands and a clean heart ; and I 
 hope a clean house for friends or servants. But Job himself, or 
 whosoever was the justest judge, by such hunting for matters 
 against him as hath been used against me, may for a time seem 
 foul, specially in a time when greatness is the mark, and accusation 
 is the game. And if this be to be a Chancellor, I think if the 
 great seal lay upon Hounslow Heath, nobody would take it up. But 
 the King and your Lordship will, I hope, put an end to these miseries 
 one way or other. And in troth that which I fear most is lest 
 continual attendance and business, together with these cares, and 
 want of time to do my weak body right this spring by diet and 
 physic, will cast me down ; and then it will bo thought feigning 
 or fainting. But I hope in God I shall hold out. God prosper 
 you."
 
 134 BACON. [CHAP. 
 
 The first charges attracted others, which were made 
 formal matters of complaint by the House of Commons. 
 John Churchill, to save himself, was busy setting down 
 cases of misdoing ; and probably suitors of themselves 
 became ready to volunteer evidence. But of this Bacon 
 as yet knew nothing. He was at this time only aware 
 that there were persons who were "hunting out com- 
 plaints against him," that the attack was changed from 
 his law to his private character ; he had found an un- 
 favourable feeling in the House of Lords : and he knew 
 well enough what it was to have powerful enemies in 
 those days when a sentence was often settled before a 
 trial. To any one, such a state of things was as formid- 
 able as the first serious symptoms of a fever. He was 
 uneasy, as a man might well be, on whom the House of 
 Commons had fixed its eye, and to whom the House of 
 Lords had shown itself unfriendly. But he was as yet 
 conscious of nothing fatal to his defence, and he knew 
 that if false accusations could be lightly made they could 
 also be exposed. 
 
 A few days after the first mention of corruption 
 the Commons laid their complaints of him before the 
 House of Lords, and on the same day (March 19), Bacon, 
 finding himself too ill to go to the House, wrote to the 
 Peers by Buckingham, requesting them that as some 
 "complaints of base bribery" had come before them, 
 they would give him a fair opportunity of defending 
 himself, and of cross-examining witnesses; especially 
 begging, that considering the number of decrees which 
 he had to make in a year, more than two thousand, and 
 " the courses which had been taken in hunting out com- 
 plaints against him," they would not let their opinion of
 
 vi.] BACON'S FALL. 135 
 
 him be affected by the mere number of charges that 
 might be made. Their short verbal answer, moved by 
 Southampton (March 20), that they meant to proceed 
 by right rule of justice, and would be glad if he cleared 
 his honour, was not encouraging. And now that the 
 Commons had brought the matter before them, the 
 Lords took it entirely into their own hands, appointing 
 three Committees, and examining the witnesses them- 
 selves. New witnesses came forward every day with 
 fresh cases of gifts and presents, "bribes," received by 
 the Lord Chancellor. When Parliament rose for the 
 Easter vacation (March 27 April 17), the Committees 
 continued sitting. A good deal probably passed of 
 which no record remains. When the Commons met 
 again (April 17) Coke was full of gibes about Instauratio 
 Magnet,; the true Instauratio was to restore laws; and 
 two days after an Act was brought in for review and 
 reversal of decrees in Courts of Equity. It was now 
 clear that the case against Bacon had assumed formidable 
 dimensions, and also a very strange, and almost monstrous 
 shape. For the Lords, who were to be the judges, had 
 by their Committees taken the matter out of the hands 
 of the Commons, the original accusers, and had become 
 themselves the prosecutors, collecting and arranging 
 evidence, accepting or rejecting depositions, and doing 
 all that counsel or the committing magistrate would do 
 preliminary to a trial. There appears to have been no 
 cross-examining of witnesses on Bacon's behalf, or hear- 
 ing witnesses for him ; not unnaturally at this stage of 
 business, when the prosecutors were engaged in making 
 out their own case; but considering that the future 
 judges had of their own accord turned themselves into
 
 136 BACON. [CHAP. 
 
 the prosecutors, the unfairness was great. At the same 
 time it does not appear that Bacon did anything to watch 
 how things went in the Committees, which had his friends 
 in them as well as his enemies, and are said to have been 
 open courts. Towards the end of March Chamberlain 
 wrote to Carleton that " the Houses were working hard 
 at cleansing out the Augsean stable of monopolies, and 
 also extortions in Courts of Justice. The petitions against 
 the Lord Chancellor were too numerous to be got through : 
 his chief friends and brokers of bargains, Sir George 
 Hastings, and Sir Richard Young, and others attacked, 
 are obliged to accuse him in their own defence, though 
 very reluctantly. His ordinary bribes were 300, .400, 
 and even 1000. . . . The Lords admit no evidence 
 except on oath. One Churchill, who was dismissed from 
 the Chancery Court for extortion, is the chief cause 
 of the Chancellor's ruin." l Bacon was greatly alarmed. 
 He wrote to Buckingham, who was "his anchor in these 
 floods." He wrote to the King ; he was at a loss to 
 account for the "tempest that had come on him": he 
 could not understand what he had done to offend the 
 country or Parliament : he had never " taken rewards to 
 pervert justice, however he might be frail, and partake 
 of the abuse of the time." 
 
 "Time hath been when I have brought unto you gemitum 
 columbce from others. Now I bring it from myself. I fly unto 
 your Majesty with the wings of a dove, which once within these 
 seven days I thought would have carried me a higher flight. 
 
 "When I enter into myself, I find not the materials of such a 
 tempest as is comen upon me. I have been (as your Majesty 
 knoweth best), never author of any immoderate counsel, but always 
 desired to have things carried suavibus modis. I have been no 
 
 1 Calendar of State Papers (domestic), March 24, 1621.
 
 vi.] BACON'S FALL. 137 
 
 avaricious oppressor of the people. I have been no haughty or 
 intolerable or hateful man, in my conversation or carriage. I have 
 inherited no hatred from my father, but am a good patriot born. 
 Whence should this be ? For these arc the things that use to raise 
 dislikes abroad." 
 
 And he ended by entreating the King to help him : 
 
 ' ' That which I thirst after, as the hart after the streams, is that 
 I may know by my matchless friend [Buckingham] that presenteth 
 to you this letter, your Majesty's heart (which is an abyssus of 
 goodness, as I am an abyssus of misery) towards me. I have been 
 ever your man, and counted myself but an usufructuary of myself, 
 the property being yours : and now making myself an oblation to 
 do with me as may best conduce to the honour of your justice, the 
 honour of your mercy, and the use of your service, resting as 
 " Clay in your Majesty's gracious hands, 
 
 "FR. ST. ALBAN, Cane. 
 "March 25, 1621." 
 
 To the world he kept up an undismayed countenance : 
 he went down to Gorhambury, attended by troops of 
 friends. " This man," said Prince Charles, when he met 
 his company, "scorns to go out like a snuff." But at 
 Gorhambury he made his will, leaving " his name to the 
 next ages, and to foreign nations ; " and he wrote a prayer, 
 which is a touching evidence of his state of mind : 
 
 "Most gracious Lord God, my merciful Father, from my youth 
 up, my Creator, my Redeemer, my Comforter. Thou (0 Lord) 
 soundest and searchest the depths and secrets of all hearts ; thou 
 knowlcdgest the upright of heart, thou judgest the hypocrite, thou 
 ponderest men's thoughts and doings as in a balance, thou measurest 
 their intentions as with a line, vanity and crooked ways cannot be 
 hid from thee. 
 
 "Remember (0 Lord) how thy servant hath walked before 
 thee ; remember what I have first sought, and what hath been 
 principal in mine intentions. I have loved thy assemblies, I have 
 mourned for the divisions of thy Church, I have delighted in the
 
 138 BACON. [CHAP. 
 
 brightness of thy sanctuary. This vine which thy right hand hath 
 planted in this nation, I have ever prayed unto thee that it might 
 have the first and the latter rain ; and that it might stretch her 
 branches to the seas and to the floods. The state and bread of the 
 poor and oppressed have been precious in my eyes : I have hated 
 all cruelty and hardness of heart ; I have (though in a despised 
 weed) procured the good of all men. If any have been mine 
 enemies, I thought not of them ; neither hath the sun almost set 
 upon my displeasure ; but I have been as a dove, free from super- 
 fluity of maliciousness. Thy creatures have been my books, but 
 thy Scriptures much more. I have sought thee in the courts, 
 fields, and gardens, but I have found thee in thy temples. 
 
 "Thousand have been my sins, and ten thousand my trans- 
 gressions ; but thy sanctifications have remained with me, and my 
 heart, through thy grace, hath been an unquenched coal upon thy 
 altar. Lord, my strength, I have since my youth met with 
 thee in all my ways, by thy fatherly compassions, by thy comfort- 
 able chastisements, and by thy most visible providence. As thy 
 favours have increased upon me, so have thy corrections ; so as 
 thou hast been alway near me, Lord ; and ever as my worldly 
 blessings were exalted, so secret darts from thee have pierced me ; 
 and when I have ascended before men, I have descended in humilia- 
 tion before thee. 
 
 "And now when I thought most of peace and honour, thy hand 
 is heavy upon me, and hath humbled me, according to thy former 
 loving-kindness, keeping me still in thy fatherly school, not as a 
 bastard, but as a child. Just are thy judgements upon me for my 
 sins, which are more in number than the sands of the sea, but 
 have no proportion to thy mercies ; for what are the sands of the 
 sea, to the sea, earth, heavens ? and all these are nothing to thy 
 mercies. 
 
 " Besides my innumerable sins, I confess before thee that I am 
 debtor to thee for the gracious talent of thy gifts and graces, which 
 I have misspent in things for which I was least fit ; so as I may 
 truly say, my soul hath been a stranger in the course of my 
 pilgrimage. Be merciful unto me (0 Lord) for my Saviour's sake, 
 and receive me into thy bosom, or guide me in thy ways. " 
 
 Bacon up to this time, strangely, if the Committees
 
 vi.] BACON'S FALL. 139 
 
 were " open Courts," was entirely ignorant of the 
 particulars of the charge which was accumulating 
 against him. He had an interview with the King, 
 which was duly reported to the House, and he placed 
 his case before James, distinguishing between the 
 " three cases of bribery supposed in a judge a corrupt 
 bargain ; carelessness in receiving a gift while the cause 
 is going on ; and, what is innocent, receiving a gift after 
 it is ended." And he meant in such words as these to 
 place himself at the King's disposal, and ask his direc- 
 tion : 
 
 " For my fortune, summa summarum with me is, that I may 
 not be made altogether unprofitable to do your Majesty service or 
 honour. If your Majesty continue me as I am, I hope I shall be a 
 new man, and shall reform things out of feeling, more than another 
 can do out of example. If I cast part of my burden, I shall bo 
 more strong and delimA to bear the rest. And, to tell your 
 Majesty what my thoughts run upon, I think of writing a story 
 of England, and of recompiling of your laws into a better digest. " 
 
 The King referred him to the House ; and the House 
 now (April 1 9) prepared to gather up into " one brief " 
 the charges against the Lord Chancellor, still, however, 
 continuing open to receive fresh complaints. 
 
 Meanwhile the chase after abuses of all kinds was 
 growing hotter in the Commons abuses in patents and 
 monopolies, which revived the complaints against referees, 
 among whom Bacon was frequently named, and abuses 
 in the Courts of Justice. The attack passed by and 
 spared the Common Law Courts, as was noticed in the 
 course of the debates ; it spared Cranfield's Court, the 
 Court of Wards. But it fell heavily on the Chancery 
 and the Ecclesiastical Courts. " I have neither power
 
 140 BACON. [CHAP. 
 
 nor will to defend Chancery," said Sir John Bennett, the 
 judge of the Prerogative Court ; but a few weeks after 
 his turn came, and a series of as ugly charges as could 
 well be preferred against a judge, charges of extortion 
 as well as bribery, were reported to the House by its 
 Committee. There can be no doubt of the grossness of 
 many of these abuses, and the zeal against them was 
 honest, though it would have shown more courage if it had 
 flown at higher game ; but the daily discussion of them 
 helped to keep alive and inflame the general feeling 
 against so great a " delinquent " as the Lord Chancellor 
 was supposed to be. And, indeed, two of the worst 
 charges against him were made before the Commons. 
 One was a statement made in the House by Sir George 
 Hastings, a member of the House, who had been the 
 channel of Awbry's gift, that when he had told Bacon 
 that if questioned he must admit it, Bacon's answer 
 was : " George, if you do so, I must deny it upon my 
 honour upon my oath." The other was that he had 
 given an opinion in favour of some claim of the Masters 
 in Chancery for which he received 1200, and with 
 which he said that all the judges agreed an assertion 
 which all the judges denied. Of these charges there is 
 no contradiction. 1 
 
 Bacon made one more appeal to the King (April 21). 
 He hoped that, by resigning the seal, he might be spared 
 the sentence : 
 
 "But now if not per omnipotentiam (as the divines speak), but 
 per potestatem suavlter disponentem, your Majesty will graciously 
 save me from a sentence with the good liking of the House, and 
 that cup may pass from me ; it is the utmost of my desires. 
 
 1 Commons' Journals, March 17, April 27 ; iii. 560, 594-6.
 
 vi.] BACON'S FALL. 141 
 
 " This I move with the more belief, because I assure myself that 
 if it be reformation that is sought, the very taking away the seal, 
 upon my general submission, will be as much in example for these 
 four hundred years, as any furdcr severity." 
 
 At length, informally, but for the first time distinctly, 
 the full nature of the accusation, with its overwhelming 
 list of cases, came to Bacon's knowledge (April 20 or 
 21). From the single charge, made in the middle of 
 March, it had swelled in force and volume like a 
 rising mountain torrent. That all these charges should 
 have sprung out of the ground from their long conceal- 
 ment is strange enough. How is it that nothing was 
 heard of them when the things happened 1 And what is 
 eqiially strange is that these charges were substantially 
 true and undeniable ; that this great Lord Chancellor, so 
 admirable in his despatch of business, hitherto so little 
 complained of for wrong or unfair decisions, had been in 
 the habit of receiving large sums of money from suitors, 
 in some cases certainly while the suit was pending. And 
 further, while receiving them, while perfectly aware of 
 the evil of receiving gifts on the seat of judgment, while 
 emphatically warning inferior judges against yielding to 
 the temptation, he seems really to have continued un- 
 conscious of any wrong-doing while gift after gift was 
 offered and accepted. But nothing is so strange as the 
 way in which Bacon met the charges. Tremendous as 
 the accusation was, he made not the slightest fight about 
 it. Up to this time he had held himself innocent 
 Now, overwhelmed and stunned, he made no attempt at 
 defence ; he threw up the game without a struggle, and 
 volunteered an absolute and unreserved confession of 
 his guilt that is to say, he declined to stand his trial.
 
 142 BACON. [CHAP. 
 
 Only, he made an earnest application to the House of 
 Lords, in proceeding to sentence, to be content with a 
 general admission of guilt, and to spare him the humilia- 
 tion of confessing the separate facts of alleged "bribery " 
 which were contained in the twenty -eight articles of 
 his accusation. This submission, "grounded only on 
 rumour," for the Articles of charge had not yet been 
 communicated to him by the accusers, took the House 
 by surprise. " No Lord spoke to it, after it had been 
 read, for a long time." But they did not mean that he 
 should escape with this. The House treated the sug- 
 gestion with impatient scorn (April 24). "It is too 
 late," said Lord Saye. " No word of confession of any 
 corruption in the Lord Chancellor's submission," said 
 Southampton ; "it stands with the justice and honour 
 of this House not to proceed without the parties' par- 
 ticular confession, or to have the parties to hear the 
 charge, and we to hear the parties answer." The 
 demand of the Lords was strictly just, but cruel ; the 
 Articles were now sent to him; he had been charged 
 with definite offences ; he must answer yes or no, con- 
 fess them or defend himself. A further question arose 
 whether he should not be sent for to appear at the bar. 
 He still held the seals. " Shall the Great Seal come to 
 the bar ?" asked Lord Pembroke. It was agreed that he 
 was to be asked whether he would acknowledge the 
 particulars. His answer was "that he will make no 
 manner of defence to the charge, but meaneth to 
 acknowledge corruption, and to make a particular con- 
 fession to every point, and after that a humble sub- 
 mission. But he humbly craves liberty that, when the 
 charge is more full than he finds the truth of the fact, he
 
 vi.] BACON'S FALL. 143 
 
 may make a declaration of the truth in such particulars, 
 the charge being brief and containing not all the circum- 
 stances." And such a confession he made. "My 
 Lords," he said, to those who were sent to ask whether 
 he would stand to it, " it is my act, my hand, my heart. 
 I beseech your Lordships be merciful to a broken 
 reed." This was of course followed by a request to the 
 King from the House to " sequester " the Great Seal. A 
 commission was sent to receive it (May 1). " The worse, 
 the better," he answered to the wish " that it had been 
 better with him." "By the King's great favour I 
 received the Great Seal ; by my own great fault I have 
 lost it." They intended him now to come to the bar to 
 receive his sentence. But he was too ill to leave his bed. 
 They did not push this point farther, but proceeded to 
 settle the sentence (May 3). He had asked for mercy, 
 but he did not get it. There were men who talked of 
 every extremity short of death. Coke, indeed, in the 
 Commons, from his store of precedents, had cited cases 
 where judges had been hanged for bribery. But the Lords 
 would not hear of this. " His offences foul," said Lord 
 Arundel ; " his confession pitiful. Life not to be touched." 
 But Southampton, whom twenty years before he had 
 helped to involve in Essex's ruin, urged that he should 
 be degraded from the peerage; and asked whether, at 
 any rate, "he whom this House thinks unfit to be a 
 constable -shall come to the Parliament." He was fined 
 40,000. He was to be imprisoned in the Tower during 
 the King's pleasure. He was to be incapable of any 
 office, place, or employment in the State or Common- 
 wealth. He was never to sit in Parliament or come 
 within the verge of the Court. This was agreed to,
 
 144 BACON. [CHAP. 
 
 Buckingham only dissenting. "The Lord Chancellor is 
 so sick," he said, " that he cannot live long." 
 
 What is the history of this tremendous catastrophe 
 by which, in less than two months, Bacon was cast down 
 from the height of fortune to become a byword of shame? 
 He had enemies, who certainly were glad, but there is 
 no appearance that it was the result of any plot or com- 
 bination against him. He was involved, accidentally, it 
 may almost be said, in the burst of anger excited by the 
 intolerable dealings of others. The indignation provoked 
 by Michell and Mompesson and their associates at that 
 particular moment found Bacon in its path, doing, as it 
 seemed, in his great seat of justice, even worse than they; 
 and when he threw up all attempt at defence, and his 
 judges had his hand to an unreserved confession of corrup- 
 tion, both generally, and in the long list of cases alleged 
 against him, it is not wonderful that they came to the 
 conclusion, as the rest of the world did, that he was as 
 bad as the accusation painted him a dishonest and cor- 
 rupt judge. Yet it is strange that they should not have 
 observed that not a single charge of a definitely unjust 
 decision was brought, at any rate was proved, against 
 him. He had taken money, they argued, and therefore 
 he must be corrupt ; but if he had taken money to per- 
 vert judgment, some instance of the iniquity would cer- 
 tainly have been brought forward and proved. There 
 is no such instance to be found ; though, of course, there 
 were plenty of dissatisfied suitors ; of course the men 
 who had paid their money and lost their cause were 
 furious. But in vain do we look for any case of proved 
 injustice. The utmost that can be said is that in some 
 cases he showed favour in pushing forward and expedit-
 
 vi.] BACON'S FALL. 145 
 
 ing suits. So that the real charge against Bacon assumes, 
 to us who have not to deal practically with dangerous 
 abuses, but to judge conduct and character, a different 
 complexion. Instead of being the wickedness of per- 
 verting justice and selling his judgments for bribes, it 
 takes the shape of allowing and sharing in a dishonour- 
 able and mischievous system of payment for service, 
 which could not fail to bring with it temptation and 
 discredit, and in which fair reward could not be distin- 
 guished from unlawful gain. Such a system it was high 
 time to stop ; and in this rough and harsh way, which 
 also satisfied some personal enmities, it was stopped. 
 We may put aside for good the charge on which he was 
 condemned, and which in words he admitted, of being 
 corrupt as a judge. His real fault, and it was a great 
 one, was that he did not in time open his eyes to the 
 wrongness and evil, patent to every one, and to himself 
 as soon as pointed out, of the traditional fashion in his 
 court of eking out by irregular gifts the salary of such an 
 office as his. 
 
 Thus Bacon was condemned both to suffering and to 
 dishonour ; and, as has been observed, condemned with- 
 out a trial. But it must also be observed, that it was 
 entirely owing to his own act that he had not a trial, and 
 with a trial the opportunity of cross-examining witnesses 
 and of explaining openly the matters urged against him. 
 The proceedings in the Lords were preliminary to the 
 trial : when the time came, Bacon, of his own choice, 
 stopped them from going further by his confession and 
 submission. Considering the view which he claimed 
 to take of his own case, his behaviour was wanting in 
 courage and spirit. From the moment that the attack 
 
 L
 
 146 BACON. [CHAP. 
 
 on him shifted from a charge of authorising illegal 
 monopolies to a charge of personal corruption, he never 
 fairly met his accusers. The distress and anxiety, no 
 doubt, broke down his health ; and twice, when he was 
 called upon to be in his place in the House of Lords, he 
 was obliged to excuse himself on the ground that he was 
 too ill to leave his bed. But between the time of the 
 first charge and his condemnation seven weeks elapsed : 
 and though he was able to go down to Gorhambury, he 
 never in that time showed himself in the House of Lords. 
 Whether or not, while the Committees were busy in 
 collecting the charges, he would have been allowed to take 
 part, to put questions to the witnesses, or to produce his 
 own, he never attempted to do so ; and by the course he 
 took there was no other opportunity. To have stood his 
 trial could hardly have increased his danger, or aggra- 
 vated his punishment; and it would only have been 
 Avorthy of his name and place, if not to have made a 
 fight for his character and integrity, at least to have 
 bravely said what he had made up his mind to admit, 
 and what no one could have said more nobly and 
 pathetically, in open Parliament. But he was cowed 
 at the fierceness of the disapprobation, manifest in both 
 Houses. He shrunk from looking his peers and his 
 judges in the face. His friends obtained for him that 
 he should not be brought to the bar, and that all should 
 pass in writing. But they saved his dignity at the expense 
 qf his substantial reputation. The observation that the 
 charges against him were not sifted by cross-examination 
 applies equally to his answers to them. The allegations 
 of both sides would have come down to us in a more 
 trustworthy shape if the case had gone on. But to give
 
 vi.] BACON'S FALL. 147 
 
 up the struggle, and to escape by any humiliation from 
 a regular public trial, seems to have been his only 
 thought, when he found that the King and Buckingham 
 could not or would not save him. 
 
 But the truth is that he knew that a trial of this kind 
 was a trial only in name. He knew that when a charge 
 of this sort was brought, it was not meant to be really in- 
 vestigated in open court, but to be driven home by proofs 
 carefully prepared beforehand, against which the accused 
 had little chance. He knew, too, that in those days to 
 resist in earnest an accusation was apt to be taken as an 
 insult to the court which entertained it. And further, 
 for the prosecutor to accept a submission and confession 
 without pushing to the formality of a public trial, and 
 therefore a public exposure, was a favour. It was a 
 favour which by his advice, as against the King's honour, 
 had been refused to Suffolk ; it was a favour which, in 
 a much lighter charge, had by his advice been refused 
 to his colleague Yelverton only a few months before, 
 when Bacon, in sentencing him, took occasion to expatiate 
 on the heinous guilt of misprisions or mistakes in men 
 in high, places. The humiliation was not complete with- 
 out the trial, but it was for humiliation and not fair in- 
 vestigation that the trial was wanted. Bacon knew that 
 the trial would only prolong his agony, and give a further 
 triumph to his enemies. 
 
 That there was any plot against Bacon, and much more 
 that Buckingham to save himself was a party to it, is of 
 course absurd. Buckingham, indeed, was almost the only 
 man in the Lords who said anything for Bacon, and, 
 alone, he voted against his punishment. But consider- 
 ing what Buckingham Avas, and what he dared to do
 
 148 BACON. [CHAP. 
 
 when he pleased, he was singularly cool in helping Bacon. 
 Williams, the astute Dean of Westminster, who was to 
 be Bacon's successor as Lord Keeper, had got his ear, and 
 advised him not to endanger himself by trying to save 
 delinquents. He did not. Indeed, as the inquiry went on, 
 he began to take the high moral ground ; he was shocked 
 at the Chancellor's conduct ; he would not have believed 
 that it could have been so bad ; his disgrace was richly 
 deserved. Buckingham kept up appearances by saying 
 a word for him from time to time in Parliament, which- 
 he knew would be useless, and which he certainly took 
 no measures to make effective. It is sometimes said that 
 Buckingham never knew what dissimulation was. He 
 was capable, at least, of the perfidy and cowardice of 
 utter selfishness. Bacon's conspicuous fall diverted 
 men's thoughts from the far more scandalous wickedness 
 of the great favourite. But though there was no plot, 
 though the blow fell upon Bacon almost accidentally, 
 there were many who rejoiced to be able to drive it 
 home. We can hardly wonder that foremost among 
 them was Coke. This was the end of the long rivalry 
 between Bacon and Coke, from the time that Essex 
 pressed Bacon against Coke in vain, to the day when 
 Bacon as Chancellor drove Coke from his seat for his 
 bad law, and as Privy Councillor ordered him to be pro- 
 secuted in the Star Chamber for riotously breaking 
 open men's doors to get his daughter. The two men 
 thoroughly disliked and undervalued one another. Coke 
 made light of Bacon's law. Bacon saw clearly Coke's 
 narrowness and ignorance out of that limited legal sphere 
 in which he was supposed to know everything, his pre- 
 judiced and interested use of his knowledge, his coarse-
 
 vr.] BACON'S FALL. 149 
 
 ness and insolence. But now in Parliament Coke was 
 supreme, " our Hercules," as his friends said. He posed 
 as the enemy of all abuses and corruption. He brought 
 his unrivalled though not always accurate knowledge of 
 law and history to the service of the Committees, and 
 took care that the Chancellor's name should not be for- 
 gotten when it could be connected with some bad business 
 of patent or Chancery abuse. It was the great revenge 
 of the Common Law on the encroaching and insulting 
 Chancery which had now proved so foul. And he could 
 not resist the opportunity of marking the revenge of 
 professional knowledge over Bacon's airs of philosophical 
 superiority. " To restore things to their original " was 
 his sneer in Parliament, " this, Instawatio Magna. 
 Instaurare paras : Instaura leges justitiamque prius." l 
 
 The charge of corruption was as completely a surprise 
 to Bacon as it was to the rest of the world. And yet, 
 as soon as the blot was hit, he saw in a moment that his 
 position was hopeless he knew that he had been doing 
 wrong; though all the time he had never apparently 
 given it a thought, and he insisted, what there is every 
 reason to believe, that no present had induced him to 
 give an unjust decision. It was the power of custom 
 over a character naturally and by habit too pliant to 
 
 1 Commons' Journals, iii. 578. In his copy of the Novum 
 Organum, received ex dono auctoris, Coke wrote the same words. 
 
 " Auctori consilium. 
 
 Instaurare paras veterum documenta sophcrum : 
 Instaura leges justitiamque prius. " 
 
 He added, with allusion to the ship in the frontispiece of the 
 Novum Orgamim, 
 
 " It deserveth not to be read in schools, 
 But to be freighted iii the ship of Fools."
 
 150 BACON. [CHAP. 
 
 circumstances. Custom made him insensible to the 
 evil of receiving recommendations from Buckingham in 
 favour of suitors. Custom made him insensible to the 
 evil of what it seems every one took for granted, re- 
 ceiving gifts from suitors. In the Court of James I. the 
 atmosphere which a man in office breathed was loaded 
 with the taint of gifts and bribes. Presents were as 
 much the rule, as indispensable for those who hoped to 
 get on, as they are now in Turkey. Even in Elizabeth's 
 days, when Bacon was struggling to win her favour, and 
 was in the greatest straits for money, he borrowed 500 
 to buy a jewel for the Queen. When he was James's 
 servant the giving of gifts became a necessity. New 
 Year's Day brought round its tribute of gold vases and 
 gold pieces to the King and Buckingham. And this 
 was the least. Money was raised by the sale of offices 
 and titles. For 20,000, having previously offered 
 10,000 in vain, the Chief- Justice of England, Montague, 
 became Lord Mandeville and Treasurer. The bribe was 
 sometimes disguised : a man became a Privy Councillor, 
 like Cranfield, or a Chief-Justice, like Ley (afterwards 
 "the good Earl," "unstained with gold or fee," of 
 Milton's Sonnet), by marrying a cousin or a niece of 
 Buckingham. When Bacon was made a Peer, he had 
 also given him "the making of a Baron"; that is to 
 say, he might raise money by bargaining with some one 
 who wanted a peerage; when, however, later on, he 
 asked Buckingham for a repetition of the favour, Buck- 
 ingham gave him a lecture on the impropriety of 
 prodigality, which should make it seem that " while the 
 King was asking money of Parliament with one hand 
 he was giving with the other." How things were in
 
 vi.] BACON'S FALL. 151 
 
 Chancery in the clays of the Queen, and of Bacon's 
 predecessors, we know little; but Bacon himself implies 
 that there was nothing new in what he did. " All my 
 lawyers," said James, "are so bred and nursed in cor- 
 ruption that they cannot leave it." Bacon's Chancellor- 
 ship coincided with the full bloom of Buckingham's 
 favour : and Buckingham set the fashion, beyond all 
 before him, of extravagance in receiving and in spending. 
 Encompassed by such assumptions and such customs, 
 Bacon administered the Chancery. Suitors did there 
 what people did everywhere else ; they acknowledged 
 by a present the trouble they gave, or the benefit they 
 gained. It may be that Bacon's known difficulties about 
 money, his expensive ways and love of pomp, his easi- 
 ness of nature, his lax discipline over his servants, 
 encouraged this profuseness of giving. And Bacon let 
 it be. He asked no questions ; he knew that he worked 
 hard and well; he knew that it could go on without 
 affecting his purpose to do justice " from the greatest to 
 the groom." A stronger character, a keener conscience, 
 would have faced the question, not only whether he was 
 not setting the most ruinous of precedents, but whether 
 any man could be so sure of himself as to go on dealing 
 justly with gifts in his hands. But Bacon, who never 
 dared to face the question, what James was, what Buck- 
 ingham was, let himself be spell-bound by custom. He 
 knew in the abstract that judges ought to have nothing 
 to do with gifts, and had said so impressively in his 
 charges to them. Yet he went on self-complacent, 
 secure, almost innocent, building up a great tradition of 
 corruption in the very heart of English justice, till the 
 challenge of Parliament, which began in him its terrible
 
 162 BACON. [CHAP. 
 
 and relentless but most unequal prosecution of justice 
 against ministers who had betrayed the commonwealth in 
 serving the Crown, woke him from his dream, and made 
 him see, as others saw it, the guilt of a great judge who, 
 under whatever extenuating pretext, allowed the suspicion 
 to arise that he might sell justice. " In the midst of a state 
 of as great affliction as mortal man can endure," he wrote 
 to the Lords of the Parliament, in making his submission, 
 " I shall begin with the professing gladness in some 
 things. The first is that hereafter the greatness of a 
 judge or magistrate shall be no sanctuary or protection 
 of guiltiness, which is the beginning of a golden world. 
 The next, that after this example it is like that judges 
 will fly from anything that is in the likeness of corrup- 
 tion as from a serpent." Bacon's own judgment on 
 himself, deliberately repeated, is characteristic, and pro- 
 bably comes near the truth. " Howsoever I acknowledge 
 the sentence just and for reformation's sake fit," he 
 writes to Buckingham from the Tower, where, for form's 
 sake, he was imprisoned for a few miserable days, he 
 yet had been " the justest Chancellor that hath been in 
 the five changes that have been since Sir Nicolas Bacon's 
 time." He repeated the same thing yet more deliber- 
 ately in later times. " / was the justest judge that was in 
 England these fifty years. But it was the justest censure in 
 Parliament that was these two hundred years" 
 
 He might have gone on to add, " the Wisest Coun- 
 sellor; and yet none on whom rested heavier blame; 
 none of whom England might more justly complain." 
 Good counsels given, submissive acquiescence in the 
 worst, this is the history of his statesmanship. 
 Bacon, whose eye was everywhere, was not sparing of
 
 vi.j BACON'S FALL. 153 
 
 his counsels. On all the great questions of the time he 
 has left behind abundant evidence, not" only of what he 
 thought, but of what he advised. And in every case 
 these memorials are marked with the insight, the in- 
 dependence, the breadth of view, and the moderation of 
 a mind which is bent on truth. He started, of course, 
 from a basis which we are now hardly able to understand 
 or allow for, the idea of absolute royal power and pre- 
 rogative which James had enlarged and hardened out 
 of the Kingship of the Tudors, itself imperious and 
 arbitrary enough, but always seeking, with a tact of 
 which James was incapable, to be in touch and sympathy 
 with popular feeling. But it was a basis which in prin- 
 ciple every one of any account as yet held or professed 
 to hold, and which Bacon himself held on grounds of 
 philosophy and reason. He could see no hope for orderly 
 and intelligent government except in a ruler whose 
 wisdom had equal strength to assert itself; and he 
 looked down with incredulity and scorn on the notion 
 of anything good coming out of what the world then 
 knew or saw of popular opinion or parliamentary govern- 
 ment. But when it came to what was wise and fitting 
 for absolute power to do, in the way of general measures 
 and policy, he was for the most part right. He saw the 
 inexorable and pressing necessity of putting the finance 
 of the kingdom on a safe footing. He saw the necessity 
 of a sound and honest policy in Ireland. He saw the 
 mischief of the Spanish alliance in spite of his curious 
 friendship with Gondomar, and detected the real and 
 increasing weakness of the Spanish monarchy, which still 
 awed mankind. He saw the growing danger of abuses 
 in Church and State which were left untouched, and
 
 154 BACON. [CHAP. 
 
 were protected by the punishment of those who dared 
 to complain of them. He saw the confusion and injustice 
 of much of that common law of which the lawyers were 
 so proud ; and would have attempted, if he had been 
 able, to emulate Justinian, and anticipate the Code 
 Napoleon, by a rational and consistent digest. Above 
 all, he never ceased to impress on James the importance, 
 and, if wisely used, the immense advantages, of his Parlia- 
 ments. Himself, for great part of his life, an active and 
 popular member of the House of Commons, he saw that 
 not only it was impossible to do without it, but that if 
 fairly, honourably, honestly dealt with, it would become 
 a source of power and confidence which would double the 
 strength of the Government both at home and abroad. 
 Yet of all this wisdom nothing came. The finance of the 
 kingdom was still ruined by extravagance and corruption 
 in a time of rapidly-developing prosperity and wealth. 
 The wounds of Ireland were unhealed. It was neither 
 peace nor war with Spain, and hot infatuation for its 
 friendship alternated with cold fits of distrust and 
 estrangement. Abuses flourished and multiplied under 
 great patronage. The King's one thought about Parlia- 
 ment was how to get as much money out of it as he 
 could, with as little other business as possible. Bacon's 
 counsels were the prophecies of Cassandra in that so 
 prosperous but so disastrous reign. All that he did was 
 to lend the authority of his presence, in James's most 
 intimate counsels, to policy and courses of which he 
 saw the unwisdom and the perils. James and Bucking- 
 ham made use of him when they wanted. But they 
 would have been very different in their measures and 
 their statesmanship if they had listened to him.
 
 vi.] BACON'S FALL. 155 
 
 Mirabeau said, what of course had been said before 
 him, "On ne vaut, dans la partie executive de la vie 
 humaine, que par le caractere." This is the key to 
 Bacon's failures as a judge and as a statesman ; and 
 why, knoAving so much more and judging so much 
 more wisely than James and Buckingham, he must be 
 identified with the misdoings of that ignoble reign. He 
 had the courage of his opinions, but a man wants more 
 than that ; he needs the manliness and the public spirit 
 to enforce them, if they are true and salutary. But this 
 is what Bacon had not. He did not mind being rebuffed ; 
 he knew that he was right, and did not care. But to 
 stand up against the King, to contradict him after he 
 had spoken, to press an opinion or a measure on a man 
 whose belief in his own wisdom was infinite, to risk not 
 only being set down as a dreamer, but the King's dis- 
 pleasure, and the ruin of being given over to the will of 
 his enemies, this Bacon had not the fibre, or the stiffness, 
 or the self-assertion to do. He did not do what a man 
 of firm will and strength of purpose, a man of high in- 
 tegrity, of habitual resolution, would have done. Such 
 men insist when they are responsible, and when they 
 know that they arc right ; and they prevail, or accept 
 the consequences. Bacon, knowing all that he did, 
 thinking all that he thought, was content to be the echo 
 and the instrument of the cleverest, the foolishest, the 
 vainest, the rrost pitiably unmanly of English kings.
 
 CHAPTER VII 
 BACON'S LAST YEARS 1621-1626. 
 
 THE tremendous sentences of those days, with their 
 crushing fines, were often worse in sound than in reality. 
 They meant that for the moment a man was defeated and 
 disgraced. But it was quite understood that it did not 
 necessarily follow that they would be enforced in all their 
 severity. The fine might be remitted ; the imprisonment 
 shortened; the ban of exclusion taken off. At another 
 turn of events or caprice, the man himself might return 
 to favour, and take his place in Parliament or the Coun- 
 cil, as if nothing had happened. But, of course, a man 
 might have powerful enemies, and the sentence might be 
 pressed. His fine might be assigned to some favourite ; 
 and he might be ruined, even if in the long run he was 
 pardoned; or he might remain indefinitely a prisoner. 
 Raleigh had remained to perish at last in dishonour. 
 Northumberland, Raleigh's fellow-prisoner, after fifteen 
 years' captivity, was released this year. The year after 
 Bacon's condemnation such criminals as Lord and Lady 
 Somerset were released from the Tower, after a six years' 
 imprisonment. Southampton, the accomplice of Essex, 
 Suffolk, sentenced as late as 1619 by Bacon for embezzle- 
 ment, sat in the House of Peers which judged Bacon,
 
 CH.U-. vii.] BACON'S LAST YEARS 1621-1626. 157 
 
 and both of them took a prominent part in judging 
 him. 
 
 To Bacon the sentence was ruinous. It proved an 
 irretrievable overthrow as regards public life, and though 
 some parts of it were remitted, and others lightened, it 
 plunged his private affairs into trouble which weighed 
 heavily on him for his few remaining years. To his 
 deep distress and horror he had to go to the Tower to 
 satisfy the terms of his sentence. "Good my Lord," he 
 writes to Buckingham, May 31, "procure my warrant 
 for my discharge this day. Death is so far from being 
 unwelcome to me, as I have called for it as far as 
 Christian resolution would permit any time these two 
 months. But to die before the time of his Majesty's 
 grace, in this disgraceful place, is even the worst that 
 could be." He was released after two or three days, and 
 he thanks Buckingham (June 4) for getting him out to 
 do him and the King faithful service " wherein, by the 
 grace of God, your Lordship shall find that my adversity 
 hath neither spent nor pent my spirits." In the autumn 
 his fine was remitted ; that is, it was assigned to persons 
 nominated by Bacon, who, as the Crown had the first 
 claim on all his goods, served as a protection against his 
 other creditors, who were many and some of them 
 clamorous; and it was followed by his pardon. His 
 successor, Williams, now Bishop of Lincoln, who 
 stood in great fear of Parliament, tried to stop the 
 pardon. The assignment of the fine, he said to Bucking- 
 ham, was a gross job : " it is much spoken against, not 
 for the matter (for no man objects to that), but for the 
 manner, which is full of knavery, and a wicked precedent 
 For by this assignment he is protected from all his
 
 158 BACON. [CHAP. 
 
 creditors, which (I dare say) was neither his Majesty's 
 nor your Lordship's meaning." It was an ill-natured 
 and cowardly piece of official pedantry, to plunge deeper 
 a drowning man : but in the end the pardon was passed. 
 It does not appear whether Buckingham interfered to 
 overrule the Lord Keeper's scruples. Buckingham was 
 certainly about this time very much out of humour with 
 Bacon, for a reason which, more than anything else, 
 discloses the deep meanness which lurked under his show 
 of magnanimity and pride. He had chosen this moment 
 to ask Bacon for York House. This meant that Bacon 
 would never more want it. Even Bacon was stung by 
 such a request to a friend in his condition, and declined 
 to part with it : and Buckingham accordingly was 
 offended, and made Bacon feel it. Indeed, there is 
 reason to think with Mr. Spedding that for the sealing 
 of his pardon Bacon was indebted to the good offices 
 with the King, not of Buckingham, but of the Spaniard, 
 Gondomar, with whom Bacon had always been on terms 
 of cordiality and respect, and who at this time certainly 
 " brought about something on his behalf, which his 
 other friends either had not dared to attempt, or had 
 not been able to obtain." 
 
 But though Bacon had his pardon, he had not 
 received permission to come within the verge of the 
 Court, which meant that he could not live in London. 
 His affairs were in great disorder, his health was bad, 
 and he was cut off from books. He wrote an appeal 
 to the Peers who had condemned him, asking them 
 to intercede with the King for the enlargement of 
 his liberty. " I am old," he wrote, " weak, ruined, in 
 want, a very subject of pity." The Tower at least gave
 
 vii.] BACON'S LAST YEARS 1621-1626. 159 
 
 him the neighbourhood of those who could help him. 
 " There I could have company, physicians, conference 
 with iny creditors and friends about my debts and the 
 necessities of my estate, helps for my studies and the 
 writings I have in hand. Here I live upon the sword- 
 point of a sharp air, endangered if I go abroad, dulled 
 if I stay within, solitary and comfortless, without com- 
 pany, banished from all opportunities to treat with any 
 to do myself good, and to help out my wrecks." If the 
 Lords would recommend his suit to the King, " You 
 shall do a work of charity and nobility, you shall do me 
 good, you shall do my creditors good, and it may be 
 you shall do posterity good, if out of the carcase of 
 dead and rotten greatness (as out of Samson's lion) 
 there may be honey gathered for the use of future times." 
 But Parliament was dissolved before the touching appeal 
 reached them ; and Bacon had to have recourse to other 
 expedients. He consulted Selden about the technical 
 legality of the sentence. He appealed to Buckingham, 
 who vouchsafed to appear more placable. Once more he 
 had recourse to Gondomar, " in that solitude of friends, 
 which is the base-court of adversity," as a man whom he 
 had " observed to have the magnanimity of his own 
 nation, and the cordiality of ours, and I am sure, the 
 wit of both," and who had been equally kind to him 
 in " both his fortunes " ; and he proposed through Gon- 
 domar to present Gorhambury to Buckingham "for 
 nothing," as a peace-offering.' But the purchase of his 
 liberty was to come in another way. Bacon had 
 reconciled himself to giving up York House ; but 
 now Buckingham would not have it : he had found 
 another house, he said, which suited him as well. That
 
 160 BACON. [CHAP. 
 
 is to say, he did not now choose to have York House 
 from Bacon himself; but he meant to have it. Accord- 
 ingly, Buckingham let Bacon know through a friend of 
 Bacon's, Sir Edward Sackville, that the price of his liberty 
 to live in London was the cession of York House not 
 to Buckingham, but of all men in the world, to Lionel 
 Cranfield, the man who had been so bitter against Bacon 
 in the House of Commons. This is Sir Edward Sack- 
 ville's account to Bacon of his talk with Buckingham ; 
 it is characteristic of every one concerned : 
 
 " In the forenoon he laid the law, but in the afternoon he 
 preached the gospel ; when, after some revivations of the old dis- 
 taste concerning York House, he most nobly opened his heart unto 
 me ; wherein I read that which augured much good towards you. 
 After which revelation the book was again sealed up, and imist in 
 his own time only by himself be again manifested unto you. I 
 have leave to remember some of the vision, and am not forbidden 
 to write it. He vowed (not court like), but constantly to appear 
 your friend so much, as if his Majesty should abandon the care of 
 you, you should share his fortune with him. He pleased to tell mo 
 how much he had been beholden to you, how well he loved you, 
 how unkindly he took the denial of your house (for so he will needs 
 understand it) ; but the close for all this was harmonious, since he 
 protested he would seriously begin to study your ends, now that 
 the world should see he had no ends on you. He is in hand with 
 the work, and therefore will by no means accept of your offer, 
 though I can assure you the tender hath much won upon him, and 
 mellowed his heart towards you, and your genius directed you 
 aright when you writ that letter of denial to the Duke. The King 
 saw it, and all the rest, which made him say unto the Marquis, you 
 played an after-game well ; and that now he had no reason to be 
 much offended. 
 
 " I have already talked of the Revelation, and now am to speak 
 in apocalyptical language, which I hope you will rightly comment : 
 whereof if you make difficulty, the bearer can help you with the 
 key of the cypher. 
 
 "My Lord Falkland by this time hath showed you London from
 
 vii.] BACON'S LAST YEARS 1621-1626. 161 
 
 Highgate. If York House were gone, the town were yours, and all 
 your straitest shackles clean off, besides more comfort than the city 
 air only. The Marquis would be exceeding glad the Treasurer had 
 it. This I know ; yet this you must not know from me. Bargain 
 with him presently, upon as good conditions as you can procure, so 
 you have direct motion from the Marquis to let him have it. Seem 
 not to dive into the secret of it, though you are purblind if you sec 
 not through it. I have told Mr. Meautys how I would wish your 
 Lordship now to make an end of it. From him I beseech you take 
 it, and from me only the advice to perform it. If you part not 
 speedily with it, you may defer the good which is approaching near 
 you, and disappointing other aims (which must either shortly 
 receive content or never), perhaps anew yield matter of discontent, 
 though you may be indeed as innocent as before. Make the Treasurer 
 believe that since the Marquis will by no means accept of it, and 
 that you nmst part with it, you are more willing to pleasure him than 
 anybody else, because you are given to understand my Lord Marquis 
 so inclines ; which inclination, if the Treasurer shortly send unto 
 you about it, desire may be more clearly manifested than as yet it 
 hath been ; since as I remember none hitherto hath told you in 
 terminis terminantibus that the Marquis desires you should gratify 
 the Treasurer. I know that way the hare runs, and that my Lord 
 Marquis longs until Cranfield hath it ; and so I wish too, for your 
 good ; yet would not it were absolutely passed until my Lord 
 Marquis did send or write unto you to let him have it ; for then his 
 so disposing of it were but the next degree removed from the im- 
 mediate acceptance of it, and your Lordship freed from doing it 
 otherwise than to please him, and to comply with his own will and 
 way." 
 
 It need hardly be said that when Cranfield got it, it 
 soon passed into Buckingham's hands. " Bacon con- 
 sented to part with his house, and Buckingham in return 
 consented to give him his liberty." Yet Bacon could write 
 to him, " low as I am, I had rather sojourn in a college 
 in Cambridge than recover a good fortune by any other 
 but yourself." "As for York House," he bids Toby 
 Matthews to let Buckingham know, " that whetlwr in a 
 
 M
 
 162 BACON. [CHAP. 
 
 straight line or a, compass line, I meant it for his Lordship, 
 in the way which I thought might please him best." 
 But liberty did not mean either money or recovered 
 honour. All his life long he had made light of being in 
 debt ; but since his fall this was no longer a condition 
 easy to bear. He had to beg some kind of pension of 
 the King. He had to beg of Buckingham ; " a small 
 matter for my debts would do me more good now than 
 double a twelvemonth hence. I have lost six thousand 
 by the year, besides caps and courtesies. Two things I 
 may assure your Lordship. The one, that I shall lead 
 such a course of life as whatsoever the King doth for 
 me shall rather sort to his Majesty's and your Lordship's 
 honour than to envy : the other, that whatsoever men 
 talk, I can play the good husband, and the King's bounty 
 shall not be lost." 
 
 It might be supposed from the tone of these applica- 
 tions that Bacon's mind was bowed down and crushed by 
 the extremity of his misfortune. Nothing could be 
 farther from the truth. In his behaviour during his 
 accusation there Avas little trace of that high spirit and 
 fortitude shown by far inferior men under like disasters. 
 But the moment the tremendous strain of his misfortunes 
 was taken off, the vigour of his mind recovered itself. The 
 buoyancy of his hopefulness, the elasticity of his energy, 
 are as remarkable as his profound depression. When 
 the end was approaching his thoughts turned at once to 
 other work to be done, ready in plan, ready to be taken 
 up and finished. At the close of his last desperate letter 
 to the King he cannot resist finishing at once with a 
 jestj and with the prospect of two great literary under- 
 takings
 
 vii.] BACON'S LAST YEAKS 1621-1626. 163 
 
 "This is my last suit which I shall make to your Majesty in this 
 business, prostrating myself at your mercy seat, after fifteen years 
 service, wherein I have served your Majesty in my poor endeavours 
 with an entire heart, and, as I presumed to say unto your Majesty, 
 am still a virgin for matters that concern your person and crown ; 
 and now only craving that after eight steps of honour I be not pre- 
 cipitated altogether. But because he that hath taken bribes is apt 
 to give bribes, I will go furder, and present your Majesty with a 
 bribe. For if your Majesty will give me peace and leisure, and God 
 give me life, I will present your Majesty with a good history of 
 England, and a better digest of your laws." 
 
 The Tower did, indeed, to use a word of the time, 
 "mate" him. But the moment he was out of it, his 
 quick and fertile mind was immediately at work in all 
 directions, reaching after all kinds of plans, making 
 proof of all kinds of expedients to retrieve the past, 
 arranging all kinds of work according as events might 
 point out the way. His projects for history, for law, 
 for philosophy, for letters, occupy quite as much of his 
 thoughts, as his pardon and his debts ; and they, we have 
 seen, occupied a good deal. If he was pusillanimous in 
 the moment of the storm, his spirit, his force, his 
 varied interests, returned the moment the storm was 
 past. His self-reliance, which was boundless, revived. 
 He never allowed himself to think, however men of 
 his own time might judge him, that the future world 
 would mistake him. " Aliquis fui inter vivos" he writes 
 to Gondomar, "neque omnino intermoriar apud posteros." 
 Even in his time he did not give up the hope of being 
 restored to honour and power. He compared himself to 
 Demosthenes, to Cicero, to Seneca, to Marcus Livius, 
 who had been condemned for corrupt dealings as he 
 had been, and had all recovered favour and position. 
 Lookers-on were puzzled and shocked. "He has,"
 
 164 BACON. [CHAP. 
 
 writes Chamberlain, "no manner of feeling of his fall, 
 but continuing vain and idle in all his humours as when 
 he was at the highest." " I am said," Bacon himself 
 writes, "to have a feather in my head." 
 
 Men were mistaken. His thoughts were, for the 
 moment, more than ever turned to the future ; but he 
 had not given up hope of having a good deal to say yet 
 to the affairs of the present. Strangely enough, as it 
 seems to us, in the very summer after that fatal spring 
 of 1621 the King called for his opinion concerning the 
 reformation of Courts of Justice ; and Bacon, just sen- 
 tenced for corruption and still unpardoned, proceeds 
 to give his advice as if he were a Privy Counsellor 
 in confidential employment. Early in the following 
 year he, according to his fashion, surveyed his position, 
 and drew up a paper of memoranda, like the notes of 
 the Commentarius Solutus of 1608, about points to be 
 urged to the King at an interview. Why should not 
 the King employ him again ? " Your Majesty never chid 
 me;" and as to his condemnation, "as the fault was 
 not against your Majesty, so my fall was not your act." 
 "Therefore," he goes on, "if your Majesty do at any 
 time find it fit for your affairs to employ me publicly 
 upon the stage, I shall so live and spend my time as 
 neither discontinuance shall disable me nor adversity 
 shall discourage me, nor anything that I do give any 
 new scandal or envy upon me." He insists very strongly 
 that the King's service never miscarried in his hands, 
 for he simply carried out the King's wise counsels. 
 "That his Majesty's business never miscarried in my 
 hands I do not impute to any extraordinary ability in 
 myself, but to my freedom from any particular, either
 
 vii.] BACON'S LAST YEARS 1621-1626. 165 
 
 friends or ends, and my careful receipt of his directions, 
 being, as I have formerly said to him, but as a bucket 
 and cistern to that fountain a bucket to draw forth, 
 a cistern to preserve." He is not afraid of the apparent 
 slight to the censure passed on him by Parliament. 
 " For envy, it is an almanack of the old year, and as a 
 friend of mine said, Parliament died penitent towards me" 
 "What the King bestows on me will be further seen 
 than on Paul's steeple." "There be mountebanks, as 
 well in the civil body, as in the natural ; I ever served 
 his Majesty with modesty ; no shouting, no undertak- 
 ing." In the odd fashion of the time, a fashion in which 
 no one more delighted than himself, he lays hold of 
 sacred words to give point to his argument. 
 
 " I may allude to the three petitions of the Litany Liber a nos 
 Dominc; pane nobis, Domine ; exaudi nos, Domine. In the first, 
 I am persuaded that his Majesty had a mind to do it, and could not 
 conveniently in respect of his affairs. In the second, he hath done 
 it in my fine and pardon. In the third, he hath likewise per- 
 formed, in restoring to the light of his countenance. " 
 
 But if the King did not see fit to restore him to public 
 employment, he would be ready to give private counsel; 
 and he would apply himself to any " literary province " 
 that the King appointed. " I am like ground fresh. If I 
 be left to myself I will graze and bear natural philo- 
 sophy ; but if the King will plough me up again, and sow 
 me with anything, I hope to give him some yield." 
 " Your Majesty hath power ; I have faith. Therefore 
 a miracle may be wrought." And he proposes, for 
 matters in which his pen might be useful, first, as 
 " active " works, the recompiling of laws ; the disposing 
 of wards, and generally the education of youth ; the
 
 16G BACON. [CHAP. 
 
 regulation of the jurisdiction of Courts ; and the regula- 
 tion of Trade : and for " contemplative," the continuation 
 of the history of Henry VIII. ; a general treatise de 
 Legibus et Justitia ; and the "Holy War," against the 
 Ottomans. 
 
 When he wrote this he had already shown what his 
 unquelled energy could accomplish. In the summer 
 and autumn after his condemnation, amid all the worries 
 and inconveniences of that time, moving about from 
 place to place, without his books, and without free access 
 to papers and records, he had written his History of 
 Henry VII, The theme had, no doubt, been long in 
 his head. But the book was the first attempt at philo- 
 sophical history in the language, and it at once takes 
 rank with all that the world had yet seen, in classical 
 times and more recently in Italy, of such history. He 
 sent the book, among other persons, to the Queen of 
 Bohemia, with a phrase, the translation of a trite Latin 
 commonplace, which may have been the parent of one 
 which became famous in our time ; and with an expres- 
 sion of absolute confidence in the goodness of his own 
 work. 
 
 "I have read in books that it is accounted a great bliss for a 
 man to have Leisure with Honour. That was never my fortune. 
 For time was, I had Honour without Leisure ; and now I have 
 Leisure witlwut Honour. . . . But my desire is now to have leisure 
 without Loitering, and not to become an abbey-lubber, as the old 
 proverb ,was, but to yield some fruit of my private life. ... If 
 King Henry were alive again, I hope verily he would not be so 
 angry with me for not flattering him, as well pleased in seeing 
 himself so truly described in colours that will last and be be- 
 lieved. " 
 
 But the tide had turned against him for good. A few
 
 vii.] BACON'S LAST YEARS 1621-1626. 167 
 
 fair words, a few grudging doles of money to relieve his 
 pressing wants, and those sometimes intercepted and 
 perhaps never rightly granted from an Exchequer which 
 even Cranfield's finance could not keep filled, were all the 
 graces that descended upon him from those fountains of 
 goodness in which he professed to trust with such bound- 
 less faith. The King did not want him, perhaps did not 
 trust him, perhaps did not really like him. When the 
 Nomim Organum came out all that he had to say about it 
 was in the shape of a profane jest that "it was like 
 the peace of God it passed all understanding." Other 
 men had the ear of Buckingham ; shrewd practical men 
 of business like Cranfield, who hated Bacon's loose and 
 careless ways, or the clever ecclesiastic Williams, whose 
 counsel had steered Buckingham safely through the tem- 
 pest that wrecked Bacon, and who, with no legal training, 
 had been placed in Bacon's seat. "I thought," said 
 Bacon, " that I should have known my successor." Wil- 
 liams, for his part, charged Bacon with trying to cheat 
 his creditors, when his fine was remitted. With no open 
 quarrel, Bacon's relations to Buckingham became more 
 ceremonious and guarded ; the "My singular good Lord" 
 of the former letters becomes, now that Buckingham had 
 risen so high and Bacon had sunk so low, " Excellent 
 Lord." The one friend to whom Bacon had once wished 
 to owe everything, had become the great man, now only 
 to be approached with "sweet meats" and elaborate 
 courtesy. But it was no use. His full pardon Bacon did 
 not get, though earnestly suing for it, that he might not 
 "die in ignominy." He never sat again in Parliament. 
 The Provostship of Eton fell vacant, and Bacon's hopes 
 were kindled. " It were a pretty cell for my fortune.
 
 168 BACON, [CHAP. 
 
 The College and School I do not doubt but I shall make 
 to nourish." But Buckingham had promised it to some 
 nameless follower, and by some process of exchange it 
 went 'to Sir Henry Wotton. His English history was 
 offered in vain. His digest of the Laws was offered in 
 vain. In vain he wrote a memorandum on the regulation 
 of usury; notes of advice to Buckingham; elaborate 
 reports and notes of speeches about a war with Spain, 
 when that for a while loomed before the country. In 
 vain he affected an interest which he could hardly have 
 felt in the Spanish marriage, and the escapade of Buck- 
 ingham and Prince Charles, which "began," he wrote, 
 " like a fable of the poets, but deserved all in a piece a 
 worthy narration." In vain, when the Spanish marriage 
 was off and the French was on, he proposed to offer to 
 Buckingham " his service to live a summer as upon mine 
 own delight at Paris, to settle a fast intelligence between 
 France and us ; " "I have somewhat of the French," he 
 said, " I love birds, as the King doth." Public patronage 
 and public employment were at an end for him. His 
 petitions to the King and Buckingham ceased to be for 
 office, but for the clearing of his name, and for the means 
 of living. It is piteous to read the earnestness of his 
 requests. " Help me (dear Sovereign lord and master), 
 pity me so far as that I who have borne a bag be not 
 now in my age forced in effect to bear a wallet." The 
 words are from a carefully-prepared and rhetorical letter 
 which was not sent, but they express what he added to 
 a letter presenting the De Augmentis; "det Ve&ira Majestas 
 obolum Bclisarw." Again, " I prostrate myself at your Ma- 
 jesty's feet ; I your ancient servant, now sixty-four years 
 old in age, and three years and five months old in misery.
 
 vii.] BACON'S LAST YEARS 1621-1626. 169 
 
 I desire not from your Majesty means, nor place, nor 
 employment, but only after so long a time of expiation, 
 a complete and total remission of the sentence of the 
 Upper House, to the end that blot of ignominy may be 
 removed from me and from my memory and posterity, 
 that I die not a condemned man, but may be to your 
 Majesty, as I am to God, nova creatura." But the pardon 
 never came. Sir John Bennett, who had been condemned 
 as a corrupt judge by the same Parliament, and between 
 whose case and Bacon's there was as much difference, 
 " I will not say as between black and white, but as be- 
 tween black and grey," had got his full pardon, " and 
 they say shall sit in Parliament." Lord Suffolk had been 
 one of Bacon's judges. " I hope I deserve not to be the 
 only outcast." But whether the Court did not care, or 
 whether, as he once suspected, there was some old enemy 
 like Coke, who "had a tooth against him," and was 
 watching any favour shown him, he died without his 
 wish being fulfilled, " to live out of want and to die out 
 of ignominy." 
 
 Bacon was undoubtedly an impoverished man, and 
 straitened in his means ; but this must be understood as 
 in relation to the rank and position which he still held, 
 and the work which he wanted done for the Instauratio. 
 His will, dated a few months before his death, shows 
 that it would be a mistake to suppose that he was in 
 penury. He no doubt often wanted ready money, and 
 might be vexed by creditors. But he kept a largo 
 household, and was able to live in comfort at Gray's 
 Inn or at Gorhambury. A man who speaks in his will 
 of his "four coach geldings and his best caroache," 
 besides many legacies, and who proposes to found two
 
 170 BACON". [CHAP. 
 
 lectures at the universities, may have troubles about 
 debts and be cramped in his expenditure ; but it is only 
 relatively to his station that he can be said to be poor. 
 And to subordinate officers of the Treasury who kept 
 him out of his rights, he could still write a sharp letter, 
 full of his old force and edge. A few months before his 
 death he thus wrote to the Lord Treasurer Ley, who 
 probably had made some difficulty about a claim for 
 money : 
 
 "Mv LORD I humbly entreat your Lordship, and (if I may use 
 the word) advise your Lordship to make me a better answer. Your 
 Lordship is interessed in honour, in the opinion of all that hear how 
 I am dealt with. If your Lordship malice me for Long's cause, 
 surely it was one of the justest businesses that ever was in Chancery. 
 I will avouch it ; and how deeply I was tempted therein, your 
 Lordship knoweth best. Your Lordship may do well to think of 
 your grave as I do of mine ; and to beware of hardness of heart. 
 And as for fair words, it is a wind by which neither your Lordship 
 nor any man else can sail long. Howsoever, I am the man that 
 shall give all due respects and reverence to your great place. 
 
 " 20th June 1625. FR. ST. ALBAN." 
 
 Bacon always claimed that he was not "vindicative." 
 But considering how Bishop Williams, when he was 
 Lord Keeper, had charged Bacon with "knavery" and 
 " deceiving his creditors " in the arrangements about his 
 fine, it is not a little strange to find that at the end of 
 his life Bacon had so completely made friends with him 
 that he chose him as the person to whom he meant to 
 leave his speeches and letters, which he was "willing 
 should not be lost," and also the charge of superintending 
 two foundations of 200 a year for Natural Science at 
 the universities. And the Bishop accepted the charge. 
 
 The end of this, one of the most pathetic of histories,
 
 vii.] BACON'S LAST YEARS 1621-1626. 171 
 
 was at hand ; the end was not the less pathetic because it 
 came in so homely a fashion. On a cold day in March, 
 he stopped his coach in the snow on his way to Highgate, 
 to try the effect of cold in arresting putrefaction. He 
 bought a hen from a woman by the way, and stuffed it 
 with snow. He was taken with a bad chill, which forced 
 him to stop at a strange house, Lord Arundel's, to whom 
 he wrote his last letter, a letter of apology for using 
 his house. He did not write the letter as a dying 
 man. But disease had fastened on him. A few days 
 after, early on Easter morning, April 9th, 1626, he passed 
 away. He was buried at St. Albans, in the Church of 
 St. Michael, "the only Christian church within the walls 
 of old Verulam." "For my name and memory," he 
 said in his will, " I leave it to men's charitable speeches, 
 and to foreign nations, and the next ages." So he 
 died : the brightest, richest, largest mind but one, in the 
 age which had seen Shakespeare and his fellows; so 
 bright and rich and large that there have been found 
 those who identify him with the writer of Hamlet and 
 Othello. That is idle. Bacon could no more have written 
 the plays than Shakespeare could have prophesied the 
 triumphs of natural philosophy. So ended a career, than 
 which no other in his time had grander and nobler aims, 
 aims, however mistaken, for the greatness and good of 
 England, aims for the enlargement of knowledge and 
 truth, and for the benefit of mankind. So ended a career 
 which had mounted slowly and painfully, but resolutely, 
 to the highest pinnacle of greatness, greatness full of 
 honour and beneficent activity, suddenly to plunge down 
 to depths where honour and hope were irrecoverable. So 
 closed, in disgrace and disappointment and neglect, the
 
 172 BACON. [CHAP. 
 
 last sad chapter of a life which had begun so brightly, 
 which had achieved such permanent triumphs, which had 
 lost itself so often in the tangles of insincerity and evil 
 custom, which was disfigured and marred by great mis- 
 fortunes and still more by great mistakes of his own, 
 which was in many ways misunderstood not only by his 
 generation but by himself, but which he left in the con- 
 stant and almost unaccountable faith that it would be 
 understood and greatly honoured by posterity. With 
 all its glories, it was the greatest shipwreck, the greatest 
 tragedy, of an age which saw many. 
 
 But in these gloomy and dreary days of depression 
 and vain hope to which his letters bear witness " three 
 years and five months old in misery," again later, "a 
 long cleansing week of five years' expiation and more " 
 his interest in his great undertaking and his industry 
 never flagged. The King did not want what he offered, 
 did not want his histories, did not want his help about 
 law. Well, then, he had work of his own on which his 
 heart was set ; and if the King did not want his time, 
 he had the more for himself. Even in the busy days of 
 his Chancellorship he had prepared and carried through 
 the press the Novum Organum, which he published on the 
 very eve of his fall. It was one of those works which 
 quicken a man's powers, and prove to him what he can 
 do ; and it had its effect. His mind was never more alert 
 than in these years of adversity, his labour never more 
 indefatigable, his powers of expression never more keen 
 and versatile and strong. Besides the political writings 
 of grave argument for which he found time, these five 
 years teem with the results of work. In the year before 
 his death he sketched out once more, in a letter to a
 
 vii.] BACON'S LAST YEARS 1621-1626. 173 
 
 Venetian correspondent, Fra Fulgenzio, the friend of 
 Sarpi, the plan of his great work, on which he was still 
 busy, though with fast diminishing hopes of seeing it 
 finished. To another foreign correspondent, a professor 
 of philosophy at Annecy, and a distinguished mathemati- 
 cian, Father Baranzan, who had raised some questions 
 about Bacon's method, and had asked what was to be 
 done with metaphysics, he wrote in eager acknowledg- 
 ment of the interest which his writings had excited, and 
 insisting on the paramount necessity, above everything, of 
 the observation of facts and of natural history, out of 
 which philosophy may be built. But the most comprehen- 
 sive view of his intellectual projects in all directions, " the 
 fullest account of his own personal feelings and designs 
 as a writer which we have from his own pen," is given 
 in a letter to the venerable friend of his early days, 
 Bishop Andrewes, who died a few months after him. 
 Part, he says, of his Instauratio, " the work in mine own 
 judgement (si nunquam fallit imago) I do most esteem," 
 has been published : but because he " doubts that it 
 flies too high over men's heads," he proposes " to draw it 
 down to the sense" by examples of Natural History. 
 He has enlarged and translated the Advancement into 
 the De Augmentis. "Because he could not altogether 
 desert the civil person that he had borne," he had begun 
 a work on Laws, intermediate between philosophical 
 jurisprudence and technical law. He had hoped to com- 
 pile a digest of English law, but found it more than he 
 could do alone, and had laid it aside. The Instauratio 
 had contemplated the good of men " in the dowries of 
 nature:" the Laws, their good "in society and the 
 dowries of government." As he owed duty to his
 
 174 BACON. [CHAP. 
 
 country, and could no longer do it service, he meant to 
 do it honour by his history of Henry VII. His Essays 
 were but "recreations"; and remembering that all his 
 writings had hitherto "gone all into the City and none 
 into the Temple," he wished to make "some poor 
 oblation," and therefore had chosen an argument mixed 
 of religious and civil considerations, the dialogue of 
 "an Holy War" against the Ottoman, which he never 
 finished, but which he intended to dedicate to Andrewes, 
 " in respect of our ancient and private acquaintance, and 
 because amongst the men of our times I hold you in 
 special reverence." 
 
 The question naturally presents itself, in regard to a 
 friend of Bishop Andrewes, what was Bacon as regards 
 religion 1 And the answer, it seems to me, can admit of 
 no doubt. The obvious and superficial thing to say is 
 that his religion was but an official one, a tribute to cus- 
 tom and opinion. But it was not so. Both in his philo- 
 sophical thinking, and in the feelings of his mind in the 
 various accidents and occasions of life, Bacon was a 
 religious man, with a serious and genuine religion. His 
 sense of the truth and greatness of religion was as real 
 as his sense of the truth and greatness of nature ; they 
 were interlaced together, and could not be separated, 
 though they were to be studied separately and inde- 
 pendently. The call, repeated through all his works 
 from the earliest to the last, Da Fidei quce Fidei sunt, 
 was a warning against confusing the two, but was an 
 earnest recognition of the claims of each. The solemn 
 religious words in which his prefaces and general state- 
 ments often wind up with thanksgiving and hope and 
 prayer, are no mere words of course ; they breathe the
 
 vii.] BACON'S LAST YEARS 1621-1626. 175 
 
 spirit of the deepest conviction. It is true that he takes 
 the religion of Christendom as he finds it. The grounds 
 of belief, the relation of faith to reason, the profounder 
 inquiries into the basis of man's knowledge of the 
 Eternal and Invisible, are out of the circle within which 
 he works. What we now call the philosophy of religion 
 is absent from his writings. In truth, his mind was not 
 qualified to grapple with such questions. There is no 
 sign in his writings that he ever tried his strength 
 against them ; that he ever cared to go below the surface 
 into the hidden things of mind and what mind deals 
 with above and beyond sense those metaphysical diffi- 
 culties and depths, as we call them, which there is no 
 escaping, and which are as hard to explore and as dan- 
 gerous to mistake as the forces and combinations of 
 external nature. But it does not follow, because he had 
 not asked all the questions that others have asked, that 
 he had not thought out his reasonable faith. His reli- 
 gion was not one of mere vague sentiment ; it was the 
 result of reflection and deliberate judgment. It was 
 the discriminating and intelligent Church of England 
 religion of Hooker and Andrewes, which had gone back 
 to something deeper and nobler in Christianity than 
 the popular Calvinism of the earlier Reformation ; and 
 though sternly hostile to the system of the Papacy, both 
 on religious and political grounds, attempted to judge it 
 with knowledge and justice. This deliberate character 
 of his belief is shown in the remarkable Confession of 
 Faith which he left behind him : a closely-reasoned and 
 nobly-expressed survey of Christian theology " a sum- 
 ma theologice, digested into seven pages of the finest 
 English of the days when its tones were finest." " The
 
 176 BACON. [CHAP. vii. 
 
 entire scheme of Christian theology," as Mr. Speclding 
 says, "is constantly in his thoughts; underlies every- 
 thing ; defines for him the limits of human speculation ; 
 and, as often as the course of inquiry touches at any 
 point the boundary line, never fails to present itself. 
 There is hardly any occasion or any kind of argument 
 into which it does not at one time or another incidentally 
 introduce itself." Doubtless it was a religion which in 
 him was compatible, as it has been in others, with 
 grave faults of temperament and character. But it is 
 impossible to doubt that it was honest, that it elevated 
 his thoughts, that it was a refuge and stay in the times 
 of trouble.
 
 CHAPTER VIII. 
 BACON'S PHILOSOPHY. 
 
 BACON was one of those men to whom posterity forgives 
 a great deal, for the greatness of what he has done and 
 attempted for posterity. It is idle, unless all honest 
 judgment is foregone, to disguise the many deplorable 
 shortcomings of his life ; it is unjust to have one measure 
 for him, and another for those about him and opposed 
 to him. But it is not too much to say that in temper, 
 in honesty, in labour, in humility, in reverence, he was 
 the most perfect example that the world had yet seen 
 of the student of nature, the enthusiast for knowledge. 
 That such a man was tempted and fell, and suffered the 
 Nemesis of his fall, is an instance of the awful truth 
 embodied in the tragedy of Faust. But his genuine 
 devotion, so unwearied and so paramount, to a great 
 idea and a great purpose for the good of all gene- 
 rations to come, must shield him from the insult of 
 Pope's famous and shallow epigram. Whatever may 
 have been his sins, and they were many, he cannot have 
 been the "meanest of mankind," who lived and died, 
 holding unaltered, amid temptations and falls, so noblo 
 a conception of the use and calling of his life : the duty 
 and service of helping his brethren to know as they had 
 
 N
 
 178 BACON. [CHAP. 
 
 never yet learned to know. That thought never left 
 him ; the obligations it imposed were never forgotten in 
 the crush and heat of business ; the toils, thankless at 
 the time, which it heaped upon him in addition to the 
 burdens of public life, were never refused. Nothing 
 diverted him, nothing made him despair. He was not 
 discouraged because he was not understood. There 
 never was any one in whose life the " SouveraineU du but" 
 was more certain and more apparent ; and that object 
 was the second greatest that man can have. To teach 
 men to know is only next to making them good. 
 
 The Baconian philosophy, the reforms of the Noimm 
 Organum, the method of experiment and induction, are 
 commonplaces, and sometimes lead to a misconception of 
 what Bacon did. Bacon is, and is not, the founder of 
 modern science. What Bacon believed could be done, 
 what he hoped and divined, for the correction and 
 development of human knowledge, was one thing ; what 
 his methods were, and how far they were successful is 
 another. It would hardly be untrue to say that though 
 Bacon is the parent of modern science, his methods con- 
 tributed nothing to its actual discoveries; neither by 
 possibility could they have done so. The great and 
 wonderful work which the world owes to him was in 
 the idea, and not in the execution. The idea was that 
 the systematic and wide examination of facts was the 
 first thing to be done in science, and that till this had 
 been done faithfully and impartially, with all the appli- 
 ances and all the safeguards that experience and fore- 
 thought could suggest, all generalisations, all anticipa- 
 tions from mere reasoning, must be adjourned and 
 postponed ; and further, that sought on these conditions,
 
 viii.] BACON'S PHILOSOPHY. 179 
 
 knowledge, certain and fruitful, beyond all that men 
 then imagined, could be attained. His was the faith of 
 the discoverer, the imagination of the poet, the voice of 
 the prophet. But his was not the warrior's arm, the 
 engineer's skill, the architect's creativeness. "I only 
 sound the clarion," he says, " but I enter not into the 
 battle ; " and, with a Greek quotation very rare with 
 him, he compares himself to one of Homer's peaceful 
 heralds, ^aipere /O^VKCS, Aios ayyeAoi rj8e KOI av8p<av. 
 Even he knew not the full greatness of his own enter- 
 prise. He underrated the vastness and the subtlety of 
 nature. He overrated his own appliances to bring it 
 under his command. He had not that incommunicable 
 genius and instinct of the investigator which in such 
 men as Faraday close hand to hand with phenomena. 
 His weapons and instruments wanted precision ; they 
 were powerful up to a certain point, but they had the 
 clumsiness of an unpractised time. Cowley compared 
 him to Moses on Pisgah surveying the promised land ; 
 it was but a distant survey, and Newton was the 
 Joshua who began to take possession of it. 
 
 The idea of the great enterprise, in its essential 
 outline, and with a full sense of its originality and 
 importance, was early formed, and was even sketched 
 on paper with Bacon's characteristic self-reliance when 
 he was but twenty - five. Looking back, in a letter 
 written in the last year of his life, on the ardour and 
 constancy with which he had clung to his faith "in 
 that purpose my mind never waxed old, in that long 
 interval of time it never cooled " he remarks that it 
 was then " forty years since he put together a youthful 
 essay on these matters, which with vast confidence I
 
 180 BACON. [CHAP. 
 
 called by the high-sounding title, The Greatest Birth of 
 Time." The "Greatest Birth of Time," whatever it was, 
 has perished, though the name, altered to " Partus Tem- 
 poris Masculus," has survived, attached to some frag- 
 ments of uncertain date and arrangement. But in very 
 truth the child was born, and, as Bacon says, for forty 
 years grew and developed, with many changes yet the 
 same. Bacon was most tenacious, not only of ideas, but 
 even of the phrases, images, and turns of speech in 
 which they had once flashed on him and taken shape in 
 his mind. The features of his undertaking remained 
 the same from first to last, only expanded and enlarged 
 as time went on and experience widened ; his conviction 
 that the knowledge of nature, and with it the power 
 to command and to employ nature, were within the 
 capacity of mankind and might be restored to them ; the 
 certainty that of this knowledge men had as yet acquired 
 but the most insignificant part, and that all existing 
 claims to philosophical truth were as idle and precarious 
 as the guesses and traditions of the vulgar; his belief 
 that no greater object could be aimed at than to sweep 
 away once and for ever all this sham knowledge and all 
 that supported it, and to lay an entirely new and clear 
 foundation to build on for the future ; his assurance that, 
 as it was easy to point out with fatal and luminous 
 certainty the rottenness and hollowness of all existing 
 knowledge and philosophy, so it was equally easy to 
 devise and practically apply new and natural methods 
 of investigation and construction, which should replace 
 it by knowledge of infallible truth and boundless fruit- 
 fulness. His object, to gain the key to the interpre- 
 tation of nature ; his method, to gain it, not by the
 
 viii.] BACON'S PHILOSOPHY. 181 
 
 means common to all previous schools of philosophy, by 
 untested reasonings and imposing and high-sounding 
 generalisations, but by a series and scale of rigorously 
 verified inductions, starting from the lowest facts of ex- 
 perience to discoveries which should prove and realise 
 themselves by leading deductively to practical results 
 these, in one form or another, were the theme of his 
 philosophical writings from the earliest sight of them 
 that we gain. 
 
 He had disclosed what was in his mind in the letter 
 to Lord Burghley, written when he was thirty -one 
 (15^), in which he announced that he had "taken all 
 knowledge for his province," to "purge it of 'frivolous 
 disputations' and 'blind experiments,' and that what- 
 ever happened to him, he meant to be a 'true pioner 
 in the mine of truth.' " But the first public step in the 
 opening of his great design was the publication in the 
 autumn of 1605 of the Advancement of Learning, a care- 
 ful and balanced report on the existing stock and de- 
 ficiences of human knowledge. His endeavours, as he 
 says in the Advancement itself, are " but as an image in 
 a cross-way, that may point out the way, but cannot go 
 it." But from this image of his purpose, his thoughts 
 greatly widened, as time went on. The Advancement, 
 in part at least, was probably a hurried work. It 
 shadowed out, but only shadowed out, the lines of his 
 proposed reform of philosophical thought ; it showed 
 his dissatisfaction with much that was held to be sound 
 and complete, and showed the direction of his ideas and 
 hopes. But it was many years before he took a further 
 step. Active life intervened. In 1620, at the height 
 of his prosperity, on the eve of his fall, he published
 
 182 BACON. [CHAP. 
 
 the long meditated Novum Organum, the avowed chal- 
 lenge to the old philosophies, the engine and instrument 
 of thought and discovery which was to put to shame 
 and supersede all others, containing, in part at least, the 
 principles of that new method of the use of experience 
 which was to be the key to the interpretation and 
 command of nature, and, together with the method, an 
 elaborate but incomplete exemplification of its leading 
 processes. Here were summed up, and stated with the 
 most solemn earnestness, the conclusions to which long 
 study and continual familiarity with the matters in 
 question had led him. And with the Novum Organum 
 was at length disclosed, though only in outline, the 
 whole of the vast scheme in all its parts, object, method, 
 materials, results, for the " Instauration " of human 
 knowledge, the restoration of powers lost, disused, neg- 
 lected, latent, but recoverable by honesty, patience, 
 courage, and industry. 
 
 The Instauratio, as he planned the work, "is to be divided," 
 says Mr. Ellis, " into six portions, of which the first is to contain 
 a general survey of the present state of knowledge. In the second, 
 men are to be taught how to use their understanding aright in the 
 investigation of nature. In the third, all the phenomena of the 
 universe are to be stored up as in a treasure-house, as the materials 
 on which the new method is to be employed. In the fourth, ex- 
 amples are to be given of its operation and of the results to which 
 it leads. The fifth is to contain what Bacon had accomplished in 
 natural philosophy without the aid of his own method ; ex eodem 
 intellectus usu quern alii in inquirendo et inveniendo adhibere con- 
 sueverunt. It is therefore less important than the rest, and Bacon 
 declares that he will not bind himself to the conclusions which it 
 contains. Moreover, its value will altogether cease when the sixth 
 part can be completed, wherein will be set forth the new philosophy 
 the results of the application of the new method to all the
 
 viii.] BACON'S PHILOSOPHY. 183 
 
 phenomena of the universe. But to complete this, the last part of 
 the lustauratio, Bacon does not hope ; he speaks of it as a tiling, 
 et supra vires et ultra spes nostras collocata." Works, i. 71. 
 
 The Novum Organum, itself imperfect, was the crown 
 of all that he lived to do. It was followed (1622) by 
 the publication, intended to be periodical, of materials 
 for the new philosophy to work upon, particular sections 
 and classes of observations on phenomena the History of 
 the Winds, the History of Life and Death. Others were 
 partly prepared but not published by him. And finally, 
 in 1623, he brought out in Latin a greatly enlarged 
 recasting of the Advancement; the nine books of the 
 "De Augmentis." But the great scheme was not com- 
 pleted : portions were left more or less finished. Much 
 that he purposed was left undone, and could not have 
 been yet done at that time. 
 
 But the works which he published represent im- 
 perfectly the labour spent on the undertaking. Besides 
 these, there remains a vast amount of unused or rejected 
 work, which shows how it was thought out, rearranged, 
 tried first in one fashion and then in another, recast, 
 developed. Separate chapters, introductions, "experi- 
 mental essays and discarded beginnings," treatises with 
 picturesque and imaginative titles, succeeded one another 
 in that busy workshop; and these first draughts and 
 tentative essays have in them some of the freshest and 
 most felicitous forms of his thoughts. At one time his 
 enterprise, connecting itself with his own life and mission, 
 rose before his imagination and kindled his feelings, and 
 embodied itself in the lofty and stately "Proem" already 
 quoted. His quick and brilliant imagination saw shadows 
 and figures of his ideas in the ancient mythology, which
 
 184 BACON. [CHAP. 
 
 he worked out with curious ingenuity and often much 
 poetry, in his Wisdom of the Ancients. Towards the end 
 of his life he began to embody his thoughts and plans in 
 a philosophical tale, which he did not finish, the New 
 Atlantis, a charming example of his graceful fancy and of 
 his power of easy and natural story-telling. Between the 
 Advancement and the Novum Organum (1605-20) much 
 underground work had been done. "He had finally 
 (about 1607) settled the plan of the Great Instauration, 
 and began to call it by that name." The plan, first in 
 three or four divisions, had been finally digested into 
 six. Vague outlines had become definite and clear. 
 Distinct portions had been worked out. Various modes 
 of treatment had been tried, abandoned, modified. Pre- 
 faces were written to give the sketch and purpose of 
 chapters not yet composed. The Novum Organum had 
 been written and rewritten twelve times over. Bacon 
 kept his papers, and we can trace in the unused portion 
 of those left behind him much of the progress of his 
 work, and the shapes which much of it went through. 
 The Advancement itself is the filling out and perfecting 
 of what is found in germ, meagre and rudimentary, in 
 a Discourse in Praise of Knowledge, written in the days 
 of Elizabeth, and in some Latin chapters of an early 
 date, the Cogitationes de Scientia Humana, on the 
 limits and use of knowledge, and on the relation of 
 natural history to natural philosophy. These early 
 essays, with much of the same characteristic illustration, 
 and many of the favourite images and maxims and texts 
 and phrases, which continue to appear in his writings 
 to the end, contain the thoughts of a man long accus- 
 tomed to meditate and to see his way on the new
 
 vin.] BACON'S PHILOSOPHY. 185 
 
 aspects of knowledge, opening upon him. And before 
 the Advancement, he had already tried his hand on a 
 work intended to be in two books, which Mr. Ellis 
 describes as a "great work on the Interpretation of 
 Nature," the " earliest type of the Instauratio" and 
 which Bacon called by the enigmatical name of Valerius 
 Terminus. In it, as in a second draft, which in its turn 
 was superseded by the Advancement, the line of thought 
 of the Latin Cogitationes reappears, expanded and more 
 carefully ordered ; it contains also the first sketch of his 
 certain and infallible method for what he calls the 
 "freeing of the direction" in the search after Truth, and 
 the first indications of the four classes of "Idols" 
 which were to be so memorable a portion of Bacon's 
 teaching. And between the Advancement and the Novum 
 Organum at least one unpublished treatise of great 
 interest intervened, the Visa et Cogitata, on which he 
 was long employed, and which he brought to a finished 
 shape, fit to be submitted to his friends and critics, Sir 
 Thomas Bodley and Bishop Andrewes. It is spoken of 
 as a book to be " imparted sicut videbitur," in the review 
 which he made of his life and objects soon after he was 
 made Solicitor in 1608. A number of fragments also 
 bear witness to the fierce scorn and wrath which 
 possessed him against the older and the received philo- 
 sophies. He tried his hand at declamatory onslaughts 
 on the leaders of human wisdom from the early Greeks 
 and Aristotle down to the latest " novellists ; " and he 
 certainly succeeded in being magnificently abusive. 
 But he thought wisely that this was not the best way 
 of doing what in the Commentarius Solutus ho calls on 
 himself to do " taking a greater confidence and
 
 186 BACON. [CHAP. 
 
 authority in discourses of this nature, tanquam sui 
 certus et de alto despidens; " and the rhetorical Redargutio 
 Philosophiarum, and writings of kindred nature were 
 laid aside by his more serious judgment. But all 
 these fragments witness to the immense and unwearied 
 labour bestowed in the midst of a busy life on his under- 
 taking ; they suggest, too, the suspicion that there was 
 much waste from interruption, and the doubt whether 
 his work would not have been better if it could have 
 been more steadily continuous. But if ever a man had 
 a great object in life and pursued it through good and 
 evil report, through ardent hope and keen disappoint- 
 ment, to the end, with unwearied patience and un- 
 shaken faith, it was Bacon, when he sought the 
 improvement of human knowledge "for the glory of 
 God and the relief of man's estate." It is not the least 
 part of the pathetic fortune of his life that his own 
 success was so imperfect. 
 
 When a reader first comes, from the vague popular 
 notions of Bacon's work, to his definite proposals, 
 the effect is startling. Every one has heard that he 
 contemplated a complete reform of the existing con- 
 ceptions of human knowledge, and of the methods by 
 which knowledge was to be sought ; that rejecting them 
 as vitiated by the loose and untested way in which they 
 had been formed, he called men from verbal generalisa- 
 tions and unproved assumptions to come down face to 
 face with the realities of experience ; that he substituted 
 for formal reasoning from baseless premisses and un- 
 meaning principles a methodical system of cautious and 
 sifting inference from wide observation and experiment ; 
 and that he thus opened the path which modern science
 
 vin.] BACON'S PHILOSOPHY. 187 
 
 thenceforth followed, with its amazing and unexhausted 
 discoveries, and its vast and beneficent practical results. 
 We credit all this to Bacon, and assuredly not without 
 reason. All this is what was embraced in his vision of 
 a changed world of thought and achievement. All this 
 is what was meant by that Regnum Hominis, which, with 
 a play on sacred words which his age did not shrink 
 from, and which he especially pleased himself with, 
 marked the coming of that hitherto unimagined empire 
 of man over the powers and forces which encompassed 
 him. But the detail of all this is multifarious and com- 
 plicated, and is not always what we expect ; and when 
 we come to see how his work is estimated by those who, 
 by greatest familiarity with scientific ideas and the 
 history of scientific inquiries, are best fitted to judge of 
 it, many a surprise awaits us. 
 
 For we find that the greatest differences of opinion 
 exist on the value of what he did. Not only very 
 unfavourable judgments have been passed upon it, on 
 general grounds, as an irreligious, or a shallow and 
 one-sided, or a poor and "utilitarian" philosophy, and 
 on a definite comparison of it with the actual methods 
 and processes which as a matter of history have been 
 the real means of scientific discovery but also some 
 of those who have most admired his genius, and with 
 the deepest love and reverence have spared no pains 
 to do it full justice, have yet come to the conclusion 
 that as an instrument and real method of work Bacon's 
 attempt was a failure. It is not only Do Maistre 
 and Lord Macaulay who dispute his philosophical emi- 
 nence. It is not only the depreciating opinion of a con- 
 temporary like Harvey, who was actually doing what
 
 188 BACON. [CHAP. 
 
 Bacon was writing about. It is not only that men who 
 after the long history of modern science have won 
 their place among its leaders, and are familiar by daily 
 experience with the ways in which it works a chemist 
 like Liebig, a physiologist like Claude Bernard say 
 that they can find nothing to help them in Bacon's 
 methods. It is not only that a clear and exact critic 
 like M. de Kemusat looks at his attempt with its success 
 and failure as characteristic of English massive practical 
 good sense rather than as marked by real philosophical 
 depth and refinement, such as Continental thinkers point 
 to and are proud of in Descartes and Leibnitz. It is 
 not even that a competent master of the whole domain 
 of knowledge, Whewell, filled with the deepest sense of 
 all that the world owes to Bacon, takes for granted that 
 "though Bacon's general maxims are sagacious and 
 animating, his particular precepts failed in his hands, 
 and are now practically useless ;" and assuming that 
 Bacon's method is not the right one, and not complete 
 as far as the progress of science up to his time could 
 direct it, proceeds to construct a Novum Organum 
 Renovatum. But Bacon's writings have recently under- 
 gone the closest examination by two editors, whose care 
 for his memory is as loyal and affectionate as their 
 capacity is undoubted, and their willingness to take 
 trouble boundless. And Mr. Ellis and Mr. Spedding, 
 with all their interest in every detail of Bacon's work, 
 and admiration of the way in which he performed it, 
 make no secret of their conclusion that he failed in the 
 very thing on which he was most bent the discovery of 
 practical and fruitful ways of scientific inquiry. " Bacon," 
 says Mr. Spedding, " failed to devise a practicable method
 
 vin.] BACON'S PHILOSOPHY 189 
 
 for the discovery of the Forms of Nature because he 
 misconceived the conditions of the case. . . . For the 
 same reason he failed to make any single discovery 
 which holds its place as one of the steps by which 
 science has in any direction really advanced. The clue 
 with which he entered the labyrinth did not reach far 
 enough ; before he had nearly attained his end he was 
 obliged either to come back or to go on without it." 
 
 "His peculiar system of philosophy," says Mr. Spedding in 
 another preface, "that is to say, the peculiar method of investiga- 
 tion, the " organum," the "formula" the " clavis, " the " ars ipsa 
 interpretandi naturam, " the ' 'filum Labyrinthi, " or by whatever of 
 its many names we choose to call that artificial process by which alone 
 he believed man could attain a knowledge of the laws and a com- 
 mand over the powers of nature of this philosophy we can make 
 nothing. If we have not tried it, it is because we feel confident 
 that it would not answer. We regard it as a curious piece of 
 machinery, very subtle, elaborate, and ingenious, but not worth 
 constructing, because all the work it could do may be done more 
 easily another way." Works, iii. 171. 
 
 What his method really was is itself a matter of ques- 
 tion. Mr. Ellis speaks of , it as a matter " but imper- 
 fectly apprehended." He differs from his fellow-labourer 
 Mr. Spedding, in what he supposes to be its central and 
 characteristic innovation. Mr. Ellis finds it in an improve- 
 ment and perfection of logical machinery. Mr. Spedding 
 finds it in the formation of a great " natural and experi- 
 mental history," a vast collection of facts in every de- 
 partment of nature, which was to be a more important part 
 of his philosophy than the Novuin Organum itself. Both 
 of them think that as he went on the difficulties of the 
 work grew upon him, and caused alterations in his plans, 
 and we are reminded that " there is no didactic exposi-
 
 190 BACON. [CHAP. 
 
 tion of his method in the whole of his writings," and 
 that " this has not been sufficiently remarked by those 
 who have spoken of his philosophy." 
 
 In the first place, the kind of intellectual instrument 
 which he proposed to construct was a mistake. His 
 great object was to place the human mind " on a level 
 with things and nature " (ut fadamus intelledum humanum 
 rebus et naturce parem), and this could only be done by a 
 revolution in methods. The ancients had all that genius 
 could do for man ; but it was a matter, he said, not of 
 the strength and fleetness of the running, but of the 
 Tightness of the way. It was a new method, abso- 
 lutely different from anything known, which he proposed 
 to the world, and which should lead men to knowledge, 
 with the certainty and with the impartial facility of a 
 high road. The Induction which he imagined to himself 
 as the contrast to all that had yet been tried was to have 
 two qualities. It was to end, by no very prolonged or 
 difficult processes, in absolute certainty. And next, it 
 was to leave very little to the differences of intellectual 
 power : it was to level minds and capacities. It was to 
 give all men the same sort of power which a pair of 
 compasses gives the hand in drawing a circle. " Absolute 
 certainty, and a mechanical mode of procedure," says 
 Mr. Ellis, " such that all men should be capable of em- 
 ploying it, are the two great features of the Baconian 
 system." This he thought possible, and this he set 
 himself to expound " a method universally applicable, 
 and in all cases infallible." In this he saw the novelty 
 and the vast importance of his discovery. "By this 
 method all the knowledge which the human mind was 
 capable of receiving might be attained, and attained
 
 vni.] BACON'S PHILOSOPHY. 191 
 
 without unnecessary labour." It was a method of " a 
 demonstrative character, with the power of reducing all 
 minds to nearly the same level" The conception, in- 
 deed, of a "great Art of knowledge," of an "Instaura- 
 tion " of the sciences, of a " Clavis " which should un- 
 lock the difficulties which had hindered discovery was 
 not a new one. This attempt at a method, which 
 should be certain, which should level capacities, which 
 should do its work in a short time, had a special attrac- 
 tion for the imagination of the wild spirits of the South, 
 from Raimond Lulli in the thirteenth century to the 
 audacious Calabrians of the sixteenth. With Bacon 
 it was something much more serious and reasonable and 
 business-like. But such a claim has never yet been 
 verified ; there is no reason to think that it ever can be ; 
 and to have made it shows a fundamental defect in 
 Bacon's conception of the possibilities of the human 
 mind and the field it has to work in. 
 
 In the next place, though the prominence which 
 he gave to the doctrine of Induction was one of those 
 novelties which are so obvious after the event, though 
 so strange before it, and was undoubtedly the element 
 in his system which gave it life and power and influence 
 on the course of human thought and discovery, his 
 account of Induction was far from complete and satis- 
 factory. Without troubling himself about the theory of 
 Induction, as De E^musat has pointed out, he contented 
 himself with applying to its use the precepts of com- 
 mon-sense and a sagacious perception of the circum- 
 stances in which it was to be employed. But even these 
 precepts, notable as they were, wanted distinctness and 
 the qualities needed for working rules. The change is
 
 192 BACON. [CHAP. 
 
 great when in fifty years we pass from the poetical 
 science of Bacon to the mathematical and precise science 
 of Newton. His own time may well have been struck 
 by the originality and comprehensiveness of such a dis- 
 criminating arrangement of proofs as the " Prerogative 
 Instances " of the Novum Organum, so natural and real, 
 yet never before thus compared and systematized. But 
 there is a great interval between his method of experi- 
 menting, his "Hunt of Pan" the three tables of Instan- 
 ces, "Presence" "Absence" and "Degrees, or Comparisons," 
 leading to a process of sifting and exclusion, and to the 
 First Vintage, or beginnings of theory and say, for 
 instance, Mill's four methods of experimental inquiry, 
 the method of agreement, of differences, of residues, and 
 of concomitant variations. The course which he marked 
 out so laboriously and so ingeniously for Induction to 
 follow was one which was found to be impracticable, and 
 as barren of results as those deductive philosophies on 
 which he lavished his scorn. He has left precepts and 
 examples of what he meant by his cross-examining and 
 sifting processes. As admonitions to cross-examine and 
 to sift facts and phenomena they are valuable. Many 
 of the observations and classifications are subtle and in- 
 structive. But in his hands nothing comes of them. 
 They lead at the utmost to mere negative conclusions ; 
 they show what a thing is not. But his attempt to elicit 
 anything positive out of them breaks down, or ends at 
 best in divinations and guesses, sometimes as in con- 
 necting Heat and Motion very near to later and more 
 carefully-grounded theories, but always unverified. He 
 had a radically false and mechanical conception, though 
 in words he earnestly disclaims it, of the way to deal
 
 vni.] BACON'S PHILOSOPHY. 193 
 
 with the facts of nature. He looked on them as things 
 which told their own story, and suggested the questions 
 which ought to be put to them ; and with this idea half 
 his time was spent in collecting huge masses of indigested 
 facts of the most various authenticity and value, and he 
 thought he was collecting materials which his method 
 had only to touch in order to bring forth from them light 
 and truth and power. He thought that, not in certain 
 sciences, but in all, one set of men could do the observ- 
 ing and collecting, and another be set on the work of 
 Induction and the discovery of "axioms." Doubtless in 
 the arrangement and sorting of them his versatile and 
 ingenious mind gave itself full play ; he divides and dis- 
 tinguishes them into their companies and groups, differ- 
 ent kinds of Motion, "Prerogative" instances with 
 their long tale of imaginative titles. But we look in 
 vain for any use that he was able to make of them, 
 or even to suggest. Bacon never adequately realised 
 that no promiscuous assemblage of even the most 
 certain facts could ever lead to knowledge, could ever 
 suggest their own interpretation, without the action on 
 them of the living mind, without the initiative of an idea. 
 In truth he was so afraid of assumptions and " anticipa- 
 tions " and prejudices his great bugbear was so much 
 the " intcttectus sibi permissus," the mind given liberty to 
 guess and imagine and theorise, instead of, as it ought, 
 absolutely and servilely submitting itself to the control 
 of facts, that he missed the true place of the rational and 
 formative element in his account of Induction. He does 
 tell us, indeed, that "truth emerges sooner from error 
 than from confusion." He indulges the mind, in the 
 course of its investigation of " Instances," with a first 
 

 
 194 BACON. [CHAP. 
 
 " vintage " of provisional generalisations. But of the 
 way in which the living mind of the discoverer works, 
 with its ideas, and insight, and thoughts that come no 
 one knows whence, working hand in hand with what 
 comes before the eye or is tested by the instrument, he 
 gives us no picture. Compare his elaborate investiga- 
 tion of the " Form of Heat " in the Novum Organum with 
 such a record of real inquiry as Wells' Treatise on Dew, 
 or Herschel's analysis of it in his Introduction to Natural 
 Philosophy. And of the difference of genius between a 
 Faraday or a Newton, and the crowd of average men 
 who have used and finished off their work, he takes no 
 account. Indeed, he thinks that for the future such 
 difference is to disappear. 
 
 "That his method is impracticable," sa3 T s Mr. Ellis, " cannot, I 
 think, be denied, if we reflect not only that it never has produced 
 any result, but also that the process by which scientific truths have 
 been established cannot be so presented as even to appear to be in 
 accordance with it. In all cases this process involves an element 
 to which nothing corresponds in the Tables of ' Comparence ' and 
 ' Exclusion, ' namely, the application to the facts of observation of 
 a principle of arrangement, an idea, existing in the mind of the 
 discoverer antecedently to the act of induction. It may be said 
 that this idea is precisely one of the natures into which the facts of 
 observation ought in Bacon's system to be analysed. And this is 
 in one sense true ; but it must be added that this analysis, if it be 
 thought right so to call it, is of the essence of the discovery which 
 results from it. In most cases the act of induction follows as a 
 matter of course as soon as the appropriate idea has been intro- 
 duced. " (Ellis, General Preface, i. 38. ) 
 
 Lastly, not only was Bacon's conception of philosophy 
 so narrow as to exclude one of its greatest domains ; for, 
 says Mr. Ellis, " it cannot be denied that to Bacon all 
 sound philosophy seemed to be included in what we now
 
 viii.] BACON'S PHILOSOPHY. 195 
 
 call the natural sciences," and in all its parts was claimed 
 as the subject of his inductive method ; but Bacon's 
 scientific knowledge and scientific conceptions were often 
 very imperfect more imperfect than they ought to have 
 been for his time. Of one large part of science, which 
 was just then beginning to be cultivated with high 
 promise of success, the knowledge of the heavens, he 
 speaks with a coldness and suspicion which contrasts 
 remarkably with his eagerness about things belonging to 
 the sphere of the earth, and within reach of the senses. 
 He holds, of course, the unity of the world ; the laws of 
 the whole visible universe are one order; but the heavens, 
 wonderful as they are to him, are compared with other 
 things out of his track of inquiry. He had his astro- 
 nomical theories ; he expounded them in his " Desaiptio 
 Globi Intellectualis" and his Thema Cadi. He was not 
 altogether ignorant of what was going on in days when 
 Copeijnicus, Kepler, and Galileo were at work. But he 
 did npt know how to deal with it, and there were men 
 in England, before and then, who understood much better 
 than he the problems and the methods of astronomy. 
 He had one conspicuous and strange defect for a man 
 who undertook what he did. He was not a mathema- 
 tician : he did not see the indispensable necessity of 
 mathematics in the great Instauration which he projected ; 
 he did not much believe in what they could do. He 
 cared so little about them that he takes no notice of 
 Napier's invention of Logarithms. He was not able to 
 trace how the direct information of the senses might be 
 rightly subordinated to the rational, but not self-evident 
 results of geometry and arithmetic. He was impatient 
 of the subtleties of astronomical calculations ; they only
 
 196 BACON. [CHAP. 
 
 attempted to satisfy problems about the motion of bodies 
 in the sky, and told us nothing of physical fact : they 
 gave us, as Prometheus gave to Jove, the outside skin 
 of the offering, which was stuffed inside with straw and 
 rubbish. He entirely failed to see that before dealing 
 with physical astronomy, it must be dealt with mathe- 
 matically. "It is well to remark," as Mr. Ellis says, 
 "that none of Newton's astronomical discoveries could 
 have been made if astronomers had not continued to 
 render themselves liable to Bacon's censure." Bacon 
 little thought that in navigation the compass itself 
 would become a subordinate instrument compared with 
 the helps given by mathematical astronomy. In this, 
 and in other ways, Bacon rose above his time in his con- 
 ceptions of what might be, but not of what was; the list 
 is a long one, as given by Mr. Spedding (iii. 511), of the 
 instances which show that he was ill-informed about 
 the advances of knowledge in his own time. And his 
 mind was often not clear when he came to deal with 
 complex phenomena. Thus, though he constructed a 
 table of specific gravities " the only collection," says 
 Mr. Ellis, " of quantitative experiments that we find in 
 his works," and " wonderfully accurate considering the 
 manner in which they were obtained ; " yet he failed to 
 understand the real nature of the famous experiment of 
 Archimedes. And so with the larger features of his 
 teaching it is impossible not to feel how imperfectly he 
 had emancipated himself from the power of words, and 
 of common prepossessions ; how for one reason or 
 another he had failed to call himself to account in the 
 terms he employed, and the assumptions on which he 
 argued. The caution does not seem to have occurred to
 
 viii.] BACON'S PHILOSOPHY. 197 
 
 ^ 
 
 him that the statement of a fact may, in nine cases out 
 of ten, involve a theory. His whole doctrine of " Forms," 
 and "Simple natures," which is so prominent in his method 
 of investigation, is an example of loose and slovenly 
 use of unexamined and untested ideas. He allowed 
 himself to think that it would be possible to arrive at 
 an alphabet of nature, which, once attained, would suffice 
 to spell out and constitute all its infinite combinations. 
 He accepted, without thinking it worth a doubt, the 
 doctrine of appetites, and passions, and inclinations, and 
 dislikes, and horrors, in inorganic nature. His whole 
 physiology of life and death depends on a doctrine of 
 animal spirits, of which he traces the operations and 
 qualities as if they were as certain as the nerves or the 
 blood, and of which he gives this account "that in 
 every tangible body there is a spirit covered and 
 enveloped in the grosser body;" "not a virtue, not an 
 energy, not an actuality, nor any such idle matter, but 
 a body thin and invisible, and yet having place, and 
 dimension, and real." . . . "a middle nature between 
 fiarne, which is momentary, and air which is permanent." 
 Yet these are the very things for which he holds up 
 Aristotle and the Scholastics and the Italian speculators 
 to reprobation and scorn. The clearness of his thinking 
 was often overlaid by the immense profusion of decor- 
 ative material which his meditation brought along with 
 it. The defect was greater than that which even his 
 ablest defenders admit. It was more than that in that 
 "greatest and radical difference, which he himself ob- 
 serves" between minds, the difference between minds 
 which were apt to note distinctions, and those which were 
 apt to note likenesses, he was, without knowing it, defec-
 
 198 BACON. [CHAP. 
 
 tive in the first. It was that in many instances, he 
 exemplified in his own work the very faults which he 
 charged on the older philosophies : haste, carelessness, 
 precipitancy, using words without thinking them out, 
 assuming to know when he ought to have perceived his 
 real ignorance. 
 
 What then, with all these mistakes and failures, not 
 always creditable or pardonable, has given Bacon his 
 pre-eminent place in the history of science ? 
 
 1. The answer is that with all his mistakes and 
 failures, the principles on which his mode of attaining a 
 knowledge of nature was based were the only true ones ; 
 and they had never before been propounded so systemati- 
 cally, so fully, and so earnestly. His was not the first 
 mind on whom these principles had broken. Men were, 
 and had been for some time, pursuing their inquiries 
 into various departments of nature precisely on the 
 general plan of careful and honest observation of real 
 things which he enjoined. They had seen, as he saw, 
 the futility of all attempts at natural philosophy by mere 
 thinking and arguing, without coming into contact with 
 the contradictions, or corrections, or verifications of 
 experience. In Italy, in Germany, in England there were 
 laborious and successful workers, who had long felt that 
 to be in touch with nature was the only way to know. 
 But no one had yet come before the world to proclaim 
 this on the house-tops, as the key of the only certain 
 path to the secrets of nature, the watchword of a revolu- 
 tion in the methods of interpreting her ; and this Bacon 
 did witli an imposing authority and power which enforced 
 attention. He spoke the thoughts of patient toilers like 
 Harvey with a largeness and richness which they could
 
 vin.] BACON'S PHILOSOPHY. 199 
 
 not command, and which they perhaps smiled at. He 
 disentangled and spoke the vague thoughts of his age, 
 which other men had not the courage and clearness of 
 mind to formulate. What Bacon did, indeed, and what 
 he meant, are separate matters. He meant an infallible 
 method by which man should be fully equipped for a 
 struggle with nature : he meant an irresistible and im- 
 mediate conquest, within a definite and not distant time. 
 It was too much. He himself saw no more of what he 
 meant than Columbus did of America. But what he did 
 was, to persuade men for the future that the intelligent, 
 patient, persevering cross-examination of things, and the 
 thoughts about them, was the only, and was the success- 
 ful road to know. No one had yet done this, and he 
 did it. His writings were a public recognition of real 
 science, in its humblest tasks about the commonplace 
 facts before our feet, as well as in its loftiest achieve- 
 ments. " The man who is growing great and happy by 
 electrifying a bottle," says Dr. Johnson, " wonders to 
 see the world engaged in the prattle about peace and 
 war," and the world was ready to smile at the simplicity 
 or the impertinence of his enthusiasm. Bacon impressed 
 upon the world for good, with every resource of subtle 
 observation and forcible statement, that " the man who 
 is growing great by electrifying a bottle," is as important 
 a person in the world's affairs as the arbiter of peace and 
 war. 
 
 2. Yet this is not all. An inferior man might have 
 made himself the mouthpiece of the hopes and aspira- 
 tions of his generation after a larger science. But to 
 Bacon these aspirations embodied themselves in the form 
 of a great and absorbing idea ; an idea which took pos-
 
 200 BACON. [CHAP. 
 
 session of the whole man, kindling in him a faith which 
 nothing could quench, and a passion which nothing could 
 dull ; an idea which, for forty years, was his daily com- 
 panion, his daily delight, his daily business; an idea 
 which he was never tired of placing in ever fresh and 
 more attractive lights, from which no trouble could 
 wean him, about which no disaster could make him 
 despair; an idea round which the instincts and intui- 
 tions and obstinate convictions of genius gathered, which 
 kindled his rich imagination, and was invested by it with 
 a splendour and magnificence like the dreams of fable. 
 It is this idea which finds its fitting expression in the 
 grand and stately aphorisms of the Novum Organum, in 
 the varied fields of interest in the De Augmentis, in 
 the romance of the New Atlantis. It is this idea, this 
 certainty of a new unexplored Kingdom of Knowledge 
 within the reach and grasp of man, if he will be humble 
 enough, and patient enough, and truthful enough to 
 occupy it this announcement not only of a new system 
 of thought, but of a change in the condition of the world, 
 a prize and possession such as man had not yet imagined, 
 this belief in the fortunes of the human race and its issue, 
 " such an issue, it may be, as in the present condition of 
 things and men's minds cannot easily be conceived or 
 imagined," yet more than verified in the wonders which 
 our eyes have seen it is this which gives its prerogative 
 to Bacon's work. That he bungled about the processes 
 of Induction, that he talked about an unintelligible doc- 
 trine of Farms, did not affect the weight and solemnity 
 of his call to learn, so full of wisdom and good sense, so 
 sober and so solid, yet so audaciously confident. There 
 had been nothing like it in its ardour of hope, in the
 
 viii.] BACON'S PHILOSOPHY. 201 
 
 glory Avhich it threw around the investigation of nature. 
 It was the presence and the power of a great idea long 
 become a commonplace to us, but strange and perplexing 
 at first to his own generation, which probably shared 
 Coke's opinion that it qualified its champion for a place 
 in the company of the " Ship of Fools," which expressed 
 its opinion of the man who wrote the Novum Organum 
 in the sentiment that " a fool could not have written it, 
 and a wise man would not " it is this which has placed 
 Bacon among the great discoverers of the human race. 
 
 It is this imaginative yet serious assertion of the vast 
 range and possibilities of human knowledge which, as M. 
 de Remusat remarks, the keenest and fairest of Bacon's 
 judges, gives Bacon his claim to the undefinable but very 
 real character of greatness. Two men stand out, " the 
 masters of those who know," without equals up to their 
 time, among men the Greek Aristotle and the English- 
 man Bacon. They agree in the universality and compre- 
 hensiveness of their conception of human knowledge ; 
 and they were absolutely alone in their serious practical 
 ambition to work out this conception. In the separate 
 departments of thought, of investigation, of art, each is 
 left far behind by numbers of men, who in these separate 
 departments have gone far deeper than they, have soared 
 higher, have been more successful in what they attempted. 
 But Aristotle first, and for his time more successfully, 
 and Bacon after him, ventured on the daring enterprise 
 of "taking all knowledge for their province;" and in 
 this they stood alone. This present scene of man's 
 existence, this that we call nature, the stage on which 
 mortal life begins and goes on and ends, the faculties 
 with which man is equipped to act, to enjoy, to create,
 
 202 BACON. [CHAP. 
 
 to hold his way amid or against the circumstances and 
 forces round him this is what each wants to know, as 
 thoroughly and really as can be. It is not to reduce 
 things to a theory or a system that they look around 
 them on the place where they find themselves with life 
 and thought and power : that were easily done, and has 
 been done over and over again, only to prove its futility. 
 It is to know, as to the whole and its parts, as men 
 understand knowing in some one subject of successful 
 handling, whether art, or science, or practical craft. 
 This idea, this effort, distinguishes these two men. 
 The Greeks predecessors, contemporaries, successors of 
 Aristotle were speculators, full of clever and ingenious 
 guesses, in which the amount of clear and certain fact 
 was in lamentable disproportion to the schemes blown 
 up from it ; or they devoted themselves more profitably 
 to some one or two subjects of inquiry, moral or purely 
 intellectual, with absolute indifference to what might be 
 asked, or what might be known, of the real conditions 
 under which they were passing their existence. Some 
 of the Romans, Cicero and Pliny, had encyclopaedic 
 minds; but the Roman mind was the slave of precedent, 
 and was more than satisfied with partially understanding 
 and neatly arranging what the Greeks had left. The 
 Arabians looked more widely about them ; but the 
 Arabians were essentially sceptics, and resigned subjects 
 to the inevitable and the inexplicable; there was an 
 irony, open or covert, in their philosophy, their termino- 
 logy, their transcendental mysticism, which showed 
 how little they believed that they really knew. The 
 vast and mighty intellects of the schoolmen never came 
 into a real grapple with the immensity of the facts of the
 
 viii.] BACON'S PHILOSOPHY. 203 
 
 natural or even of the moral world ; within the world 
 of abstract thought, the world of language with its in- 
 finite growths and consequences, they have never had 
 their match for keenness, for patience, for courage, for 
 inexhaustible toil ; but they were as much disconnected 
 from the natural world, which was their stage of life, as 
 if they had been disembodied spirits. The Renaissance 
 brought with it not only the desire to know, but to 
 know comprehensively and in all possible directions ; it 
 brought with it temptations to the awakened Italian 
 genius, renewed, enlarged, refined, if not strengthened 
 by its passage through the Middle Ages, to make thought 
 deal with the real, and to understand the scene in which 
 men were doing such strange and wonderful things ; but 
 Giordano Bruno, Telesio, Campanella, and their fellows, 
 were not men capable of more than short flights, though 
 they might be daring and eager ones. It required more 
 thoroughness, more humble-minded industry, to match 
 the magnitude of the task. And there have been men 
 of universal minds and comprehensive knowledge since 
 Bacon, Leibnitz, Goethe, Humboldt, men whose thoughts 
 were at home everywhere, where there was something 
 to be known. But even for them the world of know- 
 ledge has grown too large. We shall never again see 
 an Aristotle or a Bacon, because the conditions of know- 
 ledge have altered. Bacon, like Aristotle, belonged to 
 an age of adventure, which went to sea little knowing 
 whither it went, and ill furnished with knowledge and 
 instruments. He entered with a vast and vague scheme 
 of discovery on these unknown seas and new worlds, 
 which to us are familiar and daily traversed in every 
 direction. This new world of knowledge has turned out
 
 204 BACON. [CHAP. 
 
 in many ways very different from what Aristotle or 
 Bacon supposed, and has been conquered by implements 
 and weapons very different in precision and power from 
 what they purposed to rely on. But the combination of 
 patient and careful industry, with the courage and 
 divination of genius, in doing what none had done 
 before, makes it equally stupid and idle to impeach their 
 greatness. 
 
 3. Bacon has been charged with bringing philosophy 
 down from the heights, not as of old to make men know 
 themselves, and to be the teacher of the highest form 
 of truth, but to be the purveyor of material utility. It 
 contemplates only, it is said, the " commoda vitce, ; " about 
 the deeper and more elevating problems of thought it 
 does not trouble itself. It concerns itself only about 
 external and sensible nature, about what is "of the 
 earth, earthy." But when it comes to the questions 
 which have attracted the keenest and hardiest thinkers, 
 the question, what it is that thinks and wills, what is 
 the origin and guarantee of the faculties by which men 
 know anything at all and form rational and true con- 
 ceptions about nature and themselves, whence it is that 
 reason draws its powers and materials and rules 
 what is the meaning of words which all use but few 
 can explain Time and Space, and Being and Cause, and 
 consciousness and choice, and the moral law Bacon is 
 content with a loose and superficial treatment of them. 
 Bacon certainly was not a metaphysician, nor an exact 
 and lucid reasoner. With wonderful flashes of sure in- 
 tuition or happy anticipation, his mind was deficient in 
 the powers which deal with the deeper problems of 
 thought, just as it was deficient in the mathematical
 
 viii.] BACON'S PHILOSOPHY. 205 
 
 faculty. The subtlety, the intuition, the penetration, 
 the severe precision, even the force of imagination, which 
 make a man a great thinker on any abstract subject 
 were not his; the interest of questions which had in- 
 terested metaphysicians had no interest for him: he 
 distrusted and undervalued them. When he touches the 
 " ultimities " of knowledge he is as obscure and hard to 
 be understood as any of those restless Southern Italians 
 of his own age, who shared with him the ambition of 
 reconstructing science. Certainly the science which 
 most interested Bacon, the science which he found as he 
 thought in so desperate a condition, and to which he 
 gave so great an impulse, was physical science. But 
 physical science may be looked at and pursued in differ- 
 ent ways, in different tempers, with different objects. 
 It may be followed in the spirit of Newton, of Boyle, of 
 Herschel, of Faraday ; or with a confined and low hori- 
 zon it may be dwarfed and shrivelled into a mean utili- 
 tarianism. But Bacon's horizon was not a narrow one. 
 He believed in God, and immortality, and the Christian 
 creed and hope. To him the restoration of the Reign 
 of Man was a noble enterprise, because man was so 
 great and belonged to so great an order of things, 
 because the things which he was bid to search into with 
 honesty and truthfulness were the works and laws of 
 God, because it was so shameful and so miserable that 
 from an ignorance which industry and good sense could 
 remedy, the tribes of mankind passed their days in self- 
 imposed darkness and helplessness. It was God's 
 appointment that men should go through this earthly 
 st;ige of their being. Each stage of man's mysterious 
 existence had to be dealt with, not according to his own
 
 206 BACON. [CHAP. 
 
 fancies, but according to the conditions imposed on it ; 
 and it was one of man's first duties to arrange for his 
 stay on earth according to the real laws which he could 
 find out if he only sought for them. Doubtless it was 
 one of Bacon's highest hopes that from the growth of 
 true knowledge would follow in surprising ways the re- 
 lief of man's estate; this, as an end, runs through all 
 his yearning after a fuller and surer method of inter- 
 preting nature. The desire to be a great benefactor, 
 the spirit of sympathy and pity for mankind, reign 
 through this portion of his work pity for confidence so 
 greatly abused by the teachers of man, pity for ignor- 
 ance which might be dispelled, pity for pain and misery 
 which might be relieved. In the quaint but beautiful 
 picture of courtesy, kindness, and wisdom, which he 
 imagines in the New Atlantis, the representative of true 
 philosophy, the " Father of Solomon's House," is intro- 
 duced as one who " had an aspect as if he pitied men." 
 But unless it is utilitarianism to be keenly alive to the 
 needs and pains of life, and to be eager and busy to 
 lighten and assuage them, Bacon's philosophy was not 
 utilitarian. It may deserve many reproaches, but not 
 this one. Such a passage as the following in which 
 are combined the highest motives and graces and passions 
 of the soul, love of truth, humility of mind, purity of 
 purpose, reverence for God, sympathy for man, compas- 
 sion for the sorrows of the world and longing to heal 
 them, depth of conviction and faith fairly represents 
 the spirit which runs through his works. After urging 
 the mistaken use of imagination and authority in science, 
 he goes on : 
 
 " There is not and never will be an end or limit to this ; one
 
 vrii.] BACON'S PHILOSOPHY. 207 
 
 catches at one tiling, another at another ; each has his favourite 
 fancy ; pure and open light there is none ; every one philosophises 
 out of the cells of his own imagination, as out of Plato's cave ; the 
 higher wits with more acuteness and felicity, the duller, less happily 
 but with equal pertinacity. And now of late by the regulation of 
 some learned and (as things now are) excellent men (the former 
 licence having, I suppose, become wearisome), the sciences are con- 
 fined to certain and prescribed authors, and thus restrained are 
 imposed upon the old and instilled into the young ; so that now (to 
 use the sarcasm of Cicero concerning Csesar's year), the constellation 
 of Lyra rises by edict, and authority is taken for truth, not truth 
 for authority. Which kind of institution and discipline is excellent 
 for present use, but precludes all prospect of improvement. For we 
 copy the sin of our first parents while we suffer for it. They wished 
 to be like God, but their posterity wish to be even greater. For 
 we create worlds, we direct and domineer over nature, we will have 
 it that all things arc, as in our folly we think they should be, not 
 as seems fittest to the Divine wisdom, or as they are found to be in 
 fact ; and I know not whether we more distort the facts of nature 
 or of our own wits ; but we clearly impress the stamp of our own 
 image on the creatures and works of God, instead of carefully ex- 
 amining and recognising in them the stamp of the Creator himself. 
 Wherefore our dominion over creatures is a second time forfeited, 
 not undeservedly ; and whereas after the fall of man some power 
 over the resistance of creatures was still left to him the power of 
 subduing and managing them by true and solid arts yet this too 
 through our insolence, and because we desire to be like God and to 
 follow the dictates of our own reason, we in great part lose. If, 
 therefore, there be any humility towards the Creator, any reverence 
 for or disposition to magnify His works, any charity for man and 
 anxiety to relieve his sorrows and necessities, any love of truth in 
 nature, any hatred of darkness, any desire for the purification of 
 the understanding, wo must entreat men again and again to discard, 
 or at least set apart for a while, these volatile and preposterous 
 philosophies which have preferred theses to hypotheses, led experi- 
 ence captive, and triumphed over the works of God ; and to ap- 
 proach with humility and veneration to unroll the volume of 
 Creation, to linger and meditate therein, and with minds washed 
 clean from opinions to study it in purity and integrity. For this
 
 208 BACOK [CHAP. vin. 
 
 is that sound and language which "went forth into all lands," and 
 did not incur the confusion of Babel ; this should men study to be 
 perfect in, and becoming again as little children condescend to take 
 the alphabet of it into their hands, and spare no pains to search 
 and unravel the interpretation thereof, but pursue it strenuously 
 and persevere even unto death." (Preface to Historia Naturalis ; 
 transkted, Works, v. 132-3.)
 
 CHAPTER IX. 
 
 BACON AS A WRITER. 
 
 BACON'S name belongs to letters as well as to philo- 
 sophy. In his own day, whatever his contemporaries 
 thought of his Instauration of Knowledge, he was in the 
 first rank as a speaker and a writer. Sir Walter Raleigh, 
 contrasting him with Salisbury, who could speak but 
 not write, and Northampton, who could write but not 
 speak, thought Bacon eminent both as a speaker and a 
 writer. Ben Jonson, passing in review the more famous 
 names of his own and the preceding age, from Sir 
 Thomas More to Sir Philip Sidney, Hooker, Essex and 
 Raleigh, places Bacon without a rival at the head of the 
 company as the man who had " fulfilled all numbers," 
 and " stood as the mark and a*/**/ of our language. ' 
 And he also records Bacon's power as a speaker. " No 
 man," he says, " ever spoke more neatly, more pressly, 
 or suffered less emptiness, less idleness, in what he 
 uttered." . . . "His hearers could not cough or look 
 aside from him without loss. He commanded when he 
 spoke, and had his judges angry and pleased at his 
 devotion . . . the fear of every man that heard him 
 was that he should make an end." He notices one feature 
 for which we are less prepared, though we know that 
 
 p
 
 210 BACON. [CHAP. 
 
 the edge of Bacon's sarcastic tongue was felt and resented 
 in James's Court. " His speech," says Ben Jonson, 
 " was nobly censorious when he could spare and pass by 
 a jest." The unpopularity which certainly seems to 
 have gathered round his name may have had something 
 to do with this reputation. 
 
 Yet as an English writer Bacon did not expect to be 
 remembered, and he hardly cared to be. He wrote 
 much in Latin, and his first care was to have his books 
 put into a Latin dress. " For these modern languages," 
 he wrote to Toby Matthew towards the close of his life, 
 " will at one time or another play the bank-rowte with 
 books, and since I have lost much time with this age, I 
 would be glad if God would give me leave to recover it 
 with posterity." He wanted to be read by the learned 
 out of England, who were supposed to appreciate his 
 philosophical ideas better than his own countrymen, and 
 the only way to this was to have his books translated 
 into the "general language." He sends Prince Charles 
 the Advancement in its new Latin dress. " It is a book," 
 he says, " that will live, and be a citizen of the world, 
 as English books are not." And he fitted it for conti- 
 nental reading by carefully weeding it of all passages 
 that might give offence to the censors at Eome or Paris. 
 "I have been," he writes to the King, "mine own Index 
 Expurgatorius, that it may be read in all places. For 
 since my end of putting it in Latin was to have it read 
 everywhere, it had been an absurd contradiction to free 
 it in the language and to pen it up in the matter." 
 Even the Essays and the History of Henry VII. he had 
 put into Latin " by some good pens that do not forsake 
 me." Among these translators are said to have been
 
 ix.] BACON AS A WRITER. 211 
 
 George Herbert and Hobbes, and on more doubtful 
 authority, Ben Jonson and Selden. The Essays were 
 also translated into Latin and Italian with Bacon's 
 sanction. 
 
 Bacon's contemptuous and hopeless estimate of "these 
 modern languages," forty years after Spenser had pro- 
 claimed and justified his faith in his own language, is 
 only one of the proofs of the short-sightedness of the 
 wisest and the limitations of the largest-minded. Per- 
 haps we ought not to wonder at his silence about 
 Shakespeare. It was the fashion, except among a set 
 of clever but not always very reputable people, to think 
 the stage, as it was, below the notice of scholars and 
 statesmen ; and Shakespeare took no trouble to save his 
 works from neglect. Yet it is a curious defect in Bacon 
 that he should not have been more alive to the powers 
 and future of his own language. He early and all along 
 was profoundly impressed with the contrast, which the 
 scholarship of the age so abundantly presented, of words 
 to things. He dwells in the Advancement on that "first 
 distemper of learning, when men study words and not 
 matter." He illustrates it at large from the reaction of 
 the new learning and of the popular teaching of the 
 Reformation against the utilitarian and unclassical 
 terminology of the schoolmen ; a reaction which soon 
 grew to excess and made men "hunt more after choice- 
 ness of the phrase, and the round and clean composition 
 of the sentence and the sweet falling of the clauses," 
 than after worth of subject, soundness of argument, " life 
 of invention or depth of judgment." "I have repre- 
 sented this," he says, " in an example of late times, but 
 it hath been and will be secundum majus et minus in all
 
 212 BACON. [CHAP. 
 
 times ; " and he likens this " vanity " to " Pygmalion's 
 frenzy," " for to fall in love with words which are but 
 the images of matter, is all one as to fall in love with a 
 picture." He was dissatisfied with the first attempt at 
 translation into Latin of the Advancement by Dr. 
 Playfer of Cambridge, because he " desired not so much 
 neat and polite, as clear, masculine, and apt expression." 
 Yet, with this hatred of circumlocution and prettiness, 
 of the cloudy amplifications, and pompous flourishings, 
 and " the flowing and watery vein," which the scholars 
 of his time affected, it is strange that he should not have 
 seen that the new ideas and widening thoughts of which 
 he was the herald would want a much more elastic and 
 more freely-working instrument than Latin could ever 
 become. It is wonderful indeed what can be done with 
 Latin. It was long after his day to be the language of the 
 exact sciences. In his History of the Winds, which is full 
 of his irrepressible fancy and picturesqueness, Bacon 
 describes in clear and intelligible Latin the details of the 
 rigging of a modern man-of-war, and the mode of sailing 
 her. But such tasks impose a yoke, sometimes a rough 
 one, on a language which has " taken its ply " in very 
 different conditions, and of which the genius is that of 
 indirect and circuitous expression, " full of majesty and 
 circumstance." But it never, even in those days of scholar- 
 ship, could lend itself to the frankness, the straight- 
 forwardness, the fullness and shades of suggestion and 
 association, with which, in handling ideas of subtlety and 
 difficulty, a writer would wish to speak to his reader, and 
 which he could find only in his mother tongue. It might 
 have been thought that with Bacon's contempt of form and 
 ceremony in these matters, his consciousness of the powers
 
 ix.J BACON AS A WRITER. 213 
 
 of English in his hands might have led him to anticipate 
 that a flexible, and rich, and strong language might 
 create a literature, and that a literature, if worth study- 
 ing, would be studied in its own language. But so great 
 a change was beyond even his daring thoughts. To him, 
 as to his age, the only safe language was the Latin. For 
 familiar use English was well enough. But it could not 
 be trusted; "it would play the bankrupt with books." 
 And yet Galileo was writing in Italian as well as in 
 Latin; only within twenty -five years later, Descartes 
 was writing De la Me'thode, and Pascal was writing in 
 the same French in which he wrote the Provincial Letters, 
 his Nouvelles. Experiences touchant le Vide, and the con- 
 troversial pamphlets which followed it; showing how 
 in that interval of five-and-twenty years an instrument 
 had been fashioned out of a modern language such as for 
 lucid expression and clear reasoning, Bacon had not yet 
 dreamed of. From Bacon to Pascal is the change from 
 the old scientific way of writing to the modern ; from a 
 modern language as learned and used in the 1 6th century, 
 to one learned in the 17th. 
 
 But the language of the age of Elizabeth was a rich 
 and noble one, and it reached a high point in the hands 
 of Bacon. In his hands it lent itself to many uses, and 
 assumed many forms, and he valued it, not because he 
 thought highly of its qualities as a language, but 
 becatise it enabled him with least trouble "to speak 
 as he would," in throwing off the abundant thoughts 
 that rose within his mind, and in going through the 
 variety of business which could not be done in Latin. 
 But in all his writing it is the matter, the real thing that 
 he wanted to say, which was uppermost. He cared how
 
 214 BACON. [CHAP. 
 
 it was said, not for the sake of form or ornament, but 
 because the force and clearness of what was said depended 
 so much on how it was said. Of course, what he wanted 
 to say varied indefinitely with the various occasions of 
 his life. His business may merely be to write " a device " 
 or panegyric for a pageant in the Queen's honour, or for 
 the revels of Gray's Inn. But even these trifles are 
 the result of real thought, and are full of ideas, ideas 
 about the hopes of knowledge or about the policy of 
 the State; and though, of course, they have plenty of the 
 flourishes and quaint absurdities indispensable on such 
 ' occasions, yet the " rhetorical affectation " is in the thing 
 itself, and not in the way it is handled : he had an 
 opportunity of saying some of the things which were to 
 him of deep and perpetual interest, and he used it to 
 say them, as forcibly, as strikingly, as attractively as he 
 could. His manner of writing depends, not on a style, 
 or a studied or acquired habit but on the nature of the 
 task which he has in hand. Everywhere his matter is 
 close to his words, and governs, animates, informs his 
 words. No one in England before had so much as he 
 had the power to say what he wanted to say, and 
 exactly as he wanted to say it. No one was so little at 
 the mercy of conventional language or customary rhetoric, 
 except when he persuaded himself that he had to submit 
 to those necessities of flattery, which cost him at last so 
 dear. 
 
 The book by which English readers, from his own time 
 to ours, have known him best, better than by the origin- 
 ality and the eloquence of the Advancement, or than by 
 the political weight and historical imagination of the 
 History of Henry VIL, is the first book which he published,
 
 ix.J BACON AS A WRITER. 215 
 
 the volume of Essays. It is an instance of his self- 
 willed but most skilful use of the freedom and ease 
 which the " modern language," which he despised, gave 
 him. It is obvious that he might have expanded these 
 " Counsels, moral and political," to the size which such 
 essays used to swell to after his time. Many people 
 would have thanked him for doing so ; and some have 
 thought it a good book on which to hang their own 
 reflections and illustrations. But he saw how much could 
 be done by leaving the beaten track of set treatise and 
 discourse, and setting down unceremoniously the obser- 
 vations which he had made and the real rules which he 
 had felt to be true, on various practical matters which 
 come home to men's "business and bosoms." He was 
 very fond of these moral and political generalisations, 
 both of his own collecting and as found in writers 
 who, he thought, had the right to make them, like 
 the Latins of the Empire and the Italians and Span- 
 iards of the Renaissance. But a mere string of 
 maxims and quotations would have been a poor thing 
 and not new; and he cast what he had to say into 
 connected wholes. But nothing can be more loose than 
 the structure of the essays. There is no art, no style, 
 almost, except in a few, the political ones, no order : 
 thoughts are put down and left unsupported, unproved, 
 undeveloped. In the first form of the ten, which com- 
 posed the first edition of 1597, they are more like notes 
 of analysis or tables of contents ; they are austere even 
 to meagreness. But the general character continues in 
 the enlarged and expanded ones of Bacon's later years. 
 They are like chapters in Aristotle's Ethics and Rhetoric 
 on virtues and characters ; only Bacon's takes Aristotle's
 
 216 BACON. [CHAP. 
 
 broad marking lines as drawn, and proceeds with the 
 subtler and more refined observations of a much longer and 
 wider experience. But these short papers say what they 
 have to say without preface, and in literary undress, with- 
 out a superfluous word, without the joints and bands of 
 structure : they say it in brief, rapid sentences, which come 
 down, sentence after sentence, like the strokes of a great 
 hammer. No wonder that in their disdainful brevity they 
 seem rugged and abrupt, " and do not seem to end, but 
 fall." But with their truth and piercingness and delicacy 
 of observation, their roughness gives a kind of flavour 
 which no elaboration could give. It is none the less that 
 their wisdom is of a somewhat cynical kind, fully alive 
 to the slipperiness and self-deceits and faithlessness which 
 are in the world and rather inclined to be amused at 
 them. In some we can see distinct records of the 
 writer's own experience : one contains the substance of a 
 charge delivered to Judge Button on his appointment ; 
 another of them is a sketch drawn from life of a character 
 which had crossed Bacon's path, and in the essay on 
 Seeming Wise we can trace from the impatient notes 
 put down in his Commentarius Solutus, the picture of 
 the man who stood in his way, the Attorney-General 
 Hobart. Some of them are memorable oracular utter- 
 ances not inadequate to the subject, on Truth, or Death, 
 or Unity. Others reveal an utter incapacity to come near 
 a subject, except as a strange external phenomena, like the 
 essay on Love. There is a distinct tendency in them to 
 the Italian school of political and moral wisdom, the 
 wisdom of distrust and of reliance on indirect and 
 roundabout ways. There is a group of them, "of Delays," 
 " of Cunning," " of Wisdom far a Man's Self," " of Des-
 
 ix.] BACON AS A WRITER. 217 
 
 patch" which show how vigilantly and to what purpose 
 he had watched the treasurers and secretaries and 
 intriguers of Elizabeth's and James's Courts ; and there 
 are curious self-revelations, as in the essay on Friendship. 
 But there are also currents of better and larger feeling, 
 such as those which show his own ideal of " Great Place" 
 and what he felt of its dangers and duties. And mixed 
 with the fantastic taste and conceits of the time, there 
 is evidence in them of Bacon's keen delight in nature, 
 in the beauty and scents of flowers, in the charm of open 
 air life, as in the essay on Gardens, "The purest of 
 human pleasures, the greatest refreshment to the spirits 
 of man." 
 
 But he had another manner of writing for what he 
 held to be his more serious work. In the philosophical 
 and historical works there is no want of attention to the 
 flow and order and ornament of composition. When 
 we come to the Advancement of Learning, we come to a 
 book which is one of the landmarks of what high thought 
 and rich imagination have made of the English language. 
 It is the first great book in English prose of secular in- 
 terest ; the first book which can claim a place beside the 
 Laws of Ecclesiastical Polity. As regards its subject- 
 matter, it has been partly thrown into the shade by the 
 greatly enlarged and elaborate form in which it ulti- 
 mately appeared, in a Latin dress, as the first portion 
 of the scheme of the Instauratio, the De Augmentis 
 Scientiarum. Bacon looked on it as a first effort, a kind 
 of call-bell to awaken and attract the interest of others 
 in the thoughts and hopes which so interested himself. 
 But it contains some of his finest writing. In the Essays 
 he writes as a looker-on at the game of human affairs,
 
 218 BACON. [CHAP. 
 
 who, according to his frequent illustration, sees more of 
 it than the gamesters themselves, and is able to give 
 wiser and faithful counsel, not without a touch of kindly 
 irony at the mistakes which he observes. In the 
 Advancement he is the enthusiast for a great cause and 
 a great hope, and all that he has of passion and power 
 is enlisted in the effort to advance it. The Advancement 
 is far from being a perfect book. As a survey of the 
 actual state of knowledge in his day, of its deficiencies 
 and what was wanted to supply them, it is not even 
 up to the materials of the time. Even the improved 
 De Augmentis is inadequate ; and there is reason to 
 think the Advancement was a hurried book, at least in 
 the later part, and it is defective in arrangement and 
 proportion of parts. Two of the great divisions of 
 knowledge history and poetry are despatched in 
 comparatively short chapters ; while in the division on 
 "Civil Knowledge," human knowledge as it respects 
 society, he inserts a long essay, obviously complete in 
 itself and clumsily thrust in here, on the ways of 
 getting on in the world, the means by which a man may 
 be " Faber fartunce SUM" the architect of his own success; 
 too lively a picture to be pleasant of the arts with which 
 he had become acquainted in the process of rising. The 
 book, too, has the blemishes of its own time ; its want 
 of simplicity, its inevitable though very often amusing 
 and curious pedantries. But the Advancement was the 
 first of a long line of books which have attempted to 
 teach English readers how to think of knowledge ; to 
 make it really and intelligently the interest, not of the 
 school or the study or the laboratory only, but of society 
 at large. It was a book with a purpose, new then, but
 
 ix.] BACON AS A WRITER. 219 
 
 of which we have seen the fulfilment. He wanted to 
 impress on his generation, as a very practical matter, all 
 that knowledge might do in wise hands, all that know- 
 ledge had lost by the faults and errors of. men and the 
 misfortunes of time, all that knowledge might be pushed 
 to in all directions by faithful and patient industry and 
 well-planned methods for the elevation and benefit of 
 man in his highest capacities as well as in his humblest. 
 And he further sought to teach them how to know ; to 
 make them understand that difficult achievement of self- 
 knowledge, to know what it is to know ; to give the first 
 attempted chart to guide them among the shallows and 
 rocks and whirlpools which beset the course and action 
 of thought and inquiry ; to reveal to them the " idols " 
 which unconsciously haunt the minds of the strongest as 
 well as the weakest, and interpose their delusions when 
 we are least aware, " the fallacies and false appearances 
 inseparable from our nature and our condition of life." 
 To induce men to believe not only that there was much 
 to know that was not yet dreamed of, but that the way 
 of knowing needed real and thorough improvement, that 
 the knowing mind bore along with it all kinds of snares 
 and disqualifications of which it is unconscious, and that 
 it needed training quite as much as materials to work 
 on, was the object of the Advancement. It was but a 
 sketch ; but it was a sketch so truly and forcibly drawn, 
 that it made an impression which has never been weak- 
 ened. To us its use and almost its interest is passed. 
 But it is a book which we can never open without coming 
 on some noble interpretation of the realities of nature 
 or the mind ; some unexpected discovery of that quick 
 and keen eye which arrests us by its truth ; some felici-
 
 220 BACON. [CHAP. 
 
 tons and unthought-of illustration, yet so natural as 
 almost to be doomed to become a commonplace ; some 
 bright touch of his incorrigible imaginativeness, ever 
 ready to force itself in amid the driest details of his 
 argument. 
 
 The Advancement was only one shape out of many 
 into which he cast his thoughts. Bacon was not easily 
 satisfied with his work ; even when he published he did 
 so, not because he had brought his work to the desired 
 point, but lest anything should happen to him and it 
 should "perish." Easy and unstudied as his writing 
 seems, it was, as we have seen, the result of uninter- 
 mitted trouble and varied modes of working. He was 
 quite as much a talker as a writer, and beat out his 
 thoughts into shape in talking. In the essay on Friend- 
 ship he describes the process with a vividness which 
 tells of his own experience : 
 
 ' ' But before you come to that [the faithful counsel that a man 
 receiveth from his friend], certain it is that whosoever hath his 
 mind fraught with many thoughts, his wits and understanding do 
 clarify and break up in the communicating and discoursing with 
 another. He tosseth his thoughts more easily ; he marshalleth 
 them more orderly ; he seeth how they look when they are turned 
 into words ; finally, he waxeth wiser than himself, and that more 
 by an hour's discourse than by a day's meditation. It was well 
 said by Themistbcles to the King of Persia, ' That speech was like 
 cloth of arras opened and put abroad, whereby the imagery doth 
 appear in figure ; whereas in thought, they lie in packs. ' Neither 
 is this second fruit of friendship, in opening the understanding, 
 restrained only to such friends as are able to give a man counsel. 
 (They are, indeed, best. ) But even without that, a man learneth 
 of himself, and bringeth his own thoughts to light, and whetteth 
 his wits against a stone which itself cuts not. In a word, a man 
 were better relate himself to a statiia or a picture, than to suffer his 
 thoughts to pass in smother."
 
 ix.] BACON AS A WRITER. 221 
 
 Bacon, as has been said, was a great maker of notes 
 and note-books : he was careful not of the thought only 
 but of the very words in which it presented itself; 
 everything was collected that might turn out useful in 
 his writing or speaking, down to alternative modes of 
 beginning or connecting or ending a sentence. He 
 watched over his intellectual appliances and resources 
 much more strictly than over his money concerns. He 
 never threw away and never forgot what could be turned 
 to account. He was never afraid of repeating himself, 
 if he thought he had something apt to say. He was 
 never tired of re-casting and re-writing, from a mere 
 fragment or preface to a finished paper. He has 
 favourite images, favourite maxims, favourite texts, 
 which he cannot do without. ".Da Fidei guce sunt 
 Fidei" comes in from his first book to his last. The 
 illustrations which he gets from the myth of Scylla, 
 from Atalanta's ball, from Borgia's saying about the 
 French marking their lodgings with chalk, the saying 
 that God takes delight, like the "innocent play of 
 children," "to hide his works in order to have them 
 found out," and to have kings as "his playfellows in 
 that game," these, with many others, reappear, however 
 varied the context, from the first to the last of his 
 compositions. An edition of Bacon with marginal 
 references and parallel passages would show a more 
 persistent recurrence of characteristic illustrations and 
 sentences than perhaps any other writer. 
 
 The Advancement was followed by attempts to give 
 serious effect to its lesson. This was nearly all done in 
 Latin. He did so, because in these works he spoke to a 
 larger and, as he thought, more interested audience ; the
 
 222 BACON. [CHAP. 
 
 use of Latin marked the gravity of his subject as one that 
 touched all mankind ; and the majesty of Latin suited 
 his taste and his thoughts. Bacon spoke, indeed, impress- 
 ively on the necessity of entering into the realm of know- 
 ledge in the spirit of a little child. He dwelt on the para- 
 mount importance of beginning from the very bottom of 
 the scale of fact, of understanding the commonplace things 
 at our feet, so full of wonder and mystery and instruction, 
 before venturing on theories. The sun is not polluted 
 by shining on a dunghill, and no facts were too ignoble 
 to be beneath the notice of the true student of nature. 
 But his own genius was for the grandeur and pomp of 
 general views. The practical details of experimental 
 science were, except in partial instances, yet a great way 
 off; and what there was, he either did not care about or 
 really understand, and had no aptitude for handling. 
 He knew enough to give reality to his argument ; he 
 knew, and insisted on it, that the labour of observation 
 and experiment would have to be very heavy and quite 
 indispensable. But his own business was with great 
 principles and new truths; these were what had the 
 real attraction for him; it was the magnificent thoughts 
 and boundless hopes of the approaching kingdom of 
 man " which kindled his imagination and fired his ambi- 
 tion. " He writes philosophy," said Harvey, who had 
 come to his own great discovery through patient and 
 obscure experiments on frogs and monkeys, " he writes 
 philosophy like a Lord Chancellor." And for this part 
 of the work, the stateliness and dignity of the Latin 
 corresponded to the proud claims which he made for his 
 conception of the knowledge which was to be. English 
 seemed to him too homely to express the hopes of the
 
 ix.] BACON AS A WETTER. 223 
 
 world, too unstable to be trusted with them. Latin was 
 the language of command and law. His Latin, without 
 enslaving itself to Ciceronian types, and with a free in- 
 fusion of barbarous but most convenient words from the 
 vast and ingenious terminology of the schoolmen, is 
 singularly forcible and expressive. It is almost always 
 easy and clear ; it can be vague and general, and it can 
 be very precise where precision is wanted. It can, on 
 occasion, be magnificent, and its gravity is continually 
 enlivened by the play upon it, as upon a background, of 
 his picturesque and unexpected fancies. The exposition 
 of his philosophical principles was attempted in two 
 forms. He began in English. He began, in the shape 
 of a personal account, a statement of a series of conclu- 
 sions to which his thinking had brought him, which he 
 called the "Clue of the Labyrinth," Filum Labyrinthi. 
 But he laid this aside unfinished, and re-wrote and com- 
 pleted it in Latin, with the title Cogitata et Visa. It 
 gains by being in Latin ; as Mr. Spedding says, " it must 
 certainly be reckoned among the most perfect of Bacon's 
 productions." The personal form with each paragraph 
 begins and ends. " Franciscus Bacon sic cogitavit . . . 
 itaque visum est ei," gives to it a special tone of serious 
 conviction, and brings the interest of the subject more 
 keenly to the reader. It has the same kind of personal 
 interest, only more solemn and commanding, which there 
 is in Descartes's Discours de la Mtthode, In this form 
 Bacon meant at first to publish. He sent it to his usual 
 critics, Sir Thomas Bodley, Toby Matthew, and Bishop 
 Andrewes. And he meant to follow it up with a prac- 
 tical exemplification of his method. But he changed 
 his plan. He had more than once expressed his pre-
 
 224 BACON. [CHAP. 
 
 ference for the form of aphorisms over the argumentative 
 and didactic continuity of a set discourse. He had, in- 
 deed, already twice begun a series of aphorisms on the 
 true methods of interpreting nature, and directing the 
 mind in the true path of knowledge, and had begun 
 them with the same famous aphorism with which the 
 Novum Organum opens. He now reverted to the form 
 of the aphorism, and resolved to throw the materials of 
 the Cogitata et Visa into this shape. The result is the 
 Novum Organum. It contains, with large additions, the 
 substance of the treatise, but broken up and re-arranged 
 in the new form of separate impersonal generalised 
 observations. The points and assertions and issues 
 which, in a continuous discourse, careful readers mark 
 and careless ones miss, are one by one picked out and 
 brought separately to the light. It begins with brief, 
 oracular, unproved maxims and propositions, and goes 
 on gradually into larger developments and explanations. 
 The aphorisms are meant to strike, to awaken questions, 
 to disturb prejudices, to let in light into a nest of un- 
 suspected intellectual confusions and self-misunderstand- 
 ings, to be the mottoes and watchwords of many a 
 laborious and difficult inquiry. They form a connected 
 and ordered chain, though the ties between each link are 
 not given. In this way Bacon put forth his proclama- 
 tion of war on all that then called itself science ; his 
 announcement that the whole work of solid knowledge 
 must be begun afresh, and by a new, and, as he thought, 
 infallible method. On this work Bacon concentrated 
 all his care. It was twelve years in hand, and twelve 
 times underwent his revision. " In the first book especi- 
 ally," says Mr. Ellis, " every word seems to have been
 
 ix.] . BACON AS A WRITER. 225 
 
 carefully weighed ; and it would be hard to omit or 
 change anything without injuring the meaning which 
 Bacon intended to convey." Severe as it is, it is instinct 
 with enthusiasm, sometimes with passion. The Latin 
 in which it is written answers to it ; it has the concise- 
 ness, the breadth, the lordliness of a great piece of 
 philosophical legislation. 
 
 The world has agreed to date from Bacon the system- 
 atic reform of natural philosophy, the beginning of an 
 intelligent attempt, which has been crowned by such 
 signal success, to place the investigation of nature on a 
 solid foundation. On purely scientific grounds his title 
 to this great honour may require considerable qualifica- 
 tion. What one thing, it is asked, would not have been 
 discovered in the age of Galileo and Harvey, if Bacon 
 had never written ? What one scientific discovery can 
 be traced to him, or to the observance of his peculiar 
 rules ? It was something, indeed, to have conceived, as 
 clearly as he conceived it, the large and comprehensive 
 idea of what natural knowledge must be, and must rest 
 upon, even if he were not able to realise his idea, and 
 were mistaken in his practical methods of reform. But 
 great ideas and great principles need their adequate 
 interpreter, their vates sacer, if they are to influence the 
 history of mankind. This was what Bacon was to 
 science, to that great change in the thoughts and activity 
 of men in relation to the world of nature around them : 
 and this is his title to the great place assigned to him. 
 He not only understood and felt what science might be, 
 but he was able to make others and it was no easy task 
 beforehand, while the wonders of discovery were yet in 
 the future understand and feel it too. And he was 
 
 Q
 
 226 BACON. [CHAP. 
 
 able to do this because he was one of the most wonderful 
 of thinkers and one of the greatest of writers. The 
 disclosure, the interpretation, the development of that 
 great intellectual revolution which was in the air, and 
 which was practically carried forward in obscurity, day 
 by day, by the fathers of modern astronomy and 
 chemistry and physiology, had fallen to the task of 
 a genius, second only to Shakespeare. He had the 
 power to tell the story of what they were doing and 
 were to do with a force of imaginative reason of which 
 they were utterly incapable. He was able to justify 
 their attempts and their hopes as they themselves could 
 not. He was able to interest the world in the great pro- 
 spects opening on it, but of which none but a few students 
 had the key. The calculations of the astronomer, the 
 investigations of the physician, were more or less a sub- 
 ject of talk, as curious or possibly useful employments. 
 But that which bound them together in the unity of 
 science, which gave them their meaning beyond them- 
 selves, which raised them to a higher level and gave them 
 their real dignity among the pursuits of men, which 
 forced all thinking men to see what new and unsuspected 
 possibilities in the knowledge and in the condition of 
 mankind were opened before them, was not Bacon's 
 own attempts at science, not even his collections of 
 facts and his rules of method, but that great idea of the 
 reality and boundless worth of knowledge which Bacon's 
 penetrating and sure intuition had discerned, and 
 which had taken possession of his whole nature. The 
 impulse which he gave to the progress of science came 
 from his magnificent and varied exposition of this idea ; 
 from his series of grand and memorable generalisations
 
 ix.] BACON AS A WRITER. 227 
 
 on the habits and faults of the human mind on the 
 difficult and yet so obvious and so natural precautions 
 necessary to guide it in the true and hopeful track. It 
 came from the attractiveness, the enthusiasm, and the 
 persuasiveness of the pleading ; from the clear and 
 forcible statements, the sustained eloquence, the gene- 
 rous hopes, the deep and earnest purpose of the Advance- 
 ment and the De Augmentis; from the nobleness, the 
 originality, the picturesqueness, the impressive and 
 irresistible truth of the great aphorisms of the Novum 
 Organum. 
 
 THE END. 
 
 Printed by R. & R. CLARK, Edinburgh.
 
 BUNYAN
 
 PRINTED BY 
 
 SrOTTIBWOODK AND CO., NKW-STRKET SQUARE 
 LONDON
 
 Mm of 
 
 EDITED BY JOHN MORLEY 
 
 BUNYAN
 
 BUNYAN 
 
 BY 
 
 JAMES ANTHONY FEOUDE 
 
 Hontfon 
 MACMILLAN AND CO. 
 
 AND NEW YORK 
 1895 
 
 fhe right of translation and reproduction is reterted
 
 First Edition printed 1880. 
 Bepiinted 1885, 1888, 1894.
 
 CONTENTS. 
 
 CHAPTER I. 
 
 PAdR 
 
 EARLY LIFE . . ... 1 
 
 CHAPTER II. 
 CONVICTION OF SIN , 16 
 
 CHAPTER III. 
 GRACE ABOUNDING . 35 
 
 CHAPTER IV. 
 CALL TO THE MINISTRY 52 
 
 CHAPTER V. 
 ARREST AND TRIAL 65 
 
 CHAPTER VI. 
 THE BEDFOHD GAOL . . 78
 
 Vi CONTENTS. 
 
 CHAPTEK VII. 
 
 PAGE 
 
 LIFE AND DEATH OF ME. BADMAX ..... 90 
 
 CHAPTER VIII. 
 THE HOLT WAE 114 
 
 CHAPTER IX. 
 THE PILGRIM'S PROGRESS .... . LSI 
 
 CHAPTER X. 
 LAST DAYS AND DEATH . . . 173
 
 BUNYAN. 
 
 CHAPTER I. 
 
 EARLY LIFE. 
 
 ' I WAS of a low and inconsiderable generation, my 
 father's house being of that rank that is meanest and 
 most despised of all families in the land.' * I never went 
 to school, to Aristotle or Plato, but was brought up in 
 my father's house in a very mean condition, among a 
 company of poor countrymen.' ' Nevertheless, I bless God 
 that by this door He brought me into the world to par- 
 take of the grace and life that is by Christ in His Gospel.' 
 This is the account given of himself and his origin by a 
 man whose writings have for two centuries affected the 
 spiritual opinions of the English race in every part of the 
 world more powerfully than any book or books, except 
 the Bible. 
 
 John Bunyan was born at Elstow, a village near 
 Bedford, in the year 1628. It was a memorable epoch in 
 English history, for in that year the House of Commons 
 extorted the consent of Charles I. to the Petition of 
 Right. The stir of politics, however, did not reach the 
 humble household into which the little boy was introduced. 
 His father was hardly occupied in earning bread for his 
 wife and children as a mender of pots and kettles : a tinker,
 
 2 BUNYAff. [CHAP. 
 
 working in neighbours' houses or at home, at such 
 business as might be brought to him. ' The Bunyans,' 
 says a friend, ' were of the national religion, as men of 
 that calling commonly were.' Bunyan himself, in a pas- 
 sage which has been always understood to refer to his 
 father, describes him ' as an honest poor labouring man, 
 who, like Adam unparadised, had all tha world to get his 
 bread in, and was very careful to maintain his family.' 
 In those days there were no village schools in England ; 
 the education of the poor was an apprenticeship to agri- 
 culture or handicraft ; their religion they learnt at home 
 or in church. Young Bunyan was more fortunate. In 
 Bedford there was a grammar school, which had been 
 founded in Queen Mary's time by the Lord Mayor of 
 London, Sir William Harper. Hither, when he was old 
 enough to walk to and fro, over the mile of road between 
 Elstow and Bedford, the child was sent, if not to learn 
 Aristotle and Plato, to learn at least ' to read and write 
 according to the rate of other poor men's children.' 
 
 If religion was not taught at school, it was taught 
 with some care in the cottages and farmhouses by pa- 
 rents and masters. It was common in many parts of 
 England, as late as the end of the last century, for the 
 farmers to gather their apprentices about them on Sunday 
 afternoons, and to teach them the Catechism. Rude as was 
 Bunyan's home, religious notions of some kind had been 
 early and vividly impressed upon him. He caught, in- 
 deed, the ordinary habits of the boys among whom he was 
 thrown. He learnt to use bad language, and he often lied. 
 When a child's imagination is exceptionally active, the 
 temptations to untruth are correspondingly powerful. The 
 inventive faculty has its dangers, and Bunyan was emi 
 nently gifted in that way. He was a violent, passionate
 
 L] EAELY LIFE. 3 
 
 boy besides, and thus he says of himself that for lying 
 and swearing he had no equal, and that his parents did 
 not sufficiently correct him. Wickedness, he declares in 
 his own remorseful story of his early years, became a 
 second nature to him. But the estimate which a man 
 forms of himself in later life, if he has arrived at any 
 strong abhorrence of moral evil, is harsher than others at 
 the time would have been likely to have formed. Even 
 then the poor child's conscience must have been curiously 
 sensitive, and it revenged itself upon him in singular 
 tortures. 
 
 ' My sins,' he says, ' did so offend the Lord that even 
 in my childhood He did scare and affright me with fearful 
 dreams, and did terrify me with dreadful visions. I have 
 been in my bed greatly afflicted while asleep, with appre- 
 hensions of devils and wicked spirits, who still, as I then 
 thought, laboured to draw me away with them, of which 
 I could never be rid. X was afflicted with thoughts of 
 the Day of Judgment night and day, trembling at the 
 thoughts of the fearful torments of hell fire.' When, at 
 ten years old, he was running about with his companions 
 in ' his sports and childish vanities,' these terrors continu- 
 ally recurred to him, yet ' he would not let go his sins.' 
 
 Such a boy required rather to be encouraged than 
 checked in seeking innocent amusements. Swearing and 
 lying were definite faults which ought to have been 
 corrected ; but his parents, perhaps, saw that there was 
 something unusual in the child. To them he probably 
 appeared not worse than other boys, but considerably 
 better. They may have thought it more likely that he 
 would conquer his own bad inclinations by his own efforts, 
 than that they could mend him by rough rebukas. 
 
 When he left school he would naturally have been 
 B 2.
 
 4 BUNYAN. [CHAP. 
 
 bound apprentice, but his father brought him up at his 
 own trade. Thus he lived at home, arid grew to manhood 
 there, forming his ideas of men and things out of such 
 opportunities as the Elstow neighbourhood afforded. 
 
 From the time when the Reformation brought them 
 a translation of it, the Bible was the book most read it 
 was often the only book which was read in humble 
 English homes. Familiarity with the words had not yet 
 trampled the sacred writings into practical barrenness. 
 No doubts or questions had yet risen about the Bible's 
 nature or origin. It was received as the authentic word 
 of God Himself. The Old and New Testament alike 
 represented the world as the scene of a struggle between 
 good and evil spirits ; and thus every ordinary incident 
 of daily life was an instance or illustration of God's 
 Providence. This was the universal popular belief, not 
 admitted only by the intellect, but accepted and realised 
 by the imagination. No one questioned it, save a few 
 speculative philosophers in their closets. The statesman 
 in the House of Commons, the judge on the Bench, the 
 peasant in a midland village, interpreted literally by this 
 rule the phenomena which they experienced or saw. They 
 not only believed that God had miraculously governed the 
 Israelites, but they believed that as directly and imme- 
 diately He governed England in the seventeenth century. 
 They not only believed that there had been a witch at 
 Endor, but they believed that there were witches in their 
 own villages, who had made compacts with the devil him- 
 self. They believed that the devil still literally walked 
 the earth like a roaring lion : that he and the evil angels 
 were perpetually labouring to destroy the souls of men ; 
 and that God was equally busy overthrowing the devil's 
 work, and bringing sin and crimes to eventual punish- 
 ment.
 
 i.] EAELY LIFE. 5 
 
 In this light the common events of life were actually 
 looked at and under-stood, and the air was filled with 
 anecdotes so told as to illustrate the belief. These stories, 
 and these experiences were Bunyan's early mental food. 
 One of them, which had deeply impressed the imagination 
 of the Midland counties, was the story of ' Old Tod.' This 
 man came one day into court, in the Summer Assizes at 
 Bedford, 'all in a dung sweat,' to demand justice upon 
 himself as a felon. No one had accused him, but God's 
 judgment was not to be escaped, and he was forced to 
 accuse himself. ' My Lord,' said Old Tod to the judge, ' I 
 have been a thief from my childhood. I have been a 
 thief ever since. There has not been a robbery com- 
 mitted these many years, within so many miles of this 
 town, but I have been privy to it.' The judge, after a 
 conference, agreed to indict him of certain felonies which 
 he had acknowledged. He pleaded guilty, implicating 
 his wife along with him, and they were both hanged. 
 
 An intense belief in the moral government of tho 
 world creates what it insists upon. Horror at sin forces 
 the sinner to confess it, and makes others eager to punish 
 it. ' God's revenge against murder and adultery' becomes 
 thus an actual fact, and justifies the conviction in which 
 it rises. Bunyan was specially attentive to accounts of 
 judgments upon swearing, to which he was himself ad- 
 dicted. He tells a story of a man at Wimbledon, who, after 
 uttering some strange blasphemy, was struck with sick- 
 ness, and died cursing. Another such scene he probably 
 witnessed himself, 1 and never forgot. An alehouse-keeper 
 in the neighbourhood of 'Elstow had a son who was half- 
 
 1 The story is told by Mr. Attentive in the 'Life of Mr. 
 Badman ; ' but it is almost certain that Bunyan was relating his 
 own experience.
 
 6 BUNYAN. [CHAP. 
 
 witted. The favourite amusement, when a party was 
 collected drinking, was for the father to provoke the lad's 
 temper, and for the lad to curse his father and wish the 
 devil had him. The devil at last did have the alehouse- 
 keeper, and rent and tore him till he died. ' I,' says 
 Bunyan, ' was eye and ear witness of what I here say. 
 I have heard Ned in his roguery cursing his father, and 
 his father laughing thereat most heartily, still provoking 
 of Ned to curse that his mirth might be increased. I saw 
 his father also when he was possessed. I saw him in one 
 of his fits, and saw his flesh as it was thought gathered 
 up in an heap about the bigness of half an egg, to the 
 unutterable torture and affliction of the old man. There 
 was also one Freeman, who was more than an ordinary 
 doctor, sent for to cast out the devil, and I was there 
 when he attempted to do it. The manner whereof was 
 this. They had the possessed in an outroom, and laid 
 him upon his belly upon a form, with his head hanging 
 down over the form's end. Then they bound him down 
 thereto ; which done, they set a pan of coals under his 
 mouth, and put something therein which made a great 
 smoke by this means, as it was said, to fetch out the devil. 
 There they kept the man till he was almost smothered in 
 the smoke, but no devil came out of him, at which Free- 
 man was somewhat abashed, the man greatly afflicted, 
 and I made to go away wondei'ing and fearing. In a 
 little time,, therefore, that which possessed the man 
 earned him out of the world, according to the cursed 
 wishes of his son.' 
 
 The wretched alehouse-keeper's life was probably 
 sacrificed in this attempt to dispossess the devil. But the 
 incident would naturally leave its mark on the mind of 
 an impressionable boy. Bunyan ceased to frequent such
 
 i.] EAELY LIFE. 7 
 
 places after he began to lead a religious life. The story, 
 therefore, most likely belongs to the experiences of his first 
 youth after he left school ; and there may have been many 
 more of a similar kind, for, except that he was steady at 
 his trade, he grew up a wild lad, the ringleader of the 
 village apprentices in all manner of mischief. He had no 
 books, except a life of Sir Bevis of Southampton, which 
 would not tend to sober him ; indeed, he soon forgot all 
 that he had learnt at school, and took to amusements and 
 doubtful adventures, orchard-robbing, perhaps, or poach- 
 ing, since he hints that he might have brought himself 
 within reach of the law. In the most passionate language 
 of self-abhorrence, he accuses himself of all manner of 
 sins, yet it is improbable that he appeared to others what 
 in later life he appeared to himself. He judged his own 
 conduct as he believed that it was regarded by his Maker, 
 by whom he supposed eternal torment to have been as- 
 signed as the just retribution for the lightest offence. Yet 
 he was never drunk. He who never forgot anything with 
 which he could charge himself, would not have passed 
 over drunkenness, if he could remember that he had been 
 guilty of it ; and he distinctly asserts, also, that he was 
 never in a single instance unchaste. In our days, a rough 
 tinker who could say as much for himself after he had 
 grown to manhood, would be regarded as a model of self- 
 restraint. If, in Bedford and the neighbourhood, there 
 was no young man more vicious than Bunyan, the moral 
 standard of an English town in the seventeenth century 
 must have been higher than believers in Progress will 
 be pleased to allow. 
 
 He declares that he was without God in the world, 
 and in the sense which he afterwards attached to the 
 word this was probably true. But serious thoughts seldom
 
 8 BUNYAN. [CHAP. 
 
 ceased to work in him. Dreams only reproduce the 
 forms and feelings with which the waking imagination is 
 most engaged. Bunyan's rest continued to be haunted 
 with the phantoms which had terrified him when a child. 
 He started in his sleep, and frightened the family with 
 his cries. He saw evil spirits in monstrous shapes and 
 fiends blowing flames out of their nostrils. ' Once,' says 
 a biographer, who knew him well, and had heard the 
 story of his visions from his own lips, ' he dreamed that 
 he saw the face of heaven as it were on fire, the firma- 
 ment crackling and shivering with the noise of mighty 
 thunder, and an archangel flew in the midst of heaven, 
 sounding a trumpet, and a glorious throne was seated in 
 the east, whereon sat One in brightness like the morning 
 star. Upon which, he thinking it was the end of the 
 world, fell upon his knees and said, " Oh, Lord, have 
 mercy on me ! What shall I do 1 The Day of Judg- 
 ment is come and I am not prepared." ' 
 
 At another time ' he dreamed that he was in a plea- 
 sant place jovial and rioting, when an earthquake rent 
 the earth, out of which came bloody flames, and the 
 figures of men tossed up in globes of fire, and falling down 
 again with horrible cries and shrieks and execrations, 
 while devils mingled among them, and laughed aloud at 
 their torments. As he stood trembling, the earth sank 
 under him, and a circle of flames embraced him. But 
 when he fancied he was at the point to perish, One in 
 shining white raiment descended and plucked him out of 
 that dreadful place, while the devils cried after him to 
 take him to the punishment which his sins had deserved. 
 Yet he escaped the danger, and leapt for joy when he 
 awoke and found it was a dream.' 
 
 Mr. Southey, who thinks wisely that Bunyan's bio-
 
 i.] EARLY LIFE. 9 
 
 graphers have exaggerated his early faults, considers that 
 at worst he was a sort of ' blackguard.' This, too, is a 
 wrong word. Young village blackguards do not dream 
 of archangels flying through the midst of heaven, nor 
 were these imaginations invented afterwards, or rhetori- 
 cally exaggerated. Bunyan was undoubtedly given to 
 story-telling as a boy, and the recollection of it made 
 him peculiarly scrupulous in his statements in later life. 
 One trait he mentions of himself which no one would 
 have thought of who had not experienced the feeling, yet 
 every person can understand it and sympathise with it. 
 These spectres and hobgoblins drove him wild. He says, 
 ' I was so overcome with despair of life and heaven, that 
 I should often wish either that there had been no hell, or 
 that I had been a devil ; supposing that they were only 
 tormentors, and that, if it must needs be that I went thither, 
 I might rather be a tormentor than tormented myself.' 
 
 The visions at last ceased. God left him to himself, 
 as he puts it, and gave him over to his own wicked in- 
 clinations. He fell, he says, into all kinds of vice and 
 ungodliness without further check. The expression is 
 very strong, yet when we look for particulars we can find 
 only that he was fond of games which Puritan preciseness 
 disapproved. He had high animal spirits, and engaged 
 in lawless enterprises. Once or twice he nearly lost his 
 life. He is sparing of details of his outward history, 
 for he regarded it as nothing but vanity ; but his escapes 
 from death were providences, and therefore he mentions 
 them. He must have gone to the coast somewhere, for 
 he was once almost drowned in a creek of the sea. He fell 
 out of a boat into the river at another time, and it seems 
 that he could not swim. Afterwards he seized hold of an 
 adder, and was not bitten by it. These mercies were sent
 
 10 BUNYAN. [CHAP.. 
 
 as warnings, but he says that he was too careless to profit 
 by them. He thought that he had forgotten God alto- 
 gether, and yet it is plain that he had not forgotten. A 
 bad young man, who has shaken off religion because it is 
 a restraint, observes with malicious amusement the faults 
 of persons who make a profession of religion. He infers 
 that they do not really believe it, and only differ from 
 their neighbours in being hypocrites. Bunyan notes this 
 disposition in his own history of Mr. Badman. Of him- 
 self, he says : ' Though I could sin with delight and ease, 
 and take pleasure in the villanies of my companions, even 
 then, if I saw wicked things done by them that professed 
 goodness, it would make my spirit tremble. Once, when 
 I was in the height of my vanity, hearing one swear that 
 was reckoned a religious man, it made my heart to ache.' 
 He was now seventeen, and we can form a tolerably 
 accurate picture of him a tall, active lad, working as 
 his father's apprentice, at his pots and kettles, ignorant 
 of books, and with no notion of the world beyond what 
 he could learn in his daily drudgery, and the talk of the 
 alehouse and the village green ; inventing lies to amuse 
 his companions, and swearing that they were true ; 
 playing bowls and tipcat, ready for any reckless action, 
 and always a leader in it, yet all the while singu- 
 larly pure from the more brutal forms of vice, and 
 haunted with feverish thoughts, which he tried to forget 
 in amusements. It has been the fashion to take his ac- 
 count of himself literally, and represent him as the worst 
 of reprobates, in order to magnify the effects of his con- 
 version, and perhaps to make intelligible to his admiring 
 followers the reproaches which he heaps upon himself. 
 They may have felt that they could not be wrong in 
 explaining his own language in the only sense in which
 
 i.] EARLY LIFE. 11 
 
 they could attach a meaning to it. Yet, sinner though 
 he may have been, like all the rest of us, his sins were 
 not the sins of coarseness and vulgarity. They were the 
 sins of a youth of sensitive nature and very peculiar gifts : 
 gifts which brought special temptations with them, and 
 inclined him to be careless and desperate, yet-from causes 
 singularly unlike those which are usually operative in 
 dissipated and uneducated boys. 
 
 It was now the year 1645. Naseby Field was near, 
 and the first Civil War was drawing to its close. At 
 this crisis Bunyan was, as he says, drawn to be a soldier ; 
 and it is extremely characteristic of him and of the body 
 to which he belonged, that he leaves us to guess on which 
 side he served. He does not tell us himself. His friends 
 in after life did not care to ask him, or he to inform them, 
 or else they also thought the matter of too small im- 
 portance to be worth mentioning with exactness. There 
 were two traditions, and his biographers chose between 
 them as we do. Close as the connection was in that 
 great struggle between civil and religious liberty flung 
 as Bunyan was flung into the very centre of the conflict 
 between the English people and the Crown and Church and 
 aristocracy- victim as he was himself of intolerance and 
 persecution, he never but once took any political part, 
 and then only in signing an address to Cromwell. He 
 never showed any active interest in political questions ; 
 and if he spoke on such questions at all after the Restora- 
 tion, it was to advise submission to the Stuart Govern- 
 ment. By the side of the stupendous issues of human 
 life, such miserable rights as men might pretend to in 
 this world were not worth contending for. The only 
 right of man that he thought much about, was the right to 
 be eternally damned if he did not lay hold of grace. King
 
 12 BUNYAN. [CHAP. 
 
 and subject were alike creatures whose sole significance 
 lay in their individual immortal souls. Their relation? 
 with one another upon earth were nothing in the presence 
 of the awful judgment which awaited them both. Thus 
 whether Banyan's brief career in the army was under 
 Charles or under Fairfax, must remain doubtful. Proba- 
 bility is on the side of his having been with the Royalists. 
 His father was of ' the national religion.' He himself 
 had as yet no special convictions of his own. John Gifford, 
 the Baptist minister at Bedford, had been a Royalist. 
 The only incident which Bunyan speaks of connected 
 with his military experience points in the same direction. 
 ' When I vras a soldier,' he says, ' I was with others 
 drawn out to go to such a place to besiege it. But when 
 I was just ready to go, one of the company desired to go 
 in my room. Coming to the siege as he stood sentinel 
 he Avas shot in the heart with a musket bullet and died.' 
 Tradition agrees that the place to which these words 
 refer was Leicester. Leicester was stormed by the King's 
 troops a few days before the battle of Naseby. It was 
 recovered afterwards by the Parliamentarians, but on the 
 second occasion there was no fighting, as it capitulated 
 without a shot being fired. Mr. Carlyle supposes that 
 Bunyan was not with the attacking party, but was in 
 the town as one of the garrison, and was taken prisoner 
 there. But this cannot be, for he says expressly that 
 he was one of the besiegers. Legend gathers freely about 
 eminent men, about men especially who are eminent in 
 religion, whether they are Catholic or Protestant. Lord 
 Macaulay is not only positive that the hero of the English 
 Dissenters fought on the side of the Commonwealth, but 
 he says, without a word of caution on the imperfection 
 of the evidence, ' His Greatheart, his Captain Boanerges,
 
 i.J EARLY LIFE. 13 
 
 and his Captain Credence, are evidently portraits of which 
 the originals were among those martial saints who fought 
 and expounded in Fairfax's army.' 1 
 
 If the martial saints had impressed Bunyan so deeply, 
 it is inconceivable that he should have made no more al- 
 lusion to his military service than in this brief passage. 
 He refers to the siege and all connected with it merely as 
 another occasion of his own providential escapes from 
 death. 
 
 Let the truth of this be what it may, the troop to 
 which he belonged was soon disbanded. He returned at 
 the end of the year to his tinker's work at Elstow, much 
 as he had left it. The saints, if he had met with saints, 
 had not converted him. ' I sinned still,' he says, ' and 
 grew more and more rebellious against God and careless 
 of my own salvation." An important change of another 
 kind, however, lay before him. Young as he was he 
 married. His friends advised it, for they thought that 
 marriage would make him steady. The step was less im- 
 prudent than it would have been had Bunyan been in a 
 higher rank of life, or had aimed at rising into it. The 
 girl whom he chose was a poor orphan, but she had been 
 carefully and piously brought up, and from her acceptance 
 of him, something more may be inferred about his cha- 
 racter. Had he been a dissolute idle scamp, it is unlikely 
 that a respectable woman would have become his wife 
 when he was a mere boy. His sins, whatever these were, 
 had not injured his outward circumstances ; it is clear 
 that all along he worked skilfully and industriously at 
 his tinkering business. He had none of the habits which 
 bring men to beggary. From the beginning of his life to 
 
 1 l/tfe of Stniyan : Collected Works, vol. vii. p. 299,
 
 14 BUNYAN. [CHAP. 
 
 the end of it he was a prudent, careful man, and, considering 
 the station to which he belonged, a very successful man. 
 
 ' I lighted on a wife,' he says, ' whose father was 
 counted godly. We came together as poor as poor might 
 be, not having so much household stuff as a dish or a 
 spoon between us. But she had for her portion two 
 books, " The Plain Man's Pathway to Heaven," and " The 
 Practice of Piety," which her father had left her when he 
 died. In these two books I sometimes read with her. 
 I found some things pleasing to me, but all this while I 
 met with no conviction. She often told me what a godly 
 man her father was, how he would reprove and correct 
 vice both in his house and among his neighbours, what 
 a strict and holy life he lived in his day both in word and 
 deed. These books, though they did not reach my heart, 
 did light in me some desire to religion.' 
 
 There was still an Established Church in England, 
 and the constitution of it had not yet been altered. The 
 Presbyterian platform threatened to take the place of 
 Episcopacy, and soon did take it ; but the clergyman was 
 still a priest and was still regarded with pious veneration 
 in the country districts as a semi-supernatural being. 
 The altar yet stood in its place, the minister still appeared 
 in his surplice, and the Prayers of the Liturgy continued 
 to be read or intoned. The old familiar bells, Catholic as 
 they were in all the emotions which they suggested, called 
 the congregation together with their musical peal, though 
 in the midst of triumphant Puritanism. The ' Book of 
 Sports,' which, under an order from Charles I., had been 
 read regularly in Church, had in 1644 been laid under a 
 ban ; but the gloom of a Presbyterian Sunday was, is, 
 and for ever will be detestable to the natural man ; and 
 the Elstow population gathered persistently after service
 
 xj EARLY LIFE. 15 
 
 on the village green for their dancing, and their leaping, 
 and their archery. Long habit cannot be transformed in 
 a day by an Edict of Council, and amidst army manifestoes 
 and battles of Marston Moor, and a king dethroned and 
 imprisoned, old English life in Bedfordshire preserved its 
 familiar features. These Sunday sports had been a special 
 delight to Bunyan, and it is to them that he refers in the 
 following passage, when speaking of his persistent wicked- 
 ness. On his marriage he became regular and respectable 
 in his habits. He says, ' I fell in with the religion of the 
 times to go to church twice a day, very devoutly to say 
 and sing as the others did, yet retaining my wicked life. 
 Withal I was so overrun with the spirit of superstition 
 that I adored with great devotion even all things, both 
 the high place, priest, clerk, vestment, service, and what 
 else belonging to the Church, counting all things holy 
 therein contained, and especially the priest and clerk most 
 happy and without doubt greatly blessed. This conceit 
 grew so strong in my spirit, that had I but seen a priest, 
 though never so sordid and debauched in his life, I should 
 find my spirit fall under him, reverence, and be knit to 
 him. Their name, their garb, and work did so intoxicate 
 and bewitch me.' 
 
 Surely if there were no other evidence, these words 
 would show that the writer of them had never listened to 
 the expositions of the martial saints.
 
 CHAPTER IL 
 
 CONVICTION OP SIN. 
 
 THE 'Pilgrim's Progress' is the history of the struggle 
 of human nature to overcome temptation and shake off 
 the bondage of sin, under the convictions which prevailed 
 among serious men in England in the seventeenth century. 
 The allegory is the life of its author cast in an imagi- 
 native form. Every step in Christian's journey had been 
 first trodden by Bunyan himself; every pang of fear and 
 shame, every spasm of despair, every breath of hope and 
 consolation, which is there described, is but a reflexion as 
 on a mirror from personal experience. It has spoken to 
 the hearts of all later generations of Erglishmen because 
 it came from the heart ; because it is the true record of 
 the genuine emotions of a human soul ; and to such a 
 record the emotions of other men will respond, as one 
 stringed instrument vibrates responsively to another. 
 The poet's power lies in creating sympathy; but he cannot, 
 however richly gifted, stir feelings which he has not him- 
 self known in all their intensity. 
 
 Ut ridentibus arrident ita flentibus adflent 
 Humani vultus. Si vis me flere dolendum est 
 Primum ipsi tibi. 
 
 The religious history of man is essentially the same in 
 all ages, It takes its rise in the duality of his nature, He
 
 CH. ii.] CONVICTION OF SIN. 17 
 
 is an animal, and as an animal he desires bodily pleasure 
 and shrinks from bodily pain. As a being capable of 
 morality, he is conscious that for him there exists a right 
 and wrong. Something, whatever that something may 
 be, binds him to choose one and avoid the other. This is 
 his religion, his religatio, his obligation, in the sense in 
 which the Romans, from whom we take it, used the word ; 
 and obligation implies some superior power to which man 
 owes obedience. The conflict between his two dispositions 
 agitates his heart, and perplexes his intellect. To do 
 what the superior power requires of him, he must thwart 
 his inclinations. He dreads punishment, if he neglects to 
 do it. He invents methods by which he can indulge his 
 appetites, and finds a substitute by which he can propitiate 
 his invisible ruler or rulers. He offers sacrifices; he 
 institutes ceremonies and observances. This is the re- 
 ligion of the body, the religion of fear. It is what we 
 call superstition. In his nobler moods he feels that this 
 is but to evade the difficulty. He perceives that the sacri- 
 fice required is the sacrifice of himself. It is not the 
 penalty for sin which he must fear, but the sin itself. He 
 must conquer his own lower nature. He must detach his 
 heart from his pleasures, and he must love good for its 
 own sake, and because it is his only real good ; and this is 
 spiritual religion or piety. Between these two forms of 
 worship of the unseen, the human race has swayed to and 
 fro from the first moment in which they learnt to discern 
 between good and evil. Superstition attracts, because it 
 is indulgent to immorality by providing means by which 
 God can be pacified. But it carries its antidote along 
 with it, for it keeps alive the sense of God's existence ; 
 and when it has produced its natural effects, when the 
 believer rests in his observances and lives practically as if 
 
 c
 
 18 BUNYAN. [CHAP. 
 
 there was no God at all, the conscience again awakes. 
 Sacrifices and ceremonies become detested as idolatry, 
 and religion becomes conviction of sin, a fiery deter- 
 mination to fight with the whole soul against appetite, 
 vanity, self-seeking, and every mean propensity which the 
 most sensitive alarm can detect. The battle unhappily is 
 attended with many vicissitudes. The victory, though 
 practically it may be won, is never wholly won. The 
 struggle brings with it every variety of emotion, alter- 
 nations of humility and confidence, despondency and hope. 
 The essence of it is always the same the effort of the 
 higher nature to overcome the lower. The form of it 
 varies from period to period, according to the conditions 
 of the time, the temperament of different people, the 
 conception of the character of the Supreme Power, which 
 the state of knowledge enables men to form. It will be 
 found even when the puzzled intellect can see no light in 
 Heaven at all, in the stern and silent fulfilment of moral 
 duty. It will appear as enthusiasm ; it will appear as 
 asceticism. It will appear wherever there is courage to 
 sacrifice personal enjoyment for a cause believed to be 
 holy. We must all live. We must all, as we suppose, in 
 one shape or other give account for our actions ; and ac- 
 counts of the conflict are most individually interesting 
 when it is an open wrestle with the enemy ; as we find 
 in the penances and austerities of the Catholic saints, or 
 when the difficulties of belief are confessed and detailed, 
 as in David's Psalms, or in the Epistles of St. Paul. 
 St. Paul, like the rest of mankind, found a law in his 
 members warring against the law which was in his heart. 
 The problem presented to him was how one was to be 
 brought into subjection to the other, and the solution 
 was by ' the putting on of Christ.' St. Paul's mind was
 
 ii.] CONVICTION OF SIX. 19 
 
 charged with the ideas of Oriental and Greek philosophy 
 then prevalent in the Roman Empire. His hearers 
 understood him, because he spoke in the language of the 
 prevailing speculations. We who have not the clue can- 
 not, perhaps, perfectly understand him ; but his words 
 have been variously interpreted as human intelligence has 
 expanded, and have formed the basis of the two great 
 theologies which have been developed out of Christianity. 
 The Christian religion taught that evil could not be over- 
 come by natural human strength. The Son of God had 
 come miraculously upon earth, had lived a life of stainless 
 purity, and had been offered as a sacrifice to redeem men 
 conditionally from, the power of sin. The conditions, as 
 English Protestant theology understands them, are no- 
 where more completely represented than in the ' Pilgrim's 
 Progress.' The Catholic theology, rising as it did in the 
 two centuries immediately following St. Paul, approached 
 probably nearer to what he really intended to say. 
 
 Catholic theology, as a system, is a development of 
 Platonism. The Platonists had discovered that the seat 
 of moral evil was material substance. In matter, and 
 therefore in the human body, there was either some in- 
 herent imperfection, or some ingrained perversity and 
 antagonism to good. The soul so long as it was attached 
 to the body was necessarily infected by it ; and as human 
 life on earth consisted in the connection of soul and body, 
 every single man was necessarily subject to infirmity. 
 Catholic theology accepted the position and formulated an 
 escape from it. The evil in matter was a fact. It was 
 explained by Adam's sin. But there it was. The taint 
 was inherited by all Adam's posterity. The flesh of man 
 was incurably vitiated, and if he was to be saved a new 
 body must be prepared for him. This Christ had done. 
 
 c2
 
 20 BUNYAN. [CHAP. 
 
 That Christ's body was not as other men's bodies was 
 proved after his resurrection, when it showed itself inde- 
 pendent of the limitations of extended substance. In 
 virtue of these mysterious properties it became the body 
 of the Corporate Church into which believers were ad- 
 mitted by baptism. The natural body was not at once 
 destroyed, but a new element was introduced into it, by 
 the power of which, assisted by penance and mortifica- 
 tion, and the spiritual food of the Eucharist, the grosser 
 qualities were gradually subdued, and the corporeal 
 system was changed. Then body and spirit became alike 
 pure together, and the saint became capable of obedience, 
 so perfect as not only to suffice for himself, but to supply 
 the wants of others. The corruptible put on incorruption. 
 The bodies of the saints worked miracles, and their flesh 
 was found unaffected by decay after hundreds of years. 
 
 This belief so long as it was sincerely held issued 
 naturally in characters of extreme beauty; of beauty so 
 great as almost to demonstrate its truth. The purpose of 
 it, so far as it affected action, was self-conquest. Those 
 who try with their whole souls to conquer themselves 
 find the effort lightened by a conviction that they are re- 
 ceiving supernatural assistance ; and the form in which 
 the Catholic theory supposed the assistance to be given 
 was at least perfectly innocent. But it is in the nature 
 of human speculations, though they may have been 
 entertained at first in entire good faith, to break down 
 under trial, if they are not in conformity with fact. 
 Catholic theology furnished Europe Avith a rule of faith 
 and action which lasted 1500 years. For the last three 
 centuries of that period it was changing from a religion 
 into a superstition, till, from being the world's guide, it 
 became its scandal. ' The body of Christ ' had become a
 
 li.] CONVICTION OF SIN. 21 
 
 kingdom of this world, insulting its subjects by the effron- 
 tery of its ministers, the insolence of its pretensions, the 
 mountains of lies which it was teaching as sacred truths. 
 Luther spoke ; and over half the Western world the 
 Catholic Church collapsed, and a new theory of Chris- 
 tianity had to be constructed out of the fragments of it. 
 
 There was left behind a fixed belief in God and in the 
 Bible as His revealed word, in a future j udgment, in the 
 fall of man, in the atonement made for sin by the death 
 of Christ, and in the new life which was made possible 
 by His resurrection. The change was in the conception 
 of the method by which the atonement was imagined to 
 be efficacious. The material or sacramental view of it, 
 though it lingered inconsistently in the mind even of 
 Luther himself, was substantially gone. New ideas 
 adopted in enthusiasm are necessarily extreme. The 
 wrath of God was held to be inseparably and eternally 
 attached to every act of sin, however infirm the sinner. 
 That his nature could be changed, and that he could be 
 mystically strengthened by incorporation with Christ's 
 body in the Church was contrary to experience, and was 
 no longer credible. The conscience of every man, in the 
 Church or out of it, told him that he was daily and hourly 
 offending. God's law demanded a life of perfect obedi- 
 ence, eternal death being the penalty of the lightest breach 
 of it. No human being was capable of such perfect 
 obedience. He could not do one single act which would 
 endure so strict a scrutiny. All mankind were thus in- 
 cluded under sin. The Catholic Purgatory was swept 
 away. It had degenerated into a contrivance for feeding 
 the priests with money, and it implied that human nature 
 could in itself be renovated by its own sufferings. Thus 
 nothing lay before the whole race except everlasting
 
 22 BUNYAN. [CHAP. 
 
 reprobation. But the door of hope had been opened on 
 the cross of Christ. Christ had done what man could 
 never do. He had fulfilled the law perfectly. God was 
 ready to accept Christ's perfect righteousness as a substi- 
 tute for the righteousness which man was required to 
 present to him, but could not. The conditions of accept- 
 ance were no longer sacraments or outward acts, or lame 
 and impotent efforts after a moral life, but faith in what 
 Christ had done ; a complete self-abnegation, a resigned 
 consciousness of utter unworthiness, and an unreserved 
 acceptance of the mercy held out through the Atonement. 
 It might have been thought that since man was born so 
 weak that it was impossible for him to do what the law 
 required, consideration would be had for his infirmity; 
 that it was even dangerous to attribute to the Almighty 
 a character so arbitrary as that He would exact an ac- 
 count from his creatures which the creature's necessary 
 inadequacy rendered him incapable of meeting. But the 
 impetuosity of the new theology would listen to no such 
 excuses. God was infinitely pure, and nothing impure 
 could stand in his sight. Man, so long as he rested on 
 merit of his own, must be for ever excluded from his 
 presence. He must accept grace on the terms on which 
 it was held out to him. Then and then only God would 
 extend his pity to him. He was no longer a child of 
 wrath : he was God's child. His infirmities remained, 
 but they were constantly obliterated by the merits of 
 Christ. And he had strength given to him, partially, at 
 least, to overcome temptation, under which, but for that 
 strength, he would have fallen. Though nothing which 
 he could do could deserve reward, yet he received grace 
 in proportion to the firmness of his belief ; and his efforts 
 after obedience, imperfect though they might be, were
 
 n.] CONVICTION OF SIN. 23 
 
 accepted for Christ's sake. A good life, or a constant 
 effort after a good life, was still the object which a man 
 was bound to labour after. Though giving no claim to 
 pardon, still less for reward, it was the necessary fruit of 
 a sense of what Christ had done, and of love and gratitude 
 towards him. Good works were the test of saving faith, 
 and if there were no signs of them, the faith was barren : 
 it was not real faith at all. 
 
 This was the Puritan belief in England in the seven- 
 teenth century. The reason starts at it, but all religion 
 is paradoxical to reason. God hates sin, yet sin exists. 
 He is omnipotent, yet evil is not overcome. The will of 
 man is free, or there can be no guilt, yet the action of the 
 will, so far as experience can throw light on its operation, 
 is as much determined by antecedent causes as every other 
 natural force. Prayer is addressed to a Being assumed 
 to be omniscient, who knows better what is good for us 
 than we can know, who sees our thoughts without re- 
 quiring to hear them in words, whose will is fixed and 
 cannot be changed. Prayer, therefore, in the eye of 
 reason is an impertinence. The Puritan theology is not 
 more open to objection on the ground of unreasonableness 
 than the Catholic theology or any other which regards 
 man as answerable to God for his conduct. We must 
 judge of a creed by its effects on character, as we judge of 
 the wholesomeness of food as it conduces to bodily health ; 
 and the creed which swept like a wave through England 
 at that time, and recommended itself to the noblest and 
 most powerful intellects, produced also in those who 
 accepted it a horror of sin, an enthusiasm for justice, 
 purity, and manliness, which can be paralleled only in the 
 first age of Christianity. Certainly there never was such 
 a theory to take man's conceit out of him. He was a
 
 24 BUNYAN. [CHAP. 
 
 miserable wretch, so worthless at his best as to deserve 
 everlasting perdition. If he was to be saved at all, he 
 could be saved only by the unmerited grace of God. In 
 himself he was a child of the devil ; and hell, not in 
 metaphor, but in hard and palpable fact, inevitably waited 
 for him. This belief, or the affectation of this belief, 
 continues to be professed, but without a realisation of its 
 tremendous meaning. The form of words is repeated by 
 multitudes who do not care to think what they are say- 
 ing. Who can measure the effect of such a conviction 
 upon men who were in earnest about their souls, who 
 were assured that this account of their situation was 
 actually true, and on whom, therefore, it bore with in- 
 creasing weight in proportion to their sincerity 1 
 
 With these few 'prefatory words, I now return to 
 Bunyan. He had begun to go regularly to church, and 
 by Church he meant the Church of England. The change 
 in the constitution of it, even when it came, did not much 
 alter its practical character in the country districts. At 
 Elstow, as we have seen, there was still a high place; 
 there was still a liturgy ; there was still a surplice. The 
 Church of England is a compromise between the old 
 theology arid the new. The Bishops have the apostolical 
 succession, but many of them disbelieve that they de- 
 rive any virtue from it. The clergyman is either a priest 
 who can absolve men from sins, or he is a minister as 
 in other Protestant communions. The sacraments are 
 either means of grace, or mere outward signs. A Chris- 
 tian is either saved by baptism, or saved by faith, as he 
 pleases to believe. In either case he may be a member of 
 the Church of England. The effect of such uncertain utter- 
 ances is to leave an impression that in defining such points 
 closely, theologians are laying down lines of doctrines
 
 H.J CONVICTION OF SIN. 25 
 
 about subjects of which they know nothing, that the real 
 truth of religion lies in what is common to the two 
 theories, the obligation to lead a moral life ; and to this 
 sensible view of their functions the bishops and clergy 
 had in fact gradually arrived in the last century, when 
 the revival of what is called earnestness, first in the form 
 of Evangelicalism, and then of Anglo-Catholicism, awoke 
 again the old controversies. 
 
 To a man of fervid temperament suddenly convinced 
 of sin, incapable of being satisfied with ambiguous 
 answers to questions which mean life or death to him, 
 the Church of England has little to say. If he is quiet 
 and reasonable, he finds in it all that he desires. En- 
 thusiastic ages and enthusiastical temperaments demand 
 something more complete and consistent. The clergy 
 under the Long Parliament caught partially the tone of 
 the prevailing spirit. The reading of the ' Book of 
 Sports ' had been interdicted, and from their pulpits they 
 lectured their congregations on the ungodliness of the 
 Sabbath amusements. But the congregations were slow 
 to listen, and the sports went on. 
 
 One Sunday morning, when Bunyan was at church 
 with his wife, a sermon was delivered on this subject. It 
 seemed to be especially addressed to himself, and it much 
 affected him. He shook off the impression, and after 
 dinner he went as usual to the green. He was on the 
 point of striking at a ball when the thought rushed across 
 his mind, Wilt thou leave thy sins and go to Heaven, or 
 have thy sins and go to hell? He looked up. The 
 reflection of his own emotion was before him in visible 
 form. He imagined that he saw Christ himself looking 
 down at him from the sky. But he concluded that it was 
 too late for him to repent. He was past pardon. Ho
 
 26 BUNYAN. [CHAP. 
 
 was sure to be damned, and he might as well be damned 
 for many sins as for few. Sin at all events was pleasant, 
 the only pleasant thing that he knew, therefore he would 
 take his fill of it. The sin was the game, and nothing 
 but the game. He continued to play, but the Puritan 
 sensitiveness had taken hold of him. An artificial 
 offence had become a real offence when his conscience was 
 wounded by it. He was reckless and desperate. 
 
 ' This temptation of the devil/ he says, ' is more usual 
 among poor creatures than many are aware of. It con- 
 tinued with me about a month or more ; but one day 
 as I was standing at a neighbour's shop-window, and there 
 cursing and swearing after my wonted manner, there sate 
 within the woman of the house and heard me, who, 
 though she was a loose and ungodly wretch, protested 
 that I swore and cursed at such a rate that she trembled 
 to hear me. I was able to spoil all the youths in a whole 
 town. At this reproof I was silenced and put to secret 
 shame, and that too, as I thought, before the God of 
 Heaven. I stood hanging down my head and wishing 
 that I might be a little child that my father might learn 
 me to speak without this wicked sin of swearing, for, 
 thought I, I am so accustomed to it that it is vain to think 
 of a reformation.' 
 
 These words have been sometimes taken as a reflection 
 on Bunyan's own father, as if he had not sufficiently 
 checked the first symptoms of a bad habit. If this was 
 so, too much may be easily made of it. The language in 
 the homes of ignorant workmen is seldom select. They 
 have not a large vocabulary, and the words which they 
 use do not mean what they seem to mean. But so sharp 
 and sudden remorse speaks remarkably for Bunyan him- 
 self. At this time he could have been barely twenty years
 
 li.] CONVICTION OP SIN. 27 
 
 old, and already he was quick to see when he was doing 
 wrong, to be sorry for it, and to wish that he could do 
 better. Vain the effort seemed to him, yet from that 
 moment 'he did leave off swearing to his own great 
 wonder,' and he found ' that he could speak better and 
 more pleasantly than he did before.' 
 
 It lies in the nature of human advance on the road of 
 improvement, that, whatever be a man's occupation, be 
 it handicraft, or art, or knowledge, or moral conquest of 
 self, at each forward step which he takes he grows more 
 conscious of his shortcomings. It is thus with his whole 
 career, and those who rise highest are least satisfied with 
 themselves. Very simply Bunyan tells the story of his 
 progress. On his outward history, on his business and 
 his fortunes with it, he is totally silent. Worldly interests 
 were not worth mentioning. He is solely occupied with 
 his rescue from spiritual perdition. Soon after he had 
 profited by the woman's rebuke, he fell in ' with a poor 
 man that made profession of religion and talked pleasantly 
 of the Scriptures.' Earnestness in such matters was 
 growing common among English labourers. Under his 
 new friend's example, Bunyan ' betook him to the Bible x 
 and began to take great pleasure in reading it,' but espe- 
 cially, as he admits frankly (and most people's experience 
 will have been the same), ' especially the historical part ; 
 for as for St. Paul's Epistles and Scriptures of that nature, 
 he could not away with them, being as yet ignorant of the 
 corruption of his nature, or of the want arid worth of 
 Jesus Christ to save him.' 
 
 Not as yet understanding these mysteries, he set him- 
 self to reform his life. He became strict with himself in 
 word and deed. ' He set the Commandments before him 
 for his way to Heaven.' ' He thought if he could but keep
 
 28 BUNYAN. [CHAP. 
 
 them pretty well he should have comfort.' If now and 
 then he broke one of them, he suffered in conscience ; he 
 repented of his fault, he made good resolutions for the 
 future and struggled to carry them out. ' His neighlxmrs 
 took him to be a new man, and marvelled at the altera- 
 tion.' Pleasure of any kind, even the most innocent, he 
 considered to be a snare to him, and he abandoned it ; he 
 had been fond of dancing, but he gave it up ; music and 
 singing he parted with, though it distressed him to leave 
 them. Of all amusements, that in which he had most 
 delighted had been in ringing the bells in Elstow church 
 tower. With his bells he could not part all at once; 
 he would no longer ring himself : but when his friends 
 were enjoying themselves with the ropes, he could not 
 help going now and then to the tower door to look on 
 and listen ; but he feared at last that the steeple might 
 fall upon him and kill him. We call such scruples in 
 these days exaggerated and fantastic. We are no longer 
 in danger ourselves of suffering from similar emotions. 
 Whether we are the better for having got rid of them, 
 will be seen in the future history of our race. 
 
 Notwithstanding his struggles and his sacrifices, Bun- 
 yan found that they did not bring him the peace which 
 he expected. A man can change his outward conduct, 
 but if he is in earnest he comes in sight of other features 
 in himself which he cannot change so easily ; the mean- 
 nesses, the paltrinesses, the selfishnesses which haunt him 
 in spite of himself, which start out upon him at moments 
 the most unlocked for, which taint the best of his actions 
 and make him loathe and hate himself. Bunyan's life was 
 now for so young a person a model of correctness ; but he 
 had no sooner brought his actions straight than he dis- 
 covered that he was admiring and approving of himself.
 
 ii.] CONVICTION OF SIN. 29 
 
 No situation is more humiliating, none brings with it a 
 feeling of more entire hopelessness. ' All this while,' he 
 says, ' I knew not Christ, nor grace, nor faith, nor hope, 
 and had I then died my state had been most fearful. I 
 was but a poor painted hypocrite, going about to establish 
 my own righteousness.' 
 
 Like his own Pilgrim, he had the burden on his back of 
 his conscious un worthiness. How was he to be rid of it ? 
 
 ' One day in a street in Bedford, as he was at work in 
 his calling, he fell in with three or four poor women sit- 
 ting at a door in the sun talking about the things of God.' 
 He was himself at that time ' a brisk talker ' about the 
 matters of religion, and ha joined these women. Their 
 expressions were wholly unintelligible to him. ' They 
 were speaking of the wretchedness of their own hearts, of 
 their unbelief, of their miserable state. They did con- 
 temn, slight, and abhor their own righteousness as filthy 
 and insufficient to do them any good. They spoke of a 
 new birth and of the work of God in their hearts, which 
 comforted and strengthened them against the temptations 
 of the Devil.' 
 
 The language of the poor women has lost its old 
 meaning. They themselves, if they were alive, would not 
 use it any longer. The conventional phrases of Evan- 
 gelical Christianity ring untrue in a modern ear like a 
 cracked bell. We have grown so accustomed to them as 
 a cant, that we can hardly believe that they ever stood 
 for sincere convictions. Yet these forms were once alive 
 with the profoundest of all moral truths ; a truth not of 
 a narrow theology, but which lies at the very bottom of 
 the well, at the fountain-head of human morality ; namely, 
 that a man who would work out his salvation must cast 
 out self, though he rend his heart-strings in doing it ; not 

 
 30 BUNYAN. [CHAP. 
 
 love of self-indulgence only, but self-applause, self-confi- 
 dence, self-conceit and vanity, desire or expectation of 
 reward ; self in all the subtle ingenuities with which it 
 winds about the soul. In one dialect or another, he 
 must recognise that he is himself a poor creature not 
 worth thinking of, or he will not take the first step to- 
 Avards excellence in any single thing which he undertakes. 
 
 Bunyan left the women and went about his work, but 
 their talk went with him. ' He was greatly aifected.' 
 ' He saw that he wanted the true tokens of a godly man.' 
 He sought them out and spoke with them again and again. 
 He could not stay away; and the more he went the more 
 he questioned his condition. 
 
 ' I found two things,' he says, ' at which I did some- 
 times marvel, considering what a blind ungodly wretch 
 but just before I was ; one a great softness and tenderness 
 of heart, which caused me to fall under the conviction of 
 what, by Scripture, they asserted; the other a great 
 bending of my mind to a continual meditating on it. My 
 mind was now like a horse-leech at the vein, still crying 
 Give, give ; so fixed on eternity and on the kingdom of 
 heaven (though I knew but little), that neither pleasure, 
 nor profit, nor persuasion, nor threats could loosen it or 
 make it let go its hold. It is in very deed a certain 
 truth ; it would have been then as difficult for me to have 
 taken my mind from heaven to earth, as I have found it 
 often since to get it from earth to heaven.' 
 
 Ordinary persons who are conscious of trying to do 
 right, who resist temptations, are sorry when they slip, 
 and determine to be more on their guard for the future, 
 are well contented with the condition which they have 
 reached. They are respectable, they are right-minded in 
 common things, they fulfil their every-day duties to their
 
 ii. j CONVICTION OF SIN. 31 
 
 families and to society with a sufficiency for which the 
 world speaks well of them, as indeed it ought to speak ; 
 and they themselves acquiesce in the world's verdict. 
 Any passionate agitation about the state of their souls 
 they consider unreal and affected. Such men may be 
 amiable in private life, good neighbours, and useful 
 citizens; but be their talents what they may, they 
 could not write a ' Pilgrim's Progress,' or ever reach the 
 Delectable Mountains, or , even be conscious that such 
 mountains exist. 
 
 Bunyan was on the threshold of the higher life. Ho 
 knew that he was a very poor creature. He longed to 
 rise to something better. He was a mere ignorant, un- 
 taught mechanic. He had not been to school with Aris- 
 totle and Plato. He could not help himself or lose 
 himself in the speculations of poets and philosophers. He 
 had only the Bible, and studying the Bible he found that 
 the wonder-working power in man's nature was Faith. 
 Faith ! What was it ? What did it mean ? Had he faith 1 
 He was but ' a poor sot,' and yet he thought that he could 
 not be wholly without it. The Bible told him that if he 
 had faith as a grain of mustard seed, he could work 
 miracles. He did not understand Oriental metaphors; 
 here was a simple test which could be at once applied. 
 
 ' One day,' he writes, ' as I was between Elstow and 
 Bedford, the temptation was hot upon me to try if I had 
 faith by doing some miracle. I must say to the puddles 
 that were in the horse-pads, " be dry," and truly at one 
 time I was agoing to say so indeed. But just as I was 
 about to speak, the thought came into my mind : Go un- 
 der yonder hedge first and pray that God would make 
 you able. But when I had concluded to pray, this came 
 hot upon me, that if I prayed and came again and tried
 
 32 BUNYAN. [CHAP. 
 
 to do it, and yet did nothing notwithstanding, then be 
 sure I had no faith but was a castaway and lost. Nay, 
 thought I, if it be so, I will never try it yet, but will 
 stay a little longer. Thus was I tossed between the 
 Devil and my own ignorance, and so perplexed at some 
 times that I could not tell what to do.' 
 
 Common sense will call this disease, and will think 
 impatiently that the young tinker would have done better 
 to attend to his business. But it must be observed that 
 Bunyan was attending to his business, toiling all the 
 while with grimed hands over his pots and kettles. No 
 one ever complained that the pots and kettles were ill- 
 mended. It was merely that being simple-minded, he 
 found in his Bible that besides earning his bread he had 
 to save or lose his soul. Having no other guide he took 
 its words literally, and the directions puzzled him. 
 
 He grew more and more unhappy more lowly in his 
 own eyes 
 
 ' Wishing him like to those more rich in hope ' 
 like the women who were so far beyond him on the 
 heavenly road. He was a poet ^without knowing it, and 
 his gifts only served to perplex him further. His specu- 
 lations assumed bodily forms which he supposed to be 
 actual visions. He saw his poor friends sitting on the 
 sunny side of a high mountain refreshing themselves in 
 the warmth, while he was shivering in frost and snow 
 and mist. The mountain was surrounded by a wall, 
 through which he tried to pass, and searched long in vain 
 for an opening through it. At last he found one, very 
 straight and narrow, through which he struggled after 
 desperate efforts. ' It showed him,' he said, ' that none 
 could enter into life but those who were in downright 
 earnest, and unless they left the wicked world behind
 
 M.] CONVICTION OF SIN. 33 
 
 them, for here was only room for body and soul, but not 
 for body and soul and sin.' The vision brought him no 
 comfort, for it passed away and left him still on the wrong 
 side : a little comfortable self-conceit would have set him 
 at rest. But, like all real men, Bunyan had the worst 
 opinion of himself. He looked at his Bible again. He found 
 that he must be elected. Was he elected 1 He could as 
 little tell as whether he had faith. He knew that he 
 longed to be elected, but ' the Scripture trampled on his 
 desire,' for it said, ' It is not of him that willeth, or of 
 him that runneth, but of God that sheweth mercy ; ' 
 therefore, unless God had chosen him his labour was in 
 vain. The Devil saw his opportunity ; the Devil among 
 his other attributes must have possessed that of omni- 
 presence, for whenever any human soul was in straits, he 
 was personally at hand to take advantage of it. 
 
 ' It may be that you are not elected,' the tempter said 
 to Bunyan. 'It may be so indeed,' thought he. ' Why 
 then/ said Satan, ' you had as good leave off and strive no 
 farther ; for if indeed you should not be elected and chosen 
 of God, there is no talk of your being saved.' 
 
 A comforting text suggested itself. ' Look at the 
 generations of old ; did any ever trust in the Lord and 
 was confounded 1 ? ' But these exact words, unfortunately, 
 were only to be found in the Apocrypha. And there 
 was a further distressing possibility, which has occurred 
 to others besides Bunyan. Perhaps the day of grace 
 was passed. It came on him one day as he walked in 
 the country that perhaps those good people in Bedford 
 were all that the Lord would save in those parts, and 
 that he came too late for the blessing. True, Christ had 
 said, ' Compel them to come in, for yet there is room.' 
 It might be ' that when Christ spoke those words,' He 
 
 D
 
 34 BUNYAN. [CH. n, 
 
 was thinking of him him among the rest that he had 
 chosen, and had meant to encourage him. But Bunyan 
 was too simply modest to gather comfort from such aspir- 
 ing thoughts. He desired to be converted, craved for it, 
 longed for it with all his heart and soul. ' Could it have 
 been gotten for gold,' he said, ' what would I not have 
 given for it. Had I had a whole world it had all 
 gone ten thousand times over for this, that my soul might 
 have been in a converted state. But, oh ! I was made 
 sick by that saying of Christ : " He called to Him whom 
 He would, and they came to Him." I feared He would 
 not call me.' 
 
 Election, conversion, day of grace, coming to Christ, 
 have been pawed and fingered by unctuous hands for 
 now two hundred years. The bloom is gone from the 
 flower. The plumage, once shining with hues direct 
 from heaven, is soiled and bedraggled. The most solemn 
 of all realities have been degraded into the passwords of 
 technical theology. InBunyan's day, in camp and coun- 
 cil chamber, in High Courts of Parliament, and among 
 the poor drudges in English villages, they were still 
 radiant with spiritual meaning. The dialect may altor ; 
 but if man is more than a brief floating bubble on the 
 eternal river of time ; if there be really an immortal 
 part of him which need not perish ; and if his business 
 on earth is to save it from perishing, he will still try to 
 pierce the mountain barrier. He will still find the 
 work as hard as Bunyan found it. We live in days of 
 progress and enlightenment ; nature on a hundred sides 
 has unlocked her storehouses of knowledge. But she has 
 furnished no ' open sesame ' to bid the mountain gate 
 fly wide which leads to conquest of self. There is still 
 no passage there for ' body and soul and sin.'
 
 CHAPTER III. 
 
 GRACE ABOUNDING. 
 
 THE women in Bedford, to whom Banyan had opened 
 his mind, had been naturally interested in him. Young 
 and rough as he was, he could not have failed to impress 
 anyone who conversed with him with a sense that he was 
 a remarkable person. They mentioned him to Mr. Gifford, 
 the minister of the Baptist Church at Bedford. John 
 Gifford had, at the beginning of the Civil War, been a 
 loose young officer in the king's army. He had been 
 taken prisoner when engaged in some exploit which was 
 contrary to the usages of war. A court-martial had 
 sentenced him to death, and he was to have been shot in 
 a few hours, when he broke out of his prison with his 
 sister's help, and, after various adventures, settled at 
 Bedford as a doctor. The near escape had not sobered 
 him. He led a disorderly life, drinking and gambling, 
 till the loss of a large sum of money startled him into 
 seriousness. In the language of the time he became con- 
 vinced of sin, and joined the Baptists, the most thorough- 
 going and consistent of all the Protestant sects. If the 
 Sacrament of Baptism is not a magical form, but is a 
 personal act, in which the baptised person devotes himself 
 to Christ's service, to baptise children at an age when 
 
 D2
 
 36 BUNYAN. [CHAP. 
 
 they cannot understand what they are doing may well 
 seem irrational and even impious. 
 
 Gifford, who was now the head of the Baptist com- 
 munity in the town, invited Bunyan to his house, and 
 explained the causes of his distress to him. He was a lost 
 sinner. It was true that he had parted with his old 
 faults, and was leading a new life. But his heart was 
 unchanged ; his past offences stood in record against him. 
 He was still under the wrath of God, miserable in his 
 position, and therefore miserable in mind. He must 
 become sensible of his lost state, and lay hold of the 
 only remedy, or there was no hope for him. 
 
 There was no difficulty in convincing Bunyan that he 
 was in a bad way. He was too well aware of it already. 
 In a work of fiction, the conviction would be followed 
 immediately by consoling grace. In the actual experience 
 of a living human soul, the medicine operates less 
 pleasantly. 
 
 ' I began,' he says, ' to see something of the vanity 
 and inward wretchedness of my wicked heart, for as yet 
 knew no great matter therein. But now it began to 
 be discovered unto me, and to work for wickedness as it 
 never did before. Lusts and corruptions would strongly 
 put themselves forth within me in wicked thoughts and 
 desires which I did not regard before. Whereas, before, 
 my soul was full of longing after God ; now my heart 
 began to hanker after every foolish vanity.' 
 
 Constitutions differ. Mr. Gifford's treatment, if it was 
 ever good for any man, was too sharp for Bunyan. The 
 fierce acid which had been poured into his wounds set them 
 all festering again. He frankly admits that he was now 
 farther from conversion than before. His heart, do what 
 he would, refused to leave off desiring forbidden pleasures
 
 in.] GEACE ABOUNDING. 37 
 
 and while this continued, he supposed that he was still 
 under the law, and must perish by it. He compared 
 himself to the child who, as he was being brought to 
 Christ, was thrown down by the devil and wallowed foam- 
 ing. A less healthy nature might have been destroyed 
 by these artificially created and exaggerated miseries. He 
 supposed he was given over to unbelief and wickedness, 
 and yet he relates with touching simplicity : 
 
 ' As to the act of sinning I was never more tender 
 than now. I durst not take up a pin or a stick, though 
 but so big as a straw, for my conscience now was sore nncl 
 would smart at every touch. I could not tell how to 
 speak my words for fear I should misplace them.' 
 
 But the care with which he watched his conduct 
 availed him nothing. He was on a morass ' that shook if 
 he did but stir/ and he was ' there left both of God and 
 Christ and the Spirit, and of all good things.' Behind 
 him lay the faults of his childhood and youth, every one 
 of which he believed to be recorded against him. Within 
 were his disobedient inclinations, which he conceived to 
 be the presence of the Devil in his heart. If he was to 
 be presented clean of stain before God he must have a per- 
 fect righteousness which was to be found only in Christ, 
 and Christ had rejected him. ' My original and inward 
 pollution,' he writes, ' was my plague and my affliction. 
 3 WHS more loathsome in my own eyes than was a toad, and 
 I thought I was so in God's eyes too. I thought every 
 one had a better heart than I had. I could have changed 
 heart with anybody. I thought none but the Devil him- 
 self could equal me for inward wickedness and pollution. 
 Sure, thought I, I am given up to the Devil and to a 
 reprobate mind ; and thus I continued for a long while, 
 even for some years together.'
 
 38 BUNYAN. [CHAP. 
 
 And all the while the world went on so quietly ; these 
 things over which Bunyan was so miserable not seeming 
 to trouble anyone except himself ; and, as if they had no 
 existence except on Sundays and in pious talk. Old people 
 were hunting after the treasures of this life, as if they 
 were never to leave the earth. Professors of religion 
 complained when they lost fortune or health ; what were 
 fortune and health to the awful possibilities which lay 
 beyond the grave 1 To Bunyan the future life of Chris- 
 tianity was a reality as certain as the next day's sunrise ; 
 and he could have been happy on bread and water if he 
 could have felt himself prepared to enter it. Every created 
 being seemed better off than he was. He was sorr} r that 
 God had made him a man. He ' blessed the condition of 
 the birds, beasts, and fishes, for they had not a sinful 
 nature. They were not obnoxious to the wrath of God. 
 They were not to go to hell-fire after death.' He recalled 
 the texts which spoke of Christ and forgiveness. He 
 tried to persuade himself that Christ cared for him. 
 He could have talked of Christ's love and mercy ' even to 
 the very crows which sate on the ploughed land before 
 him.' But he was too sincere to satisfy himself with for- 
 mulas and phrases. He could not, he would not, profess 
 to be convinced that things would go well with him when 
 he was not convinced. Cold spasms of doubt laid hold of 
 him doubts, not so much of his own salvation, as of the 
 truth of all that he had been taught to believe ; and the 
 problem had to be fought and grappled with, which lies 
 in the intellectual nature of every genuine man, whether 
 he be an ^Eschylus or a Shakespeare, or a poor working 
 Bedfordshire mechanic. No honest soul can look out 
 upon the world and see it as it really is, without the 
 question rising in him whether there be any God that
 
 m.] GRACE ABOUNDING. 39 
 
 governs it at all. No one can accept the popular notion 
 of heaven and hell as actually true, without being as ter> 
 rified as Bunyan was. We go on as we do, and attend to 
 our business and enjoy ourselves, because the words have 
 no real meaning to us. Providence in its kindness leaves 
 most of us unblessed or uncursed with natures of too fine 
 a fibre. 
 
 Bunyan was hardly dealt with. ' Whole floods of 
 blasphemies,' he says, ' against God, Christ, and the 
 Scriptures were poured upon my spirit ; questions against 
 the very being of God and of his only beloved Son, as 
 whether there was in truth a God or Christ, or no, and 
 whether the Holy Scriptures were not rather a fable and 
 cunning story than the holy and pure Word of God.' 
 
 ' How can you tell,' the tempter whispered, ' but that 
 the Turks have as good a Scripture to prove their 
 Mahomet the Saviour, as we have to prove our Jesus is ? 
 Could I think that so many tens of thousands in so many 
 countries and kingdoms should be without the knowledge 
 of the right way to heaven, if there were indeed a heaven, 
 and that we who lie in a corner of the earth, should alone 
 be blessed therewith. Every one doth think his own re- 
 ligion the lightest, both Jews, Moors, and Pagans ; and 
 how if all our faith, and Christ, and Scripture should be 
 but " a think so " too.' St. Paul spoke positively. Bunyan 
 saw shrewdly that on St. Paul the weight of the whole 
 Christian theory really rested. But ' how could he tell 
 but that S. Paul, being a subtle and cunning man, might 
 give himself up to deceive with strong delusions ? ' ' He 
 was carried away by such thoughts as by a whirlwind.' 
 
 His belief in the active agency of the Devil in human 
 affairs, of which he supposed that he had witnessed in- 
 stances, was no doubt a great help to him. If he could
 
 40 BUNYAN. [CHAP. 
 
 have imagined that his doubts or misgivings had been sug- 
 gested by a desire for truth, they would have been harder 
 to bear. More than ever he was convinced that he was 
 possessed by the devil. He ' compared himself to a child 
 carried off by a gipsy.' ' Kick sometimes I did,' he says, 
 ' and scream, and cry, but yet I was as bound in the 
 wings of temptation, and the wind would bear me 
 away.' ' I blessed the dog and toad, and counted the 
 condition of everything that God had made far better 
 than this dreadful state of mine. The dog or horse had 
 no soul to perish under the everlasting weight of hell for 
 sin, as mine was like to do.' 
 
 Doubts about revelation and the truth of Scripture 
 were more easy to encounter then than they are at 
 present. Bunyan was protected by want of learning, and 
 by a powerful predisposition to find the objections against 
 the credibility of the Gospel history to be groundless. 
 Critical investigation had not as yet analysed the his- 
 torical construction of the sacred books, and scepticism, 
 as he saw it in people round him, did actually come 
 from the devil, that is from a desire to escape the 
 moral restraints of religion. The wisest, noblest, best 
 instructed men in England, at that time regarded the 
 Bible as an authentic communication from God, and as 
 the only foundation for law and civil society. The mas- 
 culine sense and strong modest intellect of Bunyan 
 ensured his acquiescence in an opinion so powerfully sup- 
 ported. Fits of uncertainty recurred even to the end of 
 his life ; it must be so with men who are honestly in 
 earnest ; but his doubts were of course only intermittent, 
 and his judgment was hi the main satisfied that the Bible 
 was, as he had been taught, the Word of God. This, 
 however, helped him little ; for in the Bible he read his
 
 in.} GRACE ABOUNDING. 41 
 
 own condemnation. The weight which pressed him 
 down was the sense of his unworthiness. What was 
 he that God should care for him ? He fancied that 
 he heard God saying to the angels, ' This poor, simple 
 wretch doth hanker after me, as if I had nothing to do 
 with my mercy but to bestow it on such as he. Poor 
 fool, how art thou deceived ! It is not for such as thee to 
 have favour with the Highest.' 
 
 Miserable as he was, he clung to his misery as the one 
 link which connected him with the object of his longings. 
 If he had no hope of heaven, he was at least distracted 
 that he must lose it. He was afraid of dying, yet he was 
 still more afraid of continuing to live ; lest the impres- 
 sion should wear away through time, and occupation and 
 other interests should turn his heart away to the world, 
 and thus his wounds might cease to pain him. 
 
 Readers of the ' Pilgrim's 'Progress ' sometimes ask 
 with wonder, why, after Christian had been received into 
 the narrow gate, and had been set forward upon his way, 
 so many trials and dangers still lay before him. The 
 answer is simply that Christian was a pilgrim, that the 
 journey of life still lay before him, and at every step 
 temptations would meet him in new, unexpected shapes. 
 St. Anthony in his hermitage was beset by as many fiends 
 as had ever troubled him when in the world. Man's 
 spiritual existence is like the flight of a bird in the air ; 
 he is sustained only by effort, and when he ceases to 
 exert himself he falls. There are intervals, however, of 
 comparative calm, and to one of these the storm-tossed 
 Bunyan was now approaching. He had passed through 
 the Slough of Despond. He had gone astray after Mr. 
 Legality, and the rocks had almost overwhelmed him. 
 Evangelist now found him and put him right again, and
 
 42 BUNYAN. [CHAP. 
 
 he was to be allowed a breathing space at the Interpreter's 
 house. As he was at his ordinary daily work his mind 
 was restlessly busy. Verses of Scripture came into his 
 head, sweet while present, but like Peter's sheet caught 
 up again into heaven. We may have heard all our lives 
 of Christ. Words and ideas with which we have been 
 familiar from childhood are trodden into paths as barren 
 as sand. Suddenly, we know not how, the meaning 
 flashes upon us. The seed has found its way into some 
 corner of our minds where it can germinate. The shell 
 breaks, the cotyledons open, and the plant of faith is alive. 
 So it was now to be with Bunyan. 
 
 ' One day,' he says, 'as I was travelling into the 
 country, musing on the wickedness of my heart, and con- 
 sidering the enmity that was in me to God, the Scrip- 
 ture came into my mind, " He hath made peace through 
 the blood of His cross." 'I saw that the justice of God 
 and my sinful soul could embrace and kiss each other. I 
 was ready to swoon, not with grief and trouble, but with 
 solid joy and peace.' Everything became clear : the 
 Gospel history, the birth, the life, the death of the 
 Saviour ; how gently he gave himself to be nailed on the 
 cross for his (Bunyan's) sins. ' I saw Him in the spirit,' 
 he goes on, ' a Man on the right hand of the Father, 
 pleading for me, and have seen the manner of His coming 
 from Heaven to judge the world with glory.' 
 
 The sense of guilt which had so oppressed him was 
 now a key to the mystery. ' God,' he says, ' suffered me 
 to be afflicted with temptations concerning these things, 
 and then revealed them to me.' He was crushed to 
 the ground by the thought of his wickedness ; ' the Lord 
 showed him the death of Christ, and lifted the weight 
 away.'
 
 in.] GRACE ABOUNDING. 43 
 
 Now he thought he had a personal evidence from 
 Heaven that he was really saved. Before this, he had 
 lain trembling at the mouth of hell ; now he was so far 
 away from it that he could scarce tell where it was. He 
 fell in at this time with a copy of Luther's commentary 
 on the Epistle to the Galatians, ' so old that it was like 
 to fall to pieces.' Bunyan found in it the exact counter- 
 part of his own experience : ' of all the books that he 
 had ever met with, it seemed to him the most fit for a 
 wounded conscience.' 
 
 Everything was supernatural with him : when a bad 
 thought came into his mind, it was the devil that put it 
 there. These breathings of peace he regarded as the im- 
 mediate voice of his Savour. Alas ! the respite was but 
 short. He had hoped that his troubles were over, when 
 the tempter came back upon him in the most extraordi- 
 nary form which he had yet assumed. Bunyan had him- 
 self left the door open ; the evil spirits could only enter 
 ' Mansoul ' through the owner's negligence, but once in, 
 they could work their own wicked will. How it hap- 
 pened will be told afterwards. The temptation itself 
 must be described first. Never was a nature more per- 
 versely ingenious in torturing itself. 
 
 He had gained Christ, as he called it. He was now 
 tempted ' to sell and part with this most blessed Christ, 
 to exchange Him for the things of this life for anything.' 
 If there had been any real prospect of worldly advantage 
 before Bunyan, which he could have gained by abandon- 
 ing his religious profession, the words would have had a 
 meaning ; but there is no hint or trace of any prospect of 
 the kind ; nor in Bunyan's position could there have 
 been. The temptation, as he called it, was a freak of 
 fancy : fancy resenting the minuteness with which he
 
 44 BUNYAN. [CHAP. 
 
 watched his own emotions. And yet he says, ' It lay 
 upon me for a year, and did follow me so continually that 
 1 was not rid of it one day in a month, sometimes not an 
 hour in many days together, unless when I was asleep. 
 I could neither eat my food, stoop for a pin, chop a stick, 
 or cast my eye to look on this or that, but still the 
 temptation would come, " Sell Christ for this, sell Him 
 for that ! Sell Him ! Sell Him ! " ' 
 
 He had been haunted before with a notion that he 
 was under a spell ; that he had been fated to commit the 
 unpardonable sin ; and he was now thinking of Judas, 
 who had been admitted to Christ's intimacy, and had 
 then betrayed him. Here it was before him the very 
 thing which he had so long dreaded. If his heart did but 
 consent for a moment, the deed was done. His doom had 
 overtaken him. He wrestled with the thought as it rose, 
 thrust it from him ' with his hands and elbows,' body and 
 mind convulsed together in a common agony. As fast as 
 the destroyer said, ' Sell Him,' Bunyan said, ' I will not ; 
 I will not ; I will not, not for thousands, thousands, thou- 
 sands of worlds ! ' One morning as he lay in his bed, 
 the voice came again, and would not be driven away. 
 Bunyan fought against it, till he was out of breath. He 
 fell back exhausted, and without conscious action of his 
 will, the fatal sentence passed through his brain, ' Let 
 Him go if He will.' 
 
 That the ' selling Christ ' was a bargain in which he 
 was to lose all and receive nothing is evident from the 
 form in which he was overcome. Yet if he had gained a 
 fortune by fraud or forgery, he could not have been more 
 certain that he had destroyed himself. 
 
 Satan had won the battle, and he, ' as a bird shot 
 from a tree, had fallen into guilt and despair.' He got
 
 in.] GRACE ABOUNDING. 45 
 
 out of bed, ' and went moping into the fields,' where he 
 wandered for two hours, 'as a man bereft of life, and 
 now past recovering,' 'bound over to eternal punish- 
 ment.' He shrank under the hedges, ' in guilt and 
 sorrow, bemoaning the hardness of his fate.' In vain 
 the words now came back that had so comforted him, 
 ' The blood of Christ cleanseth from all sin.' They had 
 no application to him. He had acquired his birthright, 
 but, like Esau, he had sold it, and could not any more 
 find place for repentance. True it was said that ' all 
 manner of sins and blasphemies should be forgiven unto 
 men,' but only such sins and blasphemies as had been com- 
 mitted in the natural state. Bunyan had received grace, 
 and after receiving it, had sinned against the Holy Ghost. 
 It was done, and nothing could undo it. David had 
 received grace, and had committed murder and adultery 
 after it. But murder and adultery, bad as they might be, 
 were only transgressions of the law of Moses. Bunyan 
 had sinned against the Mediator himself, ' he had sold his 
 Saviour.' One sin, and only one there was which could 
 not be pardoned, and he had been guilty of it. Peter 
 had sinned against grace, and even after he had been 
 warned. Peter, however, had but denied his Master. 
 Bunyan had sold him. He was no David or Peter, he 
 was Judas. It was very hard. Others naturally as bad 
 as he had been saved. Why had he been picked out to 
 be made a Son of Perdition ? A Judas ! Was there any 
 point in which he was better than Judas] Judas had 
 sinned with deliberate purpose : he ' in a fearful hurry,' 
 and ' against prayer and striving.' But there might be 
 more ways than one of committing the unpardonable sin, 
 and there might be degrees of it. It was a dreadful con- 
 dition. The old doubts came back.
 
 46 BUNYAN. [CHAP. 
 
 ' I was now ashamed,' he says, ' that I should be like 
 such an ugly man as Judas. I thought how loathsome I 
 should be to all the saints at the Day of Judgment. I 
 was tempted to content myself by receiving some false 
 opinion, as that there should be no such thing as the Day 
 of Judgment, that we should not rise again, that sin was 
 no such grievous thing, the tempter suggesting that if 
 these things should be indeed true, yet to believe other- 
 wise would yield me ease for the present. If I must 
 perish, I need not torment myself beforehand.' 
 
 Judas ! Judas ! was now for ever before his eyes. 
 So identified he was with Judas that he felt at times as 
 if his breastbone was bursting. A mark like Cain's was 
 on him. In vain he searched again through the catalogue 
 of pardoned sinners. Manasseh had consulted wizards 
 and familiar spirits. Manasseh had burnt his children in 
 the fire to devils. He had found mercy ; but, alas ! 
 Manasseh's sins had nothing of the nature of selling the 
 Saviour. To have sold the Saviour ' was a sin bigger 
 than the sins of a country, of a kingdom, or of the whole 
 world not all of them together could equal it.' 
 
 His brain was overstrained, it will be said. Very 
 likely. It is to be remembered, however, who and what 
 he was, and that he had overstrained it in his eagerness to 
 learn what he conceived his Maker to wish him to be a 
 form of anxiety not common in this world. The cure was 
 as remarkable as the disorder. One day he was ' in a 
 good man's shop,' still ' afflicting himself with self- 
 abhorrence,' when something seemed to rush in through an 
 open window, and he heard a voice saying, ' Didst ever 
 refuse to be justified by the blood of Christ?' Bunyan 
 shared the belief of his time. He took the system of 
 things as the Bible represented it ; but his strong com-
 
 in.] GEACE ABOUNDING. 47 
 
 mon sense put him on his guard against being easily 
 credulous. He thought at the time that the voice was 
 supernatural. After twenty years he said modestly that 
 he ' could not make a judgment of it.' The effect, any 
 way, was as if an angel had come to him and had told him 
 that there was still hope. Hapless as his condition was, 
 he might still pray for mercy, and might possibly find it. 
 He tried to pray, and found it very hard. The devil 
 whispered again that God was tired of him ; God wanted 
 to be rid of him and his importunities, and had, there- 
 fore, allowed him to commit this particular sin that he 
 might hear no more of him. He remembered Esau, and 
 thought that this might be too true : ' the saying about 
 Esau was a flaming sword barring the way of the tree of 
 life to him.' Still he would not give in. 'I can but 
 die,' he said to himself, ' and if it must be so, it shall 
 be said that such an one died at the feet of Christ in 
 prayer.' 
 
 He was torturing himself with illusions. Most of the 
 saints in the Catholic Calendar have done the same. The 
 most remorseless philosopher can hardly refuse a certain 
 admiration for this poor uneducated village lad struggling 
 so bravely in the theological spider's web. The ' Pro- 
 fessors ' could not comfort him, having never experienced 
 similar distresses in their own persons. He consulted ' an 
 Antient Christian,' telling him that he feared that he had 
 sinned against the Holy Ghost, The Antient Christian 
 answered gravely that he thought so too. The devil 
 having him at advantage, began to be witty with him. 
 The devil suggested that as he had offended the second or 
 third Person of the Trinity, he had better pray the Father 
 to mediate for him with Christ and the Holy Spirit. 
 Then the devil took another turn. Christ, he said, was
 
 48 BTJNYAN. [CHAP. 
 
 really sorry for Bunyan, but his case was beyond remedy. 
 Bunyan's sin was so peculiar, that it was not of the 
 nature of those for which He had bled and died, and had 
 not, therefore, been laid to His charge. To justify Bunyan 
 he must come down and die again, and that was not to be 
 thought of. ' Oh ! ' exclaimed the unfortunate victim, 
 'the unthought-of imaginations, frights, fears, and ter- 
 rors, that are effected by a thorough application of guilt 
 (to a spirit) that is yielded to desperation. This is the 
 man that hath his dwelling among the tombs.' 
 
 Sitting in this humour on a settle in the street at Bed- 
 ford, he was pondering over his fearful state. The sun 
 in heaven seemed to grudge its light to him. ' The stones 
 in the street and the tiles on the houses did bend them- 
 selves against him.' Each crisis in Bunyan's mind is 
 always framed in the picture of some spot where it oc- 
 curred. He was crying ' in the bitterness of his soul, 
 How can God comfort such a wretch as I am 1 ' As be- 
 fore, in the shop, a voice came in answer, ' This sin is not 
 unto death.' The first voice had brought him hope 
 which was almc st extinguished ; the second was a message 
 of life. The night was gone, and it was daylight. He 
 had come to the end of the Valley of the Shadow of 
 Death, and the spectres and the hobgoblins which had 
 jibbered at him suddenly all vanished. A moment before 
 he had supposed that he was out of reach of pardon, that 
 he had no right to pray, no right to repent, or, at least, 
 that neither prayer nor repentance could profit him. If 
 his sin was not to death, then he was on the same ground 
 as other sinners. If they might pray, he might pray, 
 and might look to be forgiven on the same terms. He 
 still saw that his ' selling Christ ' had been ' most bar- 
 barous,' but despair was followed by an extravagance, no
 
 HI.] GRACE ABOUNDING. 49 
 
 less unbounded, of gratitude, when he felt that Christ 
 would pardon even this. 
 
 ' Love and affection for Christ,' he says, ' did work at 
 this time such a strong and hot desire of revengement 
 upon myself for the abuse I had done to Him, that, to 
 speak as then I thought, had I had a thousand gallons of 
 blood in my veins, I could freely have spilt it all at the 
 command of my Lord and Saviour. The tempter told 
 me it was vain to pray. 'Yet, thought I, I will pray. 
 But, said the tempter, your sin is unpardonable. Well, 
 said I, I will pray. It is no boot, said he. Yet, said I, I 
 will pray : so I went to prayer, and I uttered words to 
 this effect : Lord, Satan tells me that neither Thy mercy 
 nor Christ's blood is sufficient to save my soul. Lord, 
 shall I honour Thee most by believing that Thou wilt 
 and canst, or him, by believing that Thou neither wilt 
 nor canst ? Lord, I would fain honour Thee by believing 
 that Thou wilt and canst. As I was there before the 
 Lord, the Scripture came, Oh ! man, great is thy faith, 
 even as if one had clapped me on the back.' 
 
 The waves had not wholly subsided ; but we need not 
 follow the undulations any farther. It is enough that 
 after a ' conviction of sin,' considerably deeper than most 
 people find necessary for themselves, Bunyan had come 
 to realise what was meant by salvation in Christ, accord- 
 ing to the received creed of the contemporary Protestant 
 world. The intensity of his emotions arose only from 
 the completeness with which he believed it. Man had 
 sinned, and by sin was made a servant of the devil. His 
 redemption was a personal act of the Saviour towards 
 each individual sinner. In the Atonement Christ had 
 before him each separate person whom he designed to 
 save, blotting out his offences, however heinous they 
 
 E
 
 50 BUNYAN. [CHAP. 
 
 might be, and recording in place of them his own per- 
 fect obedience. Each reconciled sinner in return regarded 
 Christ's sufferings as undergone immediately for himself, 
 and gratitude for that great deliverance enabled and 
 obliged him to devote his strength and soul thencefor- 
 ward to God's service. In the seventeenth century, all 
 earnest English Protestants held this belief. In the nine- 
 teenth century, most of us repeat the phrases of this 
 belief, and pretend to hold it. We think we hold it. "We 
 are growing more cautious, perhaps, with our definitions. 
 We suspect that there may be mysteries in God's nature 
 and methods which we cannot fully explain. The out- 
 lines of ' the scheme of salvation ' are growing indistinct ; 
 and we see it through a gathering mist. Yet the essence 
 of it will remain true whether we recognise it or not. 
 While man remains man he will do things which he 
 ought not to do. He will leave undone things which he 
 ought to do. To will, may be present with him ; but how 
 to perform what he wills, he will never fully know, and 
 he will still hate 'the body of death' which he feels 
 clinging to him. He will try to do better. When he 
 falls he will struggle to his feet again. He will climb 
 and climb on the hill side, though he never 7-eaches the 
 top, and knows that he can never reach it. His life will 
 be a failure, which he will not dare to offer as a fit 
 account of himself, or as worth a serious regard. Yet 
 he will still hope that he will not be wholly cast away, 
 when after his sleep in death he wakes again. 
 
 Now, says Bunyan, there remained only the hinder 
 part of the tempest. Heavenly voices continued to en- 
 courage him. ' As I was passing in the field,' he goes on, 
 ' I heard the sentence, thy righteousness is in heaven ; and 
 methought I saw, with the eyes of my soul, Jesus Christ
 
 ni.J GRACE ABOUNDING. 51 
 
 at God's right hand, there I say, as my righteousness, so 
 that wherever I was, or whatever I was doing, God could 
 not say of me He wants my righteousness, for that was 
 just before Him. Now did my chains fall off my legs 
 indeed. I was loosed from my affliction and irons ; my 
 temptations also fled away, so that from that time those 
 dreadful Scriptures of God left off to trouble me. Now 
 went I home rejoicing for the grace and love of God. 
 Christ of God is made unto us wisdom and righteousness, 
 and sanctification, and redemption. I now lived very 
 sweetly at peace with God through Christ. Oh! me- 
 th ought, Christ, Christ ! There was nothing but Christ 
 before my eyes. I was not now only looking upon this 
 and the other benefits of Christ apart, as of His blood, 
 burial, and resurrection, but considered Him as a whole 
 Christ. All those graces that were now green in me 
 were yet but like those cracked groats and fourpence half- 
 pennies which rich men carry in their purses, while their 
 gold is in their trunks at home. Oh! I saw my gold 
 was in my trunk at home in Christ my Lord and Saviour. 
 The Lord led me into the mystery of union with the Son 
 of God, that I was joined to Him, that I was flesh of His 
 flesh. If He and I were one, His righteousness was 
 mine, His merits mine, His victory mine. Now I could 
 S2e myself in heaven and earth at once ; in heaven by my 
 Christ, though on earth by my body and person. Christ 
 was that common and public person in whom the whole 
 body of His elect are always to be considered and reckoned. 
 "VVe fulfilled the law by Him, died by Him, rose from the 
 dead by Him, got the victory over sin and death, the devil 
 and hell by Him. I had cause to say, Praise ye the Lord. 
 Praise God in His sanctuary.'
 
 CHAPTER IV. 
 
 CALL TO THE MINISTRY. 
 
 THE Pilgrim falls into the hands of Giant Despair be- 
 cause he has himself first strayed into Byepath Meadow. 
 Banyan found an explanation of his last convulsion in 
 an act of unbelief, of which, on looking back, he per- 
 ceived that he had been guilty. He had been delivered 
 out of his first temptation. He had not been sufficiently 
 on his guard against temptations that might come in the 
 future. Nay, he had himself tempted God. His wife 
 had been overtaken by a premature confinement, and was 
 suffering acutely. It was at the time when Banyan was 
 exercised with questions about the truth of religion alto- 
 gether. As the poor woman lay crying at his side, he had 
 said mentally, ' Lord, if Thou wilt now remove this sad 
 affliction from my wife, and cause that she be troubled no 
 more therewith this night, then I shall know that Thou 
 canst discern the more secret thoughts of the heart.' In 
 a moment the pain ceased and she fell into a sleep which 
 lasted till morning. Bunyan, though surprised at the 
 time, forgot what had happened, till it rushed back upon 
 his memory, when he had committed himself by a similar 
 mental assent to selling Christ. He remembered the 
 proof which had been given to him that God could and 
 did discern his thoughts. God had discerned this second
 
 CH. iv.] CALL TO TEE MINISTRY. 53 
 
 thought also, and in punishing him for it had punished 
 him at the same time for the doubt which he had allowed 
 himself to feel. ' I should have believed His word,' he 
 said, ' and not have put an " if " upon the all-seeingness 
 of God.' 
 
 The suffering was over now, and he felt that it had 
 been infinitely beneficial to him. He understood better 
 the glory of God and of his Son. The Scriptures had 
 opened their secrets to him, and he had seen them to be 
 in very truth the keys of the kingdom of Heaven. Never 
 so clearly as after this ' temptation ' had he perceived ' the 
 heights of grace, and love, and mercy.' Two or three 
 times ' he had such strange apprehensions of the grace of 
 God as had amazed him.' The impression was so over- 
 powering that if it had continued long ' it would have 
 rendered him incapable for business.' He joined his 
 friend Mr. Gifford's church. He was baptised in the 
 Ouse, and became a professed member of the Baptist con- 
 gregation. Soon after, his mental conflict was entirely 
 over, and he had two quiet years of peace. Before a man 
 can use his powers to any purpose, he must arrive at some 
 conviction in which his intellect can acquiesce. ' Calm 
 yourself,' says Jean Paul ; ' it is your first necessity. Be 
 a stoic if nothing else will serve.' Bunyan had not been 
 driven into stoicism. He was now restored to the posses- 
 sion of his faculties, and his remarkable ability was not 
 long in showing itself. 
 
 The first consequence of his mental troubles was an 
 illness. He had a cough which threatened to turn into 
 consumption. He thought it was all over with him, and 
 lie was fixing his eyes ' on the heavenly Jerusalem and the 
 innumerable company of angels ; ' but the danger passed 
 off, and he became well and strong in mind and body.
 
 54 EUNYAN. [CHAP. 
 
 Notwithstanding his various miseries, he had not neg- 
 lected his business, and had indeed been specially suc- 
 cessful. By the time that he was twenty-five years old 
 he was in a position considerably superior to that in 
 which he was born. 'God/ says a contemporary bio- 
 grapher, 'had increased his stores so that he lived in 
 great credit among his neighbours.' On May 13, 1653, 
 Bedfordshire sent an address to Cromwell approving the 
 dismissal of the Long Parliament, recognising Oliver him- 
 self as the Lord's instrument, and recommending two 
 county magistrates as fit persons to serve in the Assembly 
 which was to take its place. Among thirty-six names 
 attached to this document, appear those of Gifford and 
 Bunyan. This speaks for itself : he must have been at 
 least a householder and a person of consideration. It was 
 not, however, as a prosperous brazier that Bunyan was to 
 make his way. He had a gift of speech, which, in the 
 democratic congregation to which he belonged, could not 
 long remain hid. Young as he was, he had sounded the 
 depths of spiritual experience. Like Dante he had been 
 in hell the popular hell of English Puritanism and in 
 1655 he was called upon to take part in the 'ministry.' 
 He was modest, humble, shrinking. The minister when 
 he preached was, according to the theory, an instrument 
 uttering the words not of himself but of the Holy Spirit. 
 A man like Bunyan, who really believed this, might well 
 be alarmed. After earnest entreaty, however, ' he made 
 experiment of his powers ' in private, and it was at once 
 evident that, with the thing which these people meant by 
 inspiration, he was abundantly supplied. No such preacher 
 to the uneducated English masses was to be found within 
 the four seas. He says that he had no desire of vain 
 glory ; no one who has studied his character can suppose
 
 iv.] CALL TO THE MINISTRY. 55 
 
 that he had. He was a man of natural genius, who be- 
 lieved the Protestant form of Christianity to be completely 
 true. He knew nothing of philosophy, nothing of history, 
 nothing of literature. The doubts to which he acknow- 
 ledged being without their natural food, had never pre- 
 sented themselves in a form which would have compelled 
 him to submit to remain uncertain. Doubt, as he had 
 felt it, was a direct enemy of morality and purity, and as 
 such he had fought with it and conquered it. Protestant 
 Christianity was true. All mankind were perishing un- 
 less they saw it to be true. This was his message; a 
 message supposing him to have been right of an im- 
 portance so immeasurable that all else was nothing. Ho 
 was still ' afflicted with the fiery darts of the devil,' but 
 he saw that he must not bury his abilities. ' In fear and 
 trembling,' therefore, he set himself to the work, and ' did 
 according to his power preach the Gospel that God had 
 shewn him.' 
 
 ' The Lord led him to begin where his Word began- 
 with sinners. This part of my work,' he says, ' I fulfilled 
 with a great sense, for the terrors of the law and guilt for 
 my transgressions lay heavy on my conscience. I preached 
 what I felt. I had been sent to my hearers as from the 
 dead. I went myself in chains to preach to them in chains, 
 and carried that fire in my own conscience that I per- 
 suaded them to beware of. I have gone full of guilt and 
 terror to the pulpit door ; God carried me on with a 
 strong hand, for neither guilt nor hell could take me off.' 
 
 Many of Bunyan's addresses remain in the form of 
 theological treatises, and that I may not have to return 
 to the subject, I shall give some account of them. His 
 doctrine was the doctrine of the best and strongest minds 
 in Europe. It had been believed by Luther, it had been
 
 56 BUNYAN. [CHAP. 
 
 believed by Knox. It was believed at that moment by 
 Oliver Cromwell as completely as by Bunyan himself. 
 It was believed, so far as such a person could be said to 
 believe anything, by the all-accomplished Leibnitz him- 
 self. Few educated people use the language of it now. 
 In them it was a fire from heaven shining like a sun in a 
 dark world. With us the fire has gone out ; in the place 
 of it we have but smoke and ashes, and the Evangelical 
 mind in search of ' something deeper and truer than satis- 
 fied the last century,' is turning back to Catholic verities. 
 What Bunyan had to say may be less than the whole 
 truth : we shall scarcely find the still missing part of it 
 in lines of thought which we have outgrown. 
 
 Bunyan preached wherever opportunity served in 
 woods, in barns, on village greens, or in town chapels. 
 The substance of his sermons he revised and published. 
 He began, as he said, with sinners, explaining the condi- 
 tion of men in the world. They were under the law, or 
 they were under grace. Every person that came into the 
 world was born under the law, and as such was bound, 
 under pain of eternal damnation, to fulfil completely and 
 continually every one of the Ten Commandments. The 
 Bible said plainly, ' Cursed is every one that continueth 
 not in all things which are written in the book of the law 
 to do them.' ' The soul that sinneth it shall die.' The 
 Ten Commandments extended into many more, and to 
 fail in a single one was as fatal as to break them all. A 
 man might go on for a long time, for sixty years perhaps, 
 without falling. Bunyan does not mean that anyone 
 really could do all this, but he assumes the possibility ; 
 yet he says if the man slipped once before he died, he 
 would eternally perish. The law did not refer to words 
 and actions only, but to thoughts and feelings. It fol-
 
 iv.] CALL TO THE MINISTRY. 57 
 
 lowed a man in his prayers, and detected a wandering 
 thought. It allowed no repentance to those who lived 
 and died under it. If it was asked whether God could 
 not pardon, as earthly judges pardon criminals, the answer 
 was, that it is not the law which is merciful to the 
 earthly offender but the magistrate. The law is an 
 eternal principle. The magistrate may forgive a man 
 without exacting satisfaction. The law knows no for- 
 giveness. It can be as little changed as an axiom of 
 mathematics. Repentance cannot undo the past. Let a 
 man leave his sins and live as purely as an angel all the 
 rest of his life, his old faults remain in the account against 
 him, and his state is as bad as ever it was. God's justice 
 once offended knows not pity or compassion, but runs on 
 the offender like a lion and throws him into prison, there 
 to lie to all eternity unless infinite satisfaction be given 
 to it. And that satisfaction no son of Adam could pos- 
 sibly make. 
 
 This conception of Divine justice, not as a sentence of 
 a judge, but as the action of an eternal law, is identical with 
 Spinoza's. That every act involves consequences which 
 cannot be separated from it, and may continue operative 
 to eternity, is a philosophical position which is now gene- 
 rally admitted. Combined with the traditionary notions 
 of a future judgment and punishment in hell, the recog- 
 nition that there was a law in the case and that tho law 
 could not be broken, led to the frightful inference that 
 each individual was liable to be kept alive and tortured 
 through all eternity. And this, in fact, was the fate really 
 in store for every human creature unless some extra- 
 ordinary remedy could be found. Bunyan would allow 
 no merit to anyone. He would not have it supposed that 
 only the profane or grossly wicked were in danger from 

 
 58 BUNYAN. [CHAP. 
 
 the law. ' A man,' he says, ' may be turned from a vain, 
 loose, open, profane conversation and sinning against the 
 law, to a holy, righteous, religious life, and yet be under 
 the same state and as sure to be damned as the others 
 that are more profane and loose.' The natural man might 
 think it strange, but the language of the curse was not to 
 be mistaken. Cursed is every one who has failed to fulfil 
 the whole law. There was not a person in the whole 
 world who had not himself sinned in early life. All had 
 sinned in Adam also, and St. Paul had said in consequence, 
 ' There is none that doeth good, no, not one ! The law 
 was given not that we might be saved by obeying it, but 
 that we might know the holiness of God and our own 
 vileness, and that we might understand that we should 
 not be damned for nothing. God would have no quarrel- 
 ling at His just condemning of us at that day.' 
 
 This is Banyan's notion of the position in which we 
 all naturally stand in this world, and from which the 
 substitution of Christ's perfect fulfilment of the law alone 
 rescues us. It is calculated, no doubt, to impress on us 
 a profound horror of moral evil when the penalty at- 
 tached to it is so fearful. But it is dangerous to in- 
 troduce into religion metaphysical conceptions of ' law.' 
 The cord cracks that is strained too tightly ; and it is 
 only for brief periods of high spiritual tension that a 
 theology so merciless can sustain itself. No one with a 
 conscience in him will think of claiming any merit for 
 himself. But we know also that there are degrees of 
 demerit, and, theory or no theory, we fall back on the 
 first verse of the English Liturgy, as containing a more 
 endurable account of things. 
 
 For this reason, among others, Bunyan disliked the 
 Liturgy. He thought the doctrine of it false, and he
 
 iv.J CALL TO THE MINISTRY. 59 
 
 objected to a Liturgy on principle. He has a sermon on 
 Prayer, in which he insists that to be worth anything 
 prayer must be the expression of an inward feeling ; and 
 that people cannot feel in lines laid down for them. Forms 
 of prayer he thought especially mischievous to children, 
 as accustoming them to use words to which they attached 
 no meaning. 
 
 ' My judgment,' he says, ' is that men go the wrong 
 way to learn their children to pray. It seems to me a 
 better way for people to tell their children betimes what 
 cursed creatures they are, how they are under the wrath 
 of God by reason of original and actual sin ; also to tell 
 them the nature of God's wrath and the duration of 
 misery, which if they would conscientiously do, they 
 would sooner learn their children to pray than they do. 
 The way that men learn to pray is by conviction of sin, 
 and this is the way to make our " sweet babes " do so 
 too.' 
 
 ' Sweet babes ' is unworthy of Bunyan. There is 
 little sweetness in a state of things so stern as he con- 
 ceives. He might have considered, too, that there was 
 a danger of making children unreal in another and worse 
 sense by teaching them doctrines which neither child nor 
 man can comprehend. It may be true that a single sin 
 may consign me to everlasting hell, but I cannot be made 
 to acknowledge the justice of it. 'Wrath of God' and 
 such expressions are out of place when we are brought 
 into the presence of metaphysical laws. Wrath cor- 
 responds to free-will misused. It is senseless and extra- 
 vagant when pronounced against actions which men 
 cannot help, when the faulty action is the necessary con- 
 sequence of their nature, and the penalty the necessary 
 consequence of the action.
 
 60 BUNYAN. [CHAP. 
 
 The same confusion of thought lies in the treatment 
 of the kindred subjects of Free-will, Election, and Re- 
 probation. The logic must be maintained, and God's 
 moral attributes simultaneously vindicated. Bunyan 
 argues about it as ingeniously as Leibnitz himself. Those 
 who suppose that specific guilt attaches to particular acts, 
 that all men are put into the world, free to keep the Com- 
 mandments or to break them, that they are equally able 
 to do one as to do the other, and are, therefore, proper ob- 
 jects of punishment, hold an opinion which is consistent 
 in itself, but is in entire contradiction with facts. Chil- 
 dren are not as able to control their inclinations as grown 
 men, and one man is not as able to control himself as 
 another. Some have no difficulty from the first, and are 
 constitutionally good ; some are constitutionally weak, or 
 have incurable propensities for evil. Some are brought 
 up with care and insight ; others seem never to have any 
 chance at all. So evident is this, that impartial thinkers 
 have questioned the reality of human guilt in the sense 
 in which it is generally understood. Even Butler allows 
 that if we look too curiously we may have a difficulty in 
 finding where it lies. And here, if anywhere, there is a 
 real natural truth in the doctrine of Election, independent 
 of the merit of those who are so happy as to find favour. 
 Bunyan, however, reverses the inference. He will have 
 all guilty together, those who do well and those who do 
 ill. Even the elect are in themselves as badly off as the 
 reprobate, and are equally included under sin. Those 
 who are saved are saved for Christ's merits and not for 
 their own. 
 
 Men of calmer temperament accept facts as they 
 find them. They are too conscious of their ignorance to 
 insist on explaining problems which are beyond their
 
 IT.] CALL TO THE MINISTRY. 61 
 
 reach. Bunyan lived in an age of intense religious ex- 
 citement, when the strongest minds were exercising them- 
 selves on those questions. It is noticeable that the most 
 effective intellects inclined to necessitarian conclusions : 
 some in the shape of Calvinism, some in the correspond- 
 ing philosophic form of Spinozism. From both alike 
 there came an absolute submission to the decrees of God, 
 and a passionate devotion to his service ; while the 
 morality of Free-will is cold and calculating ; appeals to 
 a sense of duty do not reach beyond the understanding ; 
 the enthusiasm which will stir men's hearts and give 
 them a real power of resisting temptation must be 
 nourished on more invigorating food. 
 
 But I need dwell no more on a subject which is un- 
 suited for these pages. 
 
 The object of Bunyan, like that of Luther, like that 
 of all great spiritual teachers, was to bring his wandering 
 fellow-mortals into obedience to the commandments, even 
 while he insisted on the worthlessness of it. He sounded 
 the strings to others which had sounded loudest in him- 
 self. When he passed from mysticism into matters of 
 ordinary life, he showed the same practical good sense 
 which distinguishes the chief of all this order of thinkers 
 St. Paul. There is a sermon of Bunyan's on Christian be- 
 havioxir, on the duties of parents to children, and masters to 
 servants, which might be studied with as much advantage 
 in English households as the ' Pilgrim's Progress ' itself. 
 To fathers he says, 'Take heed that the misdeeds for 
 which thou correctest thy children be not learned them 
 by thee. Many children learn that wickedness of their 
 parents, for which they beat and chastise them. Take 
 heed that thou smile not upon them to encourage them 
 in small faults, lest that thy carriage to them be an en
 
 62 BUSYAN. [CHAP. 
 
 couragement to them to commit greater faults. Take 
 heed that thou use not unsavoury and unseemly words in 
 thy chastising of them, as railing, miscalling, and the 
 like this is devilish. Take heed that thou do not use 
 them to many chiding words and threaten ings, mixed 
 with lightness and laughter. This will harden.' 
 
 And again : ' I tell you that if parents carry it 
 lovingly towards their children, mixing their mercies 
 with loving rebukes, and their loving rebukes with 
 fatherly and motherly compassions, they are more likely 
 to save their children than by being churlish and severe 
 to them. Even if these things do not save them, if their 
 mercy do them no good, yet it will greatly ease them at 
 the day of death to consider, I have done by love as 
 much as I could to save and deliver my child from hell.' 
 
 Whole volumes on education have said less, or less to 
 the purpose, than these simple words. Unfortunately, 
 parents do not read Bunyan. He is left to children. 
 
 Similarly, he says to masters : 
 
 ' It is thy duty so to behave thyself to thy servant 
 that thy service may not only be for thy good, but for 
 the good of thy servant, and that in body and soul. Deal 
 with him as to admonition as with thy children. Take 
 heed thou do not turn thy servants into slaves by over- 
 charging them in thy work with thy greediness. Take 
 heed thou carry not thyself to thy servant as he of whom 
 it is said, " He is such a man of Belial that his servants 
 cannot speak to him." The Apostle bids you forbear to 
 threaten them, because you also have a Master in 
 Heaven. Masters, give your servants that which is just, 
 just labour and just wages. Servants that are truly godly 
 care not how cheap they serve their masters, provided 
 they may get into godly families, or where they may be
 
 iv.] CALL TO THE MINISTRY. 63 
 
 convenient for the Word. But if a master or mistress 
 takes this opportunity to make a prey of their servants, 
 it is abominable. I have heard poor servants say that in 
 some carnal families they have had more liberty to God's 
 things and more fairness of dealing than among many 
 professors. Such masters make religion to stink before 
 the inhabitants of the land." 
 
 Bunyan was generally charitable in his judgment upon 
 others. If there was any exception, it was of Professors 
 who discredited their calling by conceit and worldliness. 
 
 ' No sin,' he says, ' reigneth more in the world than 
 pride among Professors. The thing is too apparent for 
 any man to deny. We may and do see pride display it- 
 self in the apparel and carriage of Professors almost as 
 much as among any in the land. I have seen church 
 members so decked and bedaubed with their fangles and 
 toys that when they have been at worship I have won- 
 dered with what faces such painted persons could sit in 
 the place where they were without swooning. I onco 
 talked with a maid, by way of reproof for her fond and 
 gaudy garment; she told me the tailor would make it 
 so. Poor proud girl, she gave orders to the tailor to make 
 it so.' 
 
 I will give one more extract from Banyan's pastoral 
 addresses. It belongs to a later period in his ministry, 
 when the law had, for a time, remade Dissent into a crime ; 
 but it will throw light on the part of his story which we 
 are now approaching, and it is in every way very cha- 
 racteristic of him. He is speaking to sufferers under per- 
 secution. He says to them : 
 
 ' Take heed of being offended with magistrates, because 
 by their statutes they may cross thy inclinations. It is 
 given to them to bear the sword, and a command is to
 
 64 BUNYAN. [CH. iv. 
 
 thee, if thy heart cannot acquiesce with all things, with 
 meekness and patience to suffer. Discontent in the mind 
 sometimes puts discontent into the mouth ; and discontent 
 in the mouth doth sometimes also put a halter about thy 
 neck. For as a man speaking a word in jest may for that 
 be hanged in earnest, so he that speaks in discontent may 
 die for it in sober sadness. Above all, get thy conscience 
 possessed more and more with this, that the magistrate is 
 God's ordinance, and is ordered of God as such ; that he 
 is the minister of God to thee for good, and that it is 
 thy duty to fear him and to pray for him ; to give thanks 
 to God for him and be subject to him ; as both Paul and 
 Peter admonish us ; and that not only for wrath, but for 
 conscience sake. For all other arguments come short of 
 binding the soul when this argument is wanting, until we 
 believe that of God we are bound thereto. 
 
 ' I speak not these things as knowing any that are dis- 
 affected to the government, for I love to bo alone, if not 
 with godly men, in things that are convenient. I speafe"" 
 to show my loyalty to the king, and my love to my fellow- 
 subjects, and my desire that all Christians shall walk in 
 ways of peace and truth.'
 
 CHAPTER V. 
 
 ARREST AND TRIAL. 
 
 BUNYAN'S preaching enterprise became an extraordinary 
 success. All the Midland Counties heard of his fame, 
 and demanded to hear him. He had been Deacon under 
 Gifford at the Bedford Church ; but he was in such re- 
 quest as a preacher, that, in 1657, he was released from 
 his duties there as unable to attend to them. Sects were 
 springing up all over England as weeds in a hotbed. He 
 was soon in controversy ; Controversy with Church of 
 England people ; Controversy with the Banters, who be- 
 lieved Christ to be a myth ; Controversy with, certain 
 Quakers who seem to have disbelieved in his Divinity 
 and in the inspiration of the Scriptures. Envy at his 
 rapidly acquired reputation brought him baser enemies. 
 He was called a witch, a Jesuit, a highwayman. It was 
 reported that he had ' his misses,' that he had two wives, 
 &c. ' My foes have missed their mark in this,' he said 
 with honest warmth : ' I am not the man. If all the 
 fornicators and adulterers in England were hanged by 
 the neck, John Bunyan, the object of their envy, would 
 be still alive and well. I know not whether there be 
 such a thing as a woman breathing under the cope of the 
 whole heavens but by their apparel, their children, or 
 common fame, except my wife.' 
 
 F
 
 66 BUNYAN. [CHAP. 
 
 But a more serious trial was now before him. Crom- 
 well passed away. The Protectorate came to an end. 
 England decided that it had had enough of Puritans and 
 republicans, and would give the Stuarts and the Esta- 
 blished Church another trial. A necessaiy consequence 
 was the revival of the Act of Uniformity. The Inde- 
 pendents were not meek like the Baptists, using no weapons 
 to oppose what they disapproved but passive resistance. 
 The same motives which had determined the original con- 
 stitution of a Church combining the characters of Pro- 
 testant and Catholic, instead of leaving religion free, were 
 even more powerful at the Restoration than they had 
 been at the accession of Elizabeth. Before toleration is 
 possible, men must have learnt to tolerate toleration itself ; 
 and in times of violent convictions, toleration is looked 
 on as indifference, and indifference as Atheism in djs- 
 guise. Catholics and Protestants, Churchmen and Dis- 
 senters, regarded one another as enemies of God and 
 the State, with whom no peace was possible. Toleration 
 had been tried by the Yalois princes in France. Church 
 and chapel had been the rendezvous of armed fanatics. 
 The preachers blew the war-trumpet, and every town and 
 village had been the scene of furious conflicts, which cul- 
 minated in the Massacre of St. Bartholomew. The same 
 result would have followed in England if the same ex- 
 periment had been ventured. The different communities 
 were forbidden to have their separate places of worship, 
 and services were contrived which moderate men of all 
 sorts could use and interpret after their own convictions. 
 The instrument required to be delicately handled. It suc- 
 ceeded tolerably as long as Elizabeth lived. "When Eliza- 
 beth died, the balance was no longer fairly kept. The 
 High Church party obtained the ascendancy and abused
 
 v.] ARREST AND TRIAL. 67 
 
 their power. Tyranny brought revolution, and the 
 Catholic element in turn disappeared. The Bishops were 
 displaced by Presbyterian elders. The Presbyterian 
 elders became themselves ' hireling wolves,' ' old priest ' 
 written in new characters. Cromwell had left conscience 
 free to Protestants. But even he had refused equal liberty 
 to Catholics and Episcopalians. He was gone too, and 
 Church and King were back again. How were they to 
 stand ? The stern resolute men, to whom the Common- 
 wealth had been the establishment of God's kingdom 
 upon earth, were as little inclined to keep terms with 
 Antichrist as the Church people had been inclined to 
 keep terms with Cromwell. To have allowed them to 
 meet openly in their conventicles would have been to 
 make over the whole of England to them as a seed-bed in 
 which to plant sedition. It was pardonable, it was even 
 necessary, for Charles II. and his advisers to fall back 
 upon Elizabeth's principles, at least as long as the ashes were 
 still glowing. Indulgence had to be postponed till cooler 
 times. With the Fifth Monarchy men abroad, every 
 chapel, except those of the Baptists, would have been a 
 magazine of explosives. 
 
 Under the 35th of Elizabeth, Nonconformists refusing 
 to attend woi-ship in the parish churches were to be im- 
 prisoned till they made their submission. Three months 
 were allowed them to consider. If at the end of that 
 time they were still obstinate, they were to be banished 
 the realm ; and if they subsequently returned to England 
 without permission from the Crown, they were liable to 
 execution as felons. This Act had fallen with the Long 
 Parliament, but at the Restoration it was held to have 
 revived and to be still in force. The parish churches 
 were cleared of their unordained ministers. The Dis-
 
 68 BUNYAN. [CHAP. 
 
 senters' chapels were closed. The people were required 
 by proclamation to be present on Sundays in their proper 
 place. So the majority of the nation had decided. If 
 they had wished for religious liberty they would not have 
 restored the Stuarts, or they would have insisted on con- 
 ditions, and would have seen that they were observed. 
 
 Venner's plot showed the reality of the danger and 
 justified the precaution. 
 
 The Baptists and Quakers might have been trusted 
 to discourage violence, but it was impossible to distin- 
 guish among the various sects, whose tenets were unknown 
 and even unsettled. The great body of Cromwell's spiri- 
 tual supporters believed that armed resistance to a govern- 
 ment which they disapproved was not only lawful, but 
 was enjoined. 
 
 Thus, no sooner was Charles II. on the throne than 
 the Nonconformists found themselves again under bond- 
 age. Their separate meetings were prohibited, and they 
 were not only forbidden to worship in their own fashion, 
 but they had to attend church, under penalties. The 
 Bedford Baptists refused to obey. Their meeting-house 
 in the town was shut up, but they continued to assemble 
 in woods and outhouses ; Bunyan preaching to them as 
 before, and going to the place in disguise. Informers 
 were soon upon his track. The magistrates had received 
 orders to be vigilant. Bunyan was the most promi- 
 nent Dissenter in the neighbourhood. He was too sen- 
 sible to court martyrdom. He had intended to leave 
 the town till more quiet times, and had arranged to meet 
 a few of his people once more to give them a parting 
 address. It was November 12, 1660. The place agreed 
 on was a house in the village of Samsell near Harling- 
 ton. Notice of his intention was privately conveyed to
 
 v.] ARREST AND TRIAL. 69 
 
 Mr. Winga te, a magistrate in the adjoining district. The 
 constables were set to watch the house, and were directed 
 to bring Bunyan before him. Some member of the con- 
 gregation heard of it. Bunyan was warned, and was 
 advised to stay at home that night, or else to conceal 
 himself. His departure had been already arranged ; but 
 when he learnt that a warrant was actually out against 
 him, he thought that he was bound to stay and face the 
 danger. He was the first Nonconformist who had been 
 marked for arrest. If he flinched after he had been 
 singled out by name, the whole body of his congregation 
 would be discouraged. Go to church he would not, or 
 promise to go to church ; but he was willing to suffer 
 whatever punishment the law might order. Thus at the 
 time and place which had been agreed on, he was in the 
 room, at Samsell, with his Bible in his hand, and was 
 about to begin his address, when the constables entered 
 and arrested him. He made no resistance. He desired 
 only to be allowed to say a few words, which the con- 
 stables permitted. He then prepared to go with them. 
 He was not treated with any roughness. It was too late 
 to take him that night before the magistrate. His friends 
 undertook for his appearance when he should be required, 
 and he went home with them. The constables came for 
 him again on the following afternoon. 
 
 Mr. Wingate, when the information was first brought 
 to him, supposed that he had fallen on a nest of Fifth 
 Monarchy men. He enquired, when Bunyan was brought 
 in, how many arms had been found at the meeting. When 
 he learnt that there were no arms, and that it had no 
 political character whatever, he evidently thought it was 
 a matter of no consequence. He told Bunyan that he 
 had been breaking the law, and asked him why he could
 
 70 BUNYAN. [CHAP. 
 
 not attend to his business. Bunyan said that his object 
 in teaching was merely to persuade people to give up their 
 sins. He could do that and attend to his business also. 
 Wingate answered that the law must be obeyed. He 
 must commit Bunyan for trial at the Quarter Sessions ; but 
 he would take bail for him, if his securities would engage 
 that he would not preach again meanwhile. Bunyan re- 
 fused to be bailed on any such terms. Preach he would 
 and must, and the recognizances would be forfeited. After 
 such an answer, Wingate could only send him to gaol : 
 he could not help himself. The committal was made out, 
 and Bunyan was being taken away, when two of his 
 friends met him, who were acquainted with Wingate, and 
 they begged the constable to wait. They went in to the 
 magistrate. They told him who and what Bunyan was. 
 The magistrate had not the least desire to be hard, and it 
 was agreed that if he would himself give some genera], 
 promise of a vague kind he might be let go altogether. 
 Bunyan was called back. Another magistrate who knew 
 him had by this time joined Wingate. They both said 
 that they were reluctant to send him to prison. If he 
 would promise them that he would not call the people to- 
 gether any more, he might go home. 
 
 They had purposely chosen a form of words which 
 would mean as little as possible. But Bunyan would not 
 accept an evasion. He said that he would not force the 
 people to come together, but if he was in a place where 
 the people were met, he should certainly speak to them. 
 The magistrate repeated that the meetings were unlawful. 
 They would be satisfied if Bunyan would simply promise 
 that he would not call such meetings. It was as plain as 
 possible that they wished to dismiss the case, and they 
 were thrusting words into his mouth which he could use
 
 v.] ARREST AND TRIAL. 71 
 
 without a mental reservation ; but he persisted that there 
 were many ways in which a meeting might be called ; if 
 people came together to hear him, knowing that he would 
 speak, he might be said to have called them together. 
 
 Remonstrances and entreaties were equally useless, 
 and, with extreme unwillingness, they committed him to 
 Bedford Gaol to wait for the sessions. 
 
 It is not for us to say that Bunyan was too precise. 
 He was himself the best judge of what his conscience and 
 his situation required. To himself, at any rate, his trial 
 was at the moment most severe. He had been left a 
 widower a year or two before, with four young children, 
 one of them blind. He had lately married a second time. 
 His wife was pregnant. The agitation at her husband's 
 arrest brought on premature labour, and she was lying in 
 his house in great danger. He was an affectionate man, 
 and the separation at such a time was peculiarly distress- 
 ing. After some weeks the quarter sessions came on. 
 Bunyan was indicted under the usual form, that he ' being 
 a person of such and such condition had since such a 
 time devilishly and perniciously abstained from coming 
 to church to hear Divine service, and was a common up- 
 holder of unlawful meetings and conventicles, to the great 
 disturbance and distraction of the good subjects of this 
 kingdom, contrary to the laws of our Sovereign Lord the 
 King.' 
 
 There seems to have been a wish to avoid giving him 
 a formal trial. He was not required to plead, and it may 
 havo been thought that he had been punished sufficiently. 
 Ho was asked why ho did not go to church 1 He said 
 that the Prayer-book was made by man ; he was ordered 
 in the Bible to pray with the spirit and the understanding, 
 not with the spirit and the Prayer-book. The magistrates,
 
 72 BUNYAN. [CHAP. 
 
 referring to another Act of Parliament, cautioned Bunyan 
 against finding fault with the Prayer-book, or he would 
 bring himself into further trouble. Justice Keelin who 
 presided said (so Bunyan declares, and it has been the 
 standing jest of his biographers ever since) that the 
 Prayer-book had been in use ever since the Apostles' 
 time. Perhaps the words were that parts of it had been 
 then in use (the Apostles' Creed, for instance), and thus 
 they would have been strictly true. However this might 
 be, they told him kindly, as Mr. Wingate had done, that 
 it would be better for him if he would keep to his proper 
 work. The law had prohibited conventicles. He might 
 teach, if he pleased, in his own family and among his 
 friends. He must not call large numbers of people to- 
 gether. He was as impracticable as before, and the 
 magistrates, being but unregenerate mortals, may be 
 pardoned if they found him provoking. If, he said, it 
 was lawful for him to do good to a few, it must be equally 
 lawful to do good to many. He had a gift, which he was 
 bound to use. If it was sinful for men to meet together 
 to exhort one another to follow Christ, he should sin 
 still. 
 
 He was compelling the Court to punish him, whether 
 they wished it or not. He describes the scene as if the 
 choice had rested with the magistrates to convict him or 
 to let him go. If he was bound to do his duty, they were 
 equally bound to do theirs. They took his answers as a 
 plea of guilty to the indictment, and Justice Keelin, 
 who was chairman, pronounced his sentence in the terms 
 of the Act. He was to go to prison for three months ; if, 
 at the end of three months, he still refused to conform, he 
 was to be transported ; and if he came back without license 
 Le would be hanged. Bunyan merely answered, ' If I
 
 v.] ARREST AND TTJAL. 73 
 
 were out of prison to-day, I would preach the Gospel again 
 to-morrow.' More might have followed, but the gaoler 
 led him away. 
 
 There were three gaols in Bedford, and no evidence 
 has been found to show in which of the three Bunyan was 
 confined. Two of them, the county gaol and the town 
 gaol, were large roomy buildings. Tradition has chosen 
 the third, a small lock-up, fourteen feet square, which 
 stood over the river between the central arches of the 
 old bridge ; and as it appears from the story that he had 
 at times fifty or sixty fellow -prisoners, and as he admits 
 himself that he was treated at first with exceptional 
 kindness, it may be inferred that tradition, in selecting 
 the prison 011 the bridge, was merely desiring to exhibit 
 the sufferings of the Nonconformist martyr in a sensa- 
 tional form, and that he was never in this prison at all. 
 When it was pulled down in 1811 a gold ring was found 
 in the rubbish, with the initials ' J. B.' upon it. This 
 is one of the ' trifles light as air ' which carry convic- 
 tion to the 'jealous ' only, and is too slight a foundation 
 on which to assert a fact so inherently improbable. 
 
 When the three months were over, the course of law 
 would have brought him again to the bar, when he 
 would have had to choose between conformity and exile. 
 There was still the same desire to avoid extremities, and 
 as the day approached, the clerk of the peace was sent 
 to persuade him into some kind of compliance. Various 
 insurrections had broken out since his arrest, and must 
 have shown him, if he could have reflected, that there 
 was real reason for the temporary enforcement of the 
 Act. He was not asked to give up preaching. He was 
 asked only to give up public preaching. It was well 
 known that he had no disposition to rebellion. Even the
 
 74 EUNYAN. [CHAP. 
 
 going to church was not insisted on. The clerk of the 
 peace told him that he might * exhort his neighbours in 
 private discourse/ if only he would not bring the people 
 together in numbers, which the magistrates would be 
 bound to notice. In this way he might continue his use- 
 fulness, and would not be interfered with. 
 
 Bunyan knew his own freedom from seditious inten- 
 tions. He would not see that the magistrates could not 
 suspend the law and make an exception in his favour. 
 They were going already to the utmost limit of indulgence. 
 But the more he disapproved of rebellion, the more punc- 
 tilious he was in carrying out resistance of another kind 
 which he held to be legitimate. He was a representative 
 pei-son, and he thought that in yielding he would hurt 
 the cause of religious liberty. ' The law,' he said, ' had 
 provided two ways of obeying one to obey actively, and 
 if he could not in conscience obey actively, then to suffer 
 whatever penalty was inflicted on him.' 
 
 The clerk of the peace could produce no effect. Bun- 
 yan rather looked on him as a false friend trying to 
 entangle him. The three months elapsed, and the magis- 
 trates had to determine what was to be done. If Bunyan 
 was brought before them, they must exile him. His case 
 was passed over and he was left in prison, where his wife 
 and children were allowed to visit him daily. He did not 
 understand the law or appreciate their forbearance. He 
 exaggerated his danger. At the worst he could only have 
 been sent to America, where he might have remained as 
 long as he pleased. He feared that he might perhaps be 
 hanged. 
 
 ' I saw what was coming,' he said, ' and had two 
 considerations especially on my heart, how to be able to 
 ondure, should my imprisonment be long and tedious, and
 
 v.] ARREST AND TEIAL. 75 
 
 how to be able to encounter death should that be my por- 
 tion. I was made to see that if I would suffer rightly, I 
 must pass sentence of death upon everything that can 
 properly be called a thing of this life, even to reckon my- 
 self, my wife, my children, my health, my enjoyments all 
 as dead to me, and myself as dead to them. Yet I was a 
 man compassed with infirmities. The parting with my 
 wife and poor children hath often been to me in this place 
 (the prison in which he was writing) as the pulling of my 
 flesh from my bones ; and that not only because I am too, 
 too, fond of those great mercies, but also because I shoiild 
 have often brought to my mind the hardships, miseries, 
 and wants my poor family was like to meet with should 
 I be taken from them, especially my poor blind child, 
 who lay nearer my heart than all I had besides. Poor 
 child, thought I, what sorrow art thou like to have for 
 thy portion in this world ! Thou must be beaten, suffer 
 hunger, cold, nakedness, and a thousand calamities, though 
 I cannot now endure the wind should blow on thee. But 
 yet, thought I, I must venture all with God, though it 
 goeth to the quick to leave you. I was as a man who 
 was pulling down his house upon the head of his wife and 
 children. Yet thought I, I must do it I must do it. I 
 had this for consideration, that if I should now venture 
 all for God, I engaged God to take care of my concern- 
 ments. Also I had dread of the torments of hell, which 
 I was sure they must partake of that for fear of the cross 
 do shrink from their profession. I had this much upon 
 my spirit, that my imprisonment might end in the gallows 
 for aught I could tell. In the condition I now was in 
 I was not fit to die, nor indeed did I think I could if I 
 should be called to it. I feared I might show a weak, 
 heart, and give occasion to the enemy. This lay with
 
 76 BUNYAN. [CHAP. 
 
 great trouble on me, for methought I was ashamed to die 
 with a pale face and tottering knees for such a cause as 
 this. The things of God were kept out of my sight. 
 The tempter followed me with, " But whither must you 
 go when you die ? What will become of you ? What 
 evidence have you for heaven and glory, and an inheri- 
 tance among them that are sanctified 1 " Thus was I 
 tossed many weeks ; but I felt it was for the Word and 
 way of God that I was in this condition. God might 
 give me comfort or not as He pleased. I was bound, but 
 He was free yea, it was my duty to stand to His Word, 
 whether He would ever look upon me or no, or save me 
 at the last. Wherefore, thought I, the point being thus, 
 I am for going on and venturing my eternal state with 
 Christ, whether I have comfort here or no. If God does 
 not come in, thought I, I will leap off the ladder even 
 blindfold into eternity, sink or swini, come heaven, come 
 hell. Now was my heart full of comfort.' 
 
 The ladder was an imaginary ladder, but the resolu- 
 tion was a genuine manly one, such as lies at the bottom 
 of all brave and honourable action. Others who have 
 thought very differently from Bunyan about such matters 
 have felt the same as he felt. Be true to yourself what- 
 ever comes, even if damnation come. Better hell with an 
 honest heart, than heaven with cowardice and insincerity. 
 It was the more creditable to Bunyan, too, because the 
 spectres and hobgoblins had begun occasionally to revisit 
 him. 
 
 ' Of all temptations I ever met with in my life,' he 
 says, ' to question the being of God and the truth of His 
 Gospel is the worst and worst to be borne. When this 
 temptation comes it takes my girdle from me and removes 
 the foundation from under me. Though God has visited
 
 v.] ARREST AND TRIAL. 77 
 
 my soul with never so blessed a discovery of Himself, yet 
 afterwards I have been in my spirit so filled with dark- 
 ness, that I could not so much as once conceive what 
 that God and that comfort was with which I had been 
 refreshed.
 
 CHAPTER VI. 
 
 THE BEDFORD GAOL. 
 
 THE irregularities in the proceedings against Bunyan had 
 perhaps been suggested by the anticipation of the general 
 pardon which was expected in the following spring. At 
 the coronation of Charles, April 23, 1661, an order was 
 issued for the release of prisoners who were in gaol for 
 any offences short of felony. Those who were waiting 
 their trials were to be let go at once. Those convicted and 
 under sentence might sue out a pardon under the Great 
 Seal at any time within a year from the proclamation. 
 Was Bunyan legally convicted or not ? He had not 
 pleaded directly to the indictment. No evidence had 
 been heard against him. His trial had been a conver- 
 sation between himself and the Court. The point had 
 been raised by his friends. His wife had been in London 
 to make interest for him, and a peer had presented a 
 petition in Bunyan's behalf in the House of Lords. The 
 judges had been directed to look again into the matter 
 at the midsummer assizes. The high sheriff was active 
 in Bunyan's favour. The Judges Twisden, Chester, and 
 no less a person than Sir Matthew Hale, appear to have 
 concluded that his conviction was legal, that he could not 
 be tried again, and that he must apply for pardon in the 
 regular way. His wife, however, at the instance of the
 
 CH. vi.] THE BEDFOED GAOL. 79 
 
 sheriff, obtained a hearing, and they listened courteously 
 to what she had to say. When she had done, Mr. Justice 
 Twisden put the natural question, whether, if her hus- 
 band was released, he would refrain from preaching in 
 public for the future. If he intended to repeat his offence 
 immediately that he was at liberty, his liberty would only 
 bring him into a worse position. The wife at once said 
 that he dared not leave off preaching as long as he could 
 speak. The judge asked if she thought her husband was 
 to be allowed to do as he pleased. She said that he was 
 a peaceable pei-son, and wished only to be restored to a 
 position in which he could maintain his family. They 
 had four small children who could not help themselves, 
 one of them being blind, and they had nothing to live 
 upon as long as her husband was in prison but the charity 
 of their friends. Hale remarked that she looked very 
 young to have four children. ' I am but mother-in-law 
 to them,' she said, ' having not been married yet full two 
 years. I was with child when my husband was first ap- 
 prehended, but being young, I being dismayed at the 
 news fell in labour, and so continued for eight days. I 
 was delivered, but my child died.' 
 
 Hale was markedly kind. He told her that as the 
 conviction had been recorded they could not set it asidei 
 She might sue out a pardon if she pleased, or she might 
 obtain ' a writ of eiror,' which would be simpler and less 
 expensive. 
 
 She left the court in tears tears, however, which 
 were not altogether tears of suffering innocence. ' It was 
 not so much,' she said, ' because they were so hardhearted 
 against me and my husband, but to think what a sad ac- 
 count such poor creatures would have to give at the 
 coming of the Lord.' No doubt both Bunyau and she
 
 80 BUNYAN. [CHAP. 
 
 thought themselves cruelly injured, and they confounded 
 the law with the administration of it. Persons better in- 
 formed than they often choose to forget that judges are 
 sworn to administer the law which they find, and rail at 
 them as if the sentences which they are obliged by their 
 o.iths to pass were their own personal acts. 
 
 A pardon, it cannot be too often said, would have been 
 of no use to Bunyan, because he was determined to per- 
 severe in disobeying a law which he considered to be im- 
 just. The most real kindness which could be shown to 
 him was to leave him where he was. His imprisonment 
 was intended to be little more than nominal. His gaoler, 
 not certainly without the sanction of the sheriff, let him 
 go where he pleased ; once even so far as London. He 
 used his liberty as he had declared that he would. ' I fol- 
 lowed my wonted course of preaching,' he says, ' taking 
 all occasions that were put in my hand to visit the people 
 of God.' This was deliberate defiance. The authorities 
 saw that he must be either punished in earnest or the 
 law would fall into contempt. He admitted that he ex- 
 pected to be ' roundly dealt with.' His indulgences were 
 withdrawn, and he was put into close confinement. 
 
 Sessions now followed sessions, and assizes, assizes. 
 His detention was doubtless irregular, for by law he 
 should have been sent beyond the seas. He petitioned 
 to be brought to trial again, and complained loudly that 
 his petition was not listened to ; but no legislator, in 
 framing an Act of Parliament, ever contemplated an 
 offender in so singular a position. Bunyan was simply 
 trying his strength against the Crown and Parliament. 
 The judges and magistrates respected his character, and 
 were unwilling to drive him out of the country ; he had 
 himself no wish for liberty on that condition The only
 
 vi.] THE BEDFORD GAOL. 81 
 
 resource, therefore, was to prevent him forcibly from re- 
 peating an offence that would compel them to adopt 
 harsh measures which they were so earnestly trying to 
 avoid. 
 
 Such was the world-famous imprisonment of John 
 Bunyan, which has been the subject of so much eloquent 
 declamation. It lasted in all for more than twelve years. 
 It might have ended at any time if he would have pro- 
 mised to confine his addresses to a private circle. It did 
 end after six years. He was released under the first de- 
 claration of indulgence ; but as he instantly recommenced 
 his preaching, he was arrested again. Another six yeai-s 
 went by ; he was again let go, and was taken once more 
 immediately after, preaching in a wood. This time he 
 was detained but a few months, and in form more than 
 reality. The policy of the government was then changed, 
 and he was free for the rest of his life. 
 
 His condition during his long confinement has fur- 
 nished a subject for pictures which if correct would be 
 extremely affecting. It is true that, being unable to 
 attend to his usual business, he spent his unoccupied 
 hours in making tags for bootlaces. With this one fact 
 to build on, and with the assumption that the scene of 
 his sufferings was the Bridge Lockhouse, Nonconformist 
 imagination has drawn a ' den ' for us, ' where there was 
 not a yard or a court to walk in for daily exercise ; ' ' a 
 damp and dreary cell ; ' ' a narrow chink which admits 
 a few scanty rays of light to render visible the abode of 
 woe ; ' ' the prisoner, pale and emaciated, seated on the 
 humid earth, pursuing his daily task, to earn the morsel 
 which prolongs his existence and his confinement together 
 Near him, reclining in pensive sadness, his blind daughter, 
 fivo other distressed children, and an affectionate wife, 
 
 o
 
 82 BUNYAN. [CHAP. 
 
 whom pinching want and grief have worn down to the 
 gate of death. Ten summer suns have rolled over the 
 mansion of his misery whose reviving rays have never 
 once penetrated his sad abode/ &c. &c. 
 
 If this description resembles or approaches the truth, 
 I can but say that to have thus abandoned to want their 
 most distinguished pastor and his family was intensely 
 discreditable to the Baptist community. English prisons 
 in the seventeenth century were not models of good 
 management. But prisoners, whose friends could pay 
 for them, were not consigned to damp and dreary cells ; 
 and in default of evidence of which not a particle exists, 
 I cannot charge so reputable a community with a neglect 
 so scandalous. The entire story is in itself incredible. 
 Bunyan was prosperous in his business. He was re- 
 spected and looked up to by a large and growing body 
 of citizens, including persons of wealth and position in 
 London. He was a representative sufferer fighting the 
 battle of all the Nonconformists in England. He had 
 active supporters in the town of Bedford and among the 
 gentlemen of the county. The authorities, so far as can 
 be inferred from their actions, tried from the first to deal 
 as gently with him as he would allow them to do. Is it 
 conceivable that the Baptists would have left his family 
 to starve ; or that his own confinement would have been 
 made so absurdly and needlessly cruel 1 Is it not far 
 more likely that he found all the indulgences which 
 money could buy and the rules of the prison would allow? 
 Bunyan is not himself responsible for these wild legends. 
 Their real character appears more clearly when we observe 
 how he was occupied during these years. 
 
 Friends, in the first place, had free access to him, and 
 strangers who were drawn to him by reputation ; while
 
 ti.] THE BEDFOKD GAOL. 83 
 
 the gaol was considered a private place, and he was al- 
 lowed to preach there, at least occasionally, to his fellow- 
 prisoners. Charles Doe, a distinguished Nonconformist, 
 visited him in his confinement, and has left an account of 
 what he saw. ' When I was there,' he writes, ' there were 
 about sixty dissenters besides himself, taken but a little 
 before at a religious meeting at Kaistor, in the county of 
 Bedford, besides two eminent dissenting ministers, Mr. 
 Wheeler and Mr. Dun, by which means the prison was 
 much crowded. Yet, in the midst of all that hurry, I 
 heard Mr. Bunyan both preach and pray with that mighty 
 spirit of faith and plerophory of Divine assistance, that 
 he made me stand and wonder. Here they could sing 
 without fear of being over-heard, no informers prowling 
 round, and the world shut out.' 
 
 This was not all. A fresh and more severe Con- 
 venticle Act was passed in 1G70. Attempts were made 
 to levy fines in the town of Bedford. There was a riot 
 there. The local officers refused to assist in quelling it. 
 The shops were shut. Bedford was occupied by soldiers. 
 Yet, at this very time, Bunyan was again allowed to go 
 abroad through general connivance. He spent his nights 
 with his family. He even preached now and then in the 
 woods. Once when he had intended to be out for the 
 night, information was given to a clerical magistrate in 
 the neighbourhood, who disliked him, and a constable 
 was sent to ascertain if the prisoners were all within 
 ward. Bunyan had received a hint of what was coming. 
 He was in his place when the constable came ; and the 
 governor of the gaol is reported to have said to him, ' You 
 may go out when you please, for you know better when 
 to return than I can tell you.' Parliament might pass 
 laws, but the execution of them depended on the local 
 el
 
 84 BUNYAN. [.CHAP. 
 
 authorities. Before the Declaration of Indulgence, the 
 Baptist church in Bedford was reopened. Bunyan, while 
 still nominally in confinement, attended its meetings. In 
 1671 he became an Elder; in December of that year he 
 was chosen Pastor. The question was raised whether, as 
 a prisoner, he was eligible. The objection would not have 
 been set aside had he been unable to undertake the duties 
 of the office. These facts prove conclusively that, for a 
 part at least of the twelve years, the imprisonment was 
 little more than formal. He could not have been in the 
 Bridge Gaol when he had sixty fellow-prisoners, and 
 was able to preach to them in private. It is unlikely 
 that at any time he was made to suffer any greater hard- 
 ships than were absolutely inevitable. 
 
 But whether Bunyan's confinement was severe or easy, 
 it was otherwise of inestimable value to him. It gave 
 him leisure to read and reflect. Though he preached 
 often, yet there must have been intervals, perhaps long 
 intervals, of compulsory silence. The excitement of per- 
 petual speech-making is fatal to the exercise of the higher 
 qualities. The periods of calm enabled him to discover 
 powers in himself of which he might otherwise havo 
 never known the existence. Of books he had but few ; 
 for a time only the Bible and Foxe's ' Martyrs.' But the 
 Bible thoroughly known is a literature of itself the 
 rarest and the richest in all departments of thought or 
 imagination which exists. Foxe's ' Martyrs,' if he had 
 a complete edition of it, would have given him a very 
 adequate knowledge of history. With those two books 
 he had no cause to complain of intellectual destitution. 
 He must have read more, however. He knew George 
 Herbert perhaps Spenser perhaps ' Paradise Lost.' 
 But of books, except of the Bible, he was at no tijae A
 
 vi.] THE BEDFORD GAOL. 85 
 
 great student. Happily for himself, he had no other book 
 of Divinity, and he needed none. His real study was 
 human life as he had seen it, and the human heart as he 
 had experienced the workings of it. Though he never 
 mastered successfully the art of verse, he had other gifts 
 which belong to a true poet. He had imagination, if 
 not of the highest, yet of a very high order. He had 
 infinite inventive humour, tenderness, and, better than 
 all, powerful masculine sense. To obtain the use of these 
 faculties he needed only composure, and this his imprison- 
 ment secured for him. He had published several theo- 
 logical compositions before his arre&t, which have re- 
 latively little value. Those which he wrote in prison 
 even on theological subjects would alone have made 
 him a reputation as a Nonconformist divine. In no 
 other writings are the peculiar views of Evangelical Cal- 
 vinism brought out more clearly, or with a more heart- 
 felt conviction of their truth. They have furnished an 
 arsenal from which English Protestant divines have ever 
 since equipped themselves. The most beautiful of them, 
 ' Grace Abounding to the Chief of Sinners,' is his own 
 spiritual biography, which contains the account of his 
 early history. The first part of the ' Pilgrim's Progress ' 
 was composed there as an amusement. To this, and to 
 his other works which belong to literature, I shall return 
 in a future chapter. 
 
 Visitors who saw him in the gaol found his manner 
 and presence as impressive as his writings. ' He was 
 mild and affable in conversation,' says one of them, ' not 
 given to loquacity or to much discourse, unless some 
 urgent occasion required. It was observed he never fjpoke 
 of himself or of his talents, but seemed low in his own 
 eyes. He was never heard to reproach or revile any,
 
 86 BUNYAN. [CHAP, 
 
 whatever injury he received, but rather rebuked those 
 who did so. He managed all things with such exactness 
 as if he had made it his study not to give offence.' 
 
 The final ' Declaration of Indulgence ' came at last, 
 bringing with it the privilege for which Bunyan had 
 fought and suffered. Charles II. cared as little for 
 liberty as his father or his brother, but he wished to set 
 free the Catholics, and as a step towards it he conceded a 
 general toleration to the Protestant Dissenters. Within 
 two years of the passing of the Conventicle Act of 1670, 
 this and every other penal law against Nonconformists 
 was suspended. They were allowed to open their ' meet- 
 ing houses ' for ' worship and devotion,' subject only to 
 a few easy conditions. The localities were to be specified 
 in which chapels were required, and the ministers were to 
 receive their licenses ft'oni the Crown. To prevent sus- 
 picions, the Roman Catholics were for the present ex- 
 cluded from the benefit of the concession. Mass could 
 be said, as before, only in private houses. A year later 
 the Proclamation was confirmed by Act of Parliament. 
 
 Thus Banyan's long imprisonment was ended. The 
 cause was won. He had been its foremost representative 
 and champion, and was one of the first persons to receive 
 the benefit of the change of policy. He was now forty- 
 four years old. The order for his release was signed on 
 May 8, 1672. His license as pastor of the Baptist chapel 
 at Bedford was issued on the 9th. He established himself 
 in a small house in the town. ' When he came abroad,' 
 says one, ' he found his temporal affairs were gone to 
 wreck, and he had as to them to begin again as if he had 
 newly come into the world. But yet he was not destitute 
 of friends who had all along supported him with neces- 
 saries, and had been very good to his family : so that by
 
 vi.J THE BEDFOKD GAOL. 87 
 
 their assistance, getting things a little about him again, 
 he resolved, as much as possible, to decline worldly busi- 
 ness, and give himself wholly up to the service of God.' 
 As much as possible; but not entirely. In 1685, being 
 afraid of a return of persecution, he made over, as a pre- 
 caution, his Avhole estate to his wife ; ' All and singular 
 his goods, chattels, debts, ready money, plate, rings, 
 household stuff, apparel, utensils, brass, pewter, bedding, 
 and all his other substance.' In this deed he still de- 
 scribes himself as a brazier. The language is that of a 
 man in easy, if not ample circumstances. ' Though by 
 reason of losses which he sustained by imprisonment,' 
 says another biographer, ' his treasures swelled not to 
 excess, he always had sufficient to live decently and 
 creditably.' His writings and his sufferings had made 
 him famous throughout England. He became the actual 
 head of the Baptist community. Men called him, half in 
 irony, half in seriousness, Bishop Bunyan, and he passed 
 the rest of his life honourably and innocently, occupied 
 in writing, preaching, district visiting, and opening 
 daughter churches. Happy in his work, happy in the 
 sense that his influence was daily extending spreading 
 over his own country, and to the far-off settlements in 
 America, he spent his last years in his own laud of 
 Beulah, Doubting Castle out of sight, and the towers and 
 minarets of Emmanuel Land growing nearer and clearer 
 as the days went on. 
 
 He had not detected, or at least, at first, he did not 
 detect, the sinister purpose which lay behind the Indul- 
 gence. The exception of the Roman Catholics gave him 
 perfect confidence in the Government, and after his release 
 he published a ' Discourse upon Antichrist,' with a pre- 
 face, in which he credited Charles with the most righteous
 
 88 BUNYAN. [CHAP. 
 
 intentions, and urged his countrymen to be loyal and 
 faithful to him. His object in writing it, he said, ' was 
 to testify his loyalty to the King, his love to the brethren, 
 and his service to his country.' Antichrist was of course 
 the Pope, the deadliest of all enemies to vital Christianity. 
 To its kings and princes England owed its past deliver- 
 ance from him. To kings England must look for his final 
 overthrow. 
 
 ' As the noble King Henry VIII. did cast djwn the 
 Antichristian worship, so he cast down the laws that 
 held it up ; so a^o did the good King Edward his son. 
 The brave Queen Elizabeth, also, the sister of King Ed- 
 ward, left of things of this nature to her lasting fame 
 behind her.' Cromwell he dared not mention perhaps 
 he did not wish to mention him. But he evidently be- 
 lieved that there was better hope in Charles Stuart than 
 in conspiracy and revolution. 
 
 ' Kings,' he said, ' must be the men that shall down 
 with Antichrist, and they shall down with her in God's 
 time. God hath begun to draw the hearts of some of 
 them from her already, and He will set them in time 
 against her round about. If, therefore, they do not that 
 work so fast as we would have them, let us exercise 
 patience and hope in God. 'Tis a wonder they go as fast 
 as they do since the concerns of whole kingdoms lie upon 
 their shoulders, and there are so many Sanballats and 
 Tobias's to natter them and misinform them. Let the 
 King have visibly a place in your hearts, and with heart 
 and mouth give God thanks for him. He is a better 
 Saviour of us than we may be aware of, and hath de- 
 livered tis from more deaths than we can tell how to 
 think. We are bidden to give God thanks for all men, 
 and in the lirst place for kings, and all that are in autho-
 
 vi.] T1IE BEDFORD GAOL. 89 
 
 rity. Be not angry with them, no not in thy thought. 
 But consider if they go not in the work of Reformation 
 so fast as thou wouldest they should, the fault may be 
 thine. Know that thou also hast thy cold and chill 
 frames of heart, and sittest still when thou shouldest be 
 up and doing. Pray for the long life of the King. Pray 
 that God would give wisdom and judgment to the King. 
 Pray that God wo^ld discern all plots and conspiracies 
 against his person and government. 1 do confess myself 
 one of the old-fashioned professors that wish to fear God 
 and honour the King. I am also for blessing them that 
 curse me, for doing good to them that hate me, and for 
 praying for them that despitefully use me and persecute 
 me ; and I have had more peace in the practice of these 
 things than all the world are aware of.' 
 
 The Stuarts, both Charles and James, were grateful 
 for Bunyan's services. The Nonconformists generally 
 went up and down in Royal favour ; lost their privileges 
 and regained them as their help was needed or could be 
 dispensed with. But Bunyan was never more molested. 
 He did what he liked. He preached where he pleased, 
 and no one troubled him or called him to account. He 
 was not insincere. His constancy in enduring so long an 
 imprisonment which a word from him would have ended, 
 lifts him beyond the reach of unworthy suspicions. But 
 he disapproved always of violent measures. His rule 
 was to submit to the law ; and where, as he S'lid, he 
 could not obey actively, then to bear with patience the 
 punishment that might be inflicted on him. Perhaps he 
 really hoped, as long as hope was possible, that good 
 might come out of the Stuarts.
 
 CHAPTER VII. 
 
 LIFE AND DEATH OF MR. BADMAN. 
 
 To his contemporaries Bunyan was known as the Non- 
 conformist Martyr, and the greatest living Protestant 
 preacher. To us he is mainly interesting through his 
 writings, and especially through the ' Pilgrim's Progress.' 
 Although he possessed, in a remarkable degree, the gift 
 of expressing himself in written words, he had himself no 
 value for literature. He cared simply for spiritual truth, 
 and literature in his eyes was only useful as a means of 
 teaching it. Every thing with which a reasonable man 
 could concern himself was confined Avithin the limits of 
 Christian faith and practice. Ambition was folly. Amuse- 
 ment was idle trifling in a life so short as man's, and with 
 issues so far-reaching depending upon it. To understand, 
 and to make others understand, what Christ had done, 
 and what Christ required men to do, was the occupation 
 of his whole mind, and no object ever held his attention 
 except in connection with it. With a purpose so strict, 
 and a theory of religion so precise, there is usiially little 
 play for imagination or feeling. Though we read Pro- 
 testant theology as a duty, we find it as dry in the mouth 
 as sawdust. The literature which would please must repre- 
 sent nature, and nature refuses to be boiind into our dog- 
 matic systems. No object can be pictured truly, except by
 
 CH. vii.] LIFE AND DEATH OF MR. BADMAN. 91 
 
 a mind which has sympathy with it. Shakespeare no more 
 hates lago than lago hates himself. He allows lago to 
 exhibit himself in his own way, as nature does. Every 
 character, if justice is to be done to it, must be painted at 
 its best, as it appears to itself; and a man impressed 
 deeply with religious convictions is generally incapable of 
 the sympathy which would give him an insight into what 
 he disapproves and dislikes. And yet Bunyan, intensely 
 religious as he was, and narrow as his theology was, is 
 always human. His genius remains fresh and vigorous 
 under the least promising conditions. All mankind being 
 under sin together, he has no favourites to flatter, no op- 
 ponents to misrepresent. There is a kindliness in his 
 descriptions, even of the Evil One's attacks upon himself. 
 The ' Pilgrim's Progress,' though professedly an alle- 
 goric story of the Protestant plan of salvation, is con- 
 ceived in the large, wide spirit of humanity itself. 
 Anglo-Catholic and Lutheran, Calvinist and Deist can 
 alike read it with delight, and find their own theories in 
 it. Even the Romanist has only to blot out a few para- 
 graphs, and can discover no purer model of a Christian life 
 to place in the hands of his children. The religion of the 
 ' Pilgrim's Progress ' is the religion which must be always 
 and everywhere, as long as man believes that he has a 
 soul and is responsible for his actions ; and thus it is 
 that, while theological folios once devoured as manna 
 from Heaven now lie on the bookshelves dead as Egyp- 
 tian mummies, this book is wrought into the mind and 
 memory of every well-conditioned English or American 
 child ; while the matured man, furnished with all the 
 knowledge which literature can teach him, still finds the 
 adventures of Christian as charming as the adventures 
 of Ulysses or ^Eneas. He sees there the reflexion of
 
 94 BUNYAN. [CHAP. 
 
 But how neatly expressed are these ' Meditations upon 
 an Egg ' : 
 
 The egg's no chick by falling from a hen, 
 Nor man's a Christian till he's born again ; 
 The egg's at first contained in the shell, 
 Men afore grace in sin and darkness dwell ; 
 The egg, when laid, by warmth is made a chicken, 
 And Christ by grace the dead in sin doth qiiicken ; 
 The egg when first a chick the shell's its prison, 
 So flesh to soul who yet with Christ is risen. 
 
 Or this, ' On a Swallow ' : 
 
 This pretty bird ! Oh, how she flies and sings ; 
 But could she do so if she had not wings ? 
 Her wings bespeak my faith, her songs my peace ; 
 When I believe and sing, my doublings cease. 
 
 Though the Globe Theatre was, in the opinion of 
 Nonconformists, ' the heart of Satan's empire/ Bunyan 
 must yet have known something of Shakespeare. In the 
 second part of the ' Pilgrim's Progress ' we find : 
 
 Who would true valour see, 
 
 Let him came hither ; 
 One here will constant be, 
 
 Come wind, come weather. 
 
 The resemblance to the song in ' As You Like It ' is 
 too near to be accidental : 
 
 Who doth ambition shun, 
 
 And loves to be in the sun ; 
 
 Seeking the food he eats, 
 
 And pleased with what he gets, 
 
 Come hither, come hither, come hither. 
 
 Here shall be no enemy, 
 
 Save winter and rough weather.
 
 vii.] LIFE AND DEATH OF MR. BADMAN. 9.5 
 
 Bnnyan may, perhaps, have heard the lines, and the 
 rhymes may have clung to him without his knowing 
 whence they came. But he would never have been heard 
 of outside his own communion, if his imagination had 
 found no better form of expression for itself than verse. 
 His especial gift was for allegory, the single form of 
 imaginative fiction which he would not have considered 
 trivial, and his especial instrument was plain, unaffected 
 Saxon prose. * The Holy "War ' is a people's Paradise 
 Lost and Paradise Regained in one. The ' Life of Mr. Bad- 
 man ' is a didactic tale, describing the career of a vulgar, 
 middle-class, unprincipled scoundrel. 
 
 These are properly Bunyan's ' works/ the results of 
 his life so far as it affects the present generation of 
 Englishmen ; and as they are little known, I shall give an 
 account of each of them. 
 
 The ' Life of Badrnan' is presented as a dialogue between 
 Mr. Wiseman and Mr. Attentive. Mr. Wiseman tells the 
 story, Mr. Attentive comments upon it. The names re- 
 call Bunyan's well-known manner. The figures stand 
 for typical characters ; but as the dramatis personce of 
 many writers of fiction, while professing to be beings of 
 flesh and blood are no more than shadows, so Bunyan's 
 shadows are solid men whom we can feel and handle. 
 
 Mr. Badman is, of course, one of the ' reprobate.' 
 Bunyan considered theoretically that a reprobate may 
 to outward appearance have the graces of a saint, and 
 that there may be little in his conduct to mark his true 
 character. A reprobate may be sorry for his sins, he may 
 repent and lead a good life. He may reverence good men 
 and may try to resemble them ; he may pray, and his 
 prayers may be answered ; he may have the spirit of God, 
 and may receive another heart, and yet he may be under
 
 96 BUNYAN. [CHAP. 
 
 the covenant of works, and may be eternally lost. This 
 Bunyan could say while he was writing theology ; but art 
 has its rules as well as its more serious sister, and when 
 he had to draw a living specimen, he drew him as he had 
 seen him in his own Bedford neighbourhood. 
 
 Badman showed from childhood a propensity for evil, 
 He was so ' addicted to lying that his parents could not 
 distinguish when he was speaking the truth. He would 
 invent, tell, and stand to the lies which he invented, with 
 such an audacious face, that one might read in his very 
 countenance the symptoms of a hard and desperate heart. 
 It was not the fault of his parents ; they were much de- 
 jected at the beginnings of their son, nor did he want 
 counsel and correction, if that would have made him 
 better : but all availed nothing.' 
 
 Lying was not Badman's only fault. He took to 
 pilfering and stealing. He robbed his neighbour's' or- 
 chards. He picked up money if he found it lying about. 
 Especially, Mr. Wiseman notes that he hated Sundays. 
 ' Reading Scriptures, godly conferences, repeating of ser- 
 mons and prayers, were things that he could not away 
 with.' 'He was an enemy to that day, because more 
 restraint was laid upon him from his own ways than was 
 possible on any other.' Mr. Wiseman never doubts that 
 the Puritan Sunday ought to have been appreciated by 
 little boys. If a child disliked it, the cause could only be 
 his own wickedness. Young Badman ' was greatly given 
 also to swearing and cursing.' ' He made no more of it ' 
 than Mr. Wiseman made ' of telling his fingers.' ' He 
 counted it a glory to swear and curse, and it was as 
 natural to him as to eat, drink, or sleep.' Bunyan, in 
 this description, is supposed to have taken the picture 
 from himself. But too much may be made of this, Ho
 
 TIL] LIFE AND DEATH OF MR. BADMAN. 97 
 
 was thinking, perhaps, of what he might have been if 
 God's grace had not preserved him. He himself was 
 saved. Badman is represented as given over from the 
 first. Anecdotes, however, are told of contemporary pro- 
 vidential judgments upon swearers, which had much im- 
 pressed Bunyan. One was of a certain Dorothy Mately, 
 a woman whose business was to wash rubbish at the 
 Derby lead mines. Dorothy (it was in the year when 
 Bunyan was first imprisoned), had stolen twopence from 
 the coat of a boy who was working near her. When the 
 boy taxed her with having robbed him, she wished tho 
 ground might swallow her up if she had ever touched his 
 money. Presently after, some children who were watch- 
 ing her, saw a movement in the bank on which she was 
 standing. They called to her to take care, but it was too 
 late. The bank fell in, and she was carried down along 
 with it. A man ran to help her, but the sides of the pit 
 were crumbling round her : a large stone fell on her head ; 
 the rubbish followed, and she was overwhelmed. When 
 she was dug out afterwards, the pence were found in her 
 pocket. Bunyan was perfectly satisfied that her death 
 was supernatural. To discover miracles is not peculiar to 
 Catholics. They will be found wherever there is an active 
 belief in immediate providential government. 
 
 Those more cautious in forming their conclusions will 
 think, perhaps, that the woman was working above some 
 shaft in the mine, that the crust had suddenly broken, 
 and that it would equally have fallen in when gravitation 
 required it to fall, if Dorothy Mately had been a saint. 
 They will remember the words about the Tower of Siloam. 
 But to return to Badman. 
 
 His father, being unable to manage so unpromising a 
 child, bound him out as an apprentice, The master to 
 
 II
 
 98 EUNYAN. [CHAP. 
 
 whom he was assigned was as good a man as the father 
 could find : upright, Godfearing, and especially considerate 
 of his servants. He never worked them too hard. He 
 left them time to read and pray. He admitted no light 
 or mischievous books within his doors. He was not one 
 of those whose religion ' hung as a cloke in his house, 
 and was never seen on him when he went abroad.' His 
 household was as well fed and cared for as himself, and he 
 required nothing of others of which he did not set them 
 an example in his own person. 
 
 This man did his best to reclaim young Badman, and 
 was particularly kind to him. But his exertions were 
 thrown away. The good-for-nothing youth read filthy 
 romances on the sly. He fell asleep in church, or made 
 eyes at the pretty girls. He made acquaintance with low 
 companions. He became profligate, got drunk at alehouses, 
 told his master's property to get money, or stole it out of 
 the cashbox. Thrice he ran away and was taken back 
 again. The third time he was allowed to go. ' The House 
 of Correction would have been the most fit for him, but 
 thither his master was loath to send him, for the love he 
 bore his father.' 
 
 He was again apprenticed ; this time to a master like 
 himself. Being wicked he was given over to wickedness. 
 The ways of it were not altogether pleasant. He was fed 
 worse and he was worked harder than he had been before; 
 when he stole, or neglected his business, he was beaten. 
 He liked his new place, however, better than the old. 
 ' At least, there was no godliness in the house, which he 
 hated worst of all.' 
 
 So far, Bunyan's hero was travelling the usual road of 
 the Idle Apprentice, and the gallows would have been the 
 commonplace ending of it. But this would not have
 
 Vii.] LIFE AND DEATH OF MR. BADMAN. 99 
 
 answered Banyan's purpose. He wished to represent the 
 good-for-nothing character, under the more instructive as- 
 pect of worldly success, which bad men may arrive at as 
 well as good, if they are prudent and cunning. Bunyan 
 gives his hero every chance. He submits him from the 
 first to the best influences ; he creates opportunities for 
 repentance at every stage of a long career opportunities 
 which the reprobate nature cannot profit by, yet increases 
 its guilt by neglecting. 
 
 Badman's term being out, his father gives him money 
 and sets him up as a tradesman on his own account. Mr. 
 Attentive considers this to have been a mistake. Mr. 
 Wiseman answers that even in the most desperate cases, 
 kindness in parents is more likely to succeed than severity, 
 and if it fails they will have the less to reproach them- 
 selves with. The kindness is, of course, thrown away. 
 Badman continues a loose blackguard, extravagant, idle 
 and dissolute. He comes to the edge of ruin. His situa- 
 tion obliges him to think ; and now the interest of the 
 story begins. He must repair his fortune by some means 
 or other. The easiest way is by marriage. There was a 
 young oi-phan lady in the neighbourhood, who was well 
 off and her own mistress. She was a ' professor ' eagerly 
 given to religion, and not so wise as she ought to have 
 been. Badman pretends to be converted. He reforms, 
 or seems to reform. He goes to meeting, sings hymns, 
 adopts the most correct form of doctrine, tells the lady 
 that he does not want her money, but that he wants a 
 companion who will go with him along the road to 
 Heaven. He was plausible, good-looking, and, to all 
 appearance, as absorbed as herself in the one thing need- 
 ful. The congregation warn her, but to no purpose. She 
 
 H2
 
 100 EUNYAN". [CHAP. 
 
 marries him, and finds what she has done too late. In 
 her fortune he has all that he wanted. He swears at her, 
 treats her brutally, brings prostitutes into his house, 
 laughs at her religion, and at length orders her to give 
 it up. When she refuses, Bunyan introduces a special 
 feature of the times, and makes Eadman threaten to turn 
 informer, and bring her favourite minister to gaol. The 
 informers were the natural but most accursed products of 
 the Conventicle Acts. Popular abhorrence relieved itself 
 by legends of the dreadful judgments which had overtaken 
 these wretches. 
 
 In St. Ncots an informer was bitten by a dog. The 
 wound gangrened and the flesh rotted off his bones. In 
 Bedford ' there was one W. S.' (Bunyan probably knew 
 him too well), ' a man of very wicked life, and he, when 
 there seemed to be countenance given to it, would needs 
 turn informer. Well, so he did, and was as diligent in 
 his business as most of them could be. He would watch 
 at nights, climb trees and range the woods of days, if 
 possible to find out the meeters, for then they were 
 forced to meet in the fields. Yea, he would curse them 
 bitterly, and swore most fearfully what he would do to 
 them when he found them. Well, after he had gone on 
 like a Bedlam in his course awhile, and had done some 
 mischief to the people, he was stricken by the hand of 
 God. He was taken with a faltering in his speech, a 
 weakness in the back sinews of his neck, that ofttimes he 
 held up his head by strength of hand. After this his 
 speech went quite away, and he could speak no more than 
 a swine or a bear. Like one of them he would gruntle 
 and make an ugly noise, according as he was offended or 
 pleased, or would have anything done. He walked about 
 till God had made a sufficient spectacle of his judgments
 
 vn.] LIFE AND DEATH OF MR. BADMAN. 101 
 
 for his sin, and then, on a sudden, he was stricken, and 
 died miserably.' 
 
 Badman, says Mr. Wiseman, ' had malice enough in 
 his heart ' to turn informer, but he was growing prudent 
 and had an eye to the future. As a tradesman he had to 
 live by his neighbours. He knew that they would not for- 
 give him, so ' he had that wit in his anger that he did it 
 not.' Nothing else was neglected to make the unfortunate 
 wife miserable. She bore him seven children, also typical 
 figures. ' One was a very gracious child, that loved its 
 mother dearly. This child Mr. Badman could not abide, 
 and it oftenest felt the weight of its father's fingers. 
 Three were as bad as himself. The others that remained 
 became a kind of mongrel professors, not so bad as their 
 father nor so good as their mother, but betwixt them 
 both. They had their mother's notions and their father's 
 actions. Their father did not like them because they had 
 their mother's tongue. Their mother did not like them 
 because they had their father's heart and life, nor were 
 they fit company for good or bad. They were forced with 
 Esau to join in affinity with Ishmael, to wit, to look out 
 for a people that were hypocrites like themselves, and 
 with them they matched and lived and died.' 
 
 Badman meanwhile, with the help of his wife's fortune, 
 grew into an important person, and his character becomes 
 a curious study. ' He went,' we are told, ' to school with 
 the Devil, from his childhood to the end of his life.' Ho 
 was shrewd in matters of business, began to extend his 
 operations, and ' drove a great trade.' He carried a double 
 face. He was evil with the evil. He pretended to ba 
 good with the good. In religion he affected to be a free- 
 thinker, careless of death and judgment, and ridiculing 
 those who feared them ' as frighted with unseen bugbeai-s.'
 
 102 BUNYAN. [CHAP. 
 
 But he wore a mask when it suited him, and admired him- 
 self for the ease with which he could assume whatever 
 aspect was convenient. ' I can be religious and irreligious,' 
 he said ; ' I can be anything or nothing. I can swear and 
 speak against swearing. I can lie and speak against lying. 
 I can drink, wench, be unclean, and defraud, and not be 
 troubled for it. I can enjoy myself and am master of my 
 own ways, not they of me. This I have attained with 
 much study, care, and pains.' ' An Atheist Badman was, 
 if such a thing as an Atheist could be. He was not alone 
 in that mystery. There was abundance of men of the 
 same mind and the same principle. He was only an arch 
 or chief one among them.' 
 
 Mr. Badman now took to speculation, which Banyan's 
 knowledge of business enabled him to describe with in- 
 structive minuteness. His adventures were on a large 
 scale, and by some mistakes and by personal extravagance 
 he had nearly ruined himself a second time. In this 
 condition he discovered a means, generally supposed to be 
 a more modern invention, of ' getting money by hatfuls.' 
 
 ' He gave a sudden and great rush into several men's 
 debts to the value of four or five thousand pounds, driving 
 at the same time a very great trade by selling many things 
 for less than they cost him, to get him custom and blind 
 his creditors' eyes. When he had well feathered his nest 
 with other men's goods and money, after a little while he 
 breaks ; while he had by craft and knavery made so sure 
 of what he had, that his creditors could not touch a penny. 
 He sends mournful sugared letters to them, desiring them 
 not to be severe with him, for he bore towards all men an 
 honest mind, and would pay them as far as he was able. 
 He talked of the greatness of the taxes, the badness of the 
 times, his losses by bad debts, and he brought them to a
 
 vii.] LIFE AND DEATH OF ME. BADMAN. 103 
 
 composition to take five shillings in the pound. His re- 
 lease was signed and sealed, and Mr. Badman could now 
 put his head out of doors again, and be a better man than 
 when he shut up shop by several thousands of pounds.' 
 
 Twice or three times he repeated the same trick with 
 equal success. It is likely enough that Bunyan was 
 drawing from life and perhaps from a member of his own 
 congregation ; for he says that ' he had known a professor 
 do it.' He detested nothing so much as sham religion 
 which was put on as a pretence. ' A professor,' he ex- 
 claims, ' and practise such villanies as these ! Such an 
 one is not worthy the name. Go professors, go leave off 
 profession unless you will lead your lives according to 
 your profession. Better never profess than make profes- 
 sion a stalking horse to sin, deceit, the devil, and hell.' 
 
 Bankruptcy was not the only art by which Badman 
 piled up his fortune. The seventeenth century was not 
 so far behind us as we sometimes persuade ourselves. 
 ' He dealt by deceitful weights and measures. He kept 
 weights to buy by and weights to sell by, measures to buy 
 by and measures to sell by. Those he bought by were 
 too big, and those he sold by were too little. If he had 
 to do with other men's weights and measures, he coulc 
 use a thing called sleight of hand. He had the art be- 
 sides to misreckon men in their accounts, whether by 
 weight or measure or money ; and if a question was made 
 of his faithful dealing, he had his servants ready that 
 would vouch and swear to his look or word. He would 
 sell goods that cost him not the best price by far, for as 
 much as he sold his best of all for. He had also a trick 
 to mingle his commodity, that that which was bad might 
 go off with the least mistrust. If any of his customers 
 paid him money, he would call for payment a second
 
 104 BUNYAN. [CHAP. 
 
 time, and if they could not produce good and sufficient 
 ground of the payment, a hundred to one but they paid it 
 again.' 
 
 ' To buy in the cheapest market and sell in the 
 dearest ' was Mr. Badman's common rule in business. 
 According to modern political economy, it is the cardinal 
 principle of wholesome trade. In Banyan's opinion it 
 was knavery in disguise, and certain to degrade and 
 demoralise everyone who acted upon it. Bunyan had 
 evidently thought on the subject. Mr. Attentive is made 
 to object : 
 
 ' But you know that there is no settled price set by 
 God upon any commodity that is bought or sold under the 
 sun ; but all things that we buy and sell do ebb and flow 
 as to price like the tide. How then shall a man of tender 
 conscience do, neither to wrong the seller, buyer, nor him- 
 self in the buying and selling of commodities 1 ' 
 
 Mr. "Wiseman answers in the spirit of our old Acts of 
 Parliament, before political economy was invented : 
 
 ' Let a man have conscience towards God, charity to 
 his neighbours, and moderation in dealing. Let the 
 tradesman consider that there is not that in great gettings 
 and in abundance which the most of men do suppose ; for 
 all that a man has over and above what serves for his pre- 
 sent necessity and supply, serves only to feed the lusts of 
 the eye. Be thou confident that God's eyes are upon thy 
 ways ; that He marks them, writes them down, and seals 
 tKem up in a bag against the time to come. Be sure that 
 thou rememberest that thou knowest not the day of thy 
 death. Thou shalt have nothing that thou mayest so 
 much as carry away in thy hand. Guilt shall go with 
 thee if thou hast gotten thy substance dishonestly, and 
 they to whom thou shalt leave it shall receive it to their
 
 TIL] LIFE AND DEATH OF MR. BADMAN. 105 
 
 hurt. These things duly considered, I will shew thee 
 how thou should'st live in the practical part of this art. 
 Art thou to buy or sell ? If thou sellest do not commend. 
 If thou buyest do not dispraise, any otherwise but to give 
 the thing that thou hast to do with its just value and 
 worth. Art thou a seller and do things grow cheap 1 set 
 not thy hand to help or hold them up higher. Art thou 
 a buyer and do things grow dear 1 use no cunning or de- 
 ceitful language to pull them down. Leave things to the 
 Providence of God, and do thou with moderation submit 
 to his hand. Hurt not thy neighbour by crying out 
 Scarcity, scarcity ! beyond the truth of things. Especially 
 take heed of doing this by way of a prognostic for time to 
 come. This wicked thing may be done by hoarding up 
 (food) when the hunger and necessity of the poor calls for 
 it. If things rise do thou be grieved. Be also moderate 
 in all thy sellings, and be sure let the poor have a penny- 
 worth, and sell thy corn to those who are in necessity ; 
 which thou wilt do when thou showest mercy to the 
 poor in thy selling to him, and when thou undersellest 
 the market for his sake because he is poor. This is to 
 buy and sell with a good conscience. The buyer thou 
 wrongest not, thy conscience thou wrongest not, thy- 
 self thou wrongest not, for God will surely recompense 
 with thee.' 
 
 These views of Bunyan's are at issue with modern 
 science, but his principles and ours are each adjusted to 
 the objects of desire which good men in those days and 
 good men in ours have respectively set before themselves. 
 If wealth means money, as it is now assumed to do, Bun- 
 yan is wrong and modern science right. If wealth means 
 moral welfare, then those who aim at it will do well to 
 follow Bunyan's advice. It is to be feared that this part
 
 104 BUNYAN. [CHAP. 
 
 time, and if they could not produce good and sufficient 
 ground of the payment, a hundred to one but they paid it 
 again.' 
 
 ' To buy in the cheapest market and sell in the 
 dearest ' was Mr. Badman's common rule in business. 
 According to modern political economy, it is the cardinal 
 principle of wholesome trade. In Bunyan's opinion it 
 was knavery in disguise, and certain to degrade and 
 demoralise everyone who acted upon it. Bunyan had 
 evidently thought on the subject. Mr. Attentive is made 
 to object : 
 
 ' But you know that there is no settled price set by 
 God upon any commodity that is bought or sold under the 
 sun ; but all things that we buy and sell do ebb and flow 
 as to price like the tide. How then shall a man of tender 
 conscience do, neither to wrong the seller, buyer, nor him- 
 self in the buying and selling of commodities ? ' 
 
 Mr. Wiseman answers in the spirit of our old Acts of 
 Parliament, before political economy was invented : 
 
 ' Let a man have conscience towards God, charity to 
 his neighbour's, and moderation in dealing. Let the 
 tradesman consider that there is not that in great gettings 
 and in abundance which the most of men do suppose ; for 
 all that a man has over and above what serves for his pre- 
 sent necessity and supply, serves only to feed the lusts of 
 the eye. Be thou confident that God's eyes are upon thy 
 ways ; that He marks them, writes them down, and seals 
 tKem up in a bag against the time to come. Be sure that 
 thou rememberest that thou knowest not the day of thy 
 death. Thou shalt have nothing that thou mayest so 
 much as carry away in thy hand. Guilt shall go with 
 thee if thou hast gotten thy substance dishonestly, and 
 they to whom thou shalt leave it shall receive it to their
 
 TIL] LIFE AND DEATH OF MR. BADMAN. 105 
 
 hurt. These things duly considered, I will shew thee 
 how thou should'st live in the practical part of this art. 
 Art thou to buy or sell ? If thou sellest do not commend. 
 If thou buyest do not dispraise, any otherwise but to give 
 the thing that thou hast to do with its just value and 
 worth. Art thou a seller and do things grow cheap 1 set 
 not thy hand to help or hold them up higher. Art thou 
 a buyer and do things grow dear ? use no cunning or de- 
 ceitful language to pull them down. Leave things to the 
 Providence of God, and do thou with moderation submit 
 to his hand. Hurt not thy neighbour by crying out 
 Scarcity, scarcity ! beyond the truth of things. Especially 
 take heed of doing this by way of a prognostic for time to 
 come. This wicked thing may be done by hoarding up 
 (food) when the hunger and necessity of the poor calls for 
 it. If things rise do thou be grieved. Be also moderate 
 in all thy sellings, and be sure let the poor have a penny- 
 worth, and sell thy corn to those who are in necessity ; 
 which thou wilt do when thou showest mercy to the 
 poor in thy selling to him, and when thou undersellest 
 the market for his sake because he is poor. This is to 
 buy and sell with a good conscience. The buyer thou 
 wrongest not, thy conscience thou wrongest not, thy- 
 self thou wrongest not, for God will surely recompense 
 with thee.' 
 
 These views of Bunyan's are at issue with modern 
 science, but his principles and ours are each adj usted to 
 the objects of desire which good men in those days and 
 good men in ours have respectively set before themselves. 
 If wealth means money, as it is now assumed to do, Bun- 
 yan is wrong and modern science right. If wealth means 
 moral welfare, then those who aim at it will do well to 
 follow Bunyan's advice. It is to be feared that this part
 
 106 BUNYAN. [CHAP. 
 
 of his doctrine is less frequently dwelt upon by those who 
 profess to admire and follow him, than the theory of im- 
 puted righteousness or justification by faith. 
 
 Mr. Badman by his various ingenuities became a 
 wealthy man. His character as a tradesman could not 
 have been a secret from his neighbours, but money and 
 success coloured it over. The world spoke well of him. He 
 became ' proud and haughty,' took part in public affairs, 
 'counted himself as wise as the wisest in the country, as 
 good as the best, and as beautiful as he that had the most 
 of it.' ' He took great delight in praising himself, and as 
 much in the praises that others gave him.' ' He could 
 not abide that any should think themselves above him, 
 or that their wit and personage should be by others set 
 before his.' He had an objection, nevertheless, to being 
 called proud, and when Mr. Attentive asked why, his 
 companion answered with a touch which reminds us of 
 De Foe, that ' Badman did not tell him the reason. He 
 supposed it to be that which was common to all vile per- 
 sons. They loved their vice, but cared not to bear its 
 name.' Badman said he was unwilling to seem singular 
 and fantastical, and in this way he justified his expensive 
 and luxurious way of living. Singularity of all kinds he 
 affected to dislike, and for that reason his special pleasure 
 was to note the faults of professors. ' If he could get 
 anything by the end that had scandal in it, if it did but 
 touch professors, however falsely reported, oh, then he 
 would glory, laugh and be glad, and lay it upon the 
 whole party. Hang these rogues, he would say, there is 
 not a barrel better herring in all the holy brotherhood of 
 them. Like to like, quoth the Devil to the collier. This 
 is your precise crew, and then he would send them all 
 home with a curse.'
 
 TIL] LIFE AND DEATH OF MR. BADMAN. 107 
 
 Thus Bunyan developed his specimen scoundrel, till 
 he brought him to the high altitudes of worldly pros- 
 perity ; skilful in every villanous art, skilful equally in 
 keeping out of the law's hands, and feared, admired and 
 respected by all his neighbours. The reader who desires 
 to see Providence vindicated would now expect to find 
 him detected in some crimes by which justice could lay 
 hold, and poetical retribution fall upon him in the midst 
 of his triumph. An inferior artist would certainly have 
 allowed his story to end in this way. But Bunyan, satis- 
 fied though he was that dramatic judgments did overtake 
 offenders in this world with direct and startling appro- 
 priateness, was yet aware that it was often otherwise, and 
 that the worst fate which could be inflicted on a com- 
 pletely worthless person was to allow him to work out 
 his career unvisited by any penalties which might have 
 disturbed his conscience and occasioned his amendment. 
 He chose to make his story natural, and to confine himself 
 to natural machinery. The judgment to come Mr. Bad. 
 man laughed at ' as old woman's fable,' but his courage 
 lasted only as long as he was well and strong. One night 
 as he was riding home drunk, his horse fell and he broke 
 his leg. 'You would not think,' says Mr. Wiseman, 
 ' how he swore at first. Then coming to himself, and 
 finding he was badly hurt, he cried out, after the manner 
 of such, Lord help me ; Lord have mercy on me ; good 
 God deliver me, and the like. He was picked up and 
 taken home, where he lay some time. In his pain he 
 called on God, but whether it was that his sin might be 
 pardoned and his soul saved, or whether to be rid of his 
 pain,' Mr. Wiseman ' could not determine.' This leads 
 to several stories of drunkards which Bunyan clearly be- 
 lieved to be literally true. Such facts or legends were the
 
 108 EUXYAN. [CHAP. 
 
 food on which his mind had been nourished. They were 
 in the air which contemporary England breathed. 
 
 ' I have read in Mr. Clarke's Looking-glass for Sin- 
 ners,' Mr. Wiseman said, ' that upon a time a certain 
 drunken fellow boasted in his cups that there was neither 
 heaven nor hell. Also he said, he believed that man had 
 no soul, and that for his own part he would sell his soul 
 to any that would buy it. Then did one of his com- 
 panions buy it of him for a cup of wine, and presently 
 the devil, in man's shape, bought it of that man again at 
 the same price ; and so in the presence of them all laid 
 hold of the soul-seller, and carried him away through the 
 air so that he was no more heard of.' 
 
 Again : 
 
 ' There was one at Salisbury drinking and carousing 
 at a tavern, and he drank a health to the devil, saying 
 that if the devil would not come and pledge him, he could 
 not believe that there was either God or devil. Where- 
 upon his companions, stricken with fear, hastened out of 
 the room, and presently after, hearing a hideous noise 
 and smelling a stinking savour, the vintner ran into the 
 chamber, and coming in he missed his guest, and found 
 the window broken, the iron bars in it bowed and all 
 bloody, but the man was never heard of afterwards.' 
 
 These visitations were answers to a direct challenge of 
 the evil spirit's existence, and were thus easy to be ac- 
 counted for. But no devil came for Mr. Badman. He 
 clung to his unfortunate neglected wife. ' She became 
 his dear wife, his godly wife, his honest wife, his duck, 
 his dear and all.' He thought he was dying, and hell 
 and all its horrors rose up before him. ' Fear was in his 
 face, and in his tossings to and fro he would often say 
 I am undone, I am undone, my vile life hath undone me.'
 
 vii.] LIFE AND DEATH OF MR. I3ADAIAX. 109 
 
 Atheism did not help him. It never helped anyone in 
 such extremities Mr. Wiseman said ; as he had known 
 in another instance : 
 
 ' There was a man dwelt about twelve miles off from 
 us,' he said, ' that had so trained up himself in his Athe- 
 istical notions, that at last he attempted to write a book 
 against Jesus Christ and the Divine authority of the 
 Scriptures. I think it was not printed. Well, after many 
 days God struck him with sickness whereof he died. So 
 being sick, and musing of his former doings, the book 
 that he had written tore his conscience as a lion would 
 tear a kid. Some of my friends went to see him, and as 
 they were in his chamber one day he hastily called for 
 pen and ink and paper, which, when it was given to him, 
 he took it and writ to this purpose. " I such an one in 
 such a town must go to hell fire for writing a book against 
 Jesus Christ." He would have leaped out of the window 
 to have killed himself, but was by them prevented of that, 
 so he died in his bed by such a death as it was.' 
 
 Badman seemed equally miserable. But death-bed 
 repentances, as Bunyan sensibly said, were seldom of 
 more value than ' the howling of a dog.' The broken 
 leg was set again. The pain of body went, and with it 
 the pain of mind. He was assisted out of his un- 
 easiness, says Bunyan, with a characteristic hit at the 
 scientific views then coming into fashion, ' by his doctor,' 
 who told him that his alarms had come 'from an affection 
 of the brain, caused by want of sleep ; ' ' they were 
 nothing but vapours and the effects of his distemper.' 
 He gathered his spirits together, and became the old man 
 once more. His poor wife, who had believed him peni- 
 tent, broke her heart, and died of the disappointment. 
 The husband gave himself up to loose connections with
 
 110 BUNYAX. [CHAP. 
 
 abandoned women, one of whom persuaded him one day, 
 when he was drunk, to make her a promise of marriage, 
 and she held him to his word. Then retribution came 
 upon him, with the coarse, commonplace, yet rigid justice 
 which fact really deals out. The second bad wife avenged 
 the wrongs of the first innocent wife. He was mated 
 with a companion ' who could fit him with cursing and 
 swearing, give him oath for oath, and curse for curse. 
 They would fight and fly at each other like cat and dog.' 
 In this condition for Bunyan, before sending his hero to 
 his account, gave him a protracted spell of earthly dis- 
 comforts they lived sixteen years together. Fortune, 
 who had so long favoured his speculations, turned her 
 back upon him. Between them they ' sinned all his 
 wealth away,' and at last parted ' as poor as howlets.' 
 
 Then came the end. Badman was still in middle life, 
 and had naturally a powerful constitution ; but his ' cups 
 and his queans' had undermined his strength. Dropsy 
 came, and gout, with worse in his bowels, and ' on the 
 top of them all, as the captain of the men of death that 
 came to take him away,' consumption. Bunyan was a 
 true artist, though he knew nothing of the rules, and 
 was not aware that he was an artist at all. He was not 
 to be tempted into spoiling a natural story with the 
 melodramatic horrors of a sinner's deathbed. He had let 
 his victim ' howl ' in the usual way, when he meant him 
 to recover. He had now simply to conduct him to the 
 gate of the place where he was to receive the reward of 
 his iniquities. It was enough to bring him thither still 
 impenitent, with the grave solemnity with which a felon 
 is taken to execution. 
 
 1 As his life was full of sin,' says Mr. Wiseman, ' so 
 his death was without repentance. He had not, in all
 
 vii.] LIFE AND DEATH OF MR. BADMAN. HI 
 
 the time of his sickness, a sight and a sense of his sins; 
 but was as much at quiet as if he had never sinned in his 
 life : he was as secure as if he had been sinless as an 
 angel. When he drew near his end, there was no more 
 alteration in him than what was made by his disease 
 upon his body. He was the selfsame Mr. Badman still, 
 not only in name, but in condition, and that to the very 
 day of his death and the moment in which he died. 
 There seemed not to be in it to the standers by so much 
 as a strong struggle of nature. He died like a lamb, or, 
 as men call it, like a chrisom child, quietly and without 
 fear.' 
 
 To which end of Mr. Badman Bunyan attaches the 
 following remarks : * If a wicked man, if a man who has 
 lived all his days in notorious sin, dies quietly, his quiet 
 dying is so far from being a sign of his being saved that 
 it is an incontestable proof of his damnation. No man 
 can be saved except he repents ; nor can he repent that 
 knows not that he is a sinner : and he that knows him- 
 self to be a sinner will, I warrant him, be molested for 
 his knowledge before he can die quietly. I am no ad- 
 mirer of sick-bed repentance; for I think verily it is 
 seldom good for anything. But I see that he that hath 
 lived in sin and profaneness all his days, as Badman did, 
 and yet shall die quietly, that is, without repentance steps 
 in between his life and his death, is assuredly gone to 
 hell. When God would show the greatness of his anger 
 against sin and sinners in one word, He saith, Let them 
 alone ! Let them alone that is, disturb them not. 
 Let them go on without control. Let the devil enjoy 
 them peaceably. Let him carry them out of the world 
 unconverted quietly. This is the sorest of judgments. I 
 do not say that all wicked men that are molested at their
 
 112 BUNYAN. [CIIAF. 
 
 death with a sense of sin and fear of hell do therefore go 
 to heaven ; for some are made to see and are left to despair. 
 But I say there is no surer sign of a man's damnation 
 than to die quietly after a sinful life, than to sin and die 
 with a heart that cannot repent. The opinion, therefore, 
 of the common people of this kind of death is frivolous 
 and vain.' 
 
 So ends this very remarkable stoiy. It is extremely 
 interesting, merely as a picture of vulgar English life in, 
 a provincial town such as Bedford was when Bunyan 
 lived there. The drawing is so good, the details so 
 minute, the conception so unexaggerated, that we are 
 disposed to believe that we must have a real history 
 before us. But such a supposition is only a compliment to 
 the skill of the composer. Bunyan's inventive faculty 
 was a spring that never ran dry. He had a manner, as 
 I said, like De Foe's, of creating the illusion that we are 
 reading realities, by little touches such as 'I do not 
 know,' ' He did not tell me this,' or the needless intro- 
 duction of particulars irrelevant to the general plot such 
 as we always stumble on in life, and writers of fiction 
 visually omit. Bunyan was never prosecuted for libel by 
 ' Badman's ' relations, and the character is the correspond- 
 ing contrast to Christian in the ' Pilgrim's Progress,' the 
 pilgrim's journey being in the opposite direction to the 
 other place. Throughout we are on the solid earth, 
 amidst real experiences. No demand is made on our 
 credulity by Providential interpositions, except in the in- 
 tercalated anecdotes which do not touch the story itself. 
 The wicked man's career is not brought to the abrupt 
 or sensational issues so much in favour with ordinary di- 
 dactic tale-writers. Such issues are the exception, not 
 the rule, and the edifying story loses its effect when the
 
 vii.] LIFE AND DEATH OF MR. BADMAN. 113 
 
 reader turns from it to actual life, and perceives that the 
 majority are not punished in any such way. Bunyan con- 
 ceals nothing, assumes nothing, and exaggerates nothing. 
 He makes his bad man sharp and shrewd. He allows 
 sharpness and shrewdness to bring him the rewards which 
 such qualities in fact command. Badman is successful, 
 he is powerful ; he enjoys all the pleasures which money 
 can buy ; his bad wife helps him to ruin, but otherwise 
 he is not unhappy, and he dies in peace. Bunyan has 
 made him a brute, because such men do become brutes. 
 It is the real punishment of brutal and selfish habits. 
 There the figure stands; a picture of a man in the rank 
 of English life with which Bunyan was most familiar, 
 travelling along the primrose path to the everlasting 
 bonfire, as the way to Emmanuel's Land was through 
 the Slough of Despond and the Valley of the Shadow of 
 Death. Pleasures are to be found among the primroses, 
 such pleasures as a brute can be gratified by. Yet the 
 reader feels that even if there was no bonfire, he would 
 still prefer to be with Christian.
 
 CHAPTER VIII. 
 
 THE HOLY WAR. 
 
 THE supernatural has been successfully represented in 
 poetry, painting, or sculpture, only at particular periods 
 of human history, and under peculiar mental conditions. 
 The artist must himself believe in the supernatural, or 
 his description of it will be a sham, without dignity and 
 without credibility. He must feel himself able at the 
 same time to treat the subject which he selects with 
 freedom, throwing his own mind boldly into it, or he 
 will produce, at best, the hard and stiff forms of literal 
 tradition. When Benvenuto Cellini was preparing to 
 make an image of the Virgin, he declares gravely that 
 Our Lady appeared to him that he might know what she 
 was like; and so real was the apparition that for many 
 months after, he says that his friends when the room was 
 dark could see a faint aitreole about his head. Yet Ben- 
 venuto worked as if his own brain was partly the author 
 of what he produced, and, like other contemporary artists, 
 used his mistresses for his models, and was no servile 
 copyist of phantoms seen in visions. There is a truth of 
 the imagination, and there is a truth of fact, religion 
 hovering between them, translating one into the other, 
 turning natural phenomena into the activity of personal 
 beings ; or giving earthly names and habitations to mere
 
 cu. vni.] THE HOLY WAR. 116 
 
 creatures of fancy. Imagination creates a mythology. 
 The priest takes it and fashions out of it a theology, a 
 ritual, or a sacred history. So long as the priest can 
 convince the world that he is dealing with literal facts, 
 he holds reason prisoner, and imagination is his servant. 
 In the twilight when dawn is coming near but has not 
 yet come ; when the uncertain nature of the legend is 
 felt, though not intelligently discerned; imagination is 
 the first to resume its liberty; it takes possession of 
 its own inheritance, it dreams of its gods and demi-gods, 
 as Benvenuto dreamt of the Virgin, and it re-shapes 
 the priest's traditions in noble and beautiful forms. 
 Homer and the Greek dramatists would not have dared 
 to bring the gods upon the stage so freely, had they be- 
 lieved Zeus and A polio were living persons, like the man 
 in the next street, who might call the poet to account for 
 what they were made to do and say ; but neither-, on the 
 other hand, could they have been actively conscious that 
 Zeus and Apollo were phantoms, which had no existence, 
 except in their own brains. 
 
 The condition is extremely peculiar. It can exist only 
 in certain epochs, and in its nature is necessarily transi- 
 tory. Where belief is consciously gone the artist has no 
 reverence for his work, and therefore can inspire none. The 
 greatest genius in the world could not reproduce another 
 Athene like that of Phidias. But neither must the belief 
 be too complete. The poet's tongue stammers when he 
 would bring beings before us who, though invisible, are 
 awful personal existences, in whose stupendous presence 
 we one day expect to stand. As long as the conviction 
 survives that he is dealing with literal truths, he is safe 
 only while he follows with shoeless feet the letter of the 
 tradition. He dares not step beyond, lest he degrade the
 
 116 BUNYAN. [CHAP. 
 
 Infinite to the human level, and if he is wise he prefers 
 to content himself with humbler subjects. A Christian 
 artist can represent Jesus Christ as a man because He was 
 a man, and because the details of the Gospel history leave 
 room for the imagination to work. To represent Christ 
 as the Eternal Son in heaven, to bring before us the 
 Persons of the Trinity consulting, planning, and reasoning, 
 to take us into their everlasting Council Chamber, as 
 Homer takes us into Olympus, will be possible only when 
 Christianity ceases to be regarded as a history of true facts. 
 Till then it is a trespass beyond the permitted limits, 
 and revolts us by the inadequacy of the result. Either 
 the artist fails altogether by attempting the impossible, 
 or those whom he addresses are themselves intellectually 
 injured by an unreal treatment of truths hitherto sacred. 
 They confound the representation with its object, and 
 regard the whole of it as unreal together. 
 
 These observations apply most immediately to Milton's 
 ' Paradise Lost,' and are meant to explain the unsatisfac- 
 toriness of it. Milton himself was only partially eman- 
 cipated from the bondage of the letter; half in earth, 
 half ' pawing to get free ' like his own lion. The war 
 in heaven, the fall of the rebel angels, the horrid splen- 
 dours of Pandemonium seem legitimate subjects for Chris- 
 tian poetry. They stand for something which we regard 
 as real, yet we are not bound to any actual opinions about 
 them. Satan has no claim on reverential abstinence ; 
 and Paradise and the Fall of Man are perhaps suffi- 
 ciently mythic to permit poets to take certain liberties 
 with them. But even so far Milton has not entirely 
 succeeded. His wars of the angels are shadowy. They 
 have no substance like the battles of Greeks and Tro- 
 jans, or Centaurs and Lapitbas ; and Satan could not be
 
 Tin.] THE HOLY WAR. 117 
 
 made interesting without touches of a nobler nature, that 
 is, without ceasing to be the Satan of the Christian re- 
 ligion. But this is not his worst. When we are carried 
 up into heaven and hear the persons of the Trinity con- 
 versing on the mischiefs which have crept into the uni- 
 verse, and planning remedies and schemes of salvation 
 like Puritan divines, we turn away incredulous and 
 resentful. Theologians may form such theories for them- 
 selves, if 1 not wisely, yet without offence. They may 
 study the world in which they are placed, with the light 
 which can be thrown upon it by the book which they call 
 the Word of God. They may form their conclusions, in- 
 vent their schemes of doctrine, and commend to their 
 flocks the interpretation of the mystery at which they 
 have arrived. The cycles and epicycles of the Ptolemaic 
 astronomers were imperfect hypotheses, but they were 
 stsiges on which the mind could rest for a more complete 
 examination of the celestial phenomena. But the poet 
 does not offer us phrases and formulas ; he presents to us 
 personalities living and active, influenced by emotions 
 and reasoning from premises; and when the unlimited 
 and incomprehensible Being whose attributes are infinite, 
 of whom from the inadgfjuacy of our ideas we can only 
 speak in negatives, is brought on the stage to talk like 
 an ordinary man, we feel that Milton has mistaken the 
 necessary limits of his art. 
 
 When Faust claims affinity with the Erdgeist, the 
 spirit tells him to seek affinities with beings which ho 
 can comprehend. The commandment which forbade the 
 representation of God in a bodily form, forbids the poet 
 equally to make God describe his feelings and his pur- 
 poses. Where the poet would create a character he must 
 himself comprehend it first to its inmost fibre. He can-
 
 BUNYAtt. [CHAP. 
 
 not comprehend his own Creator. Admire as we may 
 ' Paradise Lost ' try as we may to admire ' Paradise 
 Regained ; ' acknowledge as we must the splendour of the 
 imagery and the stately march of the verse ; there comes 
 upon us irresistibly a sense of the unfitness of the sub- 
 ject for Milton's treatment of it. If the story which he 
 tells us is true, it is too momentous to be played with in 
 poetry. "We prefer to hear it in plain prose, with a 
 minimum of ornament and the utmost possible precision 
 of statement. Milton himself had not arrived at thinking 
 it to be a legend, a fiction like the Greek Mythology. 
 His poem falls between two modes of treatment and twa 
 conceptions of truth ; we wonder, we recite, we applaud, 
 but something comes in between our minds and a full 
 enjoyment, and it will not satisfy us better as time 
 goes on. 
 
 The same objection applies to ' The Holy "War ' of Bun- 
 yan. It is as I said, a people's version of the same series 
 of subjects the creation of man, the fall of man, his 
 redemption, his ingratitude, his lapse, and again his 
 restoration. The chief figures are the same, the action 
 is the same, though more varied and complicated, and 
 the general effect is unsatisfactory from the same cause. 
 Prose is less ambitious than poetry. There is an absence 
 of attempts at grand effects. There is no effort after 
 sublimity, and there is consequently a lighter sense of 
 incongruity in the failure to reach it. On the other hand, 
 there is the greater fulness of detail so characteristic of 
 Bunyan's manner ; and fulness of detail on a theme so far 
 beyond our understanding is as dangerous as vague gran- 
 diloquence. In 'The Pilgrim's Progress' we are among 
 genuine human beings. The reader knows the road 
 too well which Christian follows. He has struggled with
 
 Tin.] THE HOLY W4R. 119 
 
 him in the Slough of Despond. He has shuddered with 
 him in the Valley of the Shadow of Death. He has 
 groaned with him in the dungeons of Doubting Castle. 
 He has encountered on his journey the same fellow- 
 travellers. Who does not know Mr. Pliable, Mr. Ob- 
 stinate, Mr. Facing-both-ways, Mr. Feeble Mind, and all 
 the rest ? They are representative realities, flesh of our 
 flesh and bone of our bone. ' If we prick them they 
 bleed, if we tickle them they laugh,' or they make us laugh. 
 ' They are warmed and cooled by the same winter and 
 summer ' as we are. But the actors in ' The Holy 
 "War ' are parts of men special virtues, special vices : 
 allegories in fact as well as in name, which all Bunyan's 
 genius can only occasionally substantiate into persons. 
 The plot of < The Pilgrim's Progress ' is simple. The Holy 
 War ' is prolonged through endless vicissitudes, with a 
 doubtful issue after all, and the incomprehensibility of 
 the Being who allows Satan to defy him so long and GO 
 successfully is unpleasantly and harshly brought home to 
 us. True it is so in life. Evil remains after all that has 
 been done for us. But life is confessedly a mystery. ' The 
 Holy War ' professes to interpret the mystery, and only 
 restates the problem in a more elaborate form. Man 
 Friday on reading it would have asked even more em- 
 phatically, ' Why God not kill the Devil 1 ' and Robinson 
 Crusoe would have found no assistance in answering him. 
 For these reasons, I cannot agree with Macaulay in 
 thinking that if there had been no ' Pilgrim's Progress,' 
 ' The Holy War' would have been the first of religious 
 allegories. We may admire the workmanship, but the 
 same undefined sense of unreality which pursues us 
 through Milton's epic would have interfered equally with 
 the acceptance of this. The question to us is if the facts
 
 120 BUNYAN. [CHAP. 
 
 are true. If true they require no allegories to touch 
 either our hearts or our intellects. 
 
 ' The Holy War ' would have entitled Bunyan to a 
 place among the masters of English literature. It would 
 never have made his name a household word in every 
 English-speaking family on the globe. 
 
 The story which I shall try to tell in an abridged 
 form is introduced by a short prefatory poem. Works 
 of fancy, Bunyan tells us, are of many sorts, according 
 to the author's humour. For himself he says to his 
 
 I have something else to do 
 Than write vain stories thus to trouble you. 
 What here I say some men do know too well ; 
 They can with tears and joy the story tell. 
 The town of Mansoul is well known to many, 
 Nor are her troubles doubted of by any 
 That are acquainted with those histories 
 That Mansoul and her wars anatomize. 
 
 Then lend thine ears to what I do relate 
 Touching the town of Mansoul and her state, 
 How she was lost, took captive, made a slave, 
 And how against him set that should her save, 
 Yea, how by hostile ways she did oppose 
 Her Lord and with his enemy did close, 
 For they are true ; he that will them deny 
 Must needs the best of records vilify. 
 
 For my part, I myself was in the town 
 
 Both when 'twas set up and when pulling down. 
 
 I saw Diabolus in his possession, 
 
 And Mansoul also under his oppression : 
 
 Yea I was there when she him owned for Lord, 
 
 And to him did submit with one accord. 
 
 When Mansoul trampled upon things divine, 
 And wallowed in filth as doth a swine,
 
 Tin.] THE HOLY WAR. 121 
 
 When she betook herself unto his arms, 
 Fought her Emmanuel, despised his charms ; 
 Then was I there and did rejoice to see 
 Diabolus and Mansoul so agree. 
 
 Let no man count me then a fable maker, 
 Nor make my name or credit a partaker 
 Of their derision. What is here in view 
 Of mine own knowledge I dare say is true. 
 
 At setting out we are introduced into the famous con- 
 tinent of ' Universe,' a large and spacious country lying 
 between the two poles ' the people of it not all of one 
 complexion nor yet of one language, mode or way of 
 religion ; but differing as much as the planets- them- 
 selves, some right, some wrong, even as it may happen to 
 be.' 
 
 In this country of ' Universe ' was a fair and delicate 
 town and corporation called ' Mansoul,' a town for its 
 building so curious, for its situation so commodious, for 
 its privileges so advantageous, that with reference to its 
 original (state) there was not its equal under heaven. 
 The first founder was Shaddai, who built it for his own 
 delight. In the midst of the town was a famous and 
 stately palace which Shaddai intended for himself. 1 He 
 had no intention of allowing strangers to intrude there. 
 And the peculiarity of the place was that the walls of 
 Mansoul 2 could never be broken down or hurt unless 
 the townsmen consented. Mansoul had five gates which 
 in like manner could only be forced if those within 
 allowed it. These gates were Eargate, Eyegate, Mouth- 
 gate, Nosegate, and Feelgate. Thus provided, Mansoul 
 
 1 Bunyan says in a marginal note, that by this palace he 
 means the heart. 
 
 2 The body.
 
 1 22 BUNYAN. [CHAP. 
 
 was at first all that its founder could desire. It had the 
 most excellent laws in the world. There was not a rogue 
 or a rascal inside its whole precincts. The inhabitants 
 were all true men. 
 
 Now there was a certain giant named Diabolus 
 king of the blacks or negroes, as Bunyan noticeably calls 
 them the negroes standing for sinners or fallen angels. 
 Diabolus had once been a servant of Shaddai, one of the 
 chief in his territories. Pride and ambition had led him 
 to aspire to the crown which was settled on Shaddai's 
 Son. He had formed a conspiracy and planned a revolu- 
 tion. Shaddai and his Son, ' being all eye,' easily de- 
 tected the plot. Diabolus and his crew were bound 
 in chains, banished, and thrown into a pit, there to 
 ' abide for ever.' This was their sentence ; but out of 
 the pit, in spite of it, they in some way contrived to 
 escape. They ranged about full of malice against Shaddai, 
 and looking for means to injure him. They came at last 
 on Mansoul. They determined to take it, and called a 
 council to consider how it could best be done. Diabolus 
 was aware of the condition that no one could enter with- 
 out the inhabitants' consent. Alecto, Apollyon, Beel- 
 zebub, Lucifer (Pagan and Christian demons intermixed 
 indifferently) gave their several opinions. Diabolus at 
 length at Lucifer's suggestion decided to assume the shape 
 of one of the creatures over which Mansoul had dominion ; 
 and he selected as the fittest that of a snake, which at that 
 time was in great favour with the people as both harmless 
 and wise. 
 
 The population of Mansoul were simple, innocent folks 
 who believed everything that was said to them. Force, 
 however, might be necessary as well as cunning, and the 
 Tisiphone, a fury of the Lakes, was required to assist.
 
 viii.] THE HOLY WAR. 123 
 
 The attempt was to be made at Eargate. A certain 
 Captain Resistance was in charge of this gate, whom 
 Diabolus feared more than any one in the place. Tisiphone 
 was to shoot him. 
 
 The plans being all laid, Diabolus in his snake's dress 
 approached the wall, accompanied by one ' 111 Pause,' a 
 famous orator, the Fury following behind. He asked 
 for a parley with the heads of the town. Captain 
 Resistance, two of the great nobles, Lord ' Innocent,' and 
 Lord ' Will be Will,' with Mr. Conscience, the Recorder, 
 and Lord Understanding, the Lord Mayor, came to the 
 gate to see what he wanted. Lord ' Will be Will ' plays 
 a prominent part in the drama both for good and evil. 
 He is neither Free Will, nor Wilfulness, nor Inclination, 
 but the quality which metaphysicians and theologians 
 agree in describing as ' the Will.' ' The Will ' simply a 
 subtle something of great importance ; but what it is 
 they have never been able to explain. 
 
 Lord Will be Will inquired Diabolus's business. Dia- 
 bolus, ' meek as a lamb,' said he was a neighbour of theirs. 
 He had observed with distress that they were living in a 
 state of slavery, and he wished to help them to be free. 
 Shaddai was no doubt a great prince, but he was an 
 arbitrary despot. There was no liberty where the laws 
 were unreasonable, and Shaddai's laws were the reverse 
 of reasonable. They had a fruit growing among them, 
 in Mansoul, which they had but to eat to become wise. 
 Knowledge was well known to be the best of possessions. 
 Knowledge was freedom ; ignorance was bondage ; and 
 yet Shaddai hud forbidden them to touch this precious 
 fruit. 
 
 At that moment Captain Resistance fell dead, pierced 
 by an arrow from Tisiphoue. Ill Pause inadc a iiowing
 
 124 BUNYAN. [CHAP. 
 
 speech, in the midst of which Lord Innocent fell also, 
 either through a blow from Diabolus, or ' overpowered by 
 the stinking breath of the old villain 111 Pause.' The 
 people flew vipon the apple tree ; Eargate and Eyegate were 
 thrown open, and Diabolus was invited to come in ; when 
 at once he became King of Mansout and established him- 
 self in the castle. 1 
 
 The magistrates were immediately changed. Lord 
 Understanding ceased to be Lord Mayor. Mr. Conscience 
 was no longer left as Recorder. Diabolus built up a wall 
 in front of Lord Understanding's palace, and shut off the 
 light, ' so that till Mansoul was delivered the old Lord 
 Mayor was rather an impediment than an advantage to that 
 famous town.' Diabolus tried long to bring ' Conscience ' 
 over to his side, but never quite succeeded. The Recorder 
 became greatly corrupted, but he could not be prevented 
 from now and then remembering Shaddai ; and when the 
 fit was on him he would shake the town with his ex- 
 clamations. Diabolus therefore had to try other methods 
 with him. ' He had a way to make the old gentleman 
 when he was merry unsay and deny what in his fits he 
 had ainrined, and this was the next way to make him 
 ridiculous and to cause that no man should regard him.' 
 To make all secure Diabolus often said, ' Oh, Mansoul, 
 consider that, notwithstanding the old gentleman's rage 
 and the rattle of his high thundering words, you hear 
 nothing of Shaddai himself.' The Recorder had pretended 
 that the voice of the Lord was speaking in him. Had 
 this been so, Diabolus argued that the Lord would have 
 done more than speak. ' Shaddai,' he said, ' valued not 
 the loss nor the rebellion of Mansoul, nor would he 
 trouble himself with calling his town to a reckoning.' 
 1 The heart.
 
 Tin.] THE HOLY WAR. 125 
 
 In this way the Recorder came to bo generally hated, 
 and more than once the people would have destroyed him. 
 Happily his house was a castle near the waterworks. 
 When the rabble pursued him, he would pull up the 
 sluices, 1 let in the flood, and drown all about him. 
 
 Lord Will be Will, on the other hand, ' as high born 
 as any in Mansoul,' became Diabolus's principal minister. 
 He had been the first to propose admitting Diabolus, and 
 he was made Captain of the Castle, Governor of the Wall, 
 and Keeper of the Gates. Will be Will had a clerk 
 named Mr. Mind, a man every way like his master, and 
 Mansoul was thus brought ' under the lusts ' of Will and 
 Intellect. Mr. Mind had in his house some old rent and 
 torn parchments of the law of Shaddai. The Recorder 
 had some more in his study ; but to these Will be Will 
 paid no attention, and surrounded himself with officials 
 who were all in Diabolus's interest. He had as deputy 
 one Mr. Affection, ' much debauched in his principles, so 
 that he was called Vile Affection.' Vile Affection married 
 Mr. Mind's daughter, Carnal Lust, by whom he had three 
 sons Impudent, Black Mouth, and Hate Reproof; and 
 three daughters Scorn Truth, Slight Good, and Revenge. 
 All traces of Shaddai were now swept away. His image, 
 which had stood in the market-place, was taken down, and 
 an artist called Mr. No Truth was employed to set up the 
 image of Diabolus in plr.ce of it. Lord Lustings ' who 
 never savoured good, but evil ' was chosen for the new 
 Lord Mayor. Mr. Forget Good was appointed Recorder. 
 There were new burgesses and aldermen, all with appro- 
 priate names, for which Bunyan was never at a loss 
 Mr. Incredulity, Mr. Haughty, Mr. Swearing, Mr. Hard- 
 heart, Mr. Pitiless, Mr. Fury, Mr. No Truth, Mr. Stand 
 1 Fears.
 
 126 BUN Y AN. [CHAP. 
 
 to Lies, Mr. Falsepeace, Mr. Drunkenness, Mr. Cheating, 
 Mr. Atheism, and another ; thirteen of them in all. Mr. 
 Incredulity was the eldest, Mr. Atheism the youngest in 
 the company a shrewd and correct arrangement. Dia- 
 bolus, on his part, set to work to fortify Mansoul. He 
 built three fortresses ' The Hold of Defiance ' at Eyegate, 
 that the light might be darkened there ; ' ' Midnight 
 Hold ' near the old Castle, to keep Mansoul from know- 
 ledge of itself ; and ' Sweet Sin Hold ' in the market- 
 place, that there might be no desire of good there. These 
 strongholds being established and garrisoned, Diabolus 
 thought that he had made his conquest secure. 
 
 So far the story runs on firmly and clearly. It is 
 vivid, consistent in itself, and held well within the limits 
 of human nature and experience. But, like Milton, Bunyan 
 is now, by the exigencies of the situation, forced upon more 
 perilous ground. He carries us into the presence of 
 Shtiddai himself, at the time when the loss of Mansoul was 
 reported in heaven. 
 
 The king, his son, his high lords, his chief captains and 
 nobles were all assembled to hear. There was universal 
 grief, in which the king and his son shared or rather seemed 
 to share for at once the drama of the Fall of mankind be- 
 comes no better than a Mystery Play. ' Shaddai and his 
 son had foreseen it all long before, and had provided for 
 the relief of Mansoul, though they told not everybody 
 thereof but because they would have a share in condoling 
 of the misery of Mansoul they did, and that at the rate 
 of the highest degree, bewail the losing of Mansoul' 
 ' thus to show their love and compassion.' 
 
 ' Paradise Lost ' was published at the time that Bunyan 
 wrote this passage. If he had not seen it, the coincidences 
 cf treatment are singularly curious. It is equally singular,
 
 viii.] THE HOLY WAR. 127 
 
 if he had seen it, that Milton should not here at least have 
 taught him to avoid making the Almighty into a stage 
 actor. The Father and Son consult how ' to do what they 
 had designed before.' They decide that at a certain time, 
 which they preordain, the Son, ' a sweet and comely person,' 
 shall make a journey into the Universe and lay a founda- 
 tion there for Mansoul's deliverance. Milton offends in 
 the scene less than Bunyan ; but Milton cannot persuade 
 us that it is one which should have been represented by 
 either of them. They should have left ' plans of salva< 
 tion ' to eloquent orators in the pulpit. 
 
 Though the day of deliverance by the method proposed 
 was as yet far off, the war against Diabolus was to be 
 commenced immediately. The Lord Chief Secretary was 
 ordered to put in writing Shaddai's intentions, and cause 
 them to be published. 1 Mansoul, it was announced, was 
 to be put into a better condition than it was in before 
 Diabolus took it. 
 
 The report of the Council in Heaven was brought to 
 Diabolus, who took his measures accordingly, Lord Will be 
 Will standing by him and executing all his directions. 
 Mansoul was forbidden to read Shaddai's proclamation. 
 Diabolus imposed a great oath on the townspeople never to 
 desert him ; he believed that if they entered into a covenant 
 of this kind Shaddai could not absolve them from it. 
 They ' swallowed the engagement as if it had been a sprat 
 in the mouth of a whale.' Being now Diabolus's trusty 
 children, he gave them leave ' to do whatever their appe- 
 tites prompted to do.' They would thus involve them- 
 selves in all kinds of wickedness, and Shaddai's son ' being 
 Holy ' would be less likely to interest himself for them. 
 When they had in this way put themselves, as Diabolus 
 1 The Scriptures.
 
 128 BUNYAN. [CHAP. 
 
 hoped, beyond reach of mercy, he informed them that 
 Shacldai was raising an army to destroy the town. No 
 quarter would be given, and unless they defended them- 
 selves like men they would all be made slaves. Their 
 spirit being roused, he armed them with the shield of 
 unbelief, ' calling into question the truth of the Word.' He 
 gave them a helmet of hope ' hope of doing well at last, 
 whatever lives they might lead ' ; for a breastplate a heart 
 as hard as iron, ' most necessary for all that hated Shaddai ; ' 
 and another piece of most excellent armour, ' a drunken 
 and prayerless spirit that scorned to cry for mercy.' Shad- 
 dai on his side had also prepared his forces. He would 
 not as yet send his son. The first expedition was to fail 
 and was meant to fail. The object was to try whether 
 Mansoul would return to obedience ; and yet Shaddai 
 knew that it would not return to obedience. Bunyan was 
 too ambitious to explain the inexplicable. Fifty thousand 
 warriors were collected, all chosen by Shaddai himself. 
 There were four leaders Captain Boanerges, Captain 
 Conviction, Captain Judgment, and Captain Execution 
 the martial saints, with whom Macaulay thinks Bunyan 
 made acquaintance when he served, if serve he did, with 
 Fairfax. The bearings on their banners were three 
 black thunderbolts the Book of the Law, wide open, 
 with a flame of fire bursting from it ; a burning, fiery 
 furnace; and a fruitless tree with an axe at its root. 
 These emblems represent the terrors of Mount Sinai, 
 the covenant of works which was not to prevail. 
 
 The captains come to the walls of Mansoul, and sum- 
 mon the town to surrender. Their words ' beat against 
 Eargate, but without force to break it open.' The new 
 officials answer the challenge with defiance. Lord 
 Incredulity knows not by what right Shaddai invades
 
 vni.j THE HOLY WAR. 129 
 
 their country. Lord Will be Will and Mr. Forget Good 
 warn them to be off before they rouse Diabolus. The 
 townspeople ring the bells and dance on the walls. 
 Will be Will double-bars the gates. Bunyan's genius 
 is at its best in scenes of this kind. ' Old Mr. Prejudice, 
 with sixty deaf men,' is appointed to take charge of 
 Eargate. At Eargatc, too, are planted two guns, called 
 Highmind, and Heady, ' cast in the earth by Diabolus's 
 head founder, whose name was Mr. Puffup.' 
 
 The fighting begins, but the covenant of works makes 
 little progress. Shaddai's captains, when advancing on 
 Mansoul, had fallen in with ' three young fellows of pro- 
 mising appearance ' who volunteered to go with them 
 ' M r. Tradition, Mr. Human Wisdom, and Mr. Man's 
 Invention.' They were allowed to join, and were placed 
 in positions of trust, the captains of the covenant being 
 apparently wanting in discernment. They were taken 
 prisoners in the first skirmish, and immediately changed 
 sides and went over to Diabolus. More battles follow. 
 The roof of the Lord Mayor's house is beaten in. The 
 law is not wholly ineffectual. Six of the Aldermen, the 
 grosser moral sins Swearing, Stand to Lies, Drunken- 
 ness, Cheating, and others are overcome and killed. 
 Diabolus grows uneasy and loses his sleep. Old Conscience 
 begins to talk again. A party forms in the town in 
 favour of surrender, and Mr. Parley is sent to Eargate 
 to treat for terms. The spiritual sins False Peace, Un- 
 belief, Haughtiness, Atheism are still unsubdued and 
 vigorous. The conditions offered are that Incredulity, 
 Forget Good, and Will be Will shall retain their offices j 
 Mansoul shall be continued in all the liberties which it en- 
 joys under Diabolus; and a further touch is added \\hich 
 shows how little Bunyan sympathised with modern notions 
 
 K
 
 130 BU3YAN. [CHAP. 
 
 of the beauty of self-government. No new law or 
 officer shall have any power in Mansoul without the 
 people's consent. 
 
 Boanerges will agree to no conditions with rebels. 
 Incredulity and Will be Will advise the people to stand 
 by their rights, and refuse to submit to 'unlimited' 
 power. The war goes on, and Incredulity is made 
 Diabolus's universal deputy. Conscience and Under- 
 standing, the old Recorder and Mayor, raise a mutiny, 
 and there is a fight in the streets. Conscience is knocked 
 down by a Diabolonian called ' Mr. Benumming.' Under- 
 standing had a narrow escape from being shot. On the 
 other hand Mr. Mind, who had come over to the Conser- 
 vative side, laid about bravely, tumbled old Mr. Prejudice 
 into the dirt, and kicked him where he lay. Even 
 Will be Will seemed to be wavering in his allegiance to 
 Diabolus. ' He smiled and did not seern to take one side 
 more than another.' The rising, however, is put down 
 Understanding and Conscience are imprisoned, and 
 Mansoul hardens its heart, chiefly ' being in dread of 
 slavery,' and thinking liberty too fine a thing to be sur- 
 rendered. 
 
 Shaddai's four captains find that they can do no more. 
 The covenant of works will not answer. They send 
 home a petition, ' by the hand of that good man Mr. Love 
 to Mansoul,' to beg that some new general may cotne 
 to lead them. The preordained time has now arrived, 
 and Emmanuel himself is to take the command. He, too, 
 selects his captains Credence and Good Hope, Charity, 
 and Innocence, and Patience ; and the captains have 
 their squires, the counterparts of themselves Promise 
 and Expectation, Pitiful, Harmless, and Suffer Long. 
 Emmanuel's armour shines like the sun. Ho has forty-
 
 vni.] THE HOLY WAR. 131 
 
 four battering rams and twenty-two slings the sixty- 
 six books of the Bible each made of pure gold. He 
 throws up mounds and trenches, and arms them with his 
 rams, five of the largest being planted on Mount 
 Hearken, over against Eargate. Bunyan was too reverent 
 to imitate the Mystery Plays, and introduce a Mount 
 Calvary with the central sacrifice upon it. The sacrifice 
 is supposed to have been already offered elsewhere. 
 Emmanuel offers mercy to Mansoul, and when it is re- 
 jected he threatens judgment and terror. Diabolus, 
 being wiser than man, is made to know that his hour is 
 approaching. He goes in person to Mouthgate to protest 
 and remonstrate. He asks why Emmanuel is come to 
 torment him. Mansoul has disowned Shaddai and sworn 
 allegiance to himself. He begs Emmanuel to leave him to 
 rule his own subjects in peace. 
 
 Emmanuel tells him 'he is a thief and a liar.' 
 ' When,' Emmanuel is made to say, ' Mansoul sinned by 
 hearkening to thy lie, I put iu and became a surety to my 
 Father, body for body, soul for soul, that I would make 
 amends for Man soul's transgressions, and my Father did 
 accept thereof. So when the time appointed was come, I 
 gave body for body, soul for soul, life for life, blood for 
 blood, and so redeemed my beloved Mansoul. My 
 Father's law and justice, that were both concerned in the 
 threatening upon transgression, are both now satisfied, 
 and very well content that Mansoul should be delivered.' 
 
 Even against its deliverers, Mansoul was defended by 
 the original condition of its constitution. There was no 
 way into it but through the gates. Diabolus, feeling that 
 Emmanuel still had difficulties before him, withdrew from 
 the wall, and sent a messenger, Mr. Loth to Stoop, to offer 
 alternative terms, to one or other of which ha thought 
 
 rl
 
 132 BUflYAN. [CHAP. 
 
 Emmanuel might consent. Emmanuel might be titular 
 sovereign of all Mansoul, if Diabolus might keep the 
 administration of part of it. If this could not be, 
 Diabolus requested to be allowed to reside in Mansoul as a 
 private person. If Emmanuel insisted on his own personal 
 exclusion, at least he expected that his friends and kindred 
 might continue to live there, and that he himself might 
 now and then write them letters, and send them presents 
 and messages, ' in remembrance of the merry times they 
 had enjoyed together.' Finally, he would like to be con- 
 sulted occasionally when any difficulties arose in Man- 
 soul. 
 
 It will be seen that in the end Mansoul was, in 
 fact, left liable to communications from Diabolus very 
 much of this kind. Emmanuel's answer, however, is a 
 peremptory No. Diabolus must take himself away, and 
 no more must be heard of him. Seeing that there was no 
 other resource, Diabolus resolves to fight it out. There is 
 a great battle under the walls, with some losses on Em- 
 manuel's side, even Captain Conviction receiving three 
 wounds in the mouth. The shots from the gold slings 
 mow down whole ranks of Diabolonians. Mr. Love 
 no Good and Mr. Ill Pause are wounded. Old 
 Prejudice and Mr. Anything run away. Lord Will be 
 Will, who still fought for Diabolus, was never so daunted 
 in his life : ' he was hurt in the leg, and limped.' 
 
 Diabolus, when the fight was over, came again to the 
 gate with fresh proposals to Emmanuel. ' I,' he said, ' will 
 persuade Mansoul to receive thee for their Lord, and I 
 know that they will do it the sooner when they under- 
 stand that I am thy deputy, I will show them wherein 
 they have erred, and that transgression stands in the way 
 to life. I will show them the Holy law to which they
 
 viii.] THE HOLY WAE. 133 
 
 must conform, even that which they have broken. I will 
 press upon them the necessity of a reformation according 
 to thy law. At my own cost I will set up and maintain 
 a sufficient ministry, besides lecturers, in Mansoul.' This 
 obviously means the Established Church. Unable to 
 keep mankind directly in his own service, the Devil offers 
 to entangle them in the covenant of works, of which the 
 Church of England was the representative. Emmanuel 
 rebukes him for his guile and deceit. 'I will govern 
 Mansoul,' he says, 'by new laws, new officers, new mo- 
 tives, and new ways. I will pull down the town and 
 build it again, and it shall be as though it had not been, 
 and it shall be the glory of the whole universe.' 
 
 A second battle follows. Eargate is beaten in. The 
 Prince's army enters and advances as far as the old Re- 
 corder's house, where they knock and demand entrance. 
 ' The old gentleman, not fully knowing their design, had 
 kept his gates shut all the time of the fight. He as yet 
 knew nothing of the great designs of Emmanuel, and 
 could not tell what to think.' The door is violently 
 broken open, and the house is made Emmanuel's head- 
 quarters. The townspeople, with Conscience and Under- 
 standing at their head, petition that their lives may be 
 spared ; but Emmanuel gives no answer, Captain Boanerges 
 and Captain Conviction carrying terror into all hearts. 
 Diabolus, the cause of all the mischief, had retreated into 
 the castle. 1 He came out at last, and surrendered, and 
 in dramatic fitness he clearly ought now to have been 
 made away with in a complete manner. Unfortunately, 
 this could not be done. He was stripped of his armour, 
 boxtnd to Emmanuel's chariot wheels, and thus turned 
 out of Mansoul ' into parched places in a salt land, where 
 1 The heart.
 
 134 BUNYAN. [CHAP. 
 
 he might seek rest and find none.' The salt land proved 
 as insecure a prison for this embarrassing being as the 
 pit where he was to have abode for ever. 
 
 Meanwhile, Mansoul being brought upon its knees, 
 ihe inhabitants were summoned into the castle yard, 
 when Conscience, Understanding, and Will be Will were 
 committed to ward. They and the rest again prayed 
 for mercy, but again without effect. Emmanuel was 
 silent. They drew another petition, and asked Captain 
 Conviction to present it for them. Captain Conviction 
 declined to be an advocate for rebels, and advised them to 
 send it by one of themselves, with a rope about his neck. 
 Mr. Desires Awake went with it. The Prince took it 
 from his hands, and wept as Desires Awake ga-^ it in. 
 Emmanuel bade him go his way till the request could 
 be considered. The unhappy criminals knew not how to 
 take the answer. Mr. Understanding thought it promised 
 well. Conscience and Will be Will, borne down by shame 
 for their sins, looked for nothing but immediate death. 
 They tried again. They threw themselves on Emmanuel's 
 mercy. They drew up a confession of their howible 
 iniquities. This, at least, they wished to offer to him 
 whether he would pity them or not. For a messenger 
 some of them thought of choosing one Old Good Deed. 
 Conscience, however, said that would never do. Em- 
 manuel would answer, ' Is Old Good Deed yet alive in 
 Mansoul ? Then let Old Good Deed save it.' Desires 
 Awake went again with the rope on his neck, as Captain 
 Conviction recommended. Mr. Wet Eyes went with him, 
 wringing his hands. 
 
 Emmanuel still held out no comfort ; he promised 
 merely that in the camp the next morning he would give 
 such an answer as should be to his glory. Nothing but
 
 vin.] THE HOLY WAR. 135 
 
 the worst was now looked for. Mansoul passed the night 
 in sackcloth and ashes. When day broke, the prisoners 
 dressed themselves in mourning, and were carried to the 
 camp in chains, with ropes on their necks, beating their 
 breasts. Prosti*ate before Emmanuel's throne, they re- 
 peated their confession. They acknowledged that death 
 and the bottomless pit would be no more than a just retri- 
 bution for their crimes. As they excused nothing and 
 promised nothing, Emmanuel at once delivered them 
 their pardons sealed with seven seals. He took off their 
 ropes and mourning, clothed them in shining garments, 
 and gave them chains and jewels. 
 
 Lord Will be Will 'swooned outright.' When he 
 recovered, ' the Prince ' embraced and kissed him. The 
 bells in Mansoul were set ringing. Bonfires blazed. Em- 
 manuel reviewed his army ; and Mansoul, ravished at the 
 sight, prayed him to remain and be their King for ever. 
 He entered the city again in triumph, the people strewing 
 boughs and flowers before him. The streets and squares 
 were rebuilt on a new model. Lord Will be Will, now 
 regenerate, resumed the charge of the gates. The old 
 Lord Mayor was reinstated. Mr. Knowledge was made 
 Recorder, 'not out of contempt for old Conscience, who 
 was by-and-bye to have another employment.' Diabolus's 
 imago was taken down and broken to pieces, and the 
 inhabitants of Mansoul were so happy that they sang of 
 Emmanuel in their sleep. 
 
 Justice, however, remained to be done on the hardened 
 and impenitent. 
 
 There were 'perhaps necessities in the nature of 
 things,' as Bishop Butler says, and an example could not 
 be made of the principal offender. But his servants and 
 old officials were lurking in the lanes and alleys. They
 
 136 BUNYAN. [CHAP. 
 
 were apprehended, thrown into gaol, and brought to 
 formal trial. Here we have Bunyan at his best. The 
 scene in the court rises to the level of the famous trial of 
 Faithful in Vanity Fair. The prisoners were Diabolus's 
 Aldermen, Mr. Atheism, Mr. Incredulity, Mr. Lustings, 
 Mr. Forget Good, Mr. Hardheart, Mr. Falsepeac?, and 
 the rest. The proceedings were precisely what Bunyan 
 must have witnessed at a common English Assizes. The 
 Judges were the new Recorder and the new Mayor. Mr. 
 Do-right was Town Clerk. A jury was empanelled in 
 the usual way. Mr. Knowall, Mr. Telltrue, and Mr. 
 Hatelies were the principal witnesses. 
 
 Atheism was first brought to the bar, being charged 
 * with having pertinaciously and doltingly taught that 
 there was no God.' He pleaded Not Guilty. Mr. 
 Knowall was placed in the witness-box and sworn. 
 
 ' My Lord,' he said, ' I know the prisoner at the bar. 
 I and he were once in Villains Lane together, and he at 
 that time did briskly talk of diverse opinions. And then 
 and there I heard him say that for his part he did believe 
 that there was no God. " But," said he, " I can profess one 
 and be religious too, if the company I am in and the circum- 
 stances of other things," said he, " shall put me upon it." ' 
 
 Telltrue and Hatelies were next called. 
 
 Telltrue. My Lord, I was formerly a great companion of the 
 prisoner's, for the which I now repent me ; and I have often 
 heard him say, and with very great stomach -fulness, that he be- 
 lieved there was neither God, Angel, nor Spirit. 
 
 Town, Clerk. Where did you hear him say so 1 
 
 Telltrue. In Blackmoiith Lane and in Blasphemers Row, and 
 in many other places besides. 
 
 Town Clerk. Have you much knowledge of him ? 
 
 Telltrue. I know him to be a Diabolonian, the son of a 
 Diabolonian, and a horrible man to deny a Deity. His father's
 
 Tin.] THE HOLY WAR. 137 
 
 name was Never be Good, and he had more children than this 
 Atheism. 
 
 Town Clerk. Mr. Hatelies. Look upon the prisoner at the 
 bar. Do you know him ? 
 
 Hatelies. My Lord, this Atheism is one of the vilest wretches 
 that ever I came near or had to do with in my life. I have 
 heard him say that there is no God. I have heard him say that 
 there is no world to come, no sin, nor punishment hereafter; 
 and, moreover, I have heard him say that it was as good to go 
 to a bad-house as to go to hear a sermon. 
 
 Town Clerk. Where did you hear him say these things ? 
 
 Hatelies. In Drunkards Row, just at Rascal Lane's End, at a 
 house in which Mr. Impiety lived. 
 
 The next prisoner was Mr. Lustings, who said that he 
 was of high birth and ' used to pleasures and pastimes of 
 greatness.' He had always been allowed to follow his own 
 inclinations, and it seemed strange to him that he should 
 be called in question for things which not only he but 
 every man secretly or openly approved. 
 
 When the evidence had been heard against him he 
 admitted frankly its general correctness. 
 
 4 1,' he said, ' was ever of opinion that the happiest life 
 that a man could live on earth was to keep himself back 
 from nothing that he desired ; nor have I been false at 
 any time to this opinion of mine, but have lived in the 
 love of my notions all my days. Nor was I ever so 
 churlish, having found such sweetness in them myself, as 
 to keep the commendation of them from others.' 
 
 Then came Mr. Incredulity. He was charged with 
 having encouraged the town of Mansoul to resist Shaddai. 
 Incredulity too had the courage of his opinions. 
 
 ' I know not Shaddai,' he said. ' I love my old Prince. 
 I thought it my duty to be true to my trust, and to do 
 what I could to possess the minds of the men of Mansoul 
 to do their utmost to resist strangers and foreigners, and
 
 138 BUNYAN. [CHAP. 
 
 with might to fight against them. Nor have I nor shall 
 1 change my opinion for fear of trouble, though you at 
 present are possessed of place and power.' 
 
 Forget Good pleaded age and craziness. He was the 
 son of a Diabolonian called Love Naught. He had uttered 
 blasphemoiis speeches in Allbase Lane, next door to the 
 sign of ' Conscience Seared with a Hot Iron ; ' also in 
 Flesh Lane, right opposite the Church ; also in Nauseous 
 Street ; also at the sign of the ' Reprobate,' next door to 
 the ' Descent into the Pit.' 
 
 Falsepeace insisted that he was wrongly named in the 
 indictment. His real name was Peace, and he had always 
 laboured for peace. When war broke out between Shaddai 
 and Diabolus, he had endeavoured to reconcile them, &c. 
 Evidence was given that Falsepeace was his right desig- 
 nation. His father's name was Flatter. His mother, 
 before she married Flatter, was called Mrs. Sootheup. 
 When her child was born she always spoke of him as 
 Falsepeace. She would call him twenty times a day, my 
 little Falsepeace, my pretty Falsepeace, my sweet rogue 
 Falsepeace ! &c. 
 
 The court rejected his plea. He was told ' that he had 
 wickedly maintained the town of Mansoul in rebellion 
 against its king, in a false, lying, and damnable peace, 
 contrary to the law of Shaddai. Peace that was not a 
 companion of truth and holiness, was an accursed and 
 treacherous peace, and was grounded on a lie.' 
 
 No Truth had assisted with his own hands in pulling 
 down the image of Shaddai. He had set up the horned 
 image of the beast Diabolus at the same place, and had 
 torn and consumed all that remained of the laws of the 
 king. 
 
 Pitiless said his name was not Pitiless, but Cheer
 
 vm.] THE HOLY WAR. 139 
 
 Up. He disliked to see Mansoul inclined to melancholy, 
 and that was all his offence. Pitiless, however, was 
 proved to be the name of him. It was a habit of the 
 Diabolonians to assume counterfeit appellations. Cove- 
 tousness called himself Good Husbandry; Pride called 
 himself Handsome ; and so on. 
 
 Mr. Haughty's figure is admirably drawn in a few 
 lines. Mr. Haughty, when arraigned, declared ' that he 
 had carried himself bravely, not considering who was 
 his foe, or what was the cause in which he was engaged. 
 It was enough for him if he fought like a man and came 
 off victorious.' 
 
 The jury, it seems, made no distinctions between 
 opinions and acts. They did not hold that there was 
 any divine right in man to think what he pleased, and 
 to say what he thought. Bunyan had suffered as a martyr ; 
 but it was as a martyr for truth, not for general licence. 
 The genuine Protestants never denied that it was right 
 to prohibit men from teaching lies, and to punish them 
 if they disobeyed. The persecution of which they com- 
 plained was the persecution of the honest man by the 
 knave. 
 
 All the prisoners were found guilty by a unanimous 
 verdict. Even Mr. Moderate, who was one of the jury, 
 thought a man must be wilfully blind who wished to 
 spare them. They were sentenced to be executed the 
 next day. Incredulity contrived to escape in the night. 
 Search was made for him, but he was not to be found in 
 Mansoul. He had fled beyond the walls, and had joined 
 Diabolus near Hell Gate. The rest, we are told, were 
 crucified crucified by the hands of the men of Mansoul 
 themselves. They fought and struggled at the place of 
 execution so violently that Shaddai's secretary was obliged
 
 140 BUNYAN. [CHAP. 
 
 to send assistance. But justice was done at last, and all 
 the Diabolonians, except Incredulity, were thus made an 
 end of. 
 
 They were made an end of for a time only. Mansoul, 
 by faith in Christ, and by the help of the Holy Spirit, 
 had crucified all manner of sin in its members. It was 
 faith that had now the victory. Unbelief had, unfor- 
 tunately, escaped. It had left Mansoul for the time, 
 and had gone to its master the Devil. But unbelief, 
 being intellectual, had not been crucified with the sins of 
 the flesh, and thus could come back, and undo the work 
 which faith had accomplished. I do not know how far 
 this view approves itself to the more curious theologians. 
 Unbelief itself is said to be a product of the will; but an 
 allegory must not be cross-questioned too minutely. 
 
 The cornucopia of spiritual blessings was now opened 
 on Mansoul. All offences were fully and completely for- 
 given. A Holy Law and Testament was bestowed on 
 the people for their comfort and consolation, with a por- 
 tion of the grace which dwelt in the hearts of Shaddai 
 and Emmanuel themselves. They were to be allowed 
 free access to Emmanuel's palace at all seasons, he himself 
 undertaking to hear them and redress their grievances, 
 and they were empowered and enjoined to destroy all 
 Diabolonians who might be found at any time within 
 their precincts. 
 
 These grants were embodied in a charter which was 
 set up in gold letters on the castle door. Two ministers 
 were appointed to carry on the government one from. 
 Shaddai's court; the other a native of Mansoul. The 
 first was Shaddai's chief secretary, the Holy Spirit. He, 
 if they were obedient and well-conducted, would be ' ten 
 times better to them than the whole world.' But they
 
 vin.] THE HOLY WAK. 141 
 
 were cautioned to be careful of their behaviour, for if 
 they grieved him he would turn against them, and the 
 worst might then be looked for. The second minister 
 was the old Recorder, Mr. Conscience, for whom, as was 
 said, a new office had been provided. The address of 
 Emmanuel to Conscience in handing his commission to 
 him contains the essence of Bunyan's creed. 
 
 * Thou must confine thyself to the teaching of moral 
 virtues, to civil and natural duties. But thou must not 
 attempt to presume to be a revealer of those high and 
 supernatural mysteries that are kept close in the bosom 
 of Shaddai, my father. For those things knows no man ; 
 nor can any reveal them but my father's secretary only. 
 ... In all high and supernatural things, thou must go 
 to him for information and knowledge. Wherefore keep 
 low and be humble ; and remember that the Diabolonians 
 that kept not their first charge, but left their own stand- 
 ing, are now made prisoners in the pit. Be therefore 
 content with thy station. I have made thee my father's 
 vicegerent on earth in the things of which I have made 
 mention before. Take thou power to teach them to Man- 
 soul ; yea, to impose them with whips and chastisements if 
 they shall not willingly hearken to do thy commandments. 
 . . . And one thing more to my beloved Mr. Recorder, 
 and to all the town of Mansoul. You must not dwell in 
 nor stay upon anything of that which he hath in com- 
 mission to teach you, as to your trust and expectation of 
 the next world. Of the next world, I say ; for I purpose 
 to give another to Mansoul when this is worn out. But 
 for that you must wholly and solely have recourse to and 
 make stay upon the doctrine of your teacher of the first 
 order. Yea, Mr. Recorder himself must not look for life 
 from that which he himself revealeth. His dependence
 
 142 BUNYAtf. [CHAP. 
 
 for that must be founded in the doctrine of the other 
 preacher. Let Mr. Recorder also take heed that he 
 receive not any doctrine or points of doctrine that are 
 not communicated to him by his superior teacher, nor yet 
 within the precincts of his own formal knowledge.' 
 
 Here, as a work of art, the ' Holy War ' should have 
 its natural end. Mansoul had been created pure and 
 happy. The Devil plotted against it, took it, defiled it. 
 The Lord of the town came to the rescue, drove the Devil 
 out, executed his officers and destroyed his works. Man- 
 soul, according to Emmanuel's promise, was put into a 
 better condition than that in which it was originally 
 placed. New laws was drawn for it. New ministers were 
 appointed to execute them. Yice had been destroyed. 
 Unbelief had been driven away. The future lay serene 
 and bright before it ; all trials and dangers being 
 safely passed. Thus we have all the parts of a complete 
 drama the fair beginning, the perils, the struggles, and 
 the final victory of good. At this point, for purposes 
 of art, the curtain ought to fall. 
 
 For purposes of art not, however, for purposes of 
 truth. For the drama of Mansoul was still incomplete, 
 and will remain incomplete till man puts on another 
 nature or ceases altogether to be. Christianity might 
 place him in a new relation to his Maker, and, according 
 to Bunyan, might expel the Devil out of his heart. But 
 for practical purposes, as Mansoul too well knows, the 
 Devil is still in possession. At intervals as in the first 
 centuries of the Christian era, for a period in the middle 
 ages, and again in Protestant countries tot another period 
 at the Reformation- -mankind made noble efforts to drive 
 him out, and make the law of God into reality. But he 
 .comes back again, and the world is again IVK it was. The
 
 VIII. J 
 
 THE HOLY WAR. 143 
 
 vices again flourish which had been nailed to the Cross. 
 The statesman finds it as little possible as ever to take 
 moral right and justice for his rule in politics. The 
 Evangelical preacher continues to confess and deplore 
 the despei-ate wickedness of the human heart. The Devil 
 had been deposed, but his faithful subjects have restored 
 him to his throne. The stone of Sisyphus has been brought 
 to the brow of the hill only to rebound again to the 
 bottom. The old battle has to be fought a second 
 time, and, for all we can see, no closing victory will ever 
 be in ' this country of Universe.' Bunyan knew this but 
 too well. He tries to conceal it from himself by treating 
 Mansoul alternately as the soul of a single individual 
 from which the Devil may be so expelled as never danger- 
 ously to come back, or as the collective souls of the Chris- 
 tian world. But, let him mean which of the two he will, 
 the overpowering fact remains that, from the point of view 
 of his own theology, the great majority of mankind are 
 the Devil's servants through life, and are made over to 
 him everlastingly when their lives are over; while the 
 human race itself continues to follow its idle amusements 
 and its sinful pleasures as if no Emmanuel had ever come 
 from heaven to rescue it. Thus the situation is incom- 
 plete, and the artistic treatment necessarily unsatisfactory 
 nay in a sense even worse than unsatisfactory, for the 
 attention of the reader, being reawakened by the fresh and 
 lively treatment of the subject, refuses to be satisfied with 
 conventional explanatory commonplaces. His mind is 
 puzzled ; his faith wavers in its dependence upon a Being 
 who can permit His wcrk to be spoilt, His power defied, 
 His victories even, when won, made useless. 
 
 Thus we take up the continuation of the ' Holy War ' 
 with a certain weariness and expectation of disappoint-
 
 144 BUN Y AN. [CHAP. 
 
 ment. The deliver)' of Mansoul has not been finished 
 after all, and, for all that we can see, the struggle between 
 Shaddai and Diabolus may go on to eternity. Emmanuel, 
 before he withdraws his presence, warns the inhabitants 
 that many Diabolonians are still lurking about the outside 
 walls of the town. 1 The names are those in St. Paul's list 
 Fornication, Adultery, Murder, Anger, Lasciviousness, 
 Deceit, Evil Eye, Drunkenness, Revelling, Idolatry, 
 Witchcraft, Variance, Emulation, Wrath, Strife, Sedition, 
 Heresy. If all these were still abroad, not much had been 
 gained by the crucifixion of the Aldermen. For the time, 
 it was true, they did not show themselves openly. Mansoul 
 after the conquest was clothed in white linen, and was in a 
 state of peace and glory. But the linen was speedily soiled 
 again. Mr. Carnal Security became a great person in Man- 
 soul. The Chief Secretary's functions fell early into abey- 
 ance. He discovered the Recorder and Lord Will be Will 
 at dinner in Mr. Carnal Security's parlour, and ceased to 
 communicate with them. Mr. Godly Fear sounded an 
 alarm, and Mr. Carnal Security's house was burnt by 
 the mob ; but Mansoul's backslidings grew worse. It 
 had its fits of repentance, and petitioned Emmanuel, but the 
 messenger could have no admittance. The Lusts of the 
 Flebh came out of their dens. They held a meeting in the 
 room of Mr. Mischief, and wrote to invite Diabolus to 
 return. Mr. Profane carried their letter to Hell Gate. 
 Cerberus opened it, and a cry of joy ran through the 
 prison. Beelzebub, Lucifer, Apollyon, and the rest of the 
 devils came crowding to hear the news. Deadman's bell 
 was rung. Diabolus addressed the assembly, putting them 
 in hopes of recovering their prize. 'Nor need you fear, 
 he said, that if ever we get Mansoul again, we after that 
 1 The Flesh,
 
 viii.] THE HOLY WAR. 145 
 
 shall be cast out any more. It is the law of that Prince 
 that now they own, that if we get them a second time 
 they shall be ours for ever.' He returned a warm answer 
 to his friend, ' which was subscribed as given at the Pit's 
 mouth, by the joint consent of all the Princes of Darkness, 
 by me, Diabolus.' The plan was to corrupt Mansoul's 
 morals, and three devils of rank set off disguised to take 
 service in the town, and make their way into the house- 
 holds of Mr. Mind, Mr. Godly Fear, and Lord Will be 
 Will. Godly Fear discovered his mistake and turned the 
 devil out. The other two established themselves success- 
 fully, and Mr. Profane was soon at Hell Gate again to 
 report progress. Cerberus welcomed him with a ' St. 
 Mary, I am glad to see thee.' Another council was held 
 in Pandemonium, and Diabolus was impatient to show 
 himself again on the scene. Apollyon advised him not to 
 be in a hurry. ' Let our friends,' he said, ' draw Mansoul 
 more and more into sin there is nothing like sin to de- 
 vour Mansoul ; ' but Diabolus would not wait for so slow 
 a process, and raised an army of Doubters 'from the land 
 of Doubting on the confines of Hell Gate Hill.' ' Doubt.' 
 Bunyan always admitted, had been his own most dange- 
 rous enemy. 
 
 Happily the townspeople became aware of the peril 
 which threatened them. Mr. Prywell, a great lover of 
 Mansoul, overheard some Diabolonians talking about it 
 at a place called Vile Hill. He earned his information 
 to the Lord Mayor ; the B-ecorder rang the Alarm Bell ; 
 Mansoul flew to penitence, held a day of fasting and 
 humiliation, and prayed to Shaddai. The Diabolonians 
 were hunted out, and all that conld be found were 
 killed. So far as haste and alarm would permit, 
 Mansoul mended its ways. But on came the Doubting 
 
 L
 
 146 BUNYAN. [CHAP. 
 
 army, led by Incredulity, who had escaped cruci- 
 fixion ' none was truer to Diabolus than he ' on they 
 came under their several captains, Vocation Doubters, 
 Grace Doubters, Salvation Doubters, i$zc. figures now 
 gone to shadow ; then the deadliest foes of every English 
 Puritan soul. Mansoul appealed passionately to the Chief 
 Secretary ; but the Chief Secretary ' had been grieved,' 
 and would have nothing to say to it. The town legions 
 went out to meet the invaders with good words, Prayer, 
 and singing of Psalms. The Doubters replied with 
 ' horrible objections,' which were frightfully effective. 
 Lord Reason was wounded in the head and the Lord 
 Mayor in the eye ; Mr. Mind received a shot in the sto- 
 mach, and Conscience was hit near the heart; but the 
 wounds were not mortal. Mansoul had the best of it in the 
 first engagement. Terror was followed by boasting and 
 self-confidence ; a night sally was attempted night being 
 the time when the Doubters were strongest. The sally 
 failed, and the men of Mansoul were turned to rout. 
 Diabolus's army attacked Eargate, stormed the walls, 
 forced their way into the town, and captured the whole 
 of it except the castle. Then ' Mansoul became a den of 
 dragons, an emblem of Hell, a place of total darkness.' 
 ' Mr. Conscience's wounds so festered that he could have 
 no rest day or night.' ' Now a man might have walked 
 for days together in Mansoul, and scarce have seen one in 
 the town that looked like a religious man. Oh, the fear- 
 ful state of Mansoul now ! ' ' Now every corner swarmed 
 with outlandish Doubters ; Red Coats and Black Coats 
 walked the town by clusters, and filled the houses with 
 hideous noises, lying stories, and blasphemous language 
 against Shaddai and his Son.' 
 
 This is evidently meant for fashionable London in the
 
 vni.] THE HOLY WAR. 147 
 
 time of Charles II. Bunyan was loyal to the King. He 
 was no believer in moral regeneration through political 
 revolution. But none the less he could see what was 
 under his eyes, and he knew what to think of it. 
 
 All was not lost, for the castle still held out. The 
 only hope was in Emmanuel, and the garrison proposed to 
 petition again in spite of the ill reception of their first 
 messengers. Godly Fear reminded them that no petition 
 would be received which was not signed by the Lord 
 Secretary, and that the Lord Secretary would sign nothing 
 which he had not himself drawn up. The Lord Secretary, 
 when appealed to in the proper manner, no longer refused 
 his assistance. Captain Credence flew up to Shaddai's 
 court with the simple words that Mansoul renounced all 
 trust in its own strength and relied upon its Saviour. 
 This time its prayer would be heard. 
 
 The devils meanwhile, triumphant though they were, 
 discovered that they could have no permanent victory 
 unless they could reduce the castle. ' Doubters at a 
 distance,' Beelzebub said, ' are but like objections repelled 
 by arguments. Can we but get them into the hold, and 
 make them possessors of that, the day will be our own.' 
 The object was, therefore, to corrupt Mansoul at the 
 heart. 
 
 Then follows a veiy curious passage. Bunyan had 
 still his eye on England, and had discerned the quarter 
 from which her real danger would approach. Mansoul, 
 the Devil perceived, ' was a market town, much given to 
 commerce.' ' It would be possible to dispose of some of 
 the Devil's wares there.' The people would be filled full, 
 and made rich, and would forget Emmanuel. ' Mansoul,' 
 they said, ' shall be so cumbered with abundance, that 
 they shall be forced to make their castle a warehouse.' 
 
 L2
 
 148 BUNYAN. [CHAP. 
 
 Wealth once made the first object of existence, ' Dia- 
 bolus's gang will have easy entrance, and the castle will 
 be our own.' 
 
 Political economy was still sleeping in the womb of 
 futurity. Diabolus was unable to hasten its birth, and 
 an experiment which Bunyan thought would certainly 
 have succeeded was not to be tried. The Deus ex Ma- 
 chind appeared with its naming sword. The Doubting 
 army was cut to pieces, and Mansoul was saved. Again, 
 however, the work was imperfectly done. Diabolus, like 
 the bad genius in the fairy tale, survived for fresh mis- 
 chief. Diabolus flew off again to Hell Gate, and was 
 soon at the head of a new host ; part composed of fugitive 
 Doubters whom he rallied, and part of a new set of 
 enemies called Bloodmen, by whom we are to understand 
 persecutors, 'a people from a land that lay under the 
 Dog Star.' ' Captain Pope ' was chief of the Bloodmen. 
 His escutcheon ' was the stake, the flame, and good men 
 in it.' The Bloodmen had done Diabolus wonderful ser- 
 vice in time past. ' Once they had forced Emmanuel out of 
 the Kingdom of the Universe, and why, thought he, might 
 they not do it again ? ' 
 
 Emmanuel did not this time go in person to the 
 encounter. It was enough to send his captains. The 
 Doubters fled at the first onset. ' The Bloodmen, when 
 they saw that no Emmanuel was in the field, concluded 
 that no Emmanuel was in Mansoul. Wherefore, they, 
 looking upon what the captains did to be, as they called 
 it, a fruit of the extravagancy of their wild and foolish 
 fancies, rather despised them than feared them.' ' They 
 proved, nevertheless, chicken-hearted, when they saw 
 themselves matched and equalled.' The chiefs were taken 
 prisoners, and brought to trial like Atheism and his
 
 Tin.] THE HOLY WAR. 149 
 
 companions, and so, with an address from the Prince, the 
 story comes to a close. 
 
 Thus at last the 'Holy War 'ends or seems to end. 
 It is as if Banyan had wished to show that though the 
 converted Christian was still liable to the assaults of 
 Satan, and even to be beaten down and overcome by 
 him, his state was never afterwards so desperate as it 
 had been before the redemption, and that he had assist- 
 ance ready at hand to save him when near extremity. 
 But the reader whose desire it is that good shall triumph 
 and evil be put to shame and overthrown remains 
 but partially satisfied ; and the last conflict and its issues 
 leave Mansoul still subject to fresh attacks. Diabolus 
 was still at large. Carnal Sense broke prison and con- 
 tinued to lurk in the town. Unbelief ' was a nimble 
 Jack : him they could never lay hold of, though they 
 attempted to do it often.' Unbelief remained in Man- 
 soul till the time that Mansoul ceased to dwell in the 
 country of the Universe ; and where Unbelief was Dia- 
 bolus would not be without a friend to open the gates 
 to him. Bunyan says, indeed, that ' he was stoned as 
 often as he showed himself in the streets.' He shows 
 himself in the streets much at his ease in these days of 
 ours after two more centuries. 
 
 Here lies the real weakness of the ' Holy War.' It 
 may be looked at either as the war in the soul of each 
 sinner that is saved, or as the war for the deliverance of 
 humanity. Under the first aspect it leaves out of sight 
 the large majority of mankind who are not supposed to 
 be saved, and out of whom, therefore, Diabolus is not 
 driven at all. Under the other aspect the struggle is 
 still unfinished ; the last act of the drama has still to be 
 played, and we know not what the conclusion is to be.
 
 150 BUNYAH. [CH. VHI. 
 
 To attempt to represent it, therefore, as a work of art, 
 with a beginning, a middle, and an end, is necessarily a 
 failure. The mysteries and contradictions which the 
 Christian revelation leaves unsolved are made tolerable to 
 us by Hope. We are prepared to find in religion many 
 things which we cannot understand ; and difficulties do 
 not perplex us so long as they remain in a form to which 
 we are accustomed. To emphasise the problem by offering 
 it to us in an allegory, of which we are presumed to possess 
 a key, serves only to revive Man Friday's question, or 
 the old dilemma which neither intellect nor imagination 
 has ever dealt with successfully. ' Deus aut non vult 
 tollere mala, aut nequit. Si non vult non est bonus. Si 
 nequit non est omnipotens.' It is wiser to confess with 
 Butler that ' there may be necessities in the nature of 
 things which we are not acquainted with.'
 
 CHAPTER IX. 
 THE PILGRIM'S PROGRESS. 
 
 IF the ' Holy Wai- ' is an unfit subject for allegorical 
 treatment, the ' Pilgrim's Progress ' is no less perfectly 
 adapted for it. The ' Holy War ' is a representation of the 
 struggle of human natui'e with evil, and the struggle is 
 left undecided. The 'Pilgrim's Progress' is a representa- 
 tion of the efforts of a single soul after holiness, which 
 has its natural termination when the soul quits its mortal 
 home and crosses the dark river. Each one of xis has his 
 own life battle to fight out, his own sorrows and trials, 
 his own failures or successes, and his own end. He 
 wins the game, or he loses it. The account is wound up, 
 and the curtain falls upon him. Here Bunyan had a 
 material as excellent in itself as it was exactly suited to 
 his peculiar genius ; and his treatment of the subject from 
 his own point of view that of English Protestant Chris- 
 tianity is unequalled and never will be equalled. I may 
 say never, for in this world of change the point of view 
 alters fast, and never continues in one stay. As we are 
 swept along the stream of time, lights and shadows shift 
 their places, mountain plateaus turn to sharp peaks, 
 mountain ranges dissolve into vapour. The river which 
 has been gliding deep and slow along the plain, leaps 
 suddenly over a precipice and plunges foaming down a
 
 152 BUN YAK. [CHAP. 
 
 sunless gorge. In the midst of changing circumstances the 
 cantral question remains the same What am I ? what is 
 this world in which I appear and disappear like a bubble 1 
 who made me ? and what am I to do ? Some answer or 
 other the mind of man demands and insists on receiving. 
 Theologian or poet offers at long intervals explanations 
 which are accepted as credible for a time. They wear 
 out, and another follows, and then another. Bunyan's 
 answer has served average English men and women for 
 two hundred years, but no human being with Bunyan's 
 intellect and Bunyan's sincerity can again use similar 
 language ; and the ' Pilgrim's Progress ' is and will re- 
 main unique of its kind an imperishable monument of 
 the form in which the problem presented itself to a per- 
 son of singular truthfulness, simplicity, and piety, who 
 after many struggles accepted the Puritan creed as the 
 adequate solution of it. It was composed exactly at the 
 time when it was possible for such a book to come into 
 being ; the close of the period when the Puritan formula 
 was a real belief, and was about to change from a living 
 principle into an intellectual opinion. So long as a re- 
 ligion is fully alive, men do not talk about it or make 
 allegories about it. They assume its truth as out of 
 reach of question, and they simply obey its precepts as 
 they obey the law of the land. It becomes a subject of 
 art and discourse only when men are unconsciously ceasing 
 to believe, and therefore the more vehemently think that 
 they believe, and repudiate with indignation the sugges- 
 tion that doubt has found its way into them. After this 
 religion no longer governs their lives. It governs only 
 the language in which they express themselves, and they 
 preserve it eagerly, in the shape of elaborate observances 
 or in the agreeable forms of art and literature.
 
 ix.] THE PILGRIM'S PROGRESS. 153 
 
 The ' Pilgrim's Progress ' was written before the 
 ' Holy War,' while Bunyan was still in prison at Bed- 
 ford, and was but half conscious of the gifts which he 
 possessed. It was written for his own entertainment, and 
 therefore without the thought so fatal in its effects and 
 so hard to be resisted of what the world would say about 
 it. It was written in compulsory quiet, when he was 
 comparatively unexcited by the effort of perpetual preach- 
 ing, and the shapes of things could present themselves 
 to him as they really were, undistorted by theological 
 narrowness. It is the same story which he has told of 
 himself in ' Grace Abounding,' thrown out into an objec- 
 tive form. 
 
 He tells us himself, in a metrical introduction, the 
 circumstances under which it was composed : 
 
 When at the first I took my pen in hand, 
 Thus for to write, I did not understand 
 That I at all should make a little book 
 In such a mode. Nay, I had undertook 
 To make another, which when almost done, 
 Before I was aware I this begun. 
 
 And thus it was. I writing of the way 
 
 And race of saints in this our Gospel day, 
 
 Fell suddenly into an Allegory 
 
 About the journey and the way to glory 
 
 In more than twenty things which I set down. 
 
 This done, I twenty more had in my crown, 
 
 And these again began to multiply, 
 
 Like sparks that from the coals of fire do fly. 
 
 Nay then, thought I, if that you breed so fast 
 
 I'll put you by yourselves, lest you at last 
 
 Should prove ad Infinitum, and eat out 
 
 The book that I already am about. 
 
 Well, so I did ; but yet I did not think 
 To show to all the world my pen and ink
 
 154 BUNYAN. [CHAP. 
 
 In such a mode. I only thought to make, 
 I knew not what. Nor did I undertake 
 Merely to please my neighbours ; no, not I. 
 I did it mine own self to gratify. 
 
 Neither did I but vacant seasons spend 
 
 In this my scribble ; nor did I intend 
 
 But to divert myself in doing this 
 
 From worser thoughts which make me do amiss. 
 
 Thus I set pen to paper with delight, 
 
 And quickly had my thoughts in black and white ; 
 
 For having now my method by the end, 
 
 Still as I pulled it came ; and so I penned 
 
 It down : until at last it came to be 
 
 For length and breadth the bigness which you see. 
 
 Well, when I had thus put my ends together, 
 
 I showed them others, that I might see whether 
 
 They would condemn them or them justify. 
 
 And some said, Let them live ; some, Let them die ; 
 
 Some said, John, print it ; others said, Not so ; 
 
 Some said it might do good ; others said, No. 
 
 Now was I in a strait, and did not see 
 . Which was the best thing to be done by me. 
 At last I thought, since you are thus divided, 
 I print it will ; and so the case decided. 
 
 The difference of opinion among Bunyan's friends is 
 easily explicable. The allegoric representation of religion 
 to men profoundly convinced of the truth of it might 
 naturally seem light and fantastic, and the breadth of 
 the conception could not please the narrow sectarians 
 who knew no salvation beyond the lines of their peculiar 
 formulas. The Pilgrim though in a Puritan dress is a 
 genuine man. His experience is so truly human experi- 
 ence, that Christians of every persuasion can identify 
 themselves with him; and even those who regard 
 Christianity itself as but a natural outgrowth of the
 
 ix.] THE PILGRIM'S PROGRESS. 155 
 
 conscience and intellect, and yet desire to live nobly and 
 make the best of themselves, can recognise familiar foot- 
 prints in every step of Christian's journey. Thus the 
 ' Pilgrim's Progress ' is a book, which, when once read, 
 can never be forgotten. We too, every one of us, are 
 pilgrims on the same road, and images and illustrations 
 come back upon us from so faithful an itinerary, as we 
 encounter similar trials, and learn for ourselves the 
 accuracy with which Bunyan has described them. There 
 is no occasion to follow a story minutely which memory 
 can so universally supply. I need pause only at a few 
 spots which are too charming to pass by. 
 
 How picturesque and vivid are the opening lines : 
 ' As I walked through the wilderness of this world I 
 lighted on a certain place where there was a den, 1 and 
 I laid me down in that place to sleep, and as I slept I 
 dreamed a dream. I dreamed, and behold I saw a man, 
 a man clothed in rags, standing with his face from his 
 own home with a book in his hand, and a great burden 
 upon his back.' 
 
 The man is Bunyan himself as we see him in ' Grace 
 Abounding.' His sins are the burden upon his back. He 
 reads his book and weeps and trembles. He speaks of 
 his fears to his friends and kindred. They think ' some 
 frenzy distemper has got into his head.' He meets a man 
 in the fields whose name is Evangelist. Evangelist tells 
 him to flee from the City of Destruction. He shows him 
 the way by which he must go, and points to the far-off 
 light which will guide him to the wicket-gate. He sets 
 off, and his neighbours of course think him mad. The 
 world always thinks men mad who turn their backs upon 
 it. Obstinate and Pliable (how well we know them 
 1 The Bedford Prison.
 
 156 BUNYAN. [CHAP. 
 
 both !) follow to persuade him to return. Obstinate talks 
 practical common sense to him, and as it has no effect, 
 gives him up as a fantastical fellow. Pliable thinks that 
 there may be something in what he says, and offers to go 
 with him. 
 
 Before they can reach the wicket-gate, they fall into 
 a ' miry slough.' Who does not know the miry slough 
 too ? When a man begins for the first time to think 
 seriously about himself, the first thing that rises before 
 him is a consciousness of his miserable past life. Amend- 
 ment seems to be despei'ate. He thinks it is too late to 
 change for any useful purpose, and he sinks into de- 
 spondency. 
 
 Pliable finding the road disagreeable has soon had 
 enough of it. He scrambles out of the slough ' on the 
 side which was nearest to his own house ' and goes home. 
 Christian struggling manfully is lifted out ' by a man 
 whose name was Help/ and goes on upon his journey, 
 but the burden on his back weighs him down. He falls 
 in with Mr. Worldly Wiseman who lives in the town 
 of Carnal Policy. Mr. Worldly Wiseman, Who looks like 
 a gentleman, advises him not to think about his sins. 
 If he has done wrong he must alter his life and do 
 better, for the future. He directs him to a village called 
 Morality, where he will find a gentleman well known in 
 those parts, who will take his burden off Mr. Legality. 
 Either Mr. Legality will do it himself, or it can be done 
 equally well by his pretty young son, Mr. Civility. 
 
 The way to a better life does not lie in a change of 
 outward action, but in a changed heart. Legality soon 
 passes into civility, according to the saying that vice loses 
 half its evil when it loses its grossness. Bunyan would 
 have said that the poison was the more deadly from being
 
 ix.] THE PILGRIM'S PROGRESS. 157 
 
 concealed. Christian after a near escape is set straight 
 again. He is admitted into the wicket-gate and is directed 
 how he is to go forward. He asks if he may not lose his 
 way. He is answered Yes, ' There are many ways (that) 
 butt down on this and they are crooked and wide. But 
 thus thou mayest know the right from the wrong, that 
 only being straight and narrow.' 
 
 Good people often suppose that when a man is once 
 ' converted,' as they call it, and has entered on a religious 
 life, he will find everything made easy. He has turned 
 to Christ, and in Christ he will find rest and pleasantness. 
 The path of duty is unfortunately not strewed with 
 flowers at all. The primrose road leads to the other 
 place. As on all other journeys, to persevere is the 
 difficulty. The pilgrim's feet grow sorer the longer he 
 walks. His lower nature follows him like a shadow 
 watching opportunities to trip him up, and ever appear- 
 ing in some new disguise. In the way of comfort ho 
 is allowed only certain resting places, quiet intervals of 
 peace when temptation is absent, and the mind can gather 
 strength and encouragement from a sense of the progress 
 which it has made. 
 
 The first of these resting places at which Christian 
 arrives is the ' Interpreter's House.' This means, I con- 
 ceive, that he arrives at a right understanding of the 
 objects of human desire as they really are. He learns to 
 distinguish there between passion and patience, passion 
 which demands immediate gratification, and patience 
 which can wait and hope. He sees the action of grace 
 on the heart, and sees the Devil labouring to put it out. 
 He sees the man in the iron cage who was once a flourish- 
 ing professor, but had been tempted away by pleasure and 
 had sinned against light. He hears a dream too one of
 
 158 BUNYAN. [CHAP. 
 
 Bunyan's own early dreams, but related as by another 
 person. The Pilgrim himself was beyond the reach of 
 such uneasy visions. But it shows how profoundly the 
 terrible side of Christianity had seized on Bunyan's im- 
 agination and how little he was able to forget it. 
 
 'This night as I was in my sleep I dreamed, and 
 behold the heavens grew exceeding black : jalso it thun- 
 dered and lightened in most fearful wise, that it put me 
 into an agony ; so I looked up in my dream and saw the 
 clouds rack at an unusual rate, upon which I heard a 
 great sound of a trumpet, and saw also a man sit upon a 
 cloud attended with the thousands of heaven. They 
 were all in a naming fire, and the heaven also was in a 
 burning flame. I heard then a voice, saying, Arise ye 
 dead and come to judgment; and with that the rocks 
 rent, the graves opened, and the dead that were therein 
 came forth. Some of them were exceeding glad and 
 looked upward, some sought to hide themselves under the 
 mountains. Then I saw the man that sate upon the 
 cloud open the book and bid the world draw near. Yet 
 there was, by reason of a fierce flame that issued out and 
 came from before him, a convenient distance betwixt 
 him and them, as betwixt the judge and the prisoners at 
 the bar. I heard it also proclaimed to them that attended 
 on the man that sate on the cloud, Gather together the 
 tares, the chaff, and the stubble, and cast them into the 
 burning lake. And with that the bottomless pit opened 
 just whereabouts I stood, out of the mouth of which 
 there came in an abundant manner smoke and coals of 
 fire with hideous noises. It was also said to the same 
 persons, Gather the wheat into my garner. And with 
 that I saw many catched up and carried away into the 
 clouds, but I was left behind. I also sought to hide
 
 ix.] THE PILGRIM'S PROGRESS. 159 
 
 myself, but I could not, for the man that sate upon the 
 cloud still kept his eye upon me. My sins also came into 
 my mind, and my conscience did accuse me on every 
 side. I thought the day of judgment was come and 1 
 was not ready for it.' 
 
 The resting time comes to an end. The Pilgrim 
 gathers himself together, and proceeds upon his way. 
 He is not to be burdened for ever with the sense of his 
 sins. It fell from off his back at the sight of the cross. 
 Three shining ones appear and tell him that his sins are 
 forgiven ; they take off his rags and provide him with a 
 new suit. 
 
 He now encounters fellow-travellers ; and the serious- 
 ness of the story is relieved by adventures and humorous 
 conversations. At the bottom of a hill he finds three 
 gentlemen asleep, ' a little out of the way.' These were 
 Simple, Sloth, and Presumption. He tries to rouse 
 them, but does not succeed. Presently two others are 
 seen tumbling over the wall into the Narrow Way. They 
 are come from the land of Vain Glory, and are called 
 Formalist and Hypocrisy. Like the Pilgrim, they are 
 bound for Mount Zion ; but the wicket-gate was * too far 
 about,' and they had come by a short cut. ' They had 
 custom for it a thousand years and more ; and custom 
 being of so long standing would be admitted legal by any 
 impartial judge." Whether right or wrong they insist 
 that they are in the way, and no more is to be said. 
 But they are soon out of it again. The hill is the hill 
 Difficulty, and the road parts into three. Two go round 
 the bottom, as modern engineers would make them. The 
 other rises straight over the top. Formalist and Hypo- 
 crisy choose the easy ways, and are heard of no more. 
 Pilgrim climbs up, and after various accidents comes to
 
 160 BUNYAN. [CHAP. 
 
 the second resting-place, the Palace Beautiful, built by 
 the Lord of the Hill to entertain strangers in. The re- 
 collections of Sir Bevis of Southampton furnished Bunyan 
 with his framework. Lions guard the court. Fair ladies 
 entertain him as if he had been a knight- errant in quest 
 of the Holy Grail. The ladies, of course, are all that they 
 ought to be : the Christian graces Discretion, Prudence, 
 Piety, and Charity. He tells them his history. They ask 
 him if he has brought none of his old belongings with 
 him. He answers yes ; but greatly against his will : his 
 inward and carnal cogitations, with which his country- 
 men, as well as himself, were so much delighted. Only in 
 golden hours they seemed to leave him. Who cannot 
 recognise the truth of this 1 Who has not groaned over 
 the follies and idiotcies that cling to us like the doggerel 
 verses that hang about our memories ? The room in 
 which he sleeps is called Peace. In the morning he is 
 shown the curiosities, chiefly Scripture relics, in the 
 palace. He is taken to the roof, from which he sees far 
 off the outlines of the Delectable Mountains. Next, the 
 ladies carry him to the armoury, and equip him for the 
 dangers which lie next before him. He is to go down 
 into the Valley of Humiliation, and pass thence through 
 the Yalley of the Shadow of Death. 
 
 Bunyan here shows the finest insight. To some pil- 
 grims the Valley of Humiliation was the pleasantest part 
 of the journey. Mr. Feeblemind, in the second part of 
 the story, was happier there than anywhere. But Chris- 
 tian is Bunyan himself; and Bunyan had a stiff self- 
 willed nature, and had found his spirit the most stubborn 
 part of him. Down here he encounters Apollyon him- 
 self, ' straddling quite over the whole breadth of the way' 
 a more effective devil than the Diabolus of the ' Holy
 
 ix.] THE PILGRIM'S PROGRESS. 161 
 
 War.' He fights him for half-a-day, is sorely wounded 
 in head, hand, and foot, and has a near escape cf being 
 pressed to death. Apollyon spreads his bat wings at last, 
 and flies away ; but there remains the Valley of the 
 Shadow of Death, the dark scene of lonely horrors. 
 Two men meet him on the borders of it. They tell him 
 the valley is full of spectres ; and they warn him, if he 
 values his life, to go back. Well Bunyan knew these 
 spectres, those dreary misgivings that he was toiling after 
 an illusion ; that ' good ' and ' evil ' had no meaning except 
 on earth, and for man's convenience ; and that he himself 
 was but a creature of a day, allowed a brief season of 
 what is called existence, and then to pass away and be 
 as if he had never been. It speaks well for Bunyan's 
 honesty that this state of mind which religious people 
 generally call wicked is placed directly in his Pilgrim's 
 path, and he is compelled to pass through it. In the 
 valley, close at the road-side, there is a pit, which is one 
 of the mouths of hell. A wicked spirit whispers to him 
 as he goes by. He imagines that the thought had pro- 
 ceeded out of his own heart. 
 
 The sky clears when he is beyond the gorge. Outside 
 it are the caves where the two giants, Pope and Pagan, 
 had lived in old times. Pagan had been dead many a 
 day. Pope was still living, ' but he had grown so crazy 
 and stiff in his joints that he could now do little more 
 than sit in his cave's mouth, grinning at pilgrims as they 
 went by, and biting his nail-j because he could not come 
 at them.' 
 
 Here he overtakes ' Faithful,' a true pilgrim like him- 
 self. Faithfvil had met with trials ; but his trials had 
 not resembled Christian's. Christian's difficulties, like 
 Bunyan's own, had been all spiritual. ' The lusts of tho 
 
 H
 
 162 BUNYAN. [CHAP. 
 
 flesh ' seeni to have had no attraction for him. Faithful 
 had been assailed by ' Wanton,' and had been obliged to 
 fly from her. He had not fallen into the slough ; but he 
 had been beguiled by the Old Adam, who offered him one 
 of his daughters for a wife. In the Valley of the Shadow 
 of Death he had found sunshine all the way. Doubts 
 about the truth of religion had never troubled the simpler 
 nature of the good Faithful. 
 
 Mr. Talkative is the next character introduced, and 
 is one of the best figures which Bunyan has drawn ; Mr. 
 Talkative, with Scripture at his fingers' ends, and perfect 
 master of all doctrinal subtleties, ready ' to talk of things 
 heavenly or things earthly, things moral or things evan- 
 gelical, things sacred or things profane, things past or 
 things to come, things foreign or things at home, things 
 essential or things circumstantial, provided that all be 
 done to our profit.' 
 
 This gentleman would have taken in Faithful, who 
 was awed by such a rush of volubility. Christian has 
 seen him before, knows him well, and can describe him. 
 ' He is the son of one Say well. He dwelt in Prating 
 Row. He is for any company and for any talk. As he 
 talks now with you so will he talk when on the ale- 
 bench. The more drink he hath in his crown, the more 
 of these things he hath in his mouth. Religion hath no 
 place in his heart, or home, or conversation ; all that he 
 hath lieth in his tongue, and his religion is to make a 
 noise therewith.' 
 
 The elect, though they have ceased to be of the world, 
 are still in the world. They are still part of the general 
 community of mankind, and share, whether they like it 
 or not, in the ordinary activities of life. Faithful and 
 Christian have left the City of Destruction. They have
 
 ix.] THE PILGRIM'S PROGRESS. 163 
 
 shaken off from themselves all liking for idle pleasures. 
 They nevertheless find themselves in their journey at 
 Vanity Fair, ' a fair set up by Beelzebub 5000 years ago.' 
 Trade of all sorts went on at Vanity Fair, and people of 
 all sorts were collected there : cheats, fools, asses, knaves, 
 and rogues. Some were honest, many were dishonest ; some 
 lived peaceably and uprightly, others robbed, murdered, 
 seduced their neighbours' wives, or lied and perjured 
 themselves. Vanity Fair was European society as it 
 existed in the days of Charles II. Each nation was 
 represented. There was British Row, French. Eow, and 
 Spanish Row. ' The wares of Rome and her merchandise 
 were greatly promoted at the fair, only the English nation 
 with some others had taken a dislike to them.' The 
 pilgrims appear on the scene as the Apostles appeared at 
 Antioch and Rome, to tell the people that there were 
 things in the world of more consequence than money and 
 pleasure. The better sort listen. Public opinion in 
 general calls them fools and Bedlamites. The fair be- 
 comes excited, distm-bances are feared, and the authorities 
 send to make inquiries. Authorities naturally disapprove 
 of novelties ; and Christian and Faithful are arrested, 
 beaten, and put in the cage. Their friends insist that 
 they have done no harm, that they are innocent strangers 
 teaching only what will make men better instead of 
 worse. A riot follows. The authorities determine to 
 make an example of them, and the result is the ever- 
 memorable trial of the two pilgrims. They are brought 
 in irons before my Lord Hategood, charged with ' dis- 
 turbing the trade of the town, creating divisions, and 
 making converts to their opinions in contempt of the 
 law of the Prince.' 
 
 Faithful begins with an admission which, would have
 
 164 BUNYAN. [CHAP. 
 
 mr.de it difficult for Hategood to let him off, for he says 
 that the Prince they talked of, being Beelzebub, the 
 enemy of the Lord, he defied him and all his angels. 
 Three witnesses were then called : Envy, Superstition, 
 and Pickthank. 
 
 Envy says that Faithful regards neither prince nor 
 people, but does all he can to possess men with disloyal 
 notions, which he call principles of faith and holiness. 
 
 Superstition says that he knows little of him, but has 
 heard him say that ' our religion is naught, and such by 
 which no man can please God, from which saying his 
 Lordship well knows will follow that we are yet in our 
 sins, and finally shall be damned.' 
 
 Pickthank deposes that he has heard Faithful rail on 
 Beelzebub, and speak contemptuously of his honourable 
 friends my Lord Old Man, my Lord Carnal Delight, 
 my Lord Luxurious, my Lord Desire of Vain Glory, my 
 Lord Lechery, Sir Having Greedy, and the rest of the 
 nobility, besides which he has railed against his lordship 
 on the bench himself, calling him an ungodly villain. 
 
 The evidence was perfectly true, and the prisoner, 
 when called on for his defence, confirmed it. He says 
 (avoiding the terms in which he was said to rail and 
 the like) that ' the Prince of the town, with all the rabble- 
 ment of his attendants by this gentleman named, are 
 more fit for a being in hell than in this town or country.' 
 
 Lord Hategood has been supposed to have been drawn 
 from one or other of Charles II. 's judges, perhaps from 
 either Twisden or Chester, who had the conversation with 
 Bunyan's wife. But it is difficult to see how either one 
 or the other could have acted otherwise than they did. 
 Faithful might be quite right. Hell might be and proba- 
 bly was the proper place for Beelzebub, and for all persons
 
 ix.] THE PILGRIM'S PROGRESS. 165 
 
 holding authority under him. But as a matter of fact, 
 a form of society did for some purpose or other exist, and 
 had been permitted to exist for 5000 years, owning 
 Beelzebub's spvereignt}*. It must defend itself, or must 
 cease to be, and it could not be expected to make no effort 
 at self-preservation. Faithful had come to Vanity Fair 
 to make a revolution a revolution extremely desirable, 
 but one which it was unreasonable to expect the con- 
 stituted authorities to allow to go forward. It was not a 
 case of false witness. A prisoner who admits that he has 
 taught the people that their Prince ought to be in hell, 
 and has called the judge an ungodly villain, cannot com- 
 plain if he is accused of preaching rebellion. 
 
 Lord Hategood charges the jury, and explains the law. 
 ' There was an Act made,' he says, ' in the days of Pharaoh 
 the Great, servant to our Prince, that lest those of a con- 
 trary religion should multiply and grow too strong for 
 him, their males should be thrown into the river. There 
 was also an Act made in the days of Nebuchadnezzar the 
 Great, that whoever would not fall down and worship 
 his golden image should be thrown into a fiery furnace. 
 There was also an Act made in the days of Darius that 
 whoso for some time called upon any God but him should 
 be cast into the lion's den. Now the substance of these 
 laws this rebel hath broken, not only in thought (which 
 is not to be borne), but also in word and deed, which 
 must, therefore, be intolerable. For that of Phai-aoh, his 
 law was made upon a supposition to prevent mischief, no 
 crime being yet apparent. For the second and third you 
 see his disputations against our religion, and for the trea- 
 son he hath confessed he deserveth to die the death.' 
 
 ' Then went the jury out, whose names were Mr. 
 Blindman, Mr. Nogood, Mr. Malice, Mr. Lovelust, Mr.
 
 166 EUNYAN. [CHAP. 
 
 Liveloose, Mr. Heady, Mr. Higlimind, Mr. Enmity, Mr. 
 Liar, Mr. Cruelty, Mr. Hatelight, and Mr. Implacable, 
 who every one gave in his private verdict against him 
 among themselves, and afterwards unanimously concluded 
 to bring him in guilty before the judge. And first, Mr. 
 Blindman, the foreman, said : I see clearly that this man 
 is a heretic. Then said Mr. No Good, Away with such a 
 fellow from the earth. Aye, said Mr. Malice, I hate the 
 very looks of him. Then said Mr. Lovelust, I could 
 never endure him. Nor I, said Mr. Liveloose, for he 
 would always be condemning my way. Hang him, hang 
 him, said Mr. Heady. A sorry scrub, said Mr. Highmind. 
 My heart riseth against him, said Mr. Enmity. He is a 
 rogue, said Mr. Liar. Hanging is too good for him, said 
 Mr. Cruelty. Let us despatch him out of the way, said 
 Mr. Hatelight. Then, said Mr. Implacable, might I have 
 all the world given me, I could not be reconciled to him ; 
 therefore, let us forthwith bring him in guilty of death.' 
 
 Abstract qualities of character were never clothed in 
 more substantial flesh and blood than these jurymen. 
 Spenser's knights in the ' Fairy Queen ' are mere shadows 
 to them. Faithful was, of course, condemned, scourged, 
 buffeted, lanced in his feet with knives, stoned, stabbed, 
 at last burned, and spared the pain of travelling further 
 on the narrow road. A chariot and horses were waiting 
 to bear him through the clouds, tho nearest way to the 
 Celestial Gate. Christian, who it seems had been re- 
 manded, contrives to escape. He is joined by Hopeful, a 
 convert whom he has made in the town, and they pursue 
 their journey in company. A second person is useful 
 dramatically, and Hopeful takes Faithful's place. Leaving 
 Vanity Fail', they are again on the Pilgrim's road. There 
 they encounter Mr. Bye-ends. Bye-ends comes from the
 
 nc.] THE PILGEIM'S PROGRESS. 167 
 
 town of Plain-Speech, where he has a large kindred, 
 My Lord Turnabout, my Lord Timeserver, Mr. Facing- 
 both-ways, Mr. Two Tongues, the parson of the parish. 
 Bye-ends himself was married to a daughter of Lady 
 Feignings. Bunyan's invention in such things was in- 
 exhaustible. 
 
 They have more trials of the old kind with which 
 Bunyan himself was so familiar. They cross the River 
 of Life and even drink at it, yet for all this and directly 
 after, they stray into Bye Path Meadow. They lose 
 themselves in the grounds of Doubting Castle, and are 
 seized upon by Giant Despair still a prey to doudt 
 still uncertain whether religion be not a dream, even after 
 they have fought with wild beasts in Vanity Fair and 
 have drunk of the water of life. Nowhere does Bunyan 
 show better how well he knew the heart of man. Chris- 
 tian even thinks of killing himself in the dungeons of 
 Doubting Castle. Hopeful cheers him up, they break 
 their prison, recover the road again, and arrive at the 
 Delectable Mountains in Emmanuel's own land. There it 
 might be thought the danger would be over, but it is not 
 so. Even in Emmanuel's Land there is a door in the 
 side of a hill which is a byeway to hell, and beyond 
 Emmanuel's Land is the country of conceit, a new and 
 special temptation for those who think that they are 
 near salvation. Here they encounter ' a brisk lad of the 
 neighbourhood,' needed soon after for a particular pur- 
 pose, who is a good liver, prays devoutly, fasts regularly, 
 pays tithes punctually, and hopes that everyone will get 
 to heaven by the religion which he professes, provided he 
 fears God and tries to do his duty. The name of this 
 brisk lad is Ignorance. Leaving him, they are caught in 
 a net by Flatterer, and are smartly whipped by ' a shining
 
 168 , BUNYAN. [CHAP. 
 
 .one,' who lets them out of it. False ideas and vanity 
 lay them open once more to their most dangerous enemy. 
 They meet a man coming towards them from the direc- 
 tion in which they are going. They tell him that they 
 are on the way to Mount Zion. He laughs scornfully 
 and answers : 
 
 ' There is no such place as you dream of in all the 
 world. When I was at home in my own country, I 
 heard as you now affirm, and from hearing I went out to 
 see ; and have been seeking this city these twenty years, 
 but I find no more of it than I did the first day I went 
 out. I am going back again and will seek to refresh 
 myself with things which I then cast away for hopes of 
 that which I now see is not.' 
 
 Still uncertainty even on the verge of eternity 
 strange, doubtless, and reprehensible to Right Reverend 
 persons, who never 'cast away' anything; to whom a 
 religious profession has been a highway to pleasure and 
 preferment, who live in the comfortable assurance that 
 as it has been in this life so it will be in the next. Only 
 moral obliquity of the worst kind could admit a doubt 
 about so excellent a religion as this. But Bunyan was 
 not a Right Reverend. Christianity had brought him 
 no palaces and large revenues, and a place among the 
 great of the land. If Christianity was not true his whole 
 life was folly and illusion, and the dread that it might 
 be so clung to his belief like its shadow. 
 
 The way was still long. The pilgrims reach the 
 Enchanted Ground and are drowsy and tired. Ignorance 
 comes up with them again. He talks much about him- 
 self. He tells them of the good motives that come into 
 his mind and comfort him as he walks. His heart tells 
 him that he has left all for God and Heaven. His belief
 
 ix.] THE PILGRIM'S PROGRESS. 169 
 
 and his life agree together, .and he is humbly confident 
 that his hopes are well-founded. When they speak to 
 him of Salvation by Faith and Conviction of Sin, he can- 
 not understand what they mean. As he leaves them they 
 are reminded of one Temporary, ' once a forward man 
 in religion.' Temporary dwelt in Graceless, ' a town 
 two miles from Honesty, next door to one Turnback.' 
 He ' was going on pilgrimage, but became acquainted 
 with one Save Self, and was never more heard of.' 
 
 These figures all mean something. They correspond 
 in part to Bunyan's own recollection of his own trials ; 
 partly he is indulging his humour by describing others 
 who were more astray than he was. It was over at last : 
 the pilgrims arrive at the land of Beulah, the beautiful 
 sunset after the storms were all past. Doubting Castle 
 can be seen no more, and between them and their last 
 rest there remains only the deep river over which there is 
 no bridge, the river of Death. On the hill beyond the 
 waters glitter the towers and domes of the Celestial 
 City ; but through the river they must first pass, and they 
 find it deeper or shallower according to the strength of 
 their faith. They go through, Hopeful feeling the bottom 
 all along ; Christian still in character, not without some 
 horror, and frightened by hobgoblins. On the other 
 side they are received by angels, and are carried to their 
 final home, to live for ever in the Prince's presence. Then 
 follows the only passage which the present writer reads 
 with regret in this admirable book. It is given to the 
 self-righteous Ignorance who, doubtless, had been pro- 
 voking with 'his good motives that comforted him as 
 he walked ; ' but Bunyan's zeal might have been satisfied 
 by inflicting a lighter chastisement upon him. He comes 
 up to the river. He crosses without the difficulties which
 
 170 BUNYAN. [CHAP. 
 
 attended Christian and Hopeful. 'It happened that 
 there was then at the place one Vain Hope, a Ferryman, 
 that with his boat ' (some viaticum or priestly absolution) 
 1 helped him over.' He ascends the hill, and approaches 
 the city, but no angels are in attendance, 'neither did 
 any man meet him with the least encouragement.' 
 Above the gate there was the verse written ' Blessed 
 are they that do His commandments that they may have 
 light to the Tree of Life, and may enter in through the 
 gate into the city.' Bunyan, who believed that no man 
 could keep the commandments, and had no right to any- 
 thing but damnation, must haye introduced the words 
 as if to mock the unhappy wretch who, after all, had 
 tried to keep the commandments as well as most people, 
 and was seeking admittance, with a conscience moderately 
 at ease. ' He was asked by the men that looked over the 
 gate Whence come you and what would you have ? ' He 
 answered, ' I have eaten and drunk in the presence of the 
 King, and he has taught in our street.' Then they asked 
 him for his certificate, that they might go in and show 
 it to the king. So he fumbled in his bosom for one and 
 found none. Then said they, ' Have you none 1 ' But 
 the man answered never a word. So they told the king 
 but he would not come down to see him, but commanded 
 the two shining ones that conducted Christian and 
 Hopeful to the city to go out and take Ignorance and 
 bind him hand and foot, and have him away. Then 
 they took him up and carried him through the air to the 
 door in the side of the hill, and put him in there. ' Then,' 
 so Bunyan ends, ' I saw that there was a way to Hell 
 even from the gates of Heaven, as well as from the City 
 of Destruction ; so I awoke, and behold it was a dream ! ' 
 Poor Ignorance ! Hell such a place as Bunyan
 
 ix.] THE PILGEIAI'S PEOGEESS. 171 
 
 imagined Hell to be was a hard fate for a miserable 
 mortal who had failed to comprehend the true condition? 
 of justification. We are not told that he was a vain 
 boaster. He could not have advanced so near to the 
 door of Heaven if he had not been really a decent man, 
 though vain and silly. Behold, it was a dream ! The 
 dreams which come to us when sleep is deep on the soul 
 may be sent direct from some revealing power. When 
 we are near waking, the supernatural insight may ba 
 refracted through human theory. 
 
 Charity will hope that the vision of Ignorance cast 
 bound into the mouth of Hell, when he was knocking 
 at the gate of Heaven, came through Homer's ivory 
 gate, and that Bunyan here was a mistaken interpreter 
 of the spiritual tradition. The fierce inferences of 
 Puritan theology are no longer credible to us ; yet nobler 
 men than the Puritans are not to be found in all English 
 history. It will be well if the clearer sight which enables 
 us to detect their errors, enables us also to recognise their 
 excellence. 
 
 The second part of the ' Pilgrim's Progress,' like most 
 second parts, is but a feeble reverberation of the first. It 
 is comforting, no doubt, to know that Christian's wife and 
 children were not left to their fate in the City of Destruc- 
 tion. But Bunyan had given us all that he had to tell 
 about the journey, and we do not need a repetition of it. 
 Of course there are touches of genius. No writing of 
 Bunyan's could be wholly without it. But the rough 
 simplicity is gone, and instead of it there is a tone of 
 sentiment which is almost mawkish. Giants, dragons, and 
 angelic champions carry us into a spxirious fairy land, 
 where the knight-errant is a preacher in disguise. Fair 
 ladies and love matches, however decorously chastened,
 
 172 BUNYA.X. [CH. ix. 
 
 suit ill with the sternness of the mortal conflict between 
 the soul and sin. Christiana and her children are tole- 
 rated for the pilgrim's sake to whom they belong. Had 
 they appealed to our interest on their own merits, we 
 would have been contented to wish them well through 
 their difficulties, and to trouble ourselves no further 
 about them.
 
 CHAPTER X. 
 
 LAST DAYS AND DEATH. 
 
 LITTLE remains to be told of Banyan's concluding years. 
 No friends preserved his letters. No diaries of his own 
 survive to gratify curiosity. Men truly eminent think 
 too meanly of themselves or their work to care much to 
 be personally remembered. He lived for sixteen years 
 after his release from the gaol, and those years were spent 
 in the peaceful discharge of his congregational duties, in 
 writing, in visiting the scattered members of the Baptist 
 communion, or in preaching in the villages and woods. His 
 outward circumstances were easy. He had a small but 
 well-provided house in Bedford, into which he collected 
 rare and valuable pieces of old furniture and plate, and 
 other articles presents, probably, from those who admired 
 him. He visited London annually to preach in the Bap- 
 tist churches. The ' Pilgrim's Progress ' spread his fame 
 over England, over Europe, and over the American 
 settlements. It was translated into many languages ; and 
 so catholic was its spirit, that it was adapted with a 
 few alterations for the use even of the Catholics them- 
 selves. He abstained, as he had done steadily throughout 
 his life, from all interference with politics, and the Govern- 
 ment in turn never again meddled with him. He even 
 received offers of promotion to larger spheres of action
 
 174 BUNYAN. [CHAP. 
 
 which might have tempted a meaner nature. But he could 
 never be induced to leave Bedford, and there he quietly 
 stayed through changes of ministry, Popish plots, and 
 Monmouth rebellions, while the terror of a restoration of 
 Popery was bringing on the Revolution ; careless of kings 
 and cabinets, and confident that Giant Pope had lost his 
 power for harm, and thenceforward could only bite his 
 nails at the passing pilgrims. Once only, after the failure 
 of the Exclusion Bill, he seems to have feared that violent 
 measures might again be tried against him. It is even 
 said that he was threatened with arrest, and it was on this 
 occasion that he made over his property to his wife. The 
 policy of James II., however, transparently treacherous 
 though it was, for the time gave security to the Non- 
 conformist congregations, and in the years which imme- 
 diately preceded the final expulsion of the Stuarts, liberty 
 of conscience was under fewer restrictions than it had 
 bean in the most rigorous days of the Reformation, or 
 under the Long Parliament itself. Thus the anxiety passed 
 away, and Bunyan was left undisturbed to finish his 
 earthly work. 
 
 He was happy in his family. His blind child, for 
 whom he had been so touchingly anxious, had died while 
 he was in prison. His other children lived and did well ; 
 and his brave companion, who had spoken so stoutly for 
 him to the judges, continued at his side. His health, it 
 was said, had suffered from his confinement ; but the only 
 serious illness which we hear of, was an attack of ' sweating 
 sickness,' which came upon him in 1687, and from which 
 he never thoroughly recovered. He was then fifty-nine, 
 and in the next year he died. 
 
 His end was characteristic. It was brought on by 
 exposure when he was engaged in an net of charity. A
 
 x.] LAST DAYS AND DEATH. 175 
 
 quarrel had broken out in a family at Reading with which 
 Banyan had some acquaintance. A father had taken 
 offence at his son, and threatened to disinherit him. 
 Bunyan undertook a journey on horseback from Bedford 
 to Reading in the hope of reconciling them. He suc- 
 ceeded, but at the cost of his life. Returning by London 
 he was overtaken on the road by a storm of rain, and was 
 wetted through before he could find shelter. The chill, 
 falling on a constitution already weakened by illness, 
 brought on fever. He was able to reach the house of 
 Mr. Strudwick, one of his London friends; but he never 
 left his bed afterwards. In ten days he was dead. The 
 exact date is uncertain. It was towards the end of 
 August 1688, between two and three months before the 
 landing of King William. He was buried in Mr. Strud- 
 wick's vault in the Dissenters' burying-ground at Bunhill 
 Fields. His last words were 'Take me, for I come to 
 Thee.' 
 
 So ended, at the age of sixty, a man who, if his im- 
 portance may be measured by the influence which he has 
 exerted over succeeding generations, must be counted 
 among the most extraordinary persons whom England has 
 produced. It has been the fashion to dwell on the disad- 
 vantages of his education, and to regret the carelessness 
 of nature which brought into existence a man of genius 
 in a tinker's hut at Elstow. Nature is less partial than 
 she appears, and all situations in life have their compen- 
 sations along with them. 
 
 Circumstances, I should say, qualified Bunyan perfectly 
 well for the -work which he had to do. If he had gone 
 to school, as he said, with Aristotle and Plato ; if he had 
 been broken in at a university and been turned into a 
 bishop; if he had been in any one of the learned pro-
 
 176 BUNYAN. [cuip, 
 
 fesslons, lie might easily have lost or might have never 
 known the secret of his powers. He was born to be the 
 Poet-apostle of the English middle classes, imperfectly 
 educated like himself ; and, being one of themselves, he 
 had the key of their thoughts and feelings in his own heart. 
 Like nine out of ten of his countrymen, he came into the 
 world with no fortune but his industry. He had to work 
 with his hands for his bread, and to advance by the side 
 of his neighbours along the road of common business. 
 His knowledge was scanty, though of rare quality. He 
 knew his Bible probably by heart. He had studied 
 history in Foxe's ' Martyrs,' but nowhere else that we 
 can trace. The rest of his mental furniture was gathered 
 at first hand from his conscience, his life, and his occupa- 
 tions. Thus every idea which he received falling into a 
 soil naturally fertile, sprouted up fresh, vigorous, and 
 original. He confessed to have felt (as a man of his 
 powers could hardly have failed to feel) continued doubts 
 about the Bible and the reality of the Divine government. 
 It has been well said that when we look into the world 
 to find the image of God, it is as if we were to stand 
 before a looking-glass expecting to see ourselves reflected 
 there, and to see nothing. Education scarcely improves 
 our perception in this respect ; and wider information, 
 wider acquaintance with the thoughts of other men in 
 other ages and countries, might as easily have increased 
 his difficulties as have assisted him in overcoming them. 
 He was not a man who could have contented himself with 
 compromises and half-convictions. No force could have 
 subdued him into a decent Anglican divine a ' Mr. 
 Two Tongues, parson of the parish.' He was passionate 
 and thorough-going. The authority of conscience pre- 
 sented itself to him only in the shape of religious obli-
 
 x.] LAST DAYS AND DEATH. 177 
 
 gation. Religion once shaken into a 'perhaps,' would 
 have had no existence to him ; and it is easy to conceive a 
 university-bred Bunyan, an intellectual meteor, flaring 
 uselessly across the sky and disappearing in smoke and 
 nothingness. 
 
 Powerful temperaments are necessarily intense. Bun- 
 yan, born a tinker, had heard right an/1 wrong preached 
 to him in the name of the Christian creed. He con- 
 cluded after a struggle that Christianity was true, and on 
 that conviction he built himself up into what he was. 
 It might have been the same perhaps with Burns had he 
 been born a century before. Given Christianity as an 
 unquestionably true account of the situation and future 
 prospects of man, the feature of it most appalling to the 
 imagination Ls that hell-fire a torment exceeding the most 
 horrible which fancy can conceive, and extending into 
 eternity awaits the enormous majority of the human 
 race. The dreadful probability seized hold on the young 
 Bunyan's mind. He shuddered at it when awake. In 
 the visions of the night it came before him in the tre- 
 mendous details of the dreadful reality. It became the 
 governing thought in his nature. 
 
 Such a belief, if it does not drive a man to madness, 
 will at least cure him of trifling. It will clear his mind 
 of false sentiment, take the nonsense out of him, and 
 enable him to resist vulgar temptation as nothing else 
 will. The danger is that the mind may not bear the 
 strain, that the belief itself may crack and leave nothing. 
 Bunyan was hardly tried, but in him the belief did not 
 crack. It spread over his character. It filled him first 
 with terror ; then with a loathing of sin, which entailed 
 so awful a penalty ; then, as his personal fears were allayed 
 
 N
 
 178 BUNYAN. [CHAP. 
 
 by the recognition of Christ, it turned to tenderness and 
 pity. 
 
 There was no fanaticism in Bunyan ; nothing harsh or 
 savage. His natural humour perhaps saved him. His 
 few recorded sayings all refer to the one central question ; 
 but healthy seriousness often best expresses itself in playful 
 quaintness. He was once going somewhere disguised as 
 a waggoner. He was overtaken by a constable who had 
 a warrant to arrest him. The constable asked him if he 
 knew that devil of a fellow Bunyan. ' Know him ! ' 
 Bunyan said. ' You might call him a devil if you knew 
 him as well as I once did.' 
 
 A Cambridge student was trying to show him what a 
 divine thing reason was ' reason, the chief glory of man 
 which distinguished him from a beast,' &c., &c. 
 
 Bunyan growled out : ' Sin distinguishes man from 
 beast. Is sin divine ? ' 
 
 He was extremely tolerant in his terms of Church 
 membership. He offended the stricter part of his congre- 
 gation by refusing even to make infant baptism a con- 
 dition of exclusion. The only persons with whom he 
 declined to communicate were those whose lives were 
 openly immoral. His chief objection to the Church of 
 England was the admission of the ungodly to the Sacra- 
 ments. He hated party titles and quarrels upon trifles. 
 He desired himself to be called a Christian or a Believer, 
 or ' any name which was approved by the Holy Ghost.' 
 Divisions, he said, were to Churches like wars to countries. 
 Those who talked most about religion cared least for it ; 
 and controversies about doubtful things, and things of 
 little moment, ate up all zeal for things which were 
 practicable and indisputable. 
 
 ' In countenance/ wrote a friend, < he appeared to be
 
 x.] LAST DAYS AND DEATH. 179 
 
 of a stern and rough temper, but in his conversation 
 mild and affable ; not given to loquacity or to much dis- 
 course in company unless some urgent occasion required 
 it ; observing never to boast of himself or his parts, but 
 rather to seem low in his own eyes, and submit himself 
 to the judgment of others ; abhorring lying and swearing, 
 being just, in all that lay in his power, to his word ; not 
 seeming to revenge injuries, loving to reconcile differences 
 and make friendships with all. He had a sharp quick 
 eye, with an excellent discerning of persons, being of good 
 judgment and quick wit.' ' He was tall of stature, 
 strong boned, though not corpulent, somewhat of a ruddy 
 face, with sparkling eyes, wearing his hair on his upper 
 lip; his hair reddish, but in his later days time had 
 sprinkled it with grey ; his nose well set, but not declining 
 or bending ; his moxxth moderate large, his forehead 
 something high, and his habit always plain and modest/ 
 
 He was himself indifferent to advancement, and he did 
 not seek it for his family. A London merchant offered to 
 take his son into his house. ' God,' he said, ' did not send 
 me to advance my family, but to preach the Gospel.' He 
 had no vanity an exemption extremely rare in those 
 who are personally much before the public. The personal 
 popularity was in fact the part of his situation which 
 he least liked. When he was to preach in London, ' if 
 there was but one day's notice the meeting house was 
 crowded to overflowing.' Twelve hundred people would 
 be found collected before seven o'clock on a dark winter's 
 morning to hear a lecture from him. In Zoar Street, 
 Southwark, his church was sometimes so crowded that he 
 had to be lifted to the pulpit stairs over the congregation's 
 heads. It pleased him, but he was on the watch against 
 the pleasure of being himself admired. A friend compli- 
 N 2
 
 180 BUNYAN. [CHAP. 
 
 merited him Once after service, on ' the sweet sermon ' 
 which he had delivered. ' You need not remind me of 
 that,' he said. ' The Devil told me of it before I was out 
 of the pulpit.' 
 
 ' Conviction of sin ' has become a phrase, shallow and 
 ineffective even in those who use it most sincerely. Yet 
 moral evil is still the cause of nine-tenths of human 
 misery, and it is not easy to measure the value of a man 
 who could prolong among his fellow-creatures the sense 
 of the deadly nature of it, even under the forms of a 
 decomposing theology. Times are changing. The intel- 
 lectual current is bearing us we know not where, and the 
 course of the stream is in a direction which leads us 
 far from the conclusions in which Bunyan and the 
 Puritans established themselves ; but the truths which 
 are most essential for us to know cannot be discerned 
 by speculative arguments. Chemistry cannot tell us why 
 some food is wholesome and other food is poisonous. 
 That food is best for us which best nourishes the body 
 into health and strength ; and a belief in a Supernatural 
 Power which has given us a law to live by and to which 
 we are responsible for our conduct, has alone, of ail the 
 influences known to us, succeeded in ennobling and 
 elevating the character of man. The particular theories 
 which men have formed about it have often been wild 
 and extravagant. Imagination, agitated by fear or 
 stimulated by pious enthusiasm, has peopled heaven with 
 demigods and saints creations of fancy, human forms 
 projected upon a mist and magnified into celestial images. 
 How much is true of all that men have believed in past 
 times and have now ceased to believe, how much has been a 
 txw eager dream, no one now can tell. It may be that other 
 foundations may be laid hereafter for human conduct on
 
 x.] LAST DAYS A:TD DEATH. 181 
 
 which an edifice can be raised no less fair and beautiful ; 
 but no signs of it are as yet apparent. 
 
 So far as we yet know, morality rests upon a sense of 
 obligation ; and obligation has no meaning except as imply- 
 ing a Divine command, without which it would cease to 
 be. Until ' duty ' can be presented to us in a shape which 
 will compel our recognition of it with equal or superior 
 force, the passing away of ' the conviction of sin ' can 
 operate only to obscure our aspirations after a high 
 ideal of life and character. The scientific theory may be 
 correct, and it is possible that we may be standing on the 
 verge of the most momentous intellectual revolution which 
 has been experienced in the history of our race. It may 
 be so, and also it may not be so. It may be that the most 
 important factors in the scientific equation are beyond 
 the reach of human intellect. However it be, the meat 
 which gives strength to the man is poison to the child ; 
 and as yet we are still children, and are likely to remain 
 children. ' Every relief from outward restraint,' says one 
 who was not given to superstition, ' if it be not attended 
 with increased power of self-command, is simply fatal.' 
 Men of intelligence, therefore, to whom life is not a 
 theory, but a stern fact, conditioned round with endless 
 possibilities of wrong and suffering, though they may 
 never again adopt the letter of Bunyan's creed, will con- 
 tinue to see in conscience an authority for which culture 
 is no substitute ; they will conclude that in one form or 
 other responsibility is not a fiction but a truth ; and, so 
 long as this conviction lasts, the ' Pilgrim's Progress ' will 
 still be dear to all men of all ci*eeds who share in it, even 
 though it pleases the 'elect' modern philosophers to 
 describe its author as a ' Philistine of genius.' 
 
 Sfottiatcoodc < Co., 1'rinters, Nnc-strect Sguare, London.
 
 Jlcn of betters 
 
 BENTLEY
 
 BENTLEY 
 
 R. C. JEBB, LiTT.D, 
 
 HONORARY FELLOW OF TRINITY COLLEGE, CAMBRIDGE: 
 HON LL.D.. EDINBURGH, HARVARD, AND DUBLIN: 
 
 HON. DOCT. PHILOS.. BOLOGNA: 
 PROFESSOR OF GREEK IN THE UNIVERSITY OF GLASGOW. 
 
 MACMILLAN AND CO. 
 
 AND NEW YOKE 
 1880 
 
 The Jtight of T ran flat itm anil Reproduction is reserwil-
 
 First Edition, 1882. 
 Nnv Edition, 1889.
 
 PREFATORY NOTE. 
 
 THE following are the principal sources for an 
 estimate of Bentley's life and work : 
 
 1. Life of Bentley, by J. H. Monk, 4to, London, 1830 : 
 2nd ed., 2 vols. 8vo, 1833. 2. Bentley's Correspondence, 
 ed. C. Wordsworth, 2 vols., Loud. 1842. 3. Bentley's 
 Works, ed. Alex. Dyce,-1836 38. Vols. I and II : Disser- 
 tation on Letters of Phalaris, (1) as published in 1699, 
 (2) as originally printed in Wotton's Reflections, 1697. Epis- 
 tola ad loannem Millium. Vol. Ill : Boyle Lectures, with 
 Newton's Letters : Sermons : Eemarks upon a late Discourse 
 of Free-thinking : Proposals for an edition of the New 
 Testament : Answer to the Remarks of Conyers Middleton. 
 4. Bentley's Fragments of Callimachus, in the edition of 
 Graevius, Utrecht, 1697, reprinted in Blomfield's ed., London, 
 1815. 5. Emendations on Menander and Philemon (1710), 
 reprinted, Cambridge, 171 3. 6. Horace, Camb. 1711, 2nd ed., 
 Amsterdam, 1713. 7. Terence, Camb. 1726, 2nd ed., Am- 
 sterdam, 1728. 8. Milton's Paradise Lost, Lond. 1732. 9. 
 Manilius, Lond. 1739. 
 
 Notes by Bentley appeared during his lifetime in the 
 books of other scholars. Since his death, many more 
 have been published from his MSS. These, while vary- 
 ing much in fulness and value, cannot be overlooked in 
 a survey of the field which his studies covered. The 
 subjoined list comprises the greater part of them : 
 
 On Cicero's Tusculan Disputations, in Gaisford's ed., 
 Oxford, 1805. Hephaestion, in Gaisford'sed. r 1810. Lucretius,
 
 vi BENTLET. 
 
 in Oxford ed., 1818. Horace (curae novissimae), in the Cam- 
 bridge Museum Criticum I. 194 6, ed. T. Kidd. Ovid, in 
 the Classical Journal, xix. 168, 258, ed. G. Burges. Lucan, 
 ed. E. Cumberland, Strawberry Hill, 1760. Silius Italicus, 
 Class. Journ. in. 381. L. Annaeus Seneca, ib. xxxvu. 11, 
 ed. T. Kidd. Nicander, in Museum Criticum, I. 370, 445, ed. 
 J. H. Monk. Aristophanes, in Classical Journal, xi. 131, 248, 
 xil. 104, 352, xiil. 132, 336, xiv. 130, ed. G. Burges ; and in 
 Museum Criticum, II. 126, ed. J. H. Monk. Sophocles, Theo- 
 critus, Bion, Moschus, ed. E. Maltby in Morell's Thesaurus, 
 reprinted in Classical Journal, xin. 244. Philostratus, in 
 Olearius's edition (1709). Hierocles, in Needham's edition 
 (1709).- Plautus, in E. A. Sonnenschein's ed. of the Captivi, 
 p. 135, Lond. 1880. Iliad i. n, at the end of J. Maehly's 
 memoir of Bentley (1868), from the MS. at Trinity College, 
 Cambridge. Selected Notes on the Greek Testament (from 
 the MS. at Trin. Coll. Camb.) including those on the Epistle 
 to the Galatians, in Bentleii Critica Sacra, ed. A. A. Ellis, 
 Camb. 1862. A few anecdota from Bentley's MS. notes on 
 Homer (at Trin. Coll., Camb.) are given below, p. 153. 
 
 R. Cumberland's Memoirs (4to, 1806, 2nd edition in 
 2 vols. 8vo, 1807) deserve to be consulted independently 
 of Monk's quotations from them. The memoir of Bentley 
 by F. A. Wolf, in. his Litterarische Analekten (pp. 1 89, 
 Berlin, 1816), has the permanent interest of its author- 
 ship and its date. Hud's Diary, so useful for a part of 
 Bentley's college history, was edited with some additional 
 letters by H. B. Luard for the Cambridge Antiquarian 
 Society, 1860. De Quincey's essay originally a review 
 of Monk has every charm of his style; the sometimes 
 whimsical judgments need not be taken too seriously. 
 Hartley Coleridge's comments on Monk's facts may be 
 seen in the short biography of Bentley which he wrote 
 in the Worthies of Yorkshire and Lancashire (pp. 65 
 174). In 'Richard Bentley, eine Biographie' (Leipzig,
 
 PBEFATOBY NOTE. vii 
 
 1868), Jacob Maehly gives a concise sketch for German 
 readers, on Monk's plan of a continuous chronological 
 narrative, in which notices of the literary works are 
 inserted as they occur. 
 
 It is proper to state the points which are distinctive 
 of the present volume : 1 . In regard to the external 
 facts of Bentley's life, I have been able to add some traits 
 or illustrations from contemporary or other sources : 
 these are chiefly in chapters i, in, vn, xn. 2. Chap- 
 ter VI is condensed from some results of studies in the 
 University life of Bentley's time and in the history of 
 Trinity College. 3. The controversy on the Letters of 
 Phalaris has hitherto been most familiar to English 
 readers through De Quincey's essay on Bentley, or the 
 brilliant passage in Macaulay's essay on Temple. Both 
 versions are based on Monk's. The account given here 
 will be found to present some matters under a different 
 light. In such cases the views are those to which I was 
 led by a careful examination of the original sources, 
 and of all the literary evidence which I could find. 
 4. The aim has been not more to sketch the facts of 
 Bentley's life than to estimate his work, the character of 
 his powers, and his place in scholarship. Here the 
 fundamental materials are Bentley's writings themselves. 
 To these I have given a comparatively large share of 
 the allotted space. My treatment of them has been 
 independent of any predecessor. 
 
 The courtesy of the Master of Trinity afforded me 
 an opportunity of using Bentley's marginal notes on 
 Homer at a time when they would not otherwise have 
 been accessibla Mr Tyrrell, Regius Professor of Greek 
 in the University of Dublin, favoured me with informa- 
 tion regarding a manuscript in the Library. Prof. A.
 
 viii BENTLEY. 
 
 Michaelis, of Strassburg, and Mr J. W. Clark, of Trinity 
 College, Cambridge, kindly lent me some books and tracts 
 relating to Bentley. 
 
 My thanks are especially due to Dr Hort, for reading 
 the proof-sheets of chapter x ; and to Mr Munro, for 
 reading those of chapters vm and ix. To both I have 
 owed most valuable suggestions. For others, on many 
 points, I have been indebted to Dr Luard, Registrary of 
 the University of Cambridge ; who, with a kindness which 
 I cannot adequately acknowledge, has done me the great 
 favour of reading the whole t book during its passage 
 through the press. 
 
 THE COLLEGE, GLASGOW, 
 February, 1882. 
 
 ANNALS OF BENTLEY'S LIFE. 
 
 1662 
 1672 
 1676 
 1680 
 1682 
 1683 
 1685 
 1689 
 1690 
 1691 
 1692 
 1693 
 1694 
 1695 
 1696 
 1697 
 1698 
 1699 
 
 act. 
 
 10 
 
 14 
 18 
 20 
 21 
 23 
 27 
 28 
 29 
 30 
 31 
 32 
 33 
 34 
 35 
 36 
 37 
 
 I. EAKLIEB PERIOD. 1662 1699. 
 Jan. 27. Birth. 
 Goes to Wakefleld School. 
 Enters St John's Coll., Cambridge. 
 B.A. Degree. 
 
 Master of Spalding School. Tutor to J. Stillingfleet. 
 M.A. Degree. 
 James II. 
 
 William and Mary. Goes with J. Stillingfleet to Oxford. 
 Ordained. Chaplain to Bp Stillingfleet. 
 Letter to Mill. 
 
 Boyle Lectures. Prebendary of Worcester. Temple's Essay. 
 Fragments of Callimachtis. Nominated King's Librarian. 
 Appointed, April 12. Wotton's Reflections. 
 Chaplain in Ordinary to King. F.R.S. Boyle's Phalaris. 
 Promotes reparation of Ca-nb. Press. D.D. 
 First essay on Phalaris in 2nd ed. of Wotton. 
 Jan. ' Boyle against Bentley.' 
 Mar. ' Eentley against Boyle. 'Master of Trin. Coll. Camb.
 
 ANNALS OF BENTLEY'S LIFE. 
 
 
 act. 
 
 1700 
 
 38 
 
 1701 
 
 39 
 
 1702 
 
 40 
 
 1702-4 
 
 40-2 
 
 1706-8 
 
 44-6 
 
 1710 
 
 48 
 
 1711 
 
 49 
 
 1713 
 
 51 
 
 1714 
 
 52 
 
 1715 
 
 53 
 
 1716 
 
 54 
 
 1717 
 
 55 
 
 1718 
 
 56 
 
 1719 
 
 57 
 
 1720 
 
 58 
 
 1724 
 
 62 
 
 1725 
 
 63 
 
 1726 
 
 64 
 
 1727 
 
 65 
 
 1728 
 
 66 
 
 1729 
 
 67 
 
 1730 
 
 68 
 
 1731 
 
 69 
 
 1732 
 
 70 
 
 1733 
 
 71 
 
 1734 
 
 72 
 
 1735-7 
 
 73-5 
 
 1738 
 
 76 
 
 1739 
 
 77 
 
 1740 
 
 78 
 
 1742 
 
 80 
 
 1691 
 
 29 
 
 1692 
 
 30 
 
 1693 
 
 31 
 
 1699 
 
 37 
 
 1710 
 
 48 
 
 1711 
 
 49 
 
 1713 
 
 61 
 
 1726 
 
 64 
 
 1732 
 
 70 
 
 1739 
 
 77 
 
 II. AT CAMBRIDGE. 1700 1742. 
 Feb. 1. Installed at Trin. Vice-Chancellor. 
 inn. 7. Marriage. Archdeacon of Ely. 
 Anne. 
 
 College reforms. Swift's Battle of the Books (1704). 
 Aids L. Kiistcr, T. Ilemsterhuys. 
 Feb. 10. Petition from Fellows of Trin. to Bp Mcoro. 
 
 Menander and Philemon. Thoriihill's portrait of B. 
 Dec. 8. Horace. 
 
 Bp cites B. to Ely House. Remarks in reply to Collins. 
 FIEST TEIAL AT ELY HOUSE. July 31. Bp Moore dies 
 
 before judgment has been given. Aug. 1. Death of 
 
 Queen Anne. George I. 
 
 Jacobite Revolt. B.'s Sermon on Popery. 
 
 Petition from Fellows of Trin. to Crown. 
 
 B. Regius Prof, of Divinity. George I. visits Cambridge. 
 
 B. arrested. Deprived of Degrees by Senate (Oct. 17). 
 
 B. makes terms with Miller. 
 
 Proposals for edition of New Testament. 
 
 Mar. 26. B.'s degrees restored. Declines see of Bristol. 
 
 B.'s Latin speech at Commencement. 
 
 Terence published. 
 
 George II. Death of Newton. 
 
 George II. at Cambridge. B.'s illness. Colbatch active. 
 
 Bp Greene cites B. to appear. Veto by King's Bench. 
 
 Senate House opened. 
 
 Fire at Cottonian Library. 
 
 B.'s edition of Paradise Lost. He undertakes Homer. 
 
 SECOND TEIAL AT ELY HOUSE. 
 
 April 27. Bp Greene sentences B. to deprivation. 
 
 Efforts to procure execution of the judgment. 
 
 April 22. End of the struggle. B. remains in possession. 
 
 Manilius. 
 
 Death of Mrs Bentloy. 
 
 March. Pope's enlarged Dunciad, with verses on B. 
 
 June. . examines for the Craven. July 14. His death. 
 
 DATES OP SOME PRINCIPAL WOBKS. 
 
 Letter to Mill. 
 Boyle Lectures. 
 Fragments of Callimachus. 
 Enlarged Dissertation on Phalaris. 
 i Emendations on Menander and Philemon. 
 Horace. 
 
 Remarks on a late Discourse of Free- thinking. 
 Terence. 
 
 Edition of Paradise Lost. 
 Manilius.
 
 CONTENTS. 
 
 CHAPTER I. 
 
 EARLY LIFE. THE LETTER TO MILL 
 
 CHAPTER IT. 
 
 THE BOYLE LECTURES 
 
 CHAPTER III. 
 
 LEARNED CORRESPONDENCE. THE KING'S LIBRARIAN 
 
 CHAPTER IV. 
 
 THE CONTROVERSY ON THE LETTERS OF PHALARIS 
 
 CHAPTER V. 
 BENTLEY'S DISSERTATION . 
 
 CHAPTER VI. 
 
 TRINITY COLLEGE, CAMBRIDGE . . . 
 
 PAOB 
 I 
 
 19 
 
 04
 
 CONTENTS. XI 
 
 CHAPTER VII. 
 
 PAGB 
 
 BENTLEY AS MASTER OF TRINITY 97 
 
 CHAPTER VIII. 
 
 LITERARY WORK AFTER 1700. HORACE 124 
 
 CHAPTER IX. 
 
 OTHER CLASSICAL STUDIES. TERENCE. MANILIUS. 
 
 HOMEB 136 
 
 CHAPTER X. 
 
 THE PROPOSED EDITION OF THE NEW TESTAMENT . . 157 
 
 CHAPTER XL 
 
 ENGLISH STYLE. EDITION OF PARADISE LOST .... 172 
 
 CHAPTER XII. 
 
 DOMESTIC LIFE. LAST YEARS 192 
 
 CHAPTER XIII. 
 BENTLEY'S PLACE IN THE HISTORY OF SCHOLARSHIP . . 206
 
 BENTLEY. 
 
 CHAPTER I. 
 
 EARLY LIFE. THE LETTER TO MILL. 
 
 RICHARD BENTLEY was born on January 27, 1662. 
 A remarkable variety of interest belongs to his life of 
 eighty years. He is the classical critic whose thoroughly 
 original genius set a new example of method, and gave a 
 decisive bent to the subsequent course of scholarship. 
 Among students of the Greek Testament he is memorable 
 as the first who denned a plan for constructing the whole 
 text directly from the oldest documents. His English 
 style has a place of its own in the transition from the 
 prose of the seventeenth century to that of the eighteenth. 
 During forty years he was the most prominent figure of 
 a great English University at a stirring period. And 
 everything that he did or wrote bears a vivid impress 
 of personal character. The character may alternately 
 attract and repel ; it may provoke a feeling in which 
 indignation is tempered only by a sense of the ludicrous, 
 or it may irresistibly appeal to our admiration ; but at 
 all moments and in all moods it is signally masterful. 
 
 J. B. li
 
 2 BENTLEY. [CHAP. 
 
 His birthplace was Oulton, a township in the Parish 
 of Rothwell, near Wakefield, in the "West Riding of 
 Yorkshire. His family were yeomen of the richer class, 
 who for some generations had held property in the 
 neighbourhood of Halifax. Bentley's grandfather had 
 been a captain in the royalist army during the civil 
 war, and had died while a prisoner in the hands of 
 the enemy. The Bentleys suffered in fortune for their 
 attachment to the cavalier party, but Thomas Bentley, 
 Richard's father, still owned a small estate at Woodles- 
 ford, a village in the same parish as Oulton. After 
 the death of his first wife, Thomas Bentley, then an 
 elderly man, married in 1661 Sarah, daughter of Richard 
 Willie, of Oulton, who is described as a stonemason, 
 but seems to have been rather what would now be called 
 a builder, and must have been in pretty good circum- 
 stances ; he is said to have held a major's commission 
 in the royal army during the troubles. It was after 
 him that his daughter's firstborn was called Richard. 
 Bentley's literary assailants in later years endeavoured 
 to represent him as a sort of ploughboy who had been 
 developed into a learned boor; while his amiable and 
 accomplished grandson, Richard Cumberland, exhibited 
 a pardonable tendency to overestimate the family claims. 
 Bentley himself appears to have said nothing on the 
 subject. 
 
 He was taught Latin grammar by his mother. 
 From a day-school at Methley, a village near Oulton, he 
 was sent to the Wakefield Grammar School probably 
 when he was not more than eleven years old, as he went 
 to Cambridge at fourteen. Schoolboy life must have 
 been more cheerful after the Restoration than it had 
 been before, to judge from that lively picture in
 
 i.] EARLY LIFE. THE LETTER TO MILL. 3 
 
 North's 'Lives' of the school at Bury St Edmund's, 
 where the master a staunch royalist was forced, 'in 
 the dregs of time,' to observe 'super-hypocritical fastings 
 and seekings,' and 'walked to Church after his brigade of 
 boys, there to endure the infliction of divers holders- 
 forth.' Then the King came to his own again, and this 
 scholastic martyr had the happy idea of ' publishing his 
 cavaliership by putting all the boys at his school into red 
 cloaks;' 'of whom he had near thirty to parade before 
 him, through that observing town, to church; which 
 made no vulgar appearance.' The only notice of 
 Bentley's school-life by himself (so far as I know) is in 
 Cumberland's Memoirs, and is highly characteristic. 
 ' I have had from him at times whilst standing at his 
 elbow' says his grandson, who was then a boy about 
 nine years old ' a complete and entertaining narrative 
 of his schoolboy days, with the characters of his different 
 masters very humorously displayed, and the punishments 
 described which they at times would wrongfully inflict 
 upon him for seeming to be idle and regardless of his 
 task, When the dunces, he would say, covZd not 
 discover that I ivas pondering it in my mind, and fixing 
 it more firmly in my memory, than if I had been bawling 
 it out amongst the rest of my schoolfellows. 9 However, he 
 seems to have retained through life a warm regard for 
 Wakefield School. It had a high reputation. Another 
 of its pupils, a few years later, was John Potter, author 
 of the once popular work on Greek Antiquities, editor of 
 Lycophron, and afterwards Archbishop of Canterbury. 
 
 Bentley was only thirteen when his father died. 
 His grandfather, Richard Willie, decided that he should 
 go to the University without much more delay. The 
 boy had his own way to make; his father's small estate 
 
 9
 
 4 BENTLEY. [CHAP. 
 
 had been left to a son by the first marriage ; and in 
 those days there was nothing to hinder a precocious lad 
 from matriculating at fourteen, though the ordinary age 
 was already seventeen or eighteen. On May 24, 1676, 
 'Ricardus Bentley de Oulton' was enrolled in the 
 Admission Book of St John's College. The choice of a 
 University may have been influenced by the fact that 
 John Baskervile, the master of Wakefield School, was a 
 member of Emmanuel College, Cambridge; the choice of 
 a College, partly by the fact that some scholarships for 
 natives of Yorkshire had been founded at St John's by 
 Sir Marmaduke Constable. Bentley, like Isaac Newton 
 at Trinity, entered as a subsizar, a student who receives 
 certain allowances. St John's College was just then, the 
 largest in the University, and appears to have been as 
 efficient as it was distinguished. The only relic of 
 Bentley's undergraduate life is a copy of English verses 
 on the Gunpowder Plot. That stirring theme was long 
 a stock subject for College exercises. Bentley's verses 
 have the jerky vigour of a youth whose head is full of 
 classical allusions, and who is bent on making points. 
 The social life of the University probably did not 
 engage very much of his time; and it is left to us to 
 conjecture how much he saw of two Cambridge contem- 
 poraries who afterwards wrote against him, Richard 
 Johnson, of his own College, and Garth, the poet, of 
 Peterhouse ; or of William Wotton, his firm friend in 
 later life that 'juvenile prodigy' who was a boy of 
 fourteen when Bentley took his degree, and yet already 
 a Bachelor of Arts. 
 
 Nothing is known of Bentley's classical studies 
 while he was an undergraduate. His own statement, 
 that some of his views on metrical questions dated from
 
 i.] EARLY LIFE. THE LETTER TO MILL. 5 
 
 earliest manhood (iam ab adolescentia), is too vague to 
 prove anything. Monk remarks that there were no 
 prizes for classics at Cambridge then. It may be ob- 
 served, however, that there was one very important 
 prize the Craven University Scholarship, founded in 
 1647. But no competition is recorded between 1G70, 
 when Beiitley was eight years old, and 1681, the year 
 after he took his first degree. The studies of the 
 Cambridge Schools were Logic, Ethics, Natural Philo- 
 sophy, and Mathematics. Bentley took high honours in 
 these. His place was nominally sixth in the first class, 
 but really third, since three of those above him were men 
 of straw. The Vice-Chancellor and the two Proctors 
 then possessed the privilege of interpolating one name 
 each in the list, simply as a compliment, and they 
 naturally felt that such a compliment was nothing if it 
 was not courageous. Bentley's degree had no real like- 
 ness, of course, to that of third Wrangler now ; modern 
 Mathematics were only beginning, and the other subjects 
 of the Schools had more weight ; the testing process, too, 
 was far from thorough. 
 
 Bentley never got a Fellowship. In his time, in- 
 deed, until the present century, there were territorial 
 restrictions at almost all Colleges. As a native of 
 Yorkshire, he had been elected to a Constable scholarship, 
 but the same circumstance excluded him from a greater 
 prize. When he graduated, two Fellowships at St John's 
 were already held by Yorkshiremen, and a third re- 
 presentative of the same county was inadmissible. He 
 was a candidate, indeed, in 1682; but as no person not 
 in Priest's Orders was eligible on that occasion, he must 
 have gone in merely to show what he could do. The 
 College was enabled to recognise him in other ways,
 
 6 BENTLET. [CHAP. 
 
 however. He was appointed to the mastership of 
 Spalding School in Lincolnshire. At the end of about a 
 year, he quitted this post for one which offered attractions 
 of a different kind. Dr Stillingfleet then Dean of St 
 Paul's, and formerly a Fellow of St John's, Cambridge 
 wanted a tutor for his second son ; and his choice fell on 
 Bentley. 
 
 A youth of twenty-one, with Bentley's tastes and 
 powers, could scarcely have been placed in a more ad- 
 vantageous position. Stillingfleet was already foremost 
 among those scholarly divines who were regarded as the 
 champions of Christianity against deists or materialists, 
 and more particularly as defenders of the English Church 
 against designs which had been believed to menace it since 
 the Restoration. The researches embodied in Stillingfleet's 
 Origines Sacrae and other works had for their general aim 
 to place the Anglican religion on the historical basis of 
 primitive times. In the course of his extensive and 
 varied studies, he had gradually formed that noble 
 library one of the finest private collections then existing 
 in England which after his death was purchased for 
 Dublin by Archbishop Marsh, Free access to such a 
 library was a priceless boon for Bentley. At the Dean's 
 house he would also meet the best literary society in 
 London; and his 'patron' to use the phrase of that 
 day received him on a footing which enabled him to 
 profit fully by such opportunities. Stillingfleet could 
 sympathise with the studies of his son's young tutor. In 
 his own early days, after taking his degree at the same 
 College, Stillingfleet had accepted a domestic tutorship, 
 and 'besides his attendance on his proper province, the 
 instruction of the young gentleman,' had found time to 
 set about Avriting his Irenicum, the endeavour of a
 
 i.] EAELY LIFE. THE LETTER TO MILL. 7 
 
 sanguine youth to make peace between Presbyterians 
 and Prelacy. A contemporary biographer (Dr Timothy 
 Goodwin) has thus described Dr Stillingfleet. 'He was 
 tall, graceful, and well-proportioned ; his countenance 
 comely, fresh, and awful ; in his conversation, cheerful 
 and discreet, obliging, and very instructive.' To the day 
 of his death in 1699 Stillingfleet was Bentley's best 
 friend, the architect, indeed, of his early fortunes. 
 
 The next six years, from the twenty-first to the twenty- 
 seventh of his age (1683 1689), were passed by Bentley 
 in Dr Stillingfleet' s family. It was during this period, 
 when he enjoyed much leisure and the use of a first-rate 
 library, that Bentley laid the solid foundations of his 
 learning. He enlarged his study of the Greek and Latin 
 classics, writing notes in the margin of his books as he 
 went along. In those days, it will be remembered, such 
 studies were not facilitated by copious dictionaries of 
 classical biography, geography, and antiquities, or by 
 those well-ordered and comprehensive lexicons which 
 exhibit at a glance the results attained by the labours of 
 successive generations. Bentley now began to make for 
 himself lists of the authors whom he found cited by the 
 ancient grammarians ; and it may be observed that a series 
 of detractors, from Boyle's allies to Richard Dawes, 
 constantly twit Bentley with owing all his learning to 
 'indexes.' Thus, in a copy of verses preserved by Granger, 
 Bentley figures as 
 
 Zoilus, tir'd with turning o'er 
 Dull indexes, a precious store. 
 
 At this time he also studied the New Testament critically. 
 His labours on the Old Testament may be described in 
 his own words. ' I wrote, before I was twenty -four years
 
 8 BENTLEY. [CHAP. 
 
 of age, a sort of Hexapla; a thick volume in quarto, in 
 the first column of which I inserted every word of the 
 Hebrew Bible alphabetically; and, in five other columns, 
 all the various interpretations of those words in the 
 Chaldee, Syriac, Vulgate", Latin, Septuagint, and Aquila, 
 Symmachus, and Theodotkm, that occur in the whole 
 Bible.' 
 
 Bentley did not take Orders till 1690, when he was 
 twenty-eight, but he had probably always intended to do 
 so. His delay may have been partly due to the troubles 
 of James II. 's reign. Immediately after the Revolution 
 Dean Stillihgfleet was raised to the see of Worcester. 
 His eldest son had gone to Cambridge ; but Bentley's 
 pupil, James, wa& sent to Wadham College, Oxford. 
 Bentley accompanied him thither ; and, having taken an 
 ad eundem degree of M.A., was placed on the books of 
 Wadham College. He continued to reside at Oxford till 
 the latter part of 1690; and we find him engaged on 
 behalf of the University in negotiations for the purchase 
 of the library which had belonged to Dr Isaac Voss, 
 Canon of Windsor 1 . This valuable collection including 
 the books of Gerard John Voss, Isaac's father ultimately 
 went to Leyden; not, apparently, through any fault of 
 Bentley's, though that was alleged during his controversy 
 with Boyle. 
 
 While living at Oxford, Bentley enjoyed access to 
 the Bodleian Library; and, as if his ardour had been 
 stimulated by a survey of its treasures, it is at this 
 time that his literary projects first come into view. 'I 
 had decided' (he informs Dr Mill) 'to edit the fragments 
 of all the Greek poets, with emendations and notes, as a 
 single great work/ Perhaps even Bentley can scarcely 
 then have realised the whole magnitude of such a task,
 
 i.] EARLY LIFE. THE LETTER TO MILL. 9 
 
 and would have gauged it more accurately two years 
 later, when he had edited the fragments of Callimachus. 
 Nor was this the only vast scheme that floated before his 
 mind. In a letter to Dr Edward Bernard (then Savilian 
 Professor of Astronomy at Oxford) he discloses a project 
 of editing three Greek lexicons those of Hesychius and 
 Suidas, with the Etymologicum Magnum in three parallel 
 columns for each page. These would make three folio 
 volumes; a fourth volume would contain other lexicons 
 (as those of Julius Pollux, Erotian, and Phrynichus) which 
 did not lend themselves to the arrangement in column. 
 His thoughts were also busy with Philostratus (the Greek 
 biographer of the Sophists), with Lucretius, and with 
 the astronomical poet Manilius. Bentley excelled all 
 previous scholars in accurate knowledge of the classical 
 metres. His sojourn at Oxford is the earliest moment 
 at which we find a definite notice of his metrical studies. 
 The Baroccian collection in the Bodleian Library con- 
 tains some manuscripts of the Greek 'Handbook of 
 Metres' which has come down under the name of the 
 grammarian Hephaestion. Bentley now collated these, 
 using a copy of the edition of Turnebus, in which he 
 made some marginal notes; the book is in the Library 
 of Trinity College, Cambridge. 
 
 When Bentley was thirty-six, he could still say, 'I 
 have never published anything yet, but at the desire of 
 others.' Before he left Oxford, towards the end of 1690, 
 a friend had already engaged him to appear in print. 
 The Baroccian collection of manuscripts contained the 
 only known copy of a chronicle written in Greek by 
 a certain John of Antioch. He is sometimes called John 
 Malelas, or simply Malelas. This is the Greek form of 
 a Syriac surname similar in import to the Greek rhetor,
 
 10 BENTLEY. [CHAP. 
 
 'orator,' 'eloquent writer.' It was given to other literary 
 men also, and merely served to distinguish this John of 
 Antioch from other well-known men of the same name 
 and place. His date is uncertain, but may probably be 
 placed between the seventh and tenth centuries. His 
 chronicle is a work of the kind which was often under- 
 taken by Christian compilers. Beginning from the crea- 
 tion, he sought to give a chronological sketch of universal 
 history down to his own time. The work, as extant, is 
 incomplete. It begins with a statement characteristic of 
 its general contents ; ' After the death of Hephaestus 
 (Vulcan), his son Helius (the Sun) reigned over the 
 Egyptians for the space of 4407 days ;' and it breaks off 
 at the year 560 A.D., five years before the death of 
 Justinian. Historically it is worthless, except in so far 
 as it preserves a few notices by writers contemporary 
 with the later emperors ; and it has no merit of form. 
 Scaliger once described a similar chronicle as a dust-bin. 
 Yet the mass of rubbish accumulated by John of Antioch 
 includes a few fragments of better things. Not only the 
 classical prose-writers but the classical poets were among 
 his authorities, for he made no attempt to discriminate 
 facts from myths. In several places he preserves the 
 names of lost works. Here and there, too, a bit of 
 classical prose or verse has stuck in the dismal swamp of 
 his text. Eager to reconstruct ancient chronology, the 
 students of the seventeenth century had not overlooked 
 this unattractive author. In the reign of Charles I. 
 two Oxford scholars had successively studied him. John 
 Gregory (who died in 1646) had proved the authorship of 
 the chronicle mutilated though it was at both ends by 
 showing that a passage of it is elsewhere quoted as from 
 the chronicle of Malelas. Edmund Chilmead, a man
 
 i.] EAELY LIFE. THE LETTER TO MILL. 11 
 
 remarkable for his attainments in scholarship, mathe- 
 matics, and music, translated it into Latin, adding 
 notes. As a royalist, Chilmead was ejected from Christ 
 Church by the Parliamentary Visitation of 1648. He 
 died in 1653, just as his work was ready to be printed. 
 After the lapse of thirty-eight years, the Curators of the 
 Sheldonian Press resolved in 1690 to edit it. The manu- 
 script chronicle had already gained some repute through the 
 citations of it by such scholars as Selden, Usher, Pearson, 
 Stanley, Lloyd. It was arranged that an introduction 
 should be written by Humphrey Hody, who had been 
 James Stillingfleet's College tutor at Wadham, and had, 
 like Bentley, been appointed Chaplain to the Bishop of 
 Worcester. He was an excellent scholar, and performed 
 his task in a highly creditable manner. A general 
 supervision of the edition had been entrusted to Dr John 
 Mill, Principal of St Edmund Hall, whose learning has 
 an abiding monument in his subsequent edition of the New 
 Testament. One day Mill and Bentley were walking 
 together at Oxford, when the conversation turned on the 
 chronicle of Malelas. Bentley said that he would like to 
 see the book before it was published. Mill consented, on 
 condition that Bentley would communicate any suggestions 
 that might occur to him. The proof-sheets were then 
 sent to Bentley ; who shortly afterwards left Oxford, to 
 take up his residence as chaplain with the Bishop of 
 Worcester. 
 
 Dr Mill presently claimed Bentley's promise; and, 
 thus urged, Bentley at length sent his remarks on 
 Malelas, in the form of a Latin Letter addressed to Dr 
 Mill. He elsewhere says that he had been further pressed 
 to write it by the learned Bishop Lloyd. In June, 1691, 
 the chronicle appeared, with Bentley's Letter to Mill
 
 12 BENTLEY. [CHAP. 
 
 as an appendix. This edition (' Oxoiiii, e Theatre 
 Sheldoniano') is a moderately thick octavo volume; first 
 stands a note by Hody, on the spelling of the chronicler's 
 surname ; then his Prolegomena, filling 64 pages ; the 
 Greek text follows, with Chilmead's Latin version in 
 parallel columns, and foot-notes ; and the last 98 pages 
 are occupied by Bentley's Letter to Mill. 
 
 Briefly observing that he leaves to Hody the question 
 of the chronicler's identity and age, Bentley comes at 
 once to the text, Malelas had treated Greek mythology 
 as history, interweaving it with other threads of ancient 
 record. Thus, after enumerating some fabulous kings of 
 Attica, he proceeds : ' Shortly afterwards, Gideon was 
 leader of Israel. Contemporary with him was the famous 
 lyric poet Orpheus, of Thrace.' Malelas then quotes some 
 statements as to the mystic theology taught by Orpheus. 
 One of these is a sentence which, as he gives it, seems to 
 be composed of common words, but is wholly unintelligible. 
 Bentley takes up this sentence. He shows that the deeply 
 corrupted words conceal the names of three mystic 
 divinities in the later Orphic system, symbolical, re- 
 spectively, of Counsel, Light, and Life. He proves this 
 emendation, as certain as it is wonderful, by quoting a 
 passage from Damascius, the last great Neoplatonist, who 
 lived in the early part of the sixth century, and wrote a 
 treatise called 'Questions and Answers oil First Principles,' 
 in which he sketches the theology of 'the current Orphic 
 rhapsodies.' This treatise was not even partially printed 
 till 1828; and Bentley quotes it from a manuscript in 
 the library of Corpus Christi College, Oxford. He next 
 deals with a group of fictitious 'oracles' which Malelas 
 had reduced from hexameter verse into prose of the 
 common dialect, and shows that several of them closely
 
 i.] EAELY LIFE. THE LETTER TO MILL. 13 
 
 resemble some which he had found in a manuscript at 
 Oxford, entitled 'Oracles and Theologies of Greek 
 Philosophers.' 
 
 Then he turns to those passages in which the chronicle 
 cites the Attic dramatists. He demonstrates the spuri- 
 ousness of a fragment ascribed to Sophocles. He con- 
 firms or corrects the titles of several lost plays which 
 Malelas ascribes to Euripides, and incidentally amends 
 numerous passages which he has occasion to quote. Dis- 
 cursiA T e exuberance of learning characterises the whole 
 Letter. A single example will serve to illustrate it. 
 Malelas says : ' Euripides brought out a play about 
 Pasiphae.' Bentley remarks on this : 'I do not speak at 
 random ; and I am certain that no ancient writer mentions 
 a Pasiphae of Euripides.' The comic poet Alcaeus, indeed, 
 composed a piece of that name, which is said to have been 
 exhibited in the same year as the recast Plutus of 
 Aristophanes. It is true, however, Bentley adds, that 
 the story of Pasiphae had been handled by Euripides, 
 in a lost play called The Cretans, This he proves from 
 a scholiast on the Frogs of Aristophanes. But the 
 scholiast himself needs correction : who says that Euri- 
 pides introduced Aerope in The Cretans. Here he 
 is confounding The Cretans with another lost play of 
 Euripides, called the Women of Crete : the former dealt 
 with the story of Icarus and Pasiphae, the latter with 
 that of Aerope, Atreus and Thyestes. Porphyry, in his 
 book on Abstinence, quotes nine verses from a play of 
 Euripides, in which the chorus are addressing Minos. 
 Grotius, in his Excerpts from Greek Comedies and Trage- 
 dies, had attempted to amend these corrupted verses, and 
 had supposed them to come from the Women of Crete. 
 Bentley (incidentally correcting a grammarian) demon-
 
 14 BENTLEY. [CHAP. 
 
 stratea that they can have belonged only to The Cretans. 
 He then turns to the Greek verses themselves. Grotius 
 had given a Latin version of them, in the same metre. 
 This metro was the anapsestic one which had been 
 frequently used by the scholars of the sixteenth and 
 seventeenth centuries, both in translations and in original 
 poems. Bentley points out that one of its most essential 
 laws had been ignored, not only by Grotius, but by the 
 modern Latinists generally, including Joseph Scaliger. 
 The ancients regarded the verses of this metre as forming 
 a continuous chain; hence the last syllable of a verse 
 was not indifferently long or short, but necessarily one or 
 the other, as if it occurred in the middle of a verse. 
 Thus Grotius had written : 
 
 Quas prisca domos dedit indigena 
 
 Quercus Chalyba secta bipenni. 
 
 Here the short a at the end of indigena should be a 
 long syllable, in order to make an anapaest (^/w ). This 
 is known as Bentley 's discovery of the synaphea ('con- 
 nection^ in anapsestic verse. He further illustrates the 
 metre from fragments of the Latin poet Attius, which 
 he amends ; one fragment, indeed, he recognises in the 
 prose of Cicero's Tusculans. Returning to the fragment 
 of The Cretans in Porphyry, which Grotius had handled 
 amiss, Bentley corrects it, with certainty in some points, 
 with rashness in others, but everywhere brilliantly. Nor 
 has he done with the verses yet. They mention the 
 cypress as 'native' to Crete. This leads Bentley to 
 discuss and amend passages in Pliny's Natural History, 
 in the History of Plants by Theophrastus, and in the 
 geographical work of Solinus. 
 
 Elsewhere Malelas refers to the lost Meleager of 
 Euripides. Having quoted another mention of it from
 
 i.] EAELY LIFE. THE LETTER TO MILL. 15 
 
 Hesychius, Bentley takes occasion to show at length the 
 principal causes of error in that lexicon. This is one of 
 the most striking parts of the Letter. Then, in numerous 
 places, he restores proper names which Malelas had de- 
 faced. The chronicler says that the earliest dramatists 
 were Themis, Minos, and Auleas. Bentley shows that 
 he means Thespis, Ion of Chios, and Aeschylus. Thespis 
 leads him to quote Clement of Alexandria, and to explain 
 .some mysterious words by showing that they are 
 specimens of a pastime which consisted in framing a 
 sentence with the twenty-four letters of the alphabet, 
 each used once only. Speaking of Ion, he gives an 
 exhaustive discussion of that poet's date and writings, 
 verse and prose. The Letter ends with some remarks on 
 the form of the name Malelas. Hody had found fault 
 with Bentley for adding the final s, which no previous 
 scholar used. Bentley replies that a at the end of a 
 foreign name ordinarily became as in Greek, as Agrippas. 
 And Malelas being the Greek form of a Greek writer's 
 name, we should keep it in Latin and English, just as 
 Cicero says Lysias, not Lysia. The Latin exceptions aro 
 the domesticated names, those of slaves, or of Greeks 
 naturalised by residence : as Sosia, Phania. But it was 
 objected that Malela was a 'barbarian' name, and there- 
 fore indeclinable. Bentley answers that the Hun Attila 
 appears in Greek writers as Attilas, adding half-a-dozen 
 Huns, Goths, and Vandals. The prejudice in favour of 
 Malela arose from a simple cause. The chronicler is 
 mentioned only thrice by Greek writers : two of these 
 three passages happen to have the name in the genitive 
 case, which is Malela ; the third, however, has the nomi- 
 native, which is Malelas. Mr Hody was not convinced 
 about the s. The note in four large pages of small
 
 16 BENTLEY. [CHAP. 
 
 print which precedes his Prolegomena was written after 
 he had read Bentley's argument; and ends with a prayer. 
 Mr Hody's aspiration is that he may always write in a 
 becoming spirit; and, finally, that he may be a despiser 
 of trifles (nugarum denique contemptor). 
 
 Taken as a whole, Bentley's Letter to Mill is an 
 extraordinary performance for a scholar of twenty-eight 
 in the year 1690. It ranges from one topic to another 
 over almost the whole field of ancient literature. Upwards 
 of sixty Greek and Latin writers, from the earliest to the 
 latest, are incidentally explained or corrected. There are 
 many curious tokens of the industry with which Bentley 
 had used his months at Oxford. Thus, referring to a 
 manuscript of uncertain origin in the Bodleian Library, 
 'I have made out,' he says, 'from some iambics at the 
 beginning, almost effaced by age that it contains the 
 work of the grammarian Theognotus, whom the author 
 of the Etymoloyicum Magnum quotes several times;' and 
 he gives his proof. 
 
 It is interesting to see how strongly this first pro- 
 duction bears the stamp of that peculiar style which 
 afterwards marked Bentley's criticism. It is less the 
 style of a writer than of a speaker who is arguing in 
 a strain of rough vivacity with another person. The 
 tone is often as if the ancient author was reading his 
 composition aloud to Bentley, but making stupid mistakes 
 through drowsiness or inattention. Bentley pulls him up 
 short ; remonstrates with him in a vein of good-humoured 
 sarcasm; points out to him that he can scarcely mean 
 this, but as his own words elsewhere prove must, no 
 doubt, have meant that ; and recommends him to think 
 more of logic. Sometimes it is the modern reader whom 
 Bentley addresses, as if begging him to be calm in
 
 I.] EARLY LIFE. THE LETTER TO MILL. 17 
 
 the face of some tremendous blunder just committed by 
 the ancient author, who is intended to overhear the 
 ' aside :' ' Do not mind him ; he does not really mean it. 
 He is like this sometimes, and makes us anxious ; but ho 
 has plenty of good sense, if one can only get at it. Let 
 us see what we can do for him.' This colloquial manner, 
 with its alternating appeals to author and reader, in 
 one instance exposed Bentley to an unmerited rebuko 
 from Dr Monk. Once, after triumphantly showing that 
 John of Antioch supposed the Boeotian Aulis to be in 
 Scythia, Bentley exclaims, 'Good indeed, Johnny!' (Euge 
 vero, <3 'IwavviSioy). Dr Monk thought that this was said 
 to Dr John Mill, and reproved it as 'an indecorum which 
 neither the familiarity of friendship, nor the license of a 
 dead language, can justify towards the dignified Head 
 of a House.' Mr Maehly, in a memoir of Bentley, 
 rejoins : 'That may be the view of English high life; a 
 German savant would never have been offended by the 
 expressions in question.' (Das mag Anschauung des 
 englischen high life sein : einem deutschen Gelehrten 
 wiirden die fraglichen Ausdriicke nie aufgef alien sein.) 
 But our Aristarchus was not addressing the Principal of 
 St Edmund Hall; he was sportively upbraiding the 
 ancient chronicler. Indeed, Monk's slip a thing most 
 rare in his work was pointed out in a review of his 
 first edition, and is absent from the second. 
 
 Two of the first scholars of that day John George 
 Graevius and Ezechiel Spanheim separately saluted the 
 young author of the Letter to Mill as ' a new and already 
 bright star' of English letters. But the Letter to Mill 
 received by far its most memorable tribute, years after 
 Bentley's death, from David Ruhnken, in his preface to 
 the Hesychius of Alberti. 'Those great men,' he says 
 J. D. c
 
 13 BENTLEY. [CHAP. i. 
 
 meaning such scholars as Scaliger, Casaubon, Saumaise 
 'did not dare to say openly what they thought (about 
 Hesychius), whether deterred by the established repute 
 of the grammarian, or by the clamours of the half -learned, 
 who are always noisy against their betters, and who were 
 uneasy at the notion of the great Hesychius losing his 
 pre-eminence. In order that the truth should be pub- 
 lished and proved, we needed the learned daring of 
 Eichard Bentley, daring which here, if anywhere, 
 served literature better than the sluggish and credulous 
 superstition of those who wish to be called and deemed 
 critics. Bentley shook off the servile yoke, and put forth 
 that famous Letter to Mill, a wonderful monument of 
 genius and learning, such as could have come only from 
 the first critic of his time.'
 
 CHAPTER II. 
 
 THE BOYLE LECTURES. 
 
 ROBERT BOYLE, born in the year after Bacon's death 
 (1627), stands next to him among the Englishmen of the 
 seventeenth century who advanced inductive science. 
 His experiments ' physico-mechanical,' as he describes 
 them led to the discovery of the law for the elasticity of 
 the air; improvements in the air-pump and the ther- 
 mometer were due to him ; and his investigations were 
 serviceable to Hydrostatics, Chemistry, and Medicine. In 
 his theological writings it was his chief aim to show 'the 
 reconcilableness of reason and religion,' and thus to 
 combat the most powerful prejudice which opposed the 
 early progress of the New Philosophy. Boyle's mind, like 
 Newton's, became more profoundly reverent the further 
 he penetrated into the secrets of nature ; his innermost 
 feeling appears to be well represented by the title which 
 he chose for one of his essays ' On the high veneration 
 man's intellect owes to God, peculiarly for his wisdom 
 and power.' Thus his 'Disquisition on Final Causes' 
 was designed to prove, as against inferences which had 
 been drawn from the cosmical system of Descartes, that 
 the structure of the universe reveals the work of a divine 
 
 c2
 
 20 BENTLEY. [CHAP. 
 
 intelligence. Dying on December 30, 1691, he left a 
 bequest which was in harmony with the main purpose of 
 his life, and which might be regarded as his personal and 
 permanent protest against the idea that a servant of 
 science is an enemy of religion. 
 
 He assigned fifty pounds a year as a stipend ' for some 
 divine, or preaching minister,' who should ' preach eight 
 Sermons in the year for proving the Christian religion 
 against notorious infidels, viz. Atheists, Deists, Pagans, 
 Jews, and Mahometans ; not descending to any controversies 
 that are among Christians themselves : The lectures to be 
 on the first Monday of the respective months of January, 
 February, March, April, May, September, October, 
 November; in such church as the trustees shall from 
 time to time appoint.' The four trustees named in the 
 will Bishop Tenison, Sir Henry Ashurst, Sir John 
 Rotheram, and John Evelyn (the author of the Sylva 
 and the Diary) soon appointed the Lecturer who was 
 to deliver the first course. 'We made choice of one 
 Mr Bentley,' says Evelyn, ' chaplain to the Bishop of 
 Worcester.' Bishop Stillingfleet, himself so eminent an 
 apologist, would naturally be consulted in such an 
 election. 
 
 Bentley took for his subject the first of the topics 
 indicated by the founder: 'A confutation of Atheism.' 
 At this time the Leviathan of Thomas Hobbes had been 
 forty years before the world : and Bentley's lectures 
 stand in a peculiar relation to it. Hobbes resolved all ideas 
 into sensations; he denied that there was 'any common rule 
 of good and evil, to be taken from the nature of the objects 
 themselves.' He did not, however, deny the existence of 
 a God. ' Curiosity about causes,' says Hobbes, ' led men 
 to search out, one after the other, till they came to the
 
 ii.] THE BOYLE LECTUBES. 21 
 
 necessary conclusion, that there is somo eternal cause 
 which men called God. But they have no more idea of 
 his nature than a blind man has of fire, though he knows 
 that there is something which warms him.' So elsewhere 
 he distinguishes between the necessary 'acknowledgment 
 of one infinite, omnipotent and eternal God,' and tho 
 attempt which he pronounces delusive to define tho 
 nature of that Being 'by spirit incorporeal.' 
 
 Bentley held with those who regarded Hobbes, not 
 merely as a materialist who destroyed the basis of 
 morality, but as an atheist in the disguise of a deist. 
 Writing to Bernard, Bentley says roundly of Hobbes, 
 'his corporeal God is a meer sham to get his book 
 printed.' Hobbes had said not in the Leviathan, but 
 in ' An Answer to Bishop Bramhall,' who had pressed 
 him on this point ' I maintain God's existence, and that 
 he is a most pure and most simple corporeal spirit : ' 
 adding, ' by corporeal I mean a substance that has mag- 
 nitude.' Elsewhere he adds 'invisible' before 'corpo- 
 real.' But at this time the suspicion of a tendency 
 was sometimes enough to provoke the charge of atheism : 
 thus Cuclworth, in his Intellectual System published 
 fourteen years before Bentley 's lectures, and, like them, 
 directed mainly against Hobbes casts the imputation, 
 without a shadow of reason, on Gassendi, Descartes, 
 and Bacon. Bentley declared that atheism was rife 
 in 'taverns and coffee-houses, nay Westminster-hall and 
 the very churches.' The school of Hobbes, he was 
 firmly persuaded, was answerable for this. 'There may 
 be some Spinosists, or immaterial Fatalists, beyond seas,' 
 says Bentley; 'but not one English infidel in a hundred 
 is any other than a Hobbist ; which I know to be rank 
 atheism in the private study and select conversation of
 
 22 BENTLEY. [CHAP. 
 
 those men, whatever it may appear abroad.' Beiitley's 
 Lectures are, throughout, essentially an argument against 
 Hobbes. The set of the lecturer's thoughts may be seen 
 from an illustration used in his second discourse, where 
 he is arguing against a fortuitous origin of the universe. 
 ' If a man should affirm that an ape, casually meeting 
 with pen, ink, and paper, and falling to scribble, did 
 happen to write exactly the Leviathan of Thomas Hobbes, 
 would an atheist believe such a story ? ' 
 
 It was from the pulpit of St Martin's Church, in 
 London, that Bentley delivered his Boyle Lectures. The 
 first was given on March 7, 1692. Bentley announces 
 that his refutation of atheists will not be drawn from 
 those sacred books which, in their eyes, possess no 
 special authority ; ' but, however, there are other books 
 extant, which they must needs allow of as proper 
 evidence ; even the mighty volumes of visible nature, and 
 the everlasting tables of right reason; wherein, if they do 
 not wilfully shut their eyes, they may read their own 
 folly written by the finger of God, in a much plainer and 
 more terrible sentence than Belshazzar's was by the hand 
 upon the wall.' 
 
 In choosing this ground Bentley was following a re- 
 cent example. Richard Cumberland, afterwards Bishop of 
 Peterborough, had published in 1672 his 'Philosophical 
 Disquisition on the Laws of Nature' arguing, against 
 the school of Hobbes, that certain immutable principles 
 of moral choice are inherent in the nature of things and 
 in the mind of man. He purposely refrains, however, 
 from appealing to Scripture : the testimony which 
 Cumberland invokes is that of recent science, mathemati- 
 cal or physiological, of Descartes and Huygens, of 
 "Willis or Harvey. It is characteristic of Bentley that
 
 ii.] THE BOYLE LECTUEES. 23 
 
 he chose to draw his weapons from the same armoury. 
 He was already a disciple of strictly theological learning. 
 But in this field, as in others, he declined to use 
 authority as a refuge from logical encounter. 
 
 Bentley's first Lecture argues that to adopt atheism 
 is 'to choose death and evil before life and good;' that 
 such folly is needless, since religion imposes nothing 
 repugnant to man's faculties or incredible to his reason ; 
 that it is also hurtful, both to the individual, whom 
 it robs of the best hope, and to communities, since 
 religion is the basis of society. The second Lecture 
 proceeds to deduce the existence of the Deity from the 
 faculties of the human soul. Hobbes had said : ' There 
 is no conception, in a man's mind which hath not at first, 
 totally or by parts, been begotten upon the organs of 
 sense : the rest are derived from that original.' Bentley, 
 on the contrary, undertakes to prove that ' the powers of 
 cogitation, and volition, and sensation, are neither in- 
 herent in matter as such, nor producible in matter ; ' but 
 proceed from 'some cogitative substance, some incorporeal 
 inhabitant within us, which we call spirit and soul.' As 
 the result of the inquiry, he concludes that there is ' an 
 immaterial and intelligent Being, that created our souls ; 
 which Being was either eternal itself, or created im- 
 mediately or ultimately by some other Eternal, that has 
 all those perfections. There is, therefore, originally an. 
 eternal, immaterial, intelligent Creator; all which together 
 are the attributes of God alone.' Evelyn, who was pre- 
 sent at this Lecture, writes of it in his Diary (April 4, 
 1G92) 'one of tlie most learned and convincing discourses 
 I had ever heard.' From this point we may date the 
 friendship which till his death in 1706 he steadily enter- 
 tained for Bentley. The third, fourth and fifth Lectures
 
 21 BENTLEY. [CHAP. 
 
 urge the same inference from the origin and structure of 
 human bodies. Bentley seeks to prove that 'the human 
 race was neither from everlasting without beginning ; nor 
 owes its beginning to the influence of heavenly bodies; 
 nor to what they call nature, that is, the necessary and 
 mechanical motions of dead senseless matter.' His style 
 of argument on the evidence of design in the human 
 structure may be seen from this passage on the organism 
 of the heart : 
 
 ' If we consider the heart, which is supposed to be 
 the first principle of motion and life, and divide it by our 
 imagination into its constituent parts, its arteries, and 
 veins, and nerves, and tendons, and membranes, and innu- 
 merable little fibres that these secondary parts do consist 
 of, we shall find nothing here singular, but what is in any 
 other muscle of the body. "Tis only the site and posture 
 of these several parts, and the configuration of the whole, 
 that give it the form and functions of a heart. Now, 
 why should the first single fibres in the formation of the 
 heart be peculiarly drawn in spiral lines, when the fibres 
 of all other muscles are made by a transverse rectilinear 
 motion 1 What could determine the fluid matter into that 
 odd and singular figure, when as yet no other member is 
 supposed to be formed, that might direct the course of 
 that fluid matter ? Let mechanism here make an experi- 
 ment of its power, and produce a spiral and turbinated 
 motion of the whole moved body without an external 
 director.' 
 
 The last three Lectures (vL, vii., viii.) deal with the 
 proofs from 'the origin and frame of the world.' These 
 are by far the most striking of the series. Newton's 
 Principia had now been published for five years. But, 
 beyond the inner circle of scientific students, the
 
 H.] THE BOYLE LECTURES. 25 
 
 Cartesian system was still generally received. Descartes 
 taught that each planet was carried round the sun in a 
 separate vortex ; and that the satellites are likewise 
 carried round by smaller vortices, contained within those 
 of the several planets. Centrifugal motion would con- 
 stantly impel the planets to fly off in a straight line 
 from the sun ; but they are kept in their orbits by the 
 pressure of an outer sphere, consisting of denser particles 
 which are beyond the action of the vortices. 
 
 Newton had demolished this theory. He had shown 
 that the planets are held in their orbits by the force of 
 gravity, which is always drawing them towards the sun, 
 combined with a transverse impulse, which is always 
 projecting them at tangents to their orbits. Bentley 
 takes up Newton's great discovery, and applies it to prove 
 the existence of an Intelligent Providence. Let us grant, 
 ho says, that the force of gravity is inherent to matter. 
 What can have been the origin of that other force, the 
 transverse impulse? This impulse is not uniform, but 
 has been adjusted to the place of each body in the system. 
 Each planet has its particular velocity, proportioned to 
 its distance from the sun and to the quantity of the solar 
 matter. It can be due to one cause alone an intelligent 
 and omnipotent Creator. 
 
 This view has the express sanction of Newton. His 
 letters to Bentley subsequent in date to the Lectures 
 repeatedly confirm it. ' I do not know any power in 
 nature,' Newton writes, 'which would cause this trans- 
 verse motion without the divine arm. '...'To make this 
 system, with all its motions, required a cause which 
 understood and compared together the quantities of 
 matter in the several bodies of the sun and planets, and 
 the gravitating powers resulting from thence; the
 
 26 BENTLEY. [CHAP. 
 
 several distances of the primary planets from the sun, 
 and of the secondary ones from Saturn, Jupiter, and the 
 Earth ; and the velocities with which these planets could 
 revolve about those quantities of matter in the central 
 bodies ; and to compare and adjust all these things to- 
 gether, in so great a variety of bodies, argues that cause 
 to be, not blind and fortuitous, but very well skilled in 
 mechanics and geometry.' 
 
 The application of Newton's discoveries which Bentley 
 makes in the Boyle Lectures was peculiarly welcome to 
 Newton himself. 'When I wrote my treatise about our 
 system,' he says to Bentley, 'I had an eye upon such 
 principles as might work with considering men for the 
 belief of a Deity; and nothing can rejoice me more than 
 to find it useful for that purpose. But if I have done the 
 public any service this way, it is due to nothing but 
 industry and patient thought.' 
 
 The correspondence between Bentley and Newton, 
 to which the Boyle Lectures gave rise, would alone 
 make them memorable. It has commonly been supposed 
 that Bentley first studied the Principia with a view to 
 these Lectures. This, as I can prove, is an error. 
 The Library of Trinity College, Cambridge, contains 
 the autographs of Newton's four letters to Bentley, 
 and of his directions for reading the Principia; also a 
 letter to Wotton from John Craig, a Scottish mathe- 
 matician, giving advice on the same subject, for 
 Bentley's benefit. Now, Craig's letter is dated June 
 24, 1691 ; Bentley, then, must have turned his mind 
 to the Principia six months before the Boyle Lectures 
 were even founded. We know, further, that in 1689 he 
 was working on Lucretius. I should conjecture, then, 
 that his first object in studying Newton's cosmical system
 
 ii.] THE BOYLE LECTUEES. 27 
 
 had been to compare it with that of Epicurus, as in- 
 terpreted by Lucretius ; to whom, indeed, he refers moro 
 than once in the Boyle Lectures. Craig gives an 
 alarming list of books which must be read before the 
 Principla, can be understood, and represents the study as 
 most arduous. Newton's own directions to Bentley are 
 simple and encouraging: 'at y e first perusal of my 
 Book,' he concludes, 'it's enough if you understand y 8 
 Propositions w th some of y e Demonstrations w* h are 
 easier than the rest. For when you understand y e easier, 
 they will afterwards give you light into y' harder.' At 
 the bottom of the paper Bentley has written, in his 
 largest and boldest character, 'Directions from Mr 
 Newton by his own Hand.' There is no date. Clearly, 
 however, it was Craig's formidable letter which deter- 
 mined Bentley on writing to Newton. The rapidity 
 with which Bentley among all his other pursuits 
 comprehended the Principia proves both industry and 
 power. Some years later, his Lectures were searched 
 for flaws by John Keill, afterwards Savilian Professor of 
 Astronomy at Oxford, and the principal agent in in- 
 troducing Newton's system there. The Phalaris con- 
 troversy was going on, and Keill wished to damage 
 Bentley. But he could find only one real blot. Bentley 
 had missed Newton's discovery mentioned, but not 
 prominent, in the Principia that the moon revolves 
 about her own axis. Keill's only other point was a 
 verbal cavil, refuted by the context Better testimony 
 to Bentley's accuracy could scarcely have been borne. 
 
 The last Lecture was given on December 5, 1692. 
 The first six had already been printed. But before 
 publishing the last two which dealt in more detail with 
 Newton's principles Bentley wished to consult Newton
 
 28 BENTLEY. [CHAP. 
 
 himself. He therefore wrote to him, at Trinity College, 
 Cambridge. It was in the autumn of that year that 
 Newton had finished his Letters on Fluxions. He was 
 somewhat out of health, suffering from sleeplessness and 
 loss of appetite ; perhaps (as his letters to Locke suggest) 
 vexed by the repeated failure of his friends to obtain for 
 him such a provision as he desired. But he at once 
 answered Bentley's letter with that concise and lucid 
 thoroughness which makes his style a model in its kind. 
 His first letter is dated Dec. 10, 1692, and addressed to 
 Bentley 'at the Bishop of "Worcester's House, in Park- 
 Street in Westminster.' On the back of it Bentley has 
 written: 'Mr Newton's Answer to some Queries sent 
 by me, after I had preach't my 2 last Sermons ; All his 
 answers are agreeable to what I had deliver'd before in 
 the pulpit. But of some incidental things I do iireyiw 
 [suspend judgment]. R.B. ' Three other letters are extant 
 which Newton wrote at this time to Bentley, the last, 
 on Feb. 25, 1693. He probably wrote others also; 
 there are several from Bentley to him in the Portsmouth 
 collection. 
 
 In the course of these four letters, Newton approves 
 nearly all the arguments for the existence of God which 
 Bentley had deduced from the Principia. On one 
 important point, however, he corrects him. Bentley 
 had conceded to the atheists that gravity may be 
 essential and inherent to matter. 'Pray,' says Newton, 
 'do not ascribe that notion to me; for the cause of gravity 
 is what I do not pretend to know, and therefore would 
 take more time to consider of it.' In the last letter, 
 about five weeks later, Newton returns to this topic, and 
 speaks more decidedly. The notion of gravity being 
 inherent to matter 'is to me,' he says, 'so great an
 
 H.] THE BOYLE LECTUKES. 29 
 
 absurdity, that I believe no man, who has in philosophical 
 matters any competent faculty of thinking, can ever fall 
 into it. Gravity must be caused by an agent acting 
 constantly according to certain laws; but whether this 
 agent be material or immaterial, I have left to the 
 consideration of my readers.' 
 
 One of the most interesting points in these letters 
 is to see how a mind like Bentley's, so wonderfully 
 acute in certain directions, and logical in criticism even 
 to excess, is corrected by a mathematical mind. Thus 
 Bentley, in writing to Newton, had argued that every 
 particle of matter in an infinite space has an infinite 
 quantity of matter on all sides, and consequently an 
 infinite attraction every way ; it must therefore rest in 
 equilibrium, all infinites being equal. Now, says 
 Newton, by similar reasoning we might prove that an 
 inch is equal to a foot. For, if an inch may be divided 
 into an infinite number of parts, the sum of those parts 
 will be an inch ; and if a foot may be divided into an 
 infinite number of parts, the sum of those parts must 
 be a foot; and therefore, since all infinites are equal, 
 those sums must be equal ; that is, an inch must be equal 
 to a foot. The logic is strict; what, then, is the error 
 in the premises? The position, Newton answers, that 
 all infinites are equal. Infinites may be considered in 
 two ways. Viewed absolutely, they are neither equal 
 nor unequal. But when considered under certain 
 definite restrictions, as mathematics may consider them, 
 they can be compared. 'A mathematician would tell 
 you that, though there be an infinite number of infinite 
 little parts in an inch, yet there is twelve times that 
 number of such parts in a foot.' And so Bentley's 
 infinite attracting forces must be so conceived as if the
 
 80 BENTLEY. [CHAP. 
 
 addition of the slightest finite attracting force to either 
 would destroy the equilibrium. 
 
 Johnson has observed that these letters show 'how 
 even the mind of Newton gains ground gradually upon 
 darkness : ' a fine remark, but one which will convey an 
 incorrect impression if it is supposed to mean that 
 Bentley's questions had led Newton to modify or extend 
 any doctrine set forth in the Principia. Bentley's present 
 object in using the Principia was to refute atheism. 
 Newton had not previously considered all the possible 
 applications of his own discoveries to the purposes of 
 theological controversy. This is the limit to the novelty 
 of suggestion which he found in Bentley's letters. Besides 
 the few cases in which Newton points out a fallacy, there 
 are others in which he puts a keener edge on some argu- 
 ment propounded by his correspondent. For instance, 
 Bentley had submitted some reasons against 'the hypo- 
 thesis of deriving the frame of the world by mechanical 
 principles from matter evenly spread through the heavens.' 
 This was one of the theories which sought to eliminate the 
 necessity of an intelligent cause. It was, of course, radi- 
 cally incompatible with Newton's system. 'I had con- 
 sidered it very little,' Newton writes, 'before your letters 
 put me upon it.' But then he goes on to point out how 
 it may be urned against its authors. It involves the 
 assumption that gravity is inherent to matter. But, if this 
 is so, then matter could never have been evenly spread 
 through the heavens, without the intervention of a super- 
 natural power. 
 
 Newton's letters, while they heighten our admiration 
 for the master, also illustrate the great ability of the 
 disciple, his strong grasp of a subject which lay beyond 
 the sphere of his familiar studies, and his vigorous
 
 .] THE BOYLE LECTURES. SI 
 
 originality in the use of new acquisitions. Bentley's 
 Boyle Lectures have a lasting worth which is inde- 
 pendent of their scientific value as an argument In 
 regard to the latter, it may be observed that they bear 
 the mark of their age in their limited conception of a 
 natural law as distinguished from a personal agency. 
 Thus gravitation is allowed as a natural 'law' because its 
 action is constant and uniform, But wherever there is a 
 more and a less, wherever the operation is apparently 
 variable, this is explained by the intervening will of an 
 intelligent person ; it is not conceived that the disturbing 
 or modifying force may be another, though unknown, 
 'law,' in the sense in which that name is given to a 
 manifestly regular sequence of cause and effect. On 
 their literary side, the best parts of the Lectures exhibit 
 Bentley as a born controversialist, and the worst as a 
 born litigant. The latter character appears in an 
 occasional tendency to hair-splitting and quibbling; the 
 former, in his sustained power of terse and animated 
 reasoning, in rapid thrust and alert defence, in ready 
 command of various resources, in the avoidance of 
 declamation while he is proving his point, and in the 
 judicious use of eloquence to clinch it. Here, as else- 
 where, he has the knack of illustrating an abstruse subject 
 by an image from common tilings. He is touching (in 
 the second Lecture) on the doctrine of Epicurus that 
 our freedom of will is due to the declension of atoms 
 from the perpendicular as they fall through infinite 
 space. "Tis as if one should say that a bowl equally 
 poised, and thrown upon a plain and smooth bowling- 
 green, will run necessarily and fatally in a direct motion; 
 but if it be made with a bias, that may decline it a 
 little from a straight line, it may acquire by that motion
 
 32 BENTLEY. [CHAP. n. 
 
 a liberty of will, and so run spontaneously to the jack.' 
 It may be noticed that a passage in the eighth Lecture is 
 one of the quaintest testimonies in literature to the 
 comparatively recent origin of a taste for the grander 
 forms of natural scenery. Bentley supposes his adver- 
 saries to object that 'the rugged and irregular surface' 
 of the earth refutes its claim to be 'a work of divine 
 artifice.' 'We ought nol to believe,' he replies, 'that the 
 banks of the ocean are really deformed, because they 
 have not the form of a regular bulwark ; nor that the 
 mountains are out of shape, because they are not exact 
 pyramids or cones.' 
 
 The Lectures made a deep and wide impression. 
 Soon after they had been published, a Latin version 
 appeared at Berlin. A Dutch version subsequently came 
 out at Utrecht. There was one instance, indeed, of 
 dissent from the general approval. A Yorkshire squire 
 wrote a pamphlet, intimating that his own experience 
 did not lead him to consider the faculties of the human 
 soul as a decisive argument for the existence of a Deity ; 
 and, referring to Bentley's observations on this head, he 
 remarked, 'I judge he hath taken the wrong sow by the 
 ear.' In 1694 Bentley again delivered a course of Boyle 
 Lectures 'A Defence of Christianity' but they were 
 never printed. Manuscript copies of them are mentioned 
 by Kippis, the editor of the Biographia Britannica 
 (1780): but Dean Vincent, who died in 1815, is reported 
 by Kidd as believing that they were lost.
 
 CHAPTER III. 
 
 LEARNED CORRESPONDENCE. THE KING'S 
 LIBRARIAN. 
 
 IN 1692 the year of his first Boyle Lecturership an 
 accident placed Bentley in. correspondence with John 
 George Graevius, a German who held a professorship at 
 Utrecht, and stood in the front rank of classical 
 especially Latin scholarship. When Bentley was seek- 
 ing materials for an edition of Manilius, lie received 
 a box of papers from Sir Edward Sherburn, an old 
 cavalier who had partly translated the poet. The papers 
 in the box, bought at Antwerp, had belonged to the 
 Dutch scholar, Gaspar Gevarts. Among them was a Latin 
 tract by Albert Rubens (' Rubenius '), the author of 
 another treatise which Graevius had previously edited. 
 Bentley, with Sherburn's leave, sent the newly-found tract 
 to Graevius, who published it in 1694, with a dedication 
 to Bentley. This circumstance afterwards brought on 
 Bentley the absurd charge of having intercepted an 
 honour due to Sherburn. 
 
 Graevius was rejoiced to open a correspondence 
 with the author of the Letter to Mill, which he had 
 warmly admired. The professor's son had lately died, 
 leaving an unpublished edition of the Greek poet 
 
 J. D. D
 
 34 BENTLET. [CHAP. 
 
 Callimachus, which Graevius was now preparing to edit. 
 He applied to Bentley for any literary aid that he could 
 give. In reply, Bentley undertook to collect the frag- 
 ments of Callimachus, scattered up and down throughout 
 Greek literature ; remarking that he could promise to 
 double the number printed in a recent Paris edition, and 
 also to improve the text. In 1696 Bentley fulfilled this 
 promise by sending to Graevius a collection of about 420 
 fragments ; also a new recension of the poet's epigrams, 
 with additions to their number from a fresh manuscript 
 source, and with some notes on the hymns. The edition 
 appeared at Utrecht in 1697, with Bentley 's contributions. 
 In the preface Graevius shows his sense that the work 
 done by Bentley 'that new and brilliant light of 
 Britain' was not merely excellent in quality, but of a 
 new order. Such indeed it was. Since then, successive 
 generations have laboured at collecting and sifting the 
 fragments of the Greek poets. But in 1697 the world 
 had no example of systematic work in this field. The 
 first pattern of thorough treatment and the first model of 
 critical method were furnished by Bentley's Callimachus. 
 Hitherto the collector of fragments had aimed at little 
 more than heaping together 'the limbs of the dis- 
 membered poet.' Bentley shows how these limbs> when 
 they have been gathered, may serve, within certain limits, 
 to reconstruct the body. Starting from a list of the 
 poet's works, extant or known by title, he aims at 
 arranging the fragments under those works to which 
 they severally belonged. But, while he concentrates his 
 critical resources in a methodical manner, he wisely 
 refrains from pushing conjecture too far. His Calli- 
 machus is hardly more distinguished by brilliancy than 
 by cautious judgment ; praise which could not be given
 
 in.] LEAENED COEEESPONDENCE. 85 
 
 to all his later works. Here, as in the Letter to Mill, we 
 see his metrical studies bearing fruit : thus he points out 
 a fact which had hitherto escaped even such scholars as 
 Saumaise and Casaubon, that the Greek diphthongs 
 ai and oi cannot be shortened before consonants. Ernesti, 
 in the preface to his Callimachus (1763), speaks of 
 Bentley as 'having distanced competition:' and another 
 estimate, of yet higher authority, is expressed more 
 strongly still. 'Nothing more excellent in its kind 
 has appeared,' said Valckenaer, 'nothing more highly 
 finished;' 'a most thorough piece of work, by which 
 writers who respect their readers might well be deterred ' 
 from an attempt at rivalry. It is no real abatement of 
 Bentley's desert that a few gleanings were left for those 
 who came after him. Here, as in some other cases, the 
 distinctive merit of his work is not that it was final but 
 that it was exemplary. In this particular department 
 the editing of fragments he differed from his pre- 
 decessors as the numismatist, who arranges a cabinet of 
 coins, differs from the digger who is only aware that he 
 has unearthed an old bit of gold or silver. 
 
 Meanwhile letters had been passing between Bentley 
 and a correspondent very unlike Graevius. In 1693 
 Joshua Barnes, of Emmanuel College, Cambridge, was 
 editing Euripides, and wrote to Bentley, asking his 
 reasons for an opinion attributed to him, that the 
 'Letters of Euripides' were spurious. Bentley gave 
 these reasons in a long and courteous reply. Barnes, 
 however, resented the loss of a cherished illusion. Not 
 only did he omit to thank Bentley, but in the preface to 
 his Euripides (1694) he alluded to his correspondent's 
 opinion as 'a proof of effrontery or incapacity.' Barnes 
 is a curious figure, half-comic half-pathetic, among the
 
 86 BENTLEY. [CHAP. 
 
 minor persons of Bentley's story. Widely read, in- 
 cessantly laborious, but uncritical and vain, he poured 
 forth a continual stream of injudicious publications, 
 English or Greek, until, when he was fifty-one, they 
 numbered forty-three. The last work of his life was 
 an elaborate edition of Homer. He had invested the 
 fortune of Mrs Barnes in this costly enterprise, ob- 
 taining her somewhat reluctant consent, it was said, by 
 representing the Iliad as the work of King Solomon. 
 Queen Anne declined the dedication, and nothing could 
 persuade poor Barnes that this was not Bentley's doing. 
 Bentley said of Barnes that he probably knew about 
 as much Greek, and understood it about as well, as 
 an Athenian blacksmith. The great critic appears to 
 have forgotten that Sophocles and Aristophanes were 
 appreciated by audiences which represented the pit 
 and the gallery much more largely than the boxes and 
 the stalls. An Athenian blacksmith could teach us a 
 good many things. 
 
 Bentley had now made his mark, and he had power- 
 ful friends. One piece of preferment after another came 
 to him. In 1692 Bishop Stillingfleet procured for him a 
 prebendal stall at Worcester, and three years later ap- 
 pointed him to hold the Rectory of Hartlebury, in that 
 county, until James Stillingfleet should be in full orders. 
 At the end of the year 1693 the office of Royal 
 Librarian became vacant. By an arrangement which 
 was not then thought singular, the new Librarian was 
 induced to resign in favour of Bentley, who was to pay 
 him 130 a year out of the salary of 200. The patent 
 appointing Bentley Keeper of the Royal Libraries bore 
 date April 12, 1694. The 'Licensing Act' (Stat. 13 
 and 14, Car. II.) finally expired in 1694, a few months
 
 m.] LEAKNED COEEESPONDENCE. 37 
 
 after Bentley took office. But he made the most of his 
 time. The Act reserved three copies of every book 
 printed in England, one for the Royal Library, one for 
 Oxford, and one for Cambridge. Latterly it had been 
 evaded. Bentley applied to the Master of the Stationers' 
 Company, and exacted 'near a thousand' volumes. In 
 this year he was elected a Fellow of the Royal Society. 
 In 1695 he became a Chaplain in ordinary to the King. 
 Hitherto he had resided with Bishop Stillingfleet: but 
 early in 1696 he took possession of the rooms in St James's 
 Palace which were assigned to the Royal Librarian. 
 
 One of his letters to Evelyn whom he had been 
 helping to revise his Numismata, a ' Discourse on 
 Medals, ancient and modern' discloses an amusing in- 
 cident Bentley's lodgings at St James's were next the 
 Earl of Marlborough's. Bentley wished to annex some 
 rooms overhead, for the better bestowal of certain rare 
 books. Marlborough undertook to plead his cause. The 
 result of this obliging diplomacy was that the future 
 hero of Blenheim got 'the closets' for himself. Bentley 
 now became anxious to build a new library, and Evelyn 
 warmly sympathises with his ' glorious enterprise.' It 
 was, indeed, much needed. The books were so ill-lodged 
 that they could not be properly arranged ; Bentley de- 
 clared that the library was 'not fit to be seen;' and ho 
 kept its chief treasure, the Alexandrine MS. of the 
 Greek Bible, at his own rooms in the palace, 'for this 
 very reason, that persons might see it without seeing 
 the library.' The Treasury consented to the proposal 
 for building. But public business prevented the bill 
 coming before Parliament, and the scheme was dropped 
 for the time. Meanwhile Bentley's energy found scope 
 at Cambridge. Since the civil troubles, the University
 
 88 BENTLEY. [CHAP. 
 
 Press had lapsed into a state which called for repara- 
 tion. Bentley took an active part in procuring sub- 
 scriptions for that purpose. He was empowered by the 
 University to order new founts of type, which were 
 cast in Holland. Evelyn, in his Diary (Aug. 17, 1696), 
 alludes to 'that noble presse which my worthy and most 
 learned friend., is with greate charge and industrie 
 erecting now at Cambridge.' In the same year Bentley 
 took the degree of Doctor in Divinity. On Commence- 
 ment Sunday (July 5, 1696) he preached before the 
 University, taking as his text 1 Pet. iii. 15. The 
 sermon, which is extant, defends Christianity against 
 deism. 
 
 It is natural to ask, was Bentley yet remarked for 
 any of those qualities which form the harsher side of his 
 character in later life ? He was now thirty-four. There 
 is the story of the dinner-party at Bishop Stilling- 
 fleet's, at which the guest, who had been sitting next 
 Bentley, said to the Bishop after dinner, 'My Lord, that 
 chaplain of yours is certainly a very extraordinary man.' 
 (Mr. Bentley, like the chaplain in 'Esmond,' had doubtless 
 conformed to the usage of the time, and retired when the 
 custards appeared.) 'Yes,' said Stillingfleet, 'had he 
 but the gift of humility, he would be the most ex- 
 traordinary man in Europe.' If this has a certain 
 flavour of concoction, at any rate there is no doubt as to 
 what Pepys wrote, after reading Boyle's allusion to 
 Bentley's supposed discourtesy. 'I suspect Mr. Boyle is 
 in the right ; for our friend's learning (which I have a 
 great value for) wants a little filing.' Against such 
 hints, there is a noteworthy fact to be set. A letter of 
 Bentley's to Evelyn, dated Oct. 21, 1697, mentions that 
 a small group of friends had arranged to meet in the
 
 in.] LEABNED COBRESPONDENCE. 39 
 
 evenings, once or twice a week, at Bentley's lodgings in 
 St James's. These are the names: John Evelyn, Sir 
 Christopher "Wren, John Locke, Isaac Newton. A 
 person with whom such men chose to place themselves in 
 frequent and familiar intercourse must have been dis- 
 tinguished by something else than insolent erudition. 
 But now we must see how Bentley bore himself in the 
 first great crisis of his career.
 
 CHAPTER IV. 
 
 THE CONTROVERSY ON THE LETTERS OF PHALARIS. 
 
 - <S 
 
 WILLIAM WOTTON'S Reflections on Ancient and Modern 
 Learning (1694) give the best view of a discussion which 
 greatly exercised the wits of the day. ' Soon after the 
 Restauration of King Charles II.,' says Wotton, 'upon 
 the institution of the Royal Society, the comparative ex- 
 cellency of the Old and New Philosophy was eagerly 
 debated in England. But the disputes then managed be- 
 tween Stubbe and Glanvile were rather particular, relating 
 to the Royal Society, than general, relating to knowledge 
 in its utmost extent. In France this controversy has been 
 taken up more at large. The French were not content 
 to argue the point in Philosophy and Mathematicks, but 
 even in Poetry and Oratory too; where the Ancients 
 had the general opinion of the learned on their side. 
 Monsieur de Fontenelle, the celebrated author of a Book 
 concerning the Plurality of Worlds, began the dispute 
 about six years ago [1688], in a little Discourse annexed 
 to the Pastorals.' 
 
 Perrault, going further still than Fontenelle, 'in oratory 
 sets the Bishop of Meaux [Bossuet] against Pericles (or 
 rather Thucydides), the Bishop of Nismes [Flechier]
 
 CHAP, iv.] THE LETTEES OF THALAEIS. 41 
 
 against Isocrates, F. Bourdaloue against Lysias, Monsieur 
 Voiturc against Pliny, and Monsieur Balzac against 
 Cicero. In Poetry likewise he sets Monsieur Boileau 
 against Horace, Monsieur Corneille and Monsieur Moliero 
 against the Ancient Dramatic Poets.' 
 
 Sir William Temple, in his ' Essay on Ancient and 
 Modern Learning' published in 1692, and dedicated to 
 liis own University, Almae Matri Cantabrigiensi was. 
 not less uncompromising in the opposite direction. His 
 general view is that the Ancients surpassed the Moderns, 
 not merely in art and literature, but also in every branch 
 of science, though the records of their science havo 
 perished. ' The Moderns,' Temple adds, ' gather all their 
 learning out of Books in the Universities.' The Ancients, 
 on the contrary, travelled with a view to original re- 
 search, and advanced the limits of knowledge in their 
 subjects by persistent interviews with reserved specialists 
 in foreign parts. Thales and Pythagoras are Sir William's 
 models in this way. ' Thales acquired his knowledge in 
 Egypt, Phoenicia, Delphos, and Crete ; Pythagoras spent 
 twenty-two years in Egypt, and twelve years more in 
 Chaldaea ; and then returned laden with all their stores.' 
 Temple's performance was translated into French, and 
 made quite a sensation in the Academy, receiving, 
 among other tributes, tho disinterested homage of the 
 Modern Horace. 
 
 Wotton's object was to act as a mediator, and ' give 
 to every side its just due.' As to ' eloquence and poetry,' 
 it required some courage (in England) even to hint that 
 the Moderns had beaten tho Ancients. 'It is almost a 
 heresie in wit, among our poets, to set up any modern 
 name against Homer or Virgil, Horace or Terence. So 
 that though here and there one should in Discourse prefer
 
 42 BENTLEY. [CHAP. 
 
 the writers of the present age, yet scarce any man among 
 us, who sets a value upon his own reputation, will 
 venture to assert it in print.' With regard to science, 
 however, Wotton speaks out, and in a gentle way disposes 
 of the Ancients. He may, in fact, claim the credit of 
 having made a sensible contribution to the discussion. 
 Sir "William Temple, 'the ornament of the age,' was 
 no mean antagonist. Wotton must have been glad of a 
 trusty ally, especially on the ground of ancient literature, 
 the strongest part of the enemy's position. Such an ally 
 he found in Bentley. Temple had written thus : 
 
 * It may perhaps be further affirmed, in favour of the 
 Ancients, that the oldest books we have are still in their 
 kind the best. The two most ancient that I know of in 
 prose, among those we call profane authors, are .^Esop's 
 Fables and Phalaris's Epistles, both living near the same 
 time, which was that of Cyrus and Pythagoras. As 
 the first has been agreed by all ages since for the greatest 
 master in his kind, and all others of that sort have 
 been but imitations of his original ; so I think the 
 Epistles of Phalaris to have more race, more spirit, more 
 force of wit and genius, than any others I have ever 
 seen, either ancient or modern. I know several learned 
 men (or that usually pass for such, under the name of 
 critics) have not esteemed them genuine ; and Politian, 
 with some others, have attributed them to Lucian : but I 
 think he must have little skill in painting that cannot 
 find out this to be an original Such diversity of passions, 
 upon such variety of actions and passages of life and 
 government; such freedom of thought, such boldness of 
 expression ; such bounty to his friends, such scorn of his 
 enemies; such honour of learned men, such esteem of 
 good ; such knowledge of life, such contempt of death ;
 
 iv.] THE LETTEES OF PHALAEIS. 43 
 
 with such fierceness of nature and cruelty of revenge, 
 could never be represented but by him that possessed 
 them. And I esteem Lucian to have been no more 
 capable of writing than of acting what Phalaris did. In 
 all one writ you find the scholar or the sophist ; in all the 
 other, the tyrant and the commander. 1 
 
 Mutual admiration and modern journalism have seldom 
 produced a more magnificent advertisement than Sir 
 William Temple had given to this ancient writer. After 
 the slumber, or the doze, of centuries, Phalaris awoke and 
 found himself in demand. The booksellers began to feel 
 an interest in him such as they had never even simulated 
 before. 
 
 The ' Epistles of Phalaris ' are a collection of a hundred 
 and forty-eight letters, many of them only a few lines 
 long, written in ' Attic ' Greek of that artificial kind 
 which begins to appear about the time of Augustus. 
 They are first mentioned by a Greek writer, Stobaeus, 
 who flourished about 480 A. D. We know nothing about 
 the exact time at which they were written. On the 
 other hand there is no doubt as to the class of literature 
 which they represent, or the general limits of the period 
 to which they must be assigned. These limits are 
 roughly marked by the first five centuries of the 
 Christian era. 
 
 Phalaris, the reputed author of the Letters, is u 
 shadowy figure in the early legends of ancient Sicily. 
 The modern Girgenti, on the south-west coast of the 
 island, preserves the name of Agrigentum, as the Romans 
 called the Greek city of Akragas. Founded early in 
 the sixth century before Christ by a Dorian colony from 
 Gela, Akragas stood on the spacious terraces of a lofty hill. 
 It was a splendid natural stronghold. Steep cliffs were the
 
 44 BENTLEY. [CHAP. 
 
 city's bulwarks on the south; on the north, a craggy 
 ridge formed a rampart behind it, and the temple-crowned 
 citadel, a precipitous rock, towered to a height of twelve 
 hundred feet above the sea. Story told that Phalaris, 
 a citizen of Akragas, had contrived to seize the citadel, 
 and to make himself absolute ruler of the place, in 
 Greek phrase, ' tyrant.' He strengthened the city, then 
 recently founded, and was successful in wars upon his 
 neighbours. At last his own subjects rose against him, 
 overthrew his power, and put him to death. This latter 
 event is said to have occurred between 560 and 550 B. c. 
 Such was the tradition. All that we really know about 
 Phalaris, however, is that as early as about 500 B. c. his 
 name had become a proverb for horrible cruelty, not only 
 in Sicily, but throughout Hellas. Pindar refers to this in 
 his first Pythian ode (474 B. c.) : ' the kindly worth 
 of Croesus fades not: but in every land hate follows 
 the name of him who burned men in a brazen bull, the 
 ruthless Phalaris.' 
 
 This habit of slowly roasting objectionable persons in 
 a brazen bull was the only definite trait which the Greeks 
 of the classical age associated with Phalaris. And this 
 is the single fact on which Lucian founds his amusing 
 piece, in which envoys from Phalaris offer the bull to the 
 temple of Delphi, and a Delphian casuist urges that it 
 ought to be accepted. The bull may be seen, portrayed 
 by the fancy of a modern artist, in the frontispiece to 
 Charles Boyle's edition of the Letters. The head of 
 the brazen animal is uplifted, as if it was bellowing ; 
 one of the tyrant's apparitors is holding up the lid 
 of a large oblong aperture in the bull's left flank; 
 two others are hustling in a wretched man, who has 
 already disappeared, all but his legs. The two servants
 
 iv.] THE LETTERS OF PHALARIS. 45 
 
 wear the peculiar expression of countenance which may 
 be seen on the faces of persons engaged in packing ; 
 meanwhile another pair of slaves, with more animated 
 features, are arranging the faggots under the bull, which 
 are already beginning to blaze cheerfully, so that a gentle 
 warmth must be felt on the inner surface of the brass, 
 though it will probably be some minutes yet before it 
 begins to be uncomfortable. Phalaris is seated on his 
 throne just behind the bull, in a sort of undress uniform, 
 with a long round ruler for sceptre in his right hand ; 
 firmness and mildness are so blended in his aspect that it 
 is impossible not to feel in the presence of a great and 
 good man ; on the left side of the throne, a Polonius is 
 standing a little in the background, with a look of lively 
 edification subdued by deference ; and in the distance 
 there is a view of hills and snug farmhouses, suggesting 
 fair rents and fixity of tenure. 
 
 The rather hazy outlines of the old Greek tradition 
 are filled up by Phalaris himself in the Letters, which 
 abound with little bits of autobiography. He gives us 
 to know that he was born, not at Agrigentum, as 
 Lucian has it, but at a place called Astypalaea, 
 seemingly a town in Crete. He got into trouble there 
 at an early age, being suspected of aiming at a tyranny, 
 and was banished, leaving his wife and son behind 
 him ; when he betook himself to Agrigentum, and thero 
 became a farmer of taxes; obtained the management 
 of a contract for building a temple on the rocky height 
 above the town ; hired troops with the funds thus com- 
 mitted to him ; and so made himself master of the place. 
 Some of the letters are to his wife, his son, and a few of 
 his particular friends, among whom is the poet Stesichorus. 
 One or two epistles are addressed to distinguished
 
 46 BENTLEY. [CHAP. 
 
 strangers, begging them to come and see him in Sicily, 
 as to Pythagoras, and Abaris the Hyperborean ; and, what 
 is very curious, the collection gives us the answer sent by 
 Abaris, which refers not obscurely to the bull, and 
 declines the invitation of the prince in language more 
 forcible than polite. Then there are a few letters to 
 various communities, the people of Messene, the people 
 of Tauromenion, and others. 
 
 It may be well to give a short specimen or two. 
 Not a few of the Letters, it should be premised, are 
 pervaded by a strain of allusion to the bull. Phalaris 
 was a person of almost morbid sensibility, and if there 
 was one subject on which he was more alive to innuendo 
 than another it was this of the bull, and the want of 
 regard for the feelings of others which his use of it had 
 been thought to imply. There are moments when ho 
 can no longer suffer in silence, but comes to the point, 
 as in the following letter to the Athenians [Ep. 122 = 5 
 (Lennep)] : 
 
 'Your artist Perilaus, Athenians, came to me with 
 some works of very satisfactory execution; on ac- 
 count of which we gladly received him, and requited 
 him with worthy gifts, for the sake of his art, and 
 more particularly for the sake of his native city. Not 
 long since, however, he made a brazen bull of more than 
 natural size, and brought it to Akragas. Now we were 
 delighted to welcome an animal whose labours are 
 associated with those of man; the effigy appeared a 
 most proper gift to a prince, a noble object of art ; for 
 he had not yet disclosed to us the death which lurked 
 within. But when he opened a door in the flank, and 
 laid bare 
 
 Murder fulfilled of perfect cruelty, 
 
 A fate more dire than all imagined death
 
 iv.] THE LETTERS OF PHALAEIS. 47 
 
 then, indeed, after praising him for his skill, we proceeded 
 to punish him for his inhumanity. We resolved to make 
 him the first illustration of his own device, since we had 
 never met with a worse villain than its contriver. So 
 we put him into the bull, and lit the fire about it, 
 according to his own directions for the burning. Cruel 
 was his science ; stern the proof to which he brought it. 
 We did not see the sufferer; we heard not his cries or 
 lamentations; for the human shrieks that resounded 
 within came forth to his listening punishers as the 
 bellowings of a brazen throat. 
 
 'Now, Athenians, when I was informed that you 
 resented the removal of your artist, and were incensed 
 with me, I felt surprise; and for the present I am 
 unable to credit the report. If you censure me on the 
 ground that I did not torment him by a more cruel mode 
 of death, I reply that no mode more cruel has yet 
 occurred to me ; if, on the other hand, you blame me for 
 having punished him at all, then your city, which glories 
 in its humanity, courts the charge of extreme barbarity. 
 The bull was the work of one Athenian, or of all : but 
 
 this will be decided by your disposition towards me 
 
 If you consider the case dispassionately, you will perceive 
 that I act involuntarily ; and that, if Providence decrees 
 that I must suffer, my lot will be unmerited. Though 
 my royal power gives me free scope of action, I still 
 recognise that measures of a harsh tendency are ex- 
 ceptional ; and, though I cannot revoke the deeds of the 
 past, I can confess their gravity. Would, however, that 
 I had never been compelled to them by a hard necessity ! 
 In that case, no one else would have been named for his 
 virtues where Phalaris was in company.' 
 
 The following letter, addressed by Phalaris to a peevish
 
 48 BENTLEY. [CHAP. 
 
 critic, shows that consciousness of rectitude had gradually 
 braced the too sensitive mind of the prince [Ep. 66 = 94 
 (Lennep)] : 
 
 To Telecleidea. 
 
 'For reasons best known to yourself, you have re- 
 peatedly observed in conversation with my friends that, 
 after the death of Perilaus, the artist of the bull, I 
 ought not to have despatched any other persons by the 
 same mode of torment; since I thus cancel my own 
 merit. Possibly you had in view the result which has 
 actually occurred viz., that your remarks should be 
 carried to me. Now, as to Perilaus, I do not value 
 myself upon the compliments which I received for 
 having punished him ; praise was not my object in 
 assuming that office. As to the other persons, I 
 feel no uneasiness at the misrepresentations to which 
 I am exposed for chastising them. Retribution operates 
 in a sphere apart from good or evil report. Permit 
 me, however, to observe that my reason for correcting 
 the artist was precisely this, that other persons were 
 to be despatched in the bull Well, I am now in 
 possession of your views ; it is unnecessary for you to 
 trouble other listeners; do but cease to worry yourself 
 and me.' 
 
 The slight testiness which appears at the end only 
 confirms Sir William Temple's remark, that here we 
 have to do with a man of affairs, whose time was not to 
 be at the mercy of every idle tattler. After Wotton had 
 published the first edition of his ' Reflections on Ancient 
 and Modern Learning' (1694), Bentley had happened to 
 speak with him of the passage in Temple's Essay which 
 we quoted above. Bentley observed that the Letters of
 
 iv.] THE LETTERS OF THALAEI3. 49 
 
 Phalaris could be proved to be spurious, and that nothing 
 composed by ^sop was extant : opinions which he had 
 formed, and intimated, long before Temple wrote. Wotton 
 then obtained a promise from Bentley that he would give 
 his reasons for these views in a paper to be printed as 
 an appendix to the second edition of the 'Reflections.' 
 But meanwhile an incident occurred which gave a new 
 turn to the matter. 
 
 Dr Henry Aldrich, then Dean of Christ Church, 
 had been accustomed to engage the most promising of 
 the younger scholars in the task of editing classical 
 authors, and copies of such editions were usually presented 
 by him to members of the House at the beginning 
 of the year. Temple's essay had attracted attention to 
 the Letters of Phalaris. In 1693 the preparation of 
 a new edition was proposed by the Dean to 'a young 
 Gentleman of great hopes' (as Bentley calls him), the 
 Honourable Charles Boyle, a brother of the Earl of 
 Orrery, and grand-nephew of Robert Boyle, the founder 
 of the Lectures. Charles Boyle was at this time only 
 seventeen. Before coming to Oxford, he had been the 
 private pupil of Dr Gale, the Dean of York (formerly, for 
 a brief space, Greek Professor at Cambridge), of whom he 
 says 'the foundation of all the little knowledge I have 
 in these matters was laid by him, which I gratefully 
 own.' Boyle's scholarship seems to have been quite up 
 to the higher school-standard of that day; he appears to 
 have been bright, clever, and amiable, and was personally 
 much liked at Christ Church. In preparing his Phalaris, 
 he wished to consult a manuscript which was in the 
 King's Library at St James's. He accordingly wrote to 
 his bookseller in London, Mr Thomas Bennet, 'at the 
 Half-Moon in St Paul's Church-yard,' requesting him to 
 
 j. B. E
 
 50 BENTLEY. [CHAP. 
 
 get the manuscript collated. This was apparently in 
 September, 1693. Bentley had then nothing to do with 
 the Library. The Royal Patent constituting him Keeper 
 of His Majesty's Libraries bore date April 12, 1694; 
 and, owing to delays of form, it was the beginning of 
 May before he had actual custody of the Library at St 
 James's. Bennet had already spoken to Bentley (early 
 in 1694, it seems) about the manuscript of Phalaris; and 
 Bentley had replied that he would gladly 'help Mr 
 Boyle to the book.' 
 
 Meanwhile Bennet had received urgent applications 
 from Boyle, and had laid the blame of the delay on 
 Bentley. As soon as the latter had assumed charge 
 of the Library (May, 1694), he gave the manuscript 
 to a person sent for it by Bennet. 'I ordered him,' says 
 Bentley, ' to tell the collator not to lose any time ; for I 
 was shortly to go out of town for two months.' This 
 was afterwards proved by a letter from Gibson, the 
 person employed as collator. The manuscript remained 
 in Gibson's hands 'five or six days,' according to Bentley; 
 and this estimate can scarcely be excessive, for Boyle 
 himself says merely ' not nine.' Bentley was to leave 
 London for Worcester (to reside two months there) at 
 five o'clock on a Monday morning towards the end of 
 May. On the Saturday before, about noon, Bentley 
 went to Bennet's shop, asked for the manuscript, and 
 waited while a message was sent to Gibson. Word came 
 back that Gibson had not finished the collation. Bennet 
 then begged that the manuscript might be left with him 
 till Sunday morning, and promised to make the collator 
 sit up all night. Bentley declined to comply with this 
 demand ; but said that they might keep the manuscript 
 till the evening of that day Saturday. On Saturday
 
 iv.] THE LETTERS OF PHALARIS. 51 
 
 evening it was restored to Bentley. Only forty-eight 
 letters had then been collated. 
 
 As this affair was made a grave charge against 
 Bentley, it is well to see just what it means. The 
 business of the collator was to take a printed text 
 of Phalaris, compare it with the manuscript, and 
 note those readings in which the manuscript differed 
 from it. This particular manuscript was, in Bentley'a 
 words, ' as legible as print.' ' I had a mind,' he says, 
 ' for the experiment's sake, to collate the first forty 
 epistles, which are all that the collator has done. And 
 I had finished them in an hour and eighteen minutes; 
 though I made no very great haste. And yet I re- 
 marked and set down above fifty various lections, though 
 the editor has taken notice of one only.' This manuscript 
 contains only 127 of the 148 letters. At Bentley 's rate, 
 the whole might have been done in about five hours. 
 Suppose that Bentley worked thrice as fast as Gibson ; 
 the latter would have required fifteen hours. Grant, 
 further, that Gibson had the manuscript for four days 
 only, though Boyle's phrase, 'less than nine,' implies 
 eight. He could still have completed his task by 
 working less than four hours a day. So utterly ground- 
 less was the complaint that Bentley had not allowed 
 sufficient time for the use of the manuscript. 
 
 That, however, was the defence which Bennet 
 made to his employer. Clearly he had no liking for 
 the new Librarian who had begun by exacting the dues 
 of the Royal Library. And he supported it by re- 
 presenting Bentley as unfriendly to Boyle's work. 'The 
 bookseller once asked me privately,' says Bentley, 
 'that I would do him the favour to tell my opinion, 
 if the new edition of Phalaris, then in the press, would
 
 52 BENTLEY. [CHAP. 
 
 be a vendible book? for he had a concern in the im- 
 pression, and hoped it would sell well ; such a great 
 character being given of it in [Temple's] Essays as made 
 it mightily inquired after. I told him, He would be 
 safe enough, since he was concerned for nothing but 
 the sale of the book : for the great names of those that 
 recommended it would get it many buyers. But however, 
 under the rose, the book was a spurious piece, and de- 
 served not to be spread in the world by another impression.' 
 Dr William King, a member of Christ Church, and a 
 'wit,' chanced to be in Bennet's shop one day, and 
 overheard some remark of Bentley's which he considered 
 rude towards Boyle. ' After he [Bentley] was gone,' 
 writes the frank Dr King, 'I told Mr Bennet that he 
 ought to send Mr Boyle word of it.' Boyle's edition 
 of Phalaris appeared in January, 1695, with a graceful 
 dedication to the Dean of Christ Church. The Latin 
 preface concludes thus : 
 
 ' I have collated the letters themselves with two 
 Bodleian manuscripts from the Cantuar and Selden 
 collection ; I have also procured a collation, as far as 
 Letter XL., of a manuscript in the Royal Library; the 
 Librarian, with that courtesy which distinguishes him 
 [pro singulari sua humanitate], refused me the further 
 use cf it. I have not recorded every variation of the 
 MSS. from the printed texts ; to do so would have been 
 tedious and useless ; but, wherever I have departed from 
 the common reading, my authority will be found in 
 the notes. This little book is indebted to the printer 
 for more than usual elegance ; it is hoped that the 
 author's labour may bring it an equal measure of 
 acceptance.' 
 
 Pro singulari sua humanitate : with that courtesy
 
 iv.] THE LETTERS OP PHALABIS. 63 
 
 which distinguishes him : or as Bentley renders it with 
 grim literalness, ' out of his singular humanity ' ! This, 
 says Bentley, ' was meant as a lash for me, who had the 
 honour then and since to serve his Majesty in that office' 
 (of Librarian) ; and, in fact, the nature of Bentley 's 
 ' humanity ' forthwith became a question of the day. 
 
 The tone of Boyle's public reference to Bentley was 
 wholly unj ustifiable. Bentley had returned from Worcester 
 to London some months before Boyle's book was ready, 
 but no application had been made to him for a further 
 use of the manuscript, though a few hours would have 
 finished the collation. Bentley, after* his return to 
 London, spent a fortnight at Oxford, 'conversing/ he 
 says, 'in the very college where the editors resided; 
 not the least whisper there of the manuscript.' It was 
 on January 26 when the book had been out more 
 than three weeks that Bentley chanced to see it- for 
 the first time, ' in the hands of a person of honour to 
 whom it had been presented; and the rest of the im- 
 pression was not yet published. This encouraged me 
 to write the very same evening to Mr Boyle at Oxford, 
 and to give him a true information of the whole matter ; 
 expecting that, upon the receipt of my letter, he would 
 put a stop to the publication of his book, till he had 
 altered that passage, and printed the page anew ; which 
 he might have done in one day, and at the charge of 
 live shillings. I did not expressly desire him to take 
 out that passage, and reprint the whole leaf; that I 
 thought was too low a submission. But I said enough to 
 make any person of common justice and ingenuity 
 [ingenuousness] have owned me thanks for preventing 
 him from doing a very ill action.' 'After a delay of 
 two posts,' Boyle replied in terms of which Bentley gives
 
 54 BENTLEY. [CHAP. 
 
 the substance thus ; ' that what I had said in my own 
 behalf might be true ; but that Mr Bennet had repre- 
 sented the thing quite otherwise. If he had had my 
 account before, he should have considered of it : and 
 [but?] now that the book was made public, he would 
 not interpose, but that I might do myself right in 
 what method I pleased.' On receiving Bentley's ex- 
 planation, Boyle was clearly bound, if not to withdraw 
 the offensive passage, at least to stop its circulation 
 until he had inquired further. And he knew this, as 
 his own words show. This is his account of his reply 
 to Bentley : ' That Mr Bennet, whom I employed to 
 wait on him in my name, gave me such an account of 
 his reception, that I had reason to apprehend myself af- 
 fronted : and since I could make no other excuse to my 
 reader, for not collating the King's MS., but because 'twas 
 denyed me, I thought I cou'd do no less than express 
 some resentment of that denial. That I shou'd be very 
 much concern'd if Mr Bennet had dealt so ill with me 
 as to mislead me in his accounts ; and if tliat appeared, 
 shou'd be ready to take some opportunity of begging his 
 [Bentley's] pardon : and, as I remember, I expressed 
 myself so, that the Dr might understand I meant to give 
 him satisfaction as publicJcly as I had injured him. Here 
 the matter rested, and I thought that Dr Bentley was 
 satisfied.' 
 
 That is to say, Boyle had offered a public affront to 
 Bentley, without inquiring whether Bennet's story was 
 true ; Bentley explained that it was untrue ; and Boyle 
 still refused to make any amend, even provisionally. 
 Bentley was advised by some of his friends to refute 
 the aspersion : which, indeed, was not merely a charge 
 of rudeness, but also of failure in his duty as Librarian.
 
 IT.] THE LETTEKS OF PHALAEIS. 65 
 
 He remained silent. ' Out of a natural aversion to all 
 quarrels and broils, and out of regard to the editor 
 himself, I resolved to take no notice of it, but to let 
 the matter drop.' 
 
 But in 1697 Wotton was preparing a second edition 
 of the ' Reflections,' and claimed Bentley's old promise 
 to write something on ./Esop and Phalaris. Then, in 
 a great hurry, Bentley wrote an essay on the ' Epistles 
 of Phalaris, Themistocles, Socrates, Euripides, and others; 
 and the Fables of ^Esop.' This essay was printed, with 
 a separate title-page, at the end of the new edition of 
 the 'Reflections' (1697). What was he to say about 
 Boyle ? ' Upon such an occasion,' he remarks, ' I was 
 plainly obliged to speak of that calumny : for my silence 
 would have been interpreted as good as a confession : 
 especially considering with what industrious malice the 
 story had been spread all over England.' In this he 
 was possibly right : it is not easy to say now. But 
 his mode of self-vindication was certainly not judicious. 
 He ought to have confined himself to a statement of the 
 facts concerning the loan of the manuscript. After doing 
 this, however, he enters upon a hostile review of Boyle's 
 book. Throughout it he speaks in the plural of 'our 
 editors.' He may have had reason to know that Boyle 
 had been assisted ; but such a use of the knowledge was 
 unwarrantable. 
 
 Boyle's edition was the slight performance of a very 
 young man, and apart from the sentence in the preface, 
 might fairly be regarded as privileged. It contains a 
 short Latin life of Phalaris, based on ancient notices and 
 on the Letters themselves ; the Greek text, with a Latin 
 version ; and, at the end, some notes. These notes 
 deserve mention only because Bentley was afterwards
 
 56 BENTLEY. [CHAP. 
 
 accused of having ' pillaged ' them. There was a 
 singular hardihood in tliis charge. Boyle's notes on the 
 hundred and forty-eight letters occupy just twelve small 
 pages. The greater part of them are simply brief para- 
 phrases intended to bring out the sense of the text. 
 Three Latin translations of Phalaris then existed ; one, 
 not printed, but easily accessible in manuscript, by 
 Francesco Accolti of Arezzo (Aretino) ; a second, 
 printed by Thomas Kirchmeier, who Hellenized his sur- 
 name into Haogeorgus (Basel, 1558) ; and a third, ascribed 
 to Cujas, which Boyle knew as reissued at Ingolstadt in 
 1614 for the use of the Jesuit schools. Boyle's version 
 occasionally coincides with phrases of Aretino or the 
 Jesuit text : this, however, may well be accident. It is 
 manifest, however, that his translation was based on that 
 of Naogeorgus, who is sometimes less elegant, but not 
 seldom more accurate. 
 
 The story of the controversy has usually been told as 
 if Boyle defended the genuineness of the Letters, while 
 Bentley impugned it. That is certainly the impression 
 which any one would derive from Bentley's Disserta- 
 tion, with its banter of ' our editors and their Sicilian 
 prince.' Probably it will be new to most persons that 
 Boyle had never asserted the genuineness of the Letters. 
 On the contrary, ho had expressly stated some reasons for 
 believing that they were not genuine. 
 
 I translate the following from Boyle's Latin preface : 
 
 The reader of these Letters will find less profit in inquiring 
 who wrote them than pleasure in enjoying the perusal. As to 
 the axithorship, the conflicting opinions of learned men must 
 be consulted, perhaps in vain ; as to the worth of the book, 
 the reader can judge best for himself. Lest I disappoint 
 curiosity, however, though tho controversy does not deserve
 
 iv.] THE LETTERS OF PHALAEIS. 57 
 
 keen zeal on either part, I will briefly explain what seems to 
 me probable on both sides of the question. 
 
 Here he enumerates : (1) some of those who think the 
 Letters genuine including Sir W. Temple, whose en- 
 comium on Phalaris he freely Latinizes : (2) those who 
 believe the Letters to be the work of Lucian. Here 
 Boyle gives his reasons excellent as far as they go 
 for holding that Lucian was not the author. He then 
 resumes : 
 
 Theso are my reasons for not ascribing the letters to 
 Lucian ; there are other reasons which make me doubt whether 
 Phalaris can claim the Letters as his own. It was scarcely 
 possible that Letters written by so distinguished a man, and 
 in their own kind perfect, should have remained completely 
 hidden for more than a thousand years : and, as Sicilian 
 writers always preferred the Dorian dialect, the tyrant of the 
 Agrigentines (who were Dorians) ought to have used no other. 
 In tho style there is nothing unworthy of a king, except that 
 he is too fond of antithesis, and sometimes rather frigid. I have 
 also noticed that sometimes (though that may be accidental) the 
 letters bear names which look as if they had been invented to 
 suit the contents. As to history, time has robbed us of all certain 
 knowledge regarding the state of Sicily and its commonwealth, 
 in that age ; and the recipients of the letters are mostly 
 obscure, except Stesichorus, Pythagoras, and Abaris ; whose 
 age agrees with that of PhalariSj thus affording no hold for 
 doubt on that groxuid. If, however, Diodorus Siculus is right 
 in saying that Tauromenium, whose citizens our author 
 addresses, was built and so called after the destruction of 
 Naxos by the younger Dionysius, then the claim of Phalaris 
 is destroyed, and the whole fabric of conjectural ascription falls 
 to the ground. This is the sum of what I had to say on my 
 author, set forth, indeed, somewhat hastily ; but, if more 
 learned men have anything to urge against it, I am ready to 
 Lear it.
 
 58 BENTLEY. [CHAP. 
 
 Boyle wrote this, let it be remembered, before Bentley 
 had published anything on the subject. Boyle was 
 strictly justified in saying afterwards, ' I never profess'd 
 myself a patron of Phalaris ;' 'I was not in the least 
 concern'd to vindicate the Letters.' He defines his own 
 position with exactness in another place : ' Phalaris was 
 always a favourite book with me : from the moment I 
 knew it, I wish'd it might prove an original : I had now 
 and then, indeed, some suspicions that 'twas not genuine; 
 but I lov'd him so much more than I suspected him, that 
 I wou'd not suffer myself to dwell long upon 'em. To 
 be sincere, the opinion, or mistake, if you will, was so 
 pleasing that I was somewhat afraid of being undeceiv'd.' 
 It was Sir William Temple, not Boyle, who was com- 
 mitted to the view that the Letters were genuine. 
 
 "VVe shall speak of Bentley's Dissertation in its second 
 and mature form. The first rough draft, in Wottoii's 
 book, is a rapid argument, with just enough illustration 
 to make each topic clear. It had been very hastily 
 written. That Boyle and his friends should have been 
 angry, can surprise no one. Bentley, in rebutting a 
 calumny, had become a rough assailant. A reply came 
 out in January, 1696, It was entitled, 'Dr Bentley's 
 Dissertations on the Epistles of Phalaris and the Fables 
 of .^Esop, examin'd by the Honourable Charles Boyle, 
 Esq.' The motto was taken from Roscommon's 'Essay 
 of Translated Verse :' 
 
 Eemember Milo's end ; 
 Wedg'd in that Timber, which he strove to rend. 
 
 The piece is clever and effective. 'Soon after Dr 
 Bentley's Dissertation came out,' Boyle says in the 
 preface, ' I was call'd away into Ireland, to attend the 
 Parliament there. The publick business, and my own
 
 iv.] THE LETTEES OF PHALARIS. 59 
 
 private affairs, detain'd me a great while in that kingdom ; 
 else the world should have had a much earlier account of 
 him and his performance.' Boyle explains that he had 
 edited the Letters 'rather as one that wish'd well to 
 learning than prof ess' d it.' His motive for replying to 
 Bentley's attack is ' the publick affront ' of being charged 
 with setting his name to a book which was not Ids own. 
 No one had helped him in it, except one friend who had 
 been his adviser 'upon any difficulty,' and had also 
 consulted 'some books' for him 'in the Oxford Libraries.' 
 As to the Letters, he had neither asserted nor denied 
 their genuineness. He is sorry to have been the occasion 
 of bringing such a storm on the head of Sir William 
 Temple. He regrets, too, that Bentley should have 
 extended his aspersions to Christ Church. Then comes 
 an onslaught on Bentley's essay and a defence of Boyle's 
 book 'A Short Account of Dr Bentley by way of 
 Index ' was appended to the second edition. This is an 
 index to the preceding 266 pages, under such heads as 
 these: 'Dr Bentley's civil usage of Mr Boyle; His 
 singular humanity to Mr Boyle ; His elegant Similes ; His 
 clean and gentile Metaphors; His old Sayings and Pro- 
 verbs; His Collection of Asinine Proverbs ; His extraor- 
 dinary talent at Drollery; His dogmatical air; His 
 Ingenuity in transcribing and plundering Notes and 
 Prefaces of Mr Boyle [here follows a list of other victims]. 
 His modesty and decency In contradicting Great Men 
 [here follows a list of the persons contradicted, ending 
 with Everybody].' 
 
 This, we know, was a joint performance. Francis 
 Atterbury, afterwards Bishop of Rochester, was then 
 thirty-six : George Smalridge was a year younger. Both 
 were already distinguished at Oxford. Atterbury, in a
 
 60 BENTLEY. [CHAP. 
 
 letter to Boyle, says with reference to this piece: 'in 
 writing more than half of the book, in. reviewing a good 
 part of the rest, in transcribing the whole and attending 
 the press half a year of my life has passed away.' 
 Smalridge is supposed to have contributed a playful proof 
 that Bentley did not write his own essay. This is a 
 parody of Bentley's arguments about Phalaris, partly 
 woven with his own words and phrases. This sham 
 Bentley urges the critic 'is a perfect Dorian in his 
 language, in his thoughts, and in his breeding.' It is vain 
 to plead that 'he was born in some Village remote from 
 Town, and bred among the Peasantry while young.' 
 The real Bentley had been 'a Member of one University, 
 and a Sojourner in the other ; a Chaplain in Ordinary to 
 the King, and a Tutor in extraordinary to a Young 
 Gentleman:' such a man must surely have written 
 Attic; he must 'have quitted his Old Country Dialect 
 for that of a Londoner, a Gentleman, and a Scholar.' 
 Then the sham Bentley is 'a Pierce and Angry Writer; 
 and One, who when he thinks he has an advantage over 
 another Man, gives him no Quarter.' But the real 
 Bentley says in his Letter to Dr Mill, ' it is not in my 
 nature to trample upon the Prostrate.' The real Bentley 
 was ' much vers'd in the Learned Languages.' This 
 pseudo-Bentley shows 'that he was not only a perfect 
 Stranger to the best Classic Authors, but that he wanted 
 that Light which any Ordinary Dictionary would have 
 afforded him.' The pages on ^3Esop may have been 
 chiefly due to Anthony Alsop, a young Student of 
 Christ Church, who edited the Pables in that year (1698). 
 The 'very deserving gentleman' to whom Boyle refers 
 as his assistant appears to have been John Preind, whose 
 brother Kobert (both were Students of Christ Church) is
 
 iv.] THE LETTERS OF PHALABIS. 61 
 
 also believed to have helped. Some of the insults to 
 Bentley are very gross. Thus it is hinted, twice over, 
 that his further compliance in the matter of the manu- 
 script might have been purchased by a fee. This is the 
 only thing in the piece which Bentley noticed with a 
 word of serious reproof. 
 
 The book gives us some curious glimpses of the 
 way in which critical studies were then viewed by Per- 
 sons of Honour. 'Begging the Dr's pardon,' says Boyle, 
 'I take Index-hunting after Words and Phrases to be, 
 next after Anagrams and Acrosticks, the lowest Diversion 
 a Man can betake himself to.' Boyle is apprehensive lest 
 'worthy Men, who know so well how to employ their 
 hours, should be diverted from the pursuit of Useful 
 Knowledge into such trivial Enquiries as these : ' and he 
 shrinks from being suspected of having ' thrown away any 
 considerable part of his life on so trifling a subject.' He 
 need not have felt much uneasiness. 
 
 However small Boyle's share in this book may 
 have been, it is right to observe that there is an almost 
 ludicrous exaggeration in the popular way of telling the 
 story, as if all Christ Church, or all Oxford, had been 
 in a league to annihilate Bentley. The joint book 
 was written by a group of clever friends who repre- 
 sented only themselves. Rymer, indeed, says, ' Dr Aid- 
 rich, no doubt, was at the head of them, and smoaked 
 and punned plentifully on this occasion.' But this was 
 a mistake. The 'Short Review' published anony- 
 mously in 1701 (the author was Atterbury) says ex- 
 pressly : 'That an answer was preparing, he [the Dean 
 of Christ Church] knew nothing of till 'twas publick 
 talk, and he never saw a line of the Examination but in. 
 Print.'
 
 62 BENTLEY. [CHAP. 
 
 In the preface to Anthony Alsop's ^Esop another of 
 the Christ Church editions, which came out, before Boyle's 
 book, early in 1698 our hero is mentioned as 'a certain 
 Bentley, diligent enough in turning over lexicons;' and 
 his behaviour about the manuscript is indicated by a 
 Latin version of 'The Dog in the Manger.' The wearied 
 ox, coming home to dinner, is driven from his hay by 
 the snarling usurper, and remonstrates warmly when 
 the dog replies, 'You call me currish ; if foreigners are 
 any judges, there is not a hound alive that approaches 
 me in humanity.' To whom the ox: 'Is this your 
 singular humanity, to refuse me the food that you will 
 not and cannot enjoy yourself 1 ?' 
 
 At last 'Boyle against Bentley' came out (1698). Its 
 success was enormous. A second edition was called for 
 in a few months. A third edition followed in the next 
 year. Forty-six years later, when both the combatants 
 were dead, it was still thought worth while to publish 
 a fourth edition. 
 
 Temple lost no time in pronouncing. In March, just 
 after the book appeared, he writes : ' The compass 
 and application of so much learning, the strength and 
 pertinence of his (Boyle's) arguments, the candour of 
 his relations, in return to such foul r mouthed raillery, 
 the pleasant turns of wit, and the easiness of style, 
 are in my opinion as extraordinary as the contrary 
 of these all appear to be in what the Doctor and his 
 friend [Wotton] have written.' Hard as this is on 
 Bentley, it is harder still on poor Wotton, who had 
 been elaborately civil to Temple. Garth published 
 his Dispensary in 1699, with that luckless couplet, 
 meant, says Noble, 'to please his brother wits at 
 Button's:'
 
 iv.] THE LETTERS OF PHALAEIS. G3 
 
 So diamonds take a lustre from their foil, 
 And to a Bentley 'tis we owe a Boyle. 
 
 John Milner, formerly Vicar of Leeds, had, as a non- 
 juror, lost his preferments at the Revolution, and was 
 then living at St John's College, Cambridge. In his 
 'View of the Dissertation' (1698) he proposes 'to 
 manifest the incertitude of heathen chronology,' and 
 takes part against Bentley. According to Eustace 
 Budgell, a caricature was published at Cambridge, in 
 which Phalaris was consigning Bentley to the bull, 
 while the Doctor exclaimed, 'I would rather be roasted 
 than boyled.' Rymer, in his 'Essay on Critical and 
 Curious Learning' (1698), blames both parties. As to 
 the question at issue, he argues .that 'curious' learning is 
 all very well in its way, but should not be carried too 
 far. On Boyle's critique Rymer makes a shrewd re- 
 mark : 'There is such a profusion of wit all along, and 
 such variety of points and raillery, that every man seems 
 to have thrown in a repartee or so in his turn.' Mr Cole 
 (of Magdalen College, Oxford) compared it to ' a Cheddar 
 cheese, made of all the milk of the parish.' 
 
 In short, 'society' had declared against Bentley, and 
 the men of letters almost jinanimously agreed with it. 
 While other acquaintances were turning their backs, 
 Evelyn stood loyal. That was the .state of things in 
 1688. Bentley remained calm. A friend who met 
 him one day urged him not to lose heart. 'Indeed,' 
 he replied, 'I am in no pain about the matter; for it is 
 a maxim with me that no man was ever written out of 
 reputation but by himself.' Meanwhile ho was preparing 
 a reply.
 
 CHAPTER V. 
 
 BENTLEY'S DISSERTATION. 
 
 WE have seen that Bentley's essay in Wotton's book 
 had been a hasty production. 'I drew up that disserta- 
 tion,' he says, 'in the spare hours of a few weeks; and 
 while the Printer was employed about one leaf, the other 
 was amaking.' He now set to work to revise and enlarge 
 it. He began his task about March, 1698 soon after 
 Boyle's pamphlet appeared but was interrupted in it by 
 the two months of his residence at Worcester, from the 
 end of May to the end of July. It was finished towards 
 the close of 1698. The time employed upon it had thus 
 been about seven and a half months, not free from other 
 and urgent duties. It was published early in 1699. 
 Let us clearly apprehend the point at issue. Boyle did 
 not assert that the Letters of Phalaris were genuine ; 
 but he denied that Bentley had yet proved them to be 
 spurious. 
 
 After a detailed refutation of the personal charges 
 against him, Bentley comes to the Letters of Phalaris. 
 First he takes the flagrant anachronisms. The Letters 
 mention towns which, at the supposed date, were not built, 
 or bore other names. Phalaris presents his physician 
 with the ware of a potter named Thericles, much as if
 
 v.] BENTLEY'S DISSERTATION. 65 
 
 Oliver Cromwell were found dispensing the masterpieces 
 
 of Wedgwood. Phalaris quotes books which had not 
 
 been written ; nay, he is familiar with forms of literature 
 
 which had not been created. Though a Dorian, he writes 
 
 to his familiar friends in Attic, and in a species of false 
 
 Attic which did not exist for five centuries after he was 
 
 dead. Farmer of the taxes though he had been, he has 
 
 no idea of values in the ordinary currency of his own 
 
 country. Thus he complains that the hostile community 
 
 of Catana had made a successful raid on his principality, 
 
 and had robbed him of no less a sum than seven talents. 
 
 Again lie mentions with some complacency that he has 
 
 bestowed the munificent dower of five talents on a lady 
 
 of distinction. According to the Sicilian standard, the 
 
 loss of the prince would have amounted to twelve shillings 
 
 and seven pence, while the noble bride would have 
 
 received nine shillings. The occasions of the letters, too, 
 
 are often singular. A Syracusan sends his brother to 
 
 Akragas, a distance of a hundred miles, with a request 
 
 that Phalaris would send a messenger to Stesichorus 
 
 (another hundred miles or so), and beg that poet to 
 
 write a copy of verses on the Syracusan's deceased wife. 
 
 'This,' says Bentley, 'is a scene of putid and senseless 
 
 formality.' Then Phalaris (who brags in one of the 
 
 letters that Pythagoras had stayed five months with him) 
 
 says to Stesichorus, 'pray do not mention me in your 
 
 poems.' 'This,' says Bentley, 'was a sly fetch of our 
 
 sophist, to prevent so shrewd an objection from Stesi- 
 
 chorus's silence as to any friendship at all with him.' 
 
 But supposing Phalaris had really been so modest 
 
 Bentley adds, still, Stesichorus was a man of the world. 
 
 The poet would have known ' that those sort of requests 
 
 are but a modest simulation, and a disobedience would 
 
 j. B. F
 
 C6 BENTLEY. [CHAP. 
 
 have been easily pardoned.' Again, these Letters are 
 not mentioned by any writer before the fifth century of 
 our era, and it is clear that the ancients did not know 
 them. Thus, in the Letters, Phalaris displays the 
 greatest solicitude for the education of his son Paurolas, 
 and writes to the young man in terms which would do 
 credit to the best of fathers. But in Aristotle's time 
 there was a tradition which placed the parental conduct of 
 Phalaris in another light. It alleged, in fact, that, while 
 this boy was still of a tender age, the prince had caused 
 him to be served up at table: but how, asks Bentley, 
 supposing the Letters to be genuine 'could he eat his 
 son while he was an infant?' It is true, the works of 
 some writers in the early Christian centuries (Phsedrus, 
 Paterculus, Lactantius) are not mentioned till long after 
 their death. But the interval was one during which the 
 Western world was lapsing into barbarism. The supposed 
 epoch of Phalaris was followed by 'the greatest and 
 longest reign of learning that the world has yet seen : ' 
 and yet his Letters remain hidden for a thousand years. 
 'Take them in the whole bulk, they are a fardle of 
 commonplaces, without any life or spirit from action and 
 circumstance. Do but cast your eye upon Cicero's letters, 
 or any statesman's, as Phalaris was ; what lively 
 characters of men there ! what descriptions of place ! 
 what notifications of time ! what particularity of circum- 
 stances ! what multiplicity of designs and events ! "When 
 you return to these again, you feel, by the emptiness and 
 deadness of them, that you converse with some dreaming 
 pedant with his elbow on his desk ; not with an active, 
 ambitious tyrant, with his hand on his sword, commanding 
 a million of subjects.' 
 
 Bentley's incidental discussions of several topics are so.
 
 v.] BENTLEY'S DISSERTATION. C7 
 
 many concise monographs, each complete in itself, each 
 exhaustive within its own limits, and each, at the same 
 time, filling its due .place in the economy of the whole. 
 Such are the essays on the age of Pythagoras, on the 
 beginnings of Greek Tragedy, on anapaestic verse, on the 
 coinage of Sicily. In the last-named subject, it might 
 have appeared almost impossible that a writer of Bentley's 
 time should have made any near approximation to 
 correctness. He had not such material aids as are 
 afforded by the Sicilian coins which we now possess, 
 without which the statements of ancient writers would 
 appear involved in hopeless contradiction. I am 
 glad, therefore, to quote an estimate of Bentley's 
 work in this department by a master of numismatic 
 science. Mr Barclay Head writes : ' Speaking gene- 
 rally, Bentley's results are surprisingly accurate. I 
 think I may safely say that putting aside what was to 
 have been done within the last fifty years, Bentley's essay 
 stands alone. Even Eckhel, in his 'Doctrina numorum' 
 (1790), has nothing to compare with it.' Again, Bentley's 
 range and grasp of knowledge are strikingly seen in 
 critical remarks of general bearing which are drawn from 
 him by the course of the discussion. Thus at the outset 
 he gives in a few words a broad view of the origin and 
 growth of literary forgery in the ancient world. In the 
 last two centuries before Christ, when there was a keen 
 rivalry between the libraries of Pergamus and Alexandria, 
 the copiers of manuscripts began the practice of inscribing 
 them with the names of great writers, in order that they 
 might fetch higher prices. Thus far, the motive of 
 falsification was simply mercenary. But presently a 
 different cause began to swell the number of spurious 
 works. It was a favourite exercise of rhetoric, in the 
 
 F2
 
 68 BENTLEY. [CHAP. 
 
 early period of the Empire, to compose speeches or letters 
 in the name and character of some famous person. At 
 first such exercises would, of course, make no pretence 
 of being anything more. But, as the art was developed, 
 'some of the Greek Sophists had the success and 
 satisfaction to see their essays in that kind pass with some 
 readers for the genuine works of those they endeavoured 
 to express. This, no doubt, was great content and joy to 
 them; being as full a testimony of their skill in imitation, 
 as the birds gave to the painter when they pecked at his 
 grapes.' Some of them, indeed, candidly confessed the 
 trick. 'But most of them took the other way, and, 
 concealing their own names, put off their copies for 
 originals; preferring that silent pride and fraudulent 
 pleasure, though it was to die with them, before an 
 honest commendation from posterity for being good 
 imitators.' And hence such Letters as those of Phalaris. 
 Dr Aldrich had lately dedicated his Logic to Charles 
 i Boyle. Bentley makes a characteristic use of this 
 circumstance. 'If his new System of Logic teaches him 
 such arguments,' says Bentley, ' I'll be content with the 
 old ones.' The whole Dissertation, in fact, is a re- 
 morseless syllogism. But Bentley is more than a sound 
 reasoner. He shows in a high degree the faculties which 
 go to make debating power. He is frequently successful 
 in the useful art of turning the tables. Alluding to 
 his opponent's mock proof that ' Dr Bentley could not be 
 the author of the Dissertation,' he remarks that Boyle's 
 Examination is open to a like doubt in good earnest, if 
 we are to argue 'from the variety of styles in it, from its 
 contradictions to his edition of Phalaris, from its con- 
 tradictions to itself, from its contradictions to Mr B.'s 
 character and to his title of honourable.' Boyle had said
 
 v.] BENTLET'S DISSEBTATION. 69 
 
 of Bentley, 'the man that writ this must have been fast 
 asleep, for else he could never have talked so wildly.' 
 Bentley replies, 'I hear a greater paradox talked of 
 abroad; that not the "wild" only, but the best, part of 
 the Examiner's book may possibly have been written 
 while he was fast asleep.' 
 
 He is often neat, too, in exploding logical fallacies. 
 Boyle argued that, as Diodorus gives two different dates 
 for the founding of Tauromenium, neither can be trusted. 
 Bentley rejoins : 'One man told me in company that the 
 Examiner was twenty-four years old ; and another said, 
 twenty-five. Now, these two stories contradict one ano- 
 ther, and neither can be depended on ; we are at liberty, 
 therefore, to believe him a person of about fifty years of 
 age.' Boyle had taken refuge in a desperate suggestion 
 that people might have been called 'Tauromenites' from a 
 river Tauromenius, before there was a city Tauromenium. 
 'Now,' says Bentley, 'if the Tauromenites were a sort of 
 fish, this argument drawn from the river would be of 
 great force.' Boyle had argued that a Greek phrase was 
 not poetical because each of the two words forming it was 
 common. Bentley quotes from Lucretius 
 
 Luna dies, et nox, et noctis signa severa. 
 
 Is not every word common ? And is the total effect pro- 
 saic ? Bentley's retort is a mere quibble, turning on the 
 ambiguity of 'common' as meaning either 'vulgar' or 
 'simple,' but illustrates his readiness. Once, as if in 
 contempt for his adversary's understanding, he has 
 indulged in a notable sophism. Boyle had argued 
 that the name 'tragedy' cannot have existed before the 
 thing. Bentley rejoins : "tis a proposition false in itself 
 that things themselves must be, before the names by
 
 70 BENTLEY. [CHAP. 
 
 which they are called. For we have many new- 
 tunes in music made every day, which never existed 
 before ; yet several of them are called by names that were 
 formerly in use ; and perhaps the tune of Chevy Chase, 
 though it be of famous antiquity, is a little younger than 
 the name of the chase itself. And I humbly conceive 
 that Mr Hobbes's book, which he called the Leviathan, 
 is not quite as ancient as its name is in Hebrew.' 
 But the 'name' of which Boyle spoke was descriptive, 
 not merely appellative. Bentley's reasoning would have 
 been relevant only if Boyle had argued that, since a 
 tragedy is called the 'Agamemnon,' Tragedy must have 
 existed before Agamemnon lived. 
 
 As to the English style of the Dissertation, the 
 Boyle party had expressed their opinion pretty freely 
 when the first draft of it had appeared in Wotton's 
 book. They complained that, when Bentley 'had occasion 
 to express himself in Terms of Archness and Waggery,' 
 he descended to 'low and mean Ways of Speech.' 'The 
 familiar expressions of taking one tripping, coming 
 . off with a whole skin, minding his hits, a friend at a 
 pinch, going to blows, setting horses together, and 
 going to pot ; with others borrow'd from the Sports and 
 Employments of the Country ; shew our Author to have 
 been accustom'd to another sort of Exercise than that of 
 the Schools.' Alluding to the painful fate which was 
 said to have overtaken the mother of Phalaris, Bentley 
 particularly shocked his critics by the phrase, ' Eoasting 
 the Old Woman;' and, in a similar strain of rustic levity 
 he had described the parent of Euripides as 'Mother Clito 
 tJie Herbwoman.' Dr King, of Christ Church, (who, it 
 will be remembered, had meddled in the manuscript 
 affair,) had written an account of a journey to London ;
 
 v.] BENTLEY'S DISSERTATION. 71 
 
 wherein he relates that, on his asking concerning the ales 
 at a certain inn, the host answered ' that he had a 
 thousand such sort of liquors, as humtie dumtie, three- 
 threads, four-threads, old Pharoah [sic], knockdown, hug- 
 metee,' &c. Playfully referring to this passage, Bentley 
 says (speaking of a wild assertion), 'A man must be 
 dosed with Humty-dumty that could talk so incon- 
 sistently : ' and again, speaking of Dr King's statements, 
 'If he comes with more testimonies of his Bookseller or 
 his Humty-dumty acquaintance, I shall take those for 
 no answer.' Worst of all, this familiar style was used 
 towards Phalaris himself and his defenders. Speaking of 
 the Greek rhetoricians, Bentley announces that his 
 design is 'to pull off the disguise from those little 
 Pedants that have so long stalkt about in the Apparel 
 of Heroes.' The work of Boyle and his assistants is 
 thus characterised : ' Here are your Work-men to mend 
 an author; as bungling Tinkers do old kettles; there 
 was but one hole in the text before they meddled with it, 
 but they leave it with two.' 
 
 Not a soothing style this, nor one to be recommended 
 for imitation. But what vigour there is in some of the 
 phrases that Bentley strikes out at a red heat! They 
 ought to have made inquiries 'before they ventur'd to 
 Print, which is a sword in the hand of a Child.' 'He 
 gives us some shining metaphors, and a polished period 
 or two ; but, for the matter of it, it is some common 
 and obvious thought dressed and curled in the beauish 
 way. 1 Speaking of work which Bishop Pearson had 
 left unfinished : 'though it has not passed the last hand 
 of the author, yet it's every way worthy of him; and 
 the very dust of his ivritinga is gold.' And here, 
 as Bentley was charged in this controversy with such
 
 72 BENTLET. [CHAP. 
 
 boundless arrogance, and such ' indecency in contradicting 
 great men,' let us note his tone in the Dissertation 
 towards eminent men then living or lately dead. Nothing 
 could be more becoming, more worthy of his own genius, 
 than the warm, often glowing, terms in which he speaks 
 of such men as Selden, Pearson, Lloyd, Stillingfleet, 
 Spanheim, in a word,- of almost all the distinguished 
 scholars whom he has occasion to name. Dodwell, who 
 was ranged against him, is treated with scrupulous 
 courtesy and fairness. Joshua Barnes, whose own con- 
 duct to Bentley had been remarkably bad, could scarcely 
 be described more indulgently than in these words, 
 'one of a singular industry and a most diffuse reading.' 
 Those were precisely the two tilings which could truly be 
 said in praise of Barnes, and it would not have been 
 easy to find a third. 
 
 Hallam characterises the style of the Dissertation as 
 'rapid, concise, amusing, and superior to Boyle in that 
 which he had chiefly to boast, a sarcastic wit.' It may 
 be questioned how far 'wit,' in its special modern sense, 
 was a distinguishing trait on either side of this con- 
 troversy. The chief weapons of the Boyle alliance were 
 rather derision and invective. Bentley's sarcasm is always 
 powerful and often keen; but the finer quality of wit, 
 though seen in some touches, can hardly be said to 
 pervade the Dissertation. As to the humour, that is 
 unquestionable. There is so far an unconscious element 
 in it, that its effect on the reader is partly due to 
 Bentley's tremendous and unflagging earnestness in 
 heaping up one absurdity upon another. This cumulative 
 humour belongs to the essay as a whole; as Bentley 
 marches on triumphantly from one exposure to another, 
 our sense of the ludicrous is constantly rising. But it
 
 v.] BENTLEY'S DISSERTATION. 73 
 
 can be seen on a smaller scale too. For instance, one of 
 Boyle's grievances was that Bentley had indirectly called 
 him an ass. In Bentley 's words: 'By the help, he 
 says, of a Greek proverb, I call him a downright ass. 
 After I had censured a passage of Mr Boyle's translation 
 that has no affinity with the original, This puts me in 
 mind, said I, of the old Greek proverb, that Leucon carries 
 one thing, and his Ass quite another. Where the Ass is 
 manifestly spoken of the Sophist [the real author of the 
 Letters,] whom I had before represented as an Ass under 
 a Lion's skin. And if Mr B. has such a dearness for his 
 Phalaris that he'll change places with him there, how 
 can I help it? I can only protest that I put him into 
 Leucon's place ; and if he will needs compliment himself 
 out of it, "I must leave the two friends to the pleasure 
 of their mutual civilities."' [Boyle's own words about 
 Bentley and Wotton.] But this was not all : Boyle had 
 accused Bentley of comparing him to Lucian's ass. 
 Now this, says Bentley, 'were it true, would be no coarse 
 compliment, but a very obliging one. For Lucian's Ass 
 was a very intelligent and ingenious Ass, and had more 
 sense than any of his Riders ; he was no other than 
 Lucian himself in the shape of an ass, and had a better 
 talent at kicking and bantering than ever the Examiner 
 will have, though it seems to be his chief one.' 'But 
 is this Mr B.'s way of interpreting similitudes?... If 
 I liken an ill critic to- a bungling Tinker, that makes 
 two holes while he mends one; must I be charged with 
 calling him Tinker? At this rate Homer will call his 
 heroes Wolves, Boars, Dogs, and Bulls. Ar.d when 
 Horace has this comparison about himself, 
 
 Demitto auriculas, ut iniquae mentis asellus,
 
 74 BENTLEY. [CHAP. 
 
 Mr B. may tell him that he calls himself downright 
 ass. But he must be put in mind of the English proverb, 
 that similitudes, even when they are taken from asses, do 
 not walk upon all four.' Swift, alluding to the trans- 
 ference of the Letters from . Phalaris to their real 
 source, called Bentley that 'great rectifier of saddles.' 
 Bentley might have replied that he could rectify 
 panniers too. 
 
 It would be a mistake to regard Bentley's Dissertation 
 as if its distinctive merit had consisted in demonstrating 
 the Letters of Phalaris to be spurious. That was by 
 no means Bentley's own view. The spuriousness of 
 these Letters, he felt from the first, was patent. He had 
 given (in Wotton's book) a few of the most striking 
 proofs of this : and he had been attacked. Now he was 
 showing, in self-defence, that his proofs not only held 
 good, but had deep and solid foundations. Others before 
 him had suspected that the letters were forgeries, and he 
 would have scorned to take the smallest credit for seeing 
 what was so plain. He was the first to give sufficient 
 reasons for his belief : but he did not care, and did not 
 pretend, to give all the reasons that might be adduced. 
 Indeed, any careful reader of the Letters can remark 
 several proofs of spuriousness on which Bentley has not 
 touched. For instance, it could be shown that the 
 fictitious proper names are poskclassical ; that the forger 
 was acquainted with Thucydides ; and that he had read 
 the Tlieaetetus of Plato. But Bentley had done more 
 than enough for his purpose. The glory of his treatise 
 .was not that it established his conclusion, but that it 
 disclosed that broad and massive structure of learning 
 upon which his conclusion rested. 'The only book that 
 I have writ upon my own account,' he says, 'is this
 
 v.] BENTLEY'S DISSERTATION. 75 
 
 present answer to Mr B.'s objections; and I assure him 
 I set no great price upon 't ; the errors that it refutes 
 are so many, so gross and palpable, that I shall never be 
 very proud of the victory.' At the same time, he justly 
 refutes the assertion of his adversaries that the point at 
 issue was of no moment. Bentley replies : ' That the 
 single point whether Phalaris be genuine or no is of no 
 small importance to learning, the very learned Mr Dodwell 
 is a sufficient evidence; who, espousing Phalaris for a 
 true author, has endeavoured by that means to make a 
 great innovation in the ancient chronology. To under- 
 value this dispute about Phalaris because it does not suit 
 to one's own studies, is to quarrel with a circle because it 
 is not a square.' 
 
 A curious fatality attended on Bentley's adver- 
 saries in this controversy. While they dealt thrusts 
 at points where he was invulnerable, they missed all the 
 chinks in his armour except a statement limiting too 
 narrowly the use of two Greek verbs, and his identi- 
 fication of 'Alba Graeca' with Buda instead of Belgrade. 
 Small and few, indeed, these chinks were. It would 
 have been a petty, but fair, triumph for his opponents, 
 if they had perceived that, in correcting a passage of 
 Aristophanes, he had left a false quantity. They might 
 have shown that a passage in Diodorus had led him 
 into an error regarding Attic chronology during 
 the reign of the Thirty Tyrants. They might have 
 exulted in the fact that an emendation which he 
 proposed in Isaeus rested on a confusion between two 
 different classes of choruses; that he had certainly 
 misconstrued a passage in the life of Pythagoras by 
 lamblichus; that the 'Minos,' on which he relies as 
 Plato's work, was spurious ; that, in one of the Letters
 
 76 BENTLEY. [CHAP. 
 
 of Phalaris, he had defended a false reading by false 
 grammar. They could have shown that Bentley was 
 demonstrably wrong in asserting that no writings, bearing 
 the name of ^Esop, were extant in the time of Aristo- 
 phanes ; also in stating that the Fable of ' The Two 
 Boys' had not come down to the modern world: it 
 was, in fact, very near them, safe in a manuscript 
 at the Bodleian Library. Even the discussion on Za- 
 leucus escaped : its weak points were first brought out 
 by later critics Warburton, Salter, Gibbon. Had such 
 blemishes been ten times more numerous, they would 
 not have affected the worth of t'.ie book: but, such as 
 they were, they were just of the kind which small 
 detractors delight to magnify. In one place Bentley 
 accuses Boyle of having adopted a wrong reading 
 in one of the Letters, and thereby made nonsense 
 of the passage. Now, Boyle's reading, though not the 
 .best, happens to be capable of yielding the very sense 
 which Bentley required. Yet even this Boyle and his 
 friends did not discover. 
 
 How was the Dissertation received ? According to the 
 popular account, no sooner had Bentley blown his mighty 
 blast, than the walls of the hostile fortress fell flat. The 
 victory was immediate, the applause universal, the foe's 
 ruin overwhelming. Tyrwhitt, in his Babrius published 
 long after Beiitley's death is seeking to explain why 
 Bentley never revised the remarks on .^Esop, which he had 
 published in Wotton's book. 'Content with having 
 prostrated his adversaries with the second Dissertation 
 on Phalaris, as by a thunderbolt, he withdrew in scorn 
 from the uneven fight.' 
 
 Let us see what the evidence is. Just as the great 
 Dissertation appeared, Boyle's friends published 'A short
 
 v.] BENTLEY'S DISSERTATION. 77 
 
 Account of Dr Bentley's Humanity and Justice.' It is 
 conceived in a rancorous spirit; Bentley is accused of 
 having plundered, in his Fragments of Callimachus, some 
 papers which Thomas Stanley, the editor of Aeschylus, 
 left unpublished at his death ; and Bentley's conduct to 
 Boyle about the manuscript is set forth as related by the 
 bookseller, Mr Bennet. Now, in John Locke's corres- 
 pondence, I find a letter to him from Thomas Burnet, 
 formerly a Fellow of Christ's College, Cambridge, and 
 then Master of Charterhouse, author of a fantastic 
 book on the geological history of the earth (Telluris 
 TJieoria Sacra). The date is March 19, 1699. Bent- 
 ley had read part of his preface to Burnet before it 
 was published. Burnet had now read the whole, and a 
 great part of the Dissertation itself ; also the newly 
 published ' Short Account.' He is now disposed to believe 
 Bennet's version. 'I do profess upon second thoughts... 
 that his story seemeth the more likely, if not the most 
 true, of the two.' As to the letters of Phalaris, he is 
 aware that some great scholars are with Bentley. 'But 
 I doubt not,' he adds, 'that a greater number will be of 
 another sentiment, who would not be thought to be of the 
 unlearned tribe.' That, we may be sure, was what 
 many people were saying in London. A defence of 
 Bentley against the ' Short Account,' which came out at 
 this time, has been ascribed to a Fellow of Magdalen 
 College, Oxford, Solomon Whately, the first translator 
 of Phalaris into English. 
 
 The Boyle party had addressed themselves to the wits 
 and the town. Bentley's work had plenty of qualities 
 which could be appreciated in that quarter: but its 
 peculiar strength lay in things of which few persons could 
 judge. These few were at once convinced by it: and
 
 78 BENTLEY. [CHAP. 
 
 their authority helped to convince the inner circles of 
 students. But the Boyle party still had on their side 
 all those who, regarding the contest as essentially an 
 affair of style, preferred Boyle's style to Bentley's. This 
 number would include the rank and file of fashion and its 
 dependents, the persons who wrote dedications, and the 
 patrons in whose antechambers they waited. Most of 
 them would be genuinely unconscious how good Bent- 
 ley's answer was, and their prepossessions would set 
 strongly the other way. So, while Bentley had persuaded 
 the scholars, it would still be the tone of a large and in- 
 fluential world to say that, though the pedant might have 
 brought cumbrous proofs of a few trivial points, Boyle 
 had won a signal victory in 'wit, taste, and breeding.' 
 
 Swift's 'Battle of the Books' was begun when he was 
 living with Sir William Temple at Moor Park in 1697. 
 It was suggested by a French satire, Coutray's Ilistoire 
 Poetique de la guerre nouvellement declaree entre les 
 anciens et les modernes, and referred to Bentley's first 
 dissertation, which had just appeared. Temple was feeling 
 sore, and Swift wished to please him. But its circulation 
 was only private until it was published with the 'Tale of a 
 Tub' in 1704. Temple had then been dead five years. 
 If Bentley's victory had then been universally recognised 
 as crushing, Swift would have been running the risk of 
 turning the laugh against himself ; and no man, so fond 
 of wounding, liked that less. In the ' Battle of the Books,' 
 Boyle is Achilles, clad in armour wrought by the gods. 
 The character ascribed to Bentley and Wotton is expressed 
 in the Homeric similes which adorn the grand battle at 
 the end. 'As a Woman in a little House, that gets a 
 painful livelihood by spinning ; if chance her Geese be 
 scattered o'er the Common, she courses round the plain
 
 v.] BENTLEY'S DISSERTATION. 79 
 
 from side to side, compelling, here and there, the stragglers 
 to the flock ; they cackle loud, and flutter o'er the cham- 
 
 pain: so Boyle pursued, so fled this Pair of Friends 
 
 As when a skilful Cook has truss'd a brace of Woodcocks, 
 he, with iron Skewer, pierces the tender sides of both, 
 their legs and wings close pinion'd to their ribs ; so was this 
 Pair of Friends transfix'd, till down they fell, join'd in their 
 lives, join'd in their deaths; so closely join'd that Charon 
 would mistake them both for one, and waft them over Styx 
 for half his fare.' When this was first published, Bentley's 
 second Dissertation had been five years before the public. 
 Against this satire so purely popular that it lost 
 nothing by being whetted on the wrong edge we must set 
 two pieces of contemporary evidence to Bentley's immedi- 
 ate success with his own limited audience. In discussing 
 the age of Pythagoras, he had said : ' I do not pretend 
 to pass my own judgment, or to determine positively on 
 either side; but I submit the whole to the censure of such 
 readers as are well versed in ancient learning ; and parti- 
 cularly to that incomparable historian and chronologer, the 
 Right Reverend the Bishop of Coventry and Litchfield.' 
 In the same year (1699) Dr Lloyd responded by publish- 
 ing his views on the question, prefaced by a dedicatory 
 epistle to Bentley. The other testimony is of a different 
 kind, but not less significant. 'A Short Review' of the 
 controversy appeared in 1701. It was anonymous. 
 Dyce says that a friend of his possessed a copy in which 
 an early eighteenth century hand had written, 'by Dr 
 Atterbury.' The internal evidence leaves no doubt of 
 this. I may notice one indication of it, which does not 
 appear to have been remarked. We have seen that the 
 'Examination' of Bentley's first essay was edited, and in 
 great part written, by Atterbury. This ends with these
 
 80 BENTLEY. [CHAP. 
 
 words: 'I fancy that the reader will be glad to have... 
 the Dr's Picture in Miniature,' rather 'than that it shou'd 
 be again drawn out at full length' The 'picture in 
 miniature' is the 'Index' already mentioned above. Now 
 the 'Short Review' ends with 'the Dr's Advantagious 
 Character of himself at fall length? The writer of this 
 ' Character' is clearly going back on his own footsteps : and 
 that writer can be no other than Atterbury. He is very 
 angry, and intensely bitter. He hints that Whig interest 
 has bolstered up Bentley against Tory opponents. With 
 almost incredible violence, he accuses Bentley of ' lying, 
 stealing, and prevaricating' (p. 12). He contrasts the 
 character of a 'Critic' with that of a 'Gentleman.' Stress 
 is laid on the imputation that Bentley had attacked not 
 Boyle alone, but also the illustrious society in which 
 Boyle had been educated. The members of that 
 society (Atterbury remarks), are not cut all alike as 
 Bushels are by Winchester-measure : ' But they are men 
 of different Talents, Principles, Humours and Interests, 
 who are seldom or never united save when some unreason- 
 able oppression from abroad fastens them together, and 
 consequently whatever ill is said of all of them is falsely 
 said of many of them.' 'To answer the reflexion of a pri- 
 vate Gentleman with a general abuse of the Society he 
 belong'd to, is the manners of a dirty Boy upon a Country- 
 Green.' It will not avail Bentley that his friends 'style 
 him a Living Library, a Walking Dictionary, and a Con- 
 stellation of Criticism.' A solitary gleam of humour 
 varies this strain. Some wiseacre had suggested that the 
 Letters of Phalaris might corrupt the crowned heads of 
 Europe, if kings should take up the Agrigentine 
 tyrant as Alexander the Great took up Homer, and put 
 him under their pillows at night. 'I objected' says the
 
 T.] BENTLEY'S DISSEETATION. 81 
 
 author of the 'Short Review' 'that now, since the ad- 
 vancement of Learning and Civility in the world, Princes 
 were more refined, and would be ashamed of such acts of 
 Barbarity as Phalaris was guilty of in a ruder age.' But 
 the alarmist stuck to his point; urging that 'his Czarish 
 Majesty' (Peter the Great, then in the twelfth year of 
 his reign) might have met with the Letters of Phalaris in 
 his travels, and that 'his curiosity might have led him to 
 make a Brazen Bull, when he came home, to burn his 
 Rebells in.' The piece ends by renewing the charge of 
 plagiarism against Bentley. Considering that the second 
 Dissertation had now been out two years, this is a 
 curiosity of literature: 'Common Pilferers will still go 
 on in their trade, even after they have suffered for it.' 
 
 But, when Bentley's Dissertation had been published 
 for half-a-century, surely there can have been no longer 
 any doubt as to the completeness of his victory? We 
 shall see. In 1749, seven years after Bentley's death, an 
 English Translation of the Letters of Phalaris was 
 published by Thomas Francklin. He had been educated 
 at Westminster School, and was then a resident Fellow 
 of Trinity College, Cambridge ; his translation of 
 Sophocles is still well known. He dedicates his version of 
 Phalaris to John, Earl of Orrery, alluding to the esteem 
 in which the Greek author had been held by the lute 
 Lord Orrery (Charles Boyle). He then refers to 'the 
 celebrated dispute' between Boyle and Bentley about 
 these Letters. 'Doctor Bentley,' he allows, 'was always 
 look'd on as a man of wit and parts.' On the other hand, 
 Francklin vindicates Boyle against 'the foolish opinion' 
 that he had been helped by 'some men of distinguished 
 merit' in his book against Bentley. Had this been so, 
 those men would have been eager to claim their share in 
 j. B. a
 
 62 BENTLEY. [CHAP. 
 
 the reputation acquired by it. As they have not done so, 
 there can be no reason why Boyle's 'claim to the deserved 
 applause it has met with should ever for the future 
 be call'd in question.' 'I have not enter'd into any 
 of the points of the controversy,' Francklin proceeds, 
 ' as it would be a disagreeable as well as unnecessary task, 
 but shall only observe that, tho' several very specious 
 arguments are brought by Doctor Bentley, the strongest of 
 them do only affect particular epistles ; which as Mr Boyle 
 observes, do not hurt the whole body ; for in a collection 
 of pieces that have no dependence on each other, as 
 epistles, epigrams, fables, the first number may be en- 
 creased by the wantonness and vanity of imitators in 
 aftertimes, and yet the book be authentic in the main, and 
 an original still.' 
 
 Francklin was not outraging the sense of a learned 
 community by writing thus. In the very next year 
 (1750) he was elected to the Regius Professorship 
 of Greek. Nothing could show more conclusively the 
 average state of literary opinion on the controversy 
 half-a-century after it took place. But there is evidence 
 which carries us fifty years lower still. In 1804 Cum- 
 berland, Bentley's grandson, was writing his Memoirs. 
 'I got together' (he says) 'all the tracts relative to the 
 controversy between Boyle and Bentley, omitting none 
 even of the authorities and passages they referred to, and 
 having done this, I compressed the reasonings on both 
 sides into a kind of statement and report upon the 
 question in dispute; and if, in the result, my judgment 
 went with him to whom my inclination lent, no learned 
 critic in the present age will condemn me for the decision.' 
 Such was the apologetic tone which Bentley's grandson 
 still thought due to the world, even after Tyrwhitt had
 
 v.] BENTLEY'S DISSERTATION. 83 
 
 written of the 'thunderbolt,' and Person of the 'immortal 
 Dissertation'! The theory that Bentley had an imme- 
 diate triumph does not represent the general impression 
 of his own age, but reflects the later belief of critical 
 scholars, who felt the crushing power of Bentley's reply, 
 and imagined that every one must have felt it when it 
 first appeared. The tamer account of the matter, besides 
 being the truer, is also far more really interesting. It 
 shows how long the clearest truth may have to wait. 
 
 Bentley's Dissertation was translated into Latin by 
 the Dutch scholar, John Daniel Lennep, who edited the 
 Letters of Phalaris. After Lennep's death, the trans- 
 lation and the edition were published together by 
 Yalckenaer (1777). The Dissertation was subsequently 
 rendered into German, with notes, by Ribbeck ; and only 
 seven years ago (1874) the English text of the Disserta- 
 tion (both in its first and in its second form) was reis- 
 sued in Germany, with Introduction and notes, by Dr 
 Wilhelm Wagner. It has thus been the destiny of 
 Bentley's work, truly a work of genius, to become in 
 the best sense monumental. In a literature of which 
 continual supersession is the law, it has owed this per- 
 manent place to its triple character as a storehouse of 
 erudition, an example of method, and a masterpiece 
 of controversy. Isaac Disraeli justly said of it that ' it 
 heaves with the workings of a master spirit.' Bentley's 
 learning everywhere bears the stamp of an original mind ; 
 and, even where it can be corrected by modern lights, has 
 the lasting interest of showing the process by which an 
 intellect of rare acuteness reached approximately true 
 conclusions. As a consecutive argument it represents the 
 first sustained application of strict reasoning to questions 
 of ancient literature a domain in which his adversaries, 
 
 o2
 
 81 BENTLEY. [CHAP. 
 
 echoing the sentiment of their day, declared that 'all is 
 but a lucky guess.' As a controversial reply, it is little 
 less than marvellous, if we remember that his very 
 clever assailants had been unscrupulous in their choice of 
 weapons, freely using every sort of insinuation, however 
 irrelevant or gross, which could tell, and that Bentley 
 repulsed them at every point, without once violating the 
 usages of legitimate warfare. While he demolishes, one 
 by one, the whole series of their relevant remarks, he 
 steadily preserves his own dignity by simply turning 
 back upon them the dishonour of their own calumnies 
 and the ridicule of their own impertinence. With a 
 dexterity akin to that of a consummate debater, he wields 
 the power of retort in such a manner that he appears 
 to be hardly more than the amused spectator of a logical 
 recoil. 
 
 Shortly before Swift described Boyle as Achilles, 
 poor Achilles was writing from Ireland, in some per- 
 turbation of spirit, to those gods who were hard at work 
 oil his armour, and confiding his hopes 'that it would do 
 no harm.' It did not do much. This was the first 
 controversy in English letters that had made anything 
 like a public stir, and it is pleasant to think that 
 Achilles and his antagonist appear to have been good 
 friends afterwards : if any ill-will lingered, it was rather 
 in the bosoms of the Myrmidons. Dr William King, 
 who had helped to make the mischief, never forgave 
 Bentley for his allusions to ' Humty-dumty,' and satirised 
 him in ten 'Dialogues of the Dead' (on Lucian's model) 
 a title which suits their dulness. Bentley is Bentivoglio, 
 a critic who knows that the first weather-cock was set up 
 by the Argonauts and that cushions were invented by 
 Sardanapalus. Salter mentions a tradition, current in
 
 v.] EENTLEY'S DISSERTATION. 5 
 
 1777, that Boyle, after he became Lord Orrery, visited 
 Bentley at Trinity College, Cambridge. There is con- 
 temporary evidence, not, indeed, for such personal inter- 
 course, but for the existence of mutual esteem. In 1721 
 a weekly paper, 'The Spy,' attacked Bentley in an 
 article mainly patched up out of thefts from Boyle's 
 book on Phalaris, and a reply appeared, called 'The 
 Apothecary's Defence of Dr Bentley, in answer to the 
 Spy.' 'Let me now tell it the Spy as a secret,' says the 
 Apothecary, 'that Dr Bentley has the greatest deference 
 for his noble antagonist (Boyle), both as a person of emi- 
 nent parts and quality ; and I dare say his noble anta- 
 gonist thinks of Dr Bentley as of a person as great in 
 critical learning as England has boasted of for many a 
 century.' "VVe remember Bentley 's description of Boyle 
 as 'a young gentleman of great hopes,' and gladly be- 
 lieve that the Apothecary was as well-informed as his 
 tone would imply. Atterbury was in later life on excel- 
 lent terms with Bentley. 
 
 It is long enough now since 'the sprinkling of a 
 little dust ' allayed the last throb of angry passion that 
 had been roused by the Battle of the Books : but we 
 look back across the years, and see more than the 
 persons of the quarrel ; it was the beginning of a new 
 epoch in criticism; and it is marked by a work which, 
 to this hour, is classical in a twofold sense, in relation 
 to the literature of England and to the philology of 
 Europe.
 
 CHAPTER VI. 
 
 TRINITY COLLEGE, CAMBRIDGE. 
 
 TOWARDS the end of 1699, about eight months after the 
 publication of Bentley's Dissertation on Phalaris, the 
 Mastership of Trinity College, Cambridge, became vacant 
 by the removal of Dr Mountague to the Deanery of 
 Durham. The nomination of a successor rested with six 
 Commissioners, to whom King William had entrusted 
 the duty of advising in the ecclesiastical and academic 
 patronage of the Crown. They were Archbishops Tenison. 
 and Sharp, with Bishops Lloyd, Burnet, Patrick and 
 Moore, the last-named in place of Stillingfleet, who 
 had died in April, 1699. On their unanimous recom- 
 mendation, the post was given to Bentley. He continued 
 to hold the office of King's Librarian; but his home 
 thenceforth was at Cambridge. 
 
 No places in England have suffered so little as 
 Oxford and Cambridge from the causes which tend to 
 merge local colour in a monochrome. The academic 
 world which Bentley entered is still, after a hundred and 
 eighty years, comparatively near to us, both in form and 
 in spirit. The visitor in 1700, whom the coach con- 
 veyed in twelve hours from the 'Bull' in Bishopsgate
 
 CHAP. vi.J TRINITY COLLEGE, CAMBRIDGE. 67 
 
 Street to the ' Rose ' in the Marketplace of Cambridge, 
 found a scene of which the essential features were the 
 same as they are to-day. The most distinctive among 
 the older buildings of the University had long been such 
 as we now see them ; already for nearly two centuries 
 the chapel of King's College had been standing in the 
 completeness of its majestic beauty ; the charm of the 
 past could already be felt in the quadrangles and cloisters 
 of many an ancient house, in pleasant shades and smooth 
 lawns by the quiet river, in gardens with margins of 
 bright flowers bordering time-stained walls, over which 
 the sound of bells from old towers came like an echo of 
 the middle age, in all the haunts which tradition linked 
 with domestic memories of cherished names. It was 
 only the environment of the University that was de- 
 cidedly unlike the present. In the narrow streets of the 
 little town, where feeble oil-lamps flickered at night, the 
 projecting upper stories of the houses on either side 
 approached each other so nearly overhead as partly to 
 supply the place of umbrellas. The few shops that ex- 
 isted were chiefly open booths, with the goods displayed 
 on a board which also served as a shutter to close the 
 front. That great wilderness of peat-moss which once 
 stretched from Cambridge to the Wash had not yet been 
 drained with the thoroughness which has since reclaimed 
 two thousand square miles of the best corn-land in Eng- 
 land; tracts of fen still touched the outskirts of the 
 town ; snipe and marsh-fowl were plentiful in the pre- 
 sent suburbs. To the south and south-east the country 
 was unenclosed, as it remained, in great measure, down 
 to the beginning of this century. A horseman might 
 ride for miles without seeing a fence. 
 
 The broadest difference between the University life
 
 88 BENTLEY. [CHAP. 
 
 of Bentley's time and of our own might perhaps be 
 roughly described by saying that, for the older men, it 
 had more resemblance, both in its rigours and in its 
 laxities, to the life of a monastery, and, for the younger 
 men, to the life of a school. The College day began 
 with morning chapel, usually at six. Breakfast was not 
 a regular meal, but, from about 1700, it was often taken 
 at a coffee-house where the London newspapers could be 
 read. Morning lectures began at seven or eight in the 
 College hall. Tables were set apart for different subjects. 
 At 'the logick table' one lecturer is expounding Duncan's 
 treatise, while another, at ' the ethick table,' is inter- 
 preting Puffendorf on the Duty of a Man and a Citizen ; 
 classics and mathematics engage other groups. The 
 usual College dinner-hour, which had long been 11 A.M., 
 had advanced before 1720 to noon. The afternoon dis- 
 putations in the Schools often drew large audiences to 
 hear ' respondent ' and ' opponent ' discuss such themes 
 as ' Natural Philosophy does not tend to atheism,' or 
 ' Matter cannot think.' Evening chapel was usually at 
 five; a slight supper was provided in hall at seven or 
 eight; and at eight in winter, or nine in summer, the 
 College gates were locked. All students lodged within 
 College walls. Some tutors held evening lectures in 
 their rooms. Discipline was stern. The birch-rod which 
 was still hung up at the butteries typified a power in the 
 College dean similar to that which the fasces announced 
 in the Roman Consul ; and far on in the seventeenth 
 century it was sometimes found to be more than an 
 austere symbol, when a youth showed himself, as 
 Anthony Wood has it, 'too forward, pragmatic, and 
 conceited.' Boating, in the athletic sense, was hardly 
 known till about 1820, and the first record of cricket in
 
 vi.] TKINITY COLLEGE, CA1IBEIDGE. 80 
 
 its present form is said to be the match of Kent against 
 England in 1746; but the undergraduates of Bentley's 
 day played tennis, racquets, and bowls ; they rang peals 
 on church-bells ; they gave concerts ; nay we hear that 
 the votaries 'of Handel and Corelli' (the Italian violinist) 
 were not less earnest than those of Newton and Locke. 
 In Bentley's Cambridge the sense of a corporate life was 
 strengthened by continuous residence. Many Fellows of 
 Colleges, and some undergraduates, never left the Uni- 
 versity from one year's end to another. An excursion 
 to the Bath or to Epsom Wells was the equivalent of a 
 modern vacation-tour. No reading-party had yet pene- 
 trated to the Lakes or the Highlands. No summer fetes 
 yet brought an influx of guests ; the nearest approach to 
 anything of the kind was the annual Sturbridge Fair 
 in September, held in fields near the Cam, just outside 
 the town. The seclusion of the University world is 
 curiously illustrated by the humorous speeches which old 
 custom allowed on certain public occasions. The sallies 
 of the academic satirist were to the Cambridge of that 
 period very much what the Old Comedy was for the 
 Athens of Aristophanes. The citizens of a compact 
 commonwealth could be sufficiently entertained by lively 
 criticism of domestic affairs, or by pointed allusions to 
 the conduct of familiar persons. 
 
 In relation to the studies of Cambridge the moment 
 of Bentley's arrival was singularly opportune. The 
 theories of Descartes had just been exploded by that 
 Newtonian philosophy which Bentley's Boyle Lectures 
 had first popularised ; in alliance with Newton's princi- 
 ples, a mathematical school was growing; and other 
 sciences also were beginning to flourish. Between 1702 
 and 1727 the University was provided with chairs of
 
 90 BENTLEY. [CHAP. 
 
 Astronomy, Anatomy, Geology, and Botany ; while the 
 academic study of Medicine was also placed on a better 
 footing. George I. founded the chair of Modern History 
 in 1724. For classical learning the latter part of the 
 seventeenth century had been a somewhat sterile period. 
 There was thus a twofold function for a man of com- 
 prehensive vigour, holding an eminent station in the 
 University, to foster the new learning, and to reanimate 
 the old. Bentley proved himself equal to both tasks. 
 
 On February 1, 1700, the Fellows of Trinity College 
 met in the chapel, for the purpose of admitting their 
 new Master. Bentley took the Latin oath, promising 
 (among other undertakings) that he would 'observe in 
 all things the Statutes of the College, and interpret them 
 truly, sincerely, and according to their grammatical 
 sense;' that he would 'rule and protect all and singular 
 Fellows and Scholars, Pensioners, Sizars, Subsizars, and 
 the other members of the College, according to the same 
 Statutes and Laws, without respect of birth, condition, 
 or person, without favour or ill-will ; ' that, in the event 
 of his resigning or being deposed, he would restore all 
 that was due to the College 'without controversy or 
 tergiversation.' He was then installed in the Master's 
 seat, and his reign began. 
 
 Bentley had just completed his thirty-eighth year. 
 He had a genius for scholarship, which was already 
 recognised. He had also that which does not always 
 accompany it, a large enthusiasm for the advancement 
 of learning. His powers of work were extraordinary, 
 and his physical strength was equal to almost any 
 demand which even he could make upon it. Seldom 
 has a man of equal gifts been placed at so early an age 
 in a station which offered such opportunities.
 
 vi.] TRINITY COLLEGE, CAMBEIDGE. 91 
 
 Henry VIII. founded Trinity College only a few- 
 weeks before his death. Two establishments, each more 
 than two centuries old, then stood on the site of the 
 present Great Court. One of these was Michael-house, 
 founded in 1324 by Hervey de Stanton, Chancellor to 
 Edward II. The other, King's Hall, was founded in 
 1337 by Edward III, who assigned it to the King's 
 Scholars, thirty or forty students, maintained at Cam- 
 bridge by a royal bounty, first granted by Edward II. 
 in 1316. Thus, while Michael-house was the older 
 College, King's Hall represented the older foundation. 
 When Henry VIII. united them, the new name, 'Trinity 
 College,' was probably taken from Michael-house, which, 
 among other titles, had been dedicated to the Holy and 
 Undivided Trinity. The Reformation had been a crisis 
 in the history of the English Universities. In 1546 their 
 fortunes were almost at the lowest ebb. That fact adde 
 significance to the terms in which Henry's charter traces 
 the noble plan of Trinity College. The new house is 
 to be a 'college of literature, the sciences, philosophy, good 
 arts, and sacred Theology.' It is founded 'to the glory 
 and honour of Almighty God and the Holy and Undivided 
 Trinity ; for the amplification and establishment of the 
 Christian faith ; the extirpation of heresy and false 
 opinion ; the increase and continuance of Divine Learning 
 and all kinds of good letters; the knowledge of the 
 tongues ; the education of youth in piety, virtue, 
 learning and science ; the relief of the poor, destitute 
 and afflicted ; the prosperity of the Church of Christ ; 
 and the common good of his kingdom and subjects.' 
 
 The King had died before this conception could be 
 embodied in legislative enactment. Statutes were made 
 for Trinity College in the reign of Edward VI., and 
 again in the reign of Mary. Manuscript copies of
 
 92 LENTLEY. [CHAP. 
 
 these are preserved in the Muniment- room of the College; 
 but the first printed code of Statutes was that given in 
 the second year of Elizabeth. These governed Trinity 
 College until a revision produced the 'Victorian' Statutes 
 of 1844. Two features of the Elizabethan Statutes 
 deserve notice. All the sixty Fellowships are left open, 
 without appropriation to counties, while at every other 
 Cambridge College, except King's, territorial restrictions 
 existed till this century. And, besides the College 
 Lecturers, maintenance is assigned to three University 
 Readers. These are the Regius Professors of Divinity, 
 Hebrew and Greek, who are still on Henry VIII. 's 
 foundation. Thus, from its origin, Trinity College was 
 specially associated with two ideas: free competition of 
 merit; and provision, not only for collegiate tuition, but 
 also for properly academic teaching. 
 
 During the first century of its life from the reign of 
 Edward VI. to the Civil Wars the prosperity of Trinity 
 College was brilliant and unbroken. The early days of 
 the Great Rebellion were more disastrous for Cambridge 
 than for Oxford; yet at Cambridge, as at Oxford, the 
 period of the Commonwealth was one in which learning 
 throve. Trinity College was ' purged ' of its royalist 
 members in 1645. Dr Thomas Hill then, became Master. 
 He proved an excellent administrator. Isaac Barrow, 
 who was an undergraduate of the College, had written 
 an exercise on ' the Gunpowder Treason,' in which his 
 Cavalier sympathies were frankly avowed. Some of the 
 Fellows were so much incensed that they moved for his 
 expulsion, when Hill silenced them with the words, 
 'Barrow is a better man than any of us.' The last 
 Master of Trinity before the Restoration was Dr John 
 Wilkins, brother-in-law of Oliver Cromwell, and formerly 
 Warden of Wadham College, Oxford; who was 'always
 
 vi.] TRINITY COLLEGE, CAMBRIDGE. 93 
 
 zealous to promote worthy men and generous designs.' 
 He was shrewdly suspected of being a royalist, and 
 Cromwell had been wont to greet his visits thus : ' What, 
 brother Wilkins, I suppose you are come to ask some- 
 thing or other in favour of the Malignants?' But his 
 influence is said to have decided the Protector against 
 confiscating the revenues of Oxford and Cambridge to 
 pay his army*. 
 
 In the space of forty years between the Restoration 
 and Bentley's arrival, Trinity College had suffered some 
 decline ; not through any default of eminent abilities or 
 worthy characters, but partly from general influences 
 of the time, partly from the occasional want of a suf- 
 ficiently firm rule. Dr. John Pearson, the author of 
 the treatise on the Creed, was Master of Trinity from 
 1G62 to 1673. A contemporary whose words plainly 
 show the contrast with Bentley which was in his mind 
 said that Pearson was ' a man the least apt to encroach 
 upon anything that belonged to the Fellows, but treated 
 them all with abundance of civility and condescension.' 
 ' The Fellows, he has heard, ask'd him whether he wanted 
 anything in his lodge, table-linen, or the like;' " No," 
 saith the good man, "I think not; this I have will servo 
 yet;" and though pressed by his wife to have new, 
 especially as it was offered him, he would refuse it while 
 the old was fit for use. He was very well contented 
 with what the College allowed him.' 
 
 * See a letter, preserved in the Muniment-room of Trinity 
 College, Cambridge, and published by Mr W. Aldis Wright in Notes 
 and Queries, Aug. 13, 1881. I may remark that Dr. Creyghton, 
 whose recollections in old age the letter reports, errs in one detail. 
 It must have been as Warden of Wadham, not as Master of 
 Trinity, that Wilkins interceded against the confiscation. Oliver 
 Cromwell died Sept. 3, 1658. It was early in 1659 that Richard 
 Cromwell appointed Wilkins to Trinity College.
 
 94 BENTLEY. [CHAP. 
 
 Pearson was succeeded in the mastership by Isaac 
 Barrow, who held it for only four years from 1673 to 
 his death in 1677, Both as a mathematician and as a 
 theologian he stood in the foremost rank. In 1660 he 
 was elected 'without a competitor' to the professorship of 
 Greek. Thus a singular triad of distinctions is united 
 in his person ; as Lucasian professor of Mathematics, he 
 was the predecessor of Newton; at Trinity College, of 
 Bentley; and, in his other chair, of Porson. In early 
 boyhood he was chiefly remarkable for his pugnacity, and 
 for his aversion to books. When he was at Charterhouse, 
 'his greatest recreation was in such sports as brought on 
 fighting among the boys ; in his after-time a very great 
 courage remained... yet he had perfectly subdued all incli- 
 nation to quarrelling; but a negligence of his cloaths 
 did always continue with him.' As Master of Trinity, 
 'besides the particular assistance he gave to many in 
 their studies, he concerned himself in everything that 
 was for the interest of his College.' 
 
 The next two Masters were men of a different type. 
 John North was the fifth son of Dudley, Lord North, 
 and younger brother of Francis North, first Baron Guil- 
 ford, Lord Keeper in the reigns of Charles II. and James 
 II. He had been a Fellow of Jesus College, and in 
 1677 he was appointed Master of Trinity. John North 
 was a man of cultivated tastes and considerable accom- 
 plishments, of a gentle, very sensitive disposition, and 
 of a highly nervous temperament. Even after he was a 
 Fellow of his College, he once mistook a moonlit towel 
 for ' an enorm spectre ;' and his brother remembers how, 
 at a still later period, ' one Mr Wagstaff, a little gentle- 
 man, had an express audience, at a very good dinner, on 
 the subject of spectres, and much was said pro and con' 
 On one occasion he travelled into Wales, ' to visit and be
 
 vi.] TEINITY COLLEGE, CAMBRIDGE. 95 
 
 possessed of his sinecure of Llandinon.' 'The parishion- 
 ers came about him and hugged him, calling him their 
 pastor, and telling him they were his sheep;' when 'he 
 got him back to his College as fast as he could.' In. 
 the Mastership of Trinity North showed no weakness. 
 Certain abuses had begun to infect the election to Fellow- 
 ships, and he made a vigorous effort to remedy them. 
 He was no less firm in his endeavours to revive disci- 
 pline, which had been somewhat relaxed since the Resto- 
 ration. One day he was in the act of admonishing two 
 students, when he fell down in a fit. The two young 
 men were ' very helpful ' in carrying him to the Lodge. 
 Paralysis of one side ensued. He lived for upwards of 
 three years, but could thenceforth take little part in. 
 College affairs ; and died ; six years after he had become 
 Master, in 1683. 
 
 Dr John Mountague, North's successor, was the fourth 
 son of Edward, first Earl of Sandwich. The little that is 
 known of Mountague exhibits him as an amiable person 
 of courtly manners, who passed decently along the path 
 of rapid preferment which then awaited a young divine 
 with powerful connections. Having first been Master of 
 Sherburn Hospital at Durham, he was appointed, in 
 1683, to the Mastership of Trinity. His easy temper 
 and kindly disposition made him popular with the 
 Fellows, all the more so, perhaps, if his conscience 
 was less exacting than that of the highly-strung, anxious 
 North. In 1699 he returned, as Dean of Durham, to 
 the scene of his earlier duties, and lived to see the 
 fortunes of the College under Bentley. He died in Lon- 
 don, in 1728. There was a double disadvantage for 
 Bentley in coming after such a man ; the personal con- 
 trast was marked ; and those tendencies which North 
 strove to repress had not suffered, under Mountague,
 
 95 BENTLEY. [CHAP. 
 
 from any interference which exceeded the limits of good 
 breeding. 
 
 In the fore-front of the difficulties which met Bentley 
 Dr Monk puts the fact that he 'had no previous con- 
 nection with the College which he was sent to govern; he 
 was himself educated in another and a rival society.' 
 Now, without questioning that there were murmurs on 
 this score, I think that we shall overrate the influence 
 of such a consideration if we fail to observe what the 
 precedents had been up to that date. Bentley was the 
 twentieth Master since 1546. Of his nineteen predeces- 
 sors, only five had been educated at Trinity College. To 
 take the four immediately preceding cases, Barrow and 
 Mountague had been of Trinity, but Pearson had been 
 of King's, and North of Jesus. Since Bentley's time 
 every Master has been of Trinity. But it cannot be 
 said that any established usage then existed of which 
 Bentley's appointment was a breach. And young though 
 he was for such a post, thirty-eight, he was not young 
 beyond recent example. Pearson, when appointed, had 
 been forty; Barrow, forty-three; North, thirty-three; and 
 Mountague, only twenty-eight. Thus the choice was not 
 decidedly exceptional in either of the two points which 
 might make it appear so now. But the task which, at 
 that moment, awaited a Master of Trinity was one which 
 demanded a rare union of qualities. How would Bentley 
 succeed 1 A few readers of the Dissertation on Phalaris, 
 that mock despot of Agrigentum, might tremble a little, 
 perhaps, at the thought that the scholarly author appeared 
 to have a robust sense of what a real tyrant should be, 
 and a cordial contempt for all shams in the part. It 
 was natural, however, to look with hope to his mental 
 grasp and vigour, his energy, his penetration, his genuine 
 love of learning.
 
 CHAPTER VII. 
 
 BENTLEY AS MASTER OP TRINITY. 
 
 WHEN Bentley entered on his new office, he was in 
 one of those positions where a great deal may depend 011 
 the impression made at starting. He did not begin very 
 happily. One of his first acts was to demand part of a 
 College dividend due by usage to his predecessor, Dr 
 Mountague, who closed the discussion by waiving his 
 claim. Then the Master's Lodge required repairs, and the 
 Seniority (the eight Senior Fellows) had voted a sum for 
 that purpose, but the works were executed in a manner 
 which ultimately cost about four times the amount. 
 It is easy to imagine the comments and comparisons 
 to which such things would give rise in a society not, 
 perhaps, too favourably prepossessed towards their new 
 chief. But Bentley's first year at Trinity is marked by 
 at least one event altogether fortunate, his marriage. 
 At Bishop Stillingfleet's house he had met Miss Joanna 
 Bernard, daughter of Sir John Bernard, of Brampton, 
 Huntingdonshire. 'Being now raised to a station of 
 dignity and consequence, he succeeded in obtaining the 
 object of his affections,' says Dr Monk who refuses to 
 believe a story that the engagement was nearly broken off 
 owing to a doubt expressed by Bentley with regard 
 J. B. 11
 
 98 BENTLEY. [CHAP. 
 
 to the authority of the Book of Daniel. Whiston has 
 told us what this alleged doubt was. Nebuchadnezzar's 
 golden image is described as sixty cubits high and six 
 cubits broad ; now, said Bentley, this is out of all pro. 
 portion ; it ought to have been ten cubits broad at least ; 
 'Which made the good lady weep.' The lovers' difference 
 was possibly arranged on the basis suggested by Whiston, 
 that the sixty cubits included the pedestal. Some 
 letters which passed between Dr Bentley and Miss 
 Bernard, before their marriage, are still extant, and have 
 been printed by Dr Luard at the end of Rud's Diary, 
 In the Library of Trinity College is preserved a small 
 printed and interleaved 'Ephemeris' for the year 1701. 
 The blank page opposite the month of January has the 
 following entries in Bentley's hand : 
 
 Jan. 4. I maried Mrs Johanna Bernard, daughter of S r 
 John Bernard, Baronet. D r Richardson, Fellow of Eaton 
 College and Master of Peterhouse, maried us at Windsor in y 
 College Chapel. 
 
 6. I brought my wife to S' James's, [i.e. to his Lodgings, 
 as King's Librarian, in the Palace.] 
 
 27. I am 39 years old, complete. 
 
 28. I returnd to ye College. 
 
 It was a thoroughly happy marriage, through forty 
 years of union. What years they were, too, outside of the 
 home in which Mrs Bentley's gentle presence dwelt ! In 
 days when evil tongues were busy, no word is said of her 
 but in praise ; and perhaps, if all were known, few women 
 ever went through more in trying, like Mrs Thrale, to 
 be civil for two. 
 
 Bentley was Vice-Chancellor of Cambridge at the 
 time of his marriage. His year of office brought him into 
 collision with the gaieties of that great East England
 
 vn.] BENTLEY AS MASTER OF TRINITY. 99 
 
 carnival, Sturbridge Fair. Its entertainments were under 
 the joint control of the University and the Town, but, 
 without licence from the Vice-Chancellor, some actors 
 had been announced to play in September, 1701. Bentley 
 interposed his veto, and provided for discipline by 
 investing sixty-two Masters of Arts with the powers of 
 Proctors. One of his last acts as Vice-Chancellor was to 
 draw up an address which the University presented to 
 King William, expressing 'detestation of the indignity' 
 which Louis XIV. had just offered to the English Crown 
 by recognising the claims of the Pretender. 
 
 The term of his University magistracy having expired, 
 Bentley was able to bestow undivided attention on 
 Trinity College. An important reform was among his 
 earliest measures. Fellowships and Scholarships were at 
 that time awarded by a merely oral examination. 
 Written papers were now introduced ; the competition 
 for Scholarships became annual instead of biennial, and 
 freshmen were admitted to it. The permanent value of 
 this change is not affected by the estimate which may be 
 formed of Bentley's personal conduct in College elections. 
 There are instances in which it was represented as 
 arbitrary and unfair. But we must remember that his 
 behaviour was closely watched by numerous enemies, who 
 eagerly pressed every point which could be plausibly 
 urged against him. The few detailed accounts which we 
 have of the elections give the impression that, in those 
 cases at least, the merits of candidates were fairly con- 
 sidered. Thus John Byrom says (1709): 'We were 
 examined by the Master, Vice Master, and Dr Smith, one 
 of the Seniors. On Wednesday we made theme for Dr 
 Bentley, and on Thursday the Master and Seniors met in 
 the Chapel for the election [to scholarships.] Dr Smith 
 
 n2
 
 100 BENTLEY. [CHAP.- 
 
 had the gout and was not there. They stayed consulting 
 about an hour and a half, and then the Master wrote the 
 names of the elect and gave them to the Chapel Clerk.' 
 Whether he was or was not always blameless on such 
 occasions, Bentley deserves to be remembered as the 
 Master who instituted a better machinery for testing 
 merit, and provided better guarantees for its recognition. 
 To do him justice, no man could have been more 
 earnest than Bentley was in desiring to maintain the 
 prestige of Trinity College, or more fully sensible of the 
 rank due to it in science and letters. It was through 
 Bentley's influence that the newly-founded Plumian 
 Professorship of Astronomy was conferred on Roger 
 Cotes then only a Bachelor of Arts who was provided 
 with an observatory in the rooms over the Great Gate of 
 Trinity College (1706). Ten years later, when this man 
 of wonderful promise died at the age of thirty-four, 
 Newton said 'Had Cotes lived, we should have known 
 something.' The appointment of Cotes may be regarded 
 as marking the formal establishment of a Newtonian 
 school in Cambridge ; and it was of happy omen that it 
 should have been first lodged within the walls which had 
 sheltered the labours of the founder. Three English 
 Sovereigns visited the College in the course of Bentley's 
 Mastership, but the most interesting fact connected with 
 any of these occasions is the public recognition of 
 Newton's scientific eminence in 1705, when he received 
 knighthood from Queen Anne at Trinity Lodge. Then 
 it was Bentley who fitted up a chemical laboratory in 
 Trinity College for Vigani, a native of Verona, who, 
 after lecturing in Cambridge for some years, was 
 appointed Professor of Chemistry in 1702. It was 
 Bentley who made Trinity College the home of the
 
 vii.] EEXTLEY AS MASTER OF TRINITY. 101 
 
 eminent oriental scholar Sike, of Bremen, whom he 
 helped to obtain the Regius Chair of Hebrew in 1703. 
 Briefly, wherever real science needed protection or 
 encouragement, there, in Bentley's view, was the oppor- 
 tunity of Trinity College ; it was to be indeed a house of 
 the sciences and 'of all kinds of good letters'; it was to 
 be not only a great College, but, in its own measure, a 
 true University. 
 
 This noble conception represents the good side of 
 Bentley's Mastership ; he did something towards making 
 it a reality; he did more still towards creating, or re- 
 animating, a tradition that this is what Trinity College 
 was meant to be, and that nothing lower than this is the 
 character at which it should aim. Nor is it without 
 significance that Nevile's care for the external embellish- 
 ment of the College was resumed by Bentley. The 
 Chapel, begun in 1557 and finished in Elizabeth's reign, 
 was through Bentley's efforts entirely refitted, and 
 furnished with a fine organ by Bernard Smith. This 
 work was completed in 1727. The grounds beyond the 
 river, acquired by Nevile, were first laid out by Bentley ; 
 and the noble avenue of limes, planted in 1674 on the 
 west side of the Cam, was continued in 1717 from the 
 bridge to the College. 
 
 But unfortunately it was his resolve to be absolute, 
 and he proclaimed it in a manner which was altogether 
 his own. The College Bursar (a Fellow) having protested 
 against the lavish outlay on the repairs of the Master's 
 Lodge, Bentley said that he would 'send him into the 
 country to feed his turkeys.' When the Fellows opposed 
 him in the same matter, he alluded to his power, under 
 the Statutes, of forbidding them to leave the College, 
 and cried, 'Plave you forgotten my rusty sword 1 ?' The
 
 102 BENTLET. [CHAP. 
 
 Fellow who held the office of Junior Bursar had de- 
 murred to paying for a hen-house which had been put 
 in the Master's yard ; Bentley, doubtless in allusion 
 to Lafontaine's fable of 'the Old Lion,' replied, 'I will 
 not be kicked by an ass,' and presently strained his 
 prerogative by stopping the Junior Bursar's commons. 
 Remonstrances being made, he grimly rejoined, "Tis all 
 but lusus jocusque (mere child's-play) ; I am not warm 
 yet.' Criticising a financial arrangement which was 
 perfectly legitimate, but of which he disapproved, he 
 accused the Seniors of 'robbing the Library,' and 'putting 
 the money in their own pockets.' He harassed the 
 society by a number of petty regulations, in which we 
 may give him credit for having aimed at a tonic effect, 
 but which were so timed and executed as to be highly 
 vexatious. Thus, in order to force the Fellows to take the 
 higher degrees, he procured the decision, after a struggle, 
 that any Bachelor or Doctor of Divinity should have a 
 right to College rooms or a College living before a Master 
 of Arts, even though the latter was senior on the list of 
 Fellows. As a measure of retrenchment, he abolished 
 the entertainment of guests by the College at the great 
 festivals. Taking the dead letter of the statutes in its 
 rigour, he decreed that the College Lecturers should be 
 fined if they omitted to perform certain daily exercises 
 in the hall, which were no longer needful or valuable ; he 
 also enforced, in regard to the thirty junior Fellows, petty 
 fines for absence from chapel (which were continued 
 to recent times). On several occasions he took into his 
 own hands a jurisdiction which belonged to him only 
 jointly with the eight Seniors. Thus, in one instance, he 
 expelled two Fellows of the College by his sole fiat. 
 
 If Bentley is to be credited with the excellence of
 
 vn.] BENTLEY AS MASTER OF TEINITY. 103 
 
 the intentions which declared themselves in such a 
 form, recognition is certainly due to the forbearance 
 shown by the Fellows of Trinity. Bentley afterwards 
 sought to represent them as worthless men who resented 
 his endeavours to reform them. It cannot be too 
 distinctly said that this was totally unjust. The Fellows, 
 as a body, were liable to no such charges as Bentley in 
 his anger brought against them ; not a few of them were 
 eminent in the University ; and if there were any whoso 
 lives would not bear scrutiny, they were at most two or 
 three, usually non-resident, and always without influence. 
 It may safely be said that no large society of that time, 
 in either University, would have sustained an inspection 
 with more satisfactory results. The average College 
 Fellow of that period was a moderately accomplished 
 clergyman, whose desire was to repose in decent 
 comfort on a small freehold. Bentley swooped on 
 a large house of such persons, not ideal students, yet, 
 on the whole, decidedly favourable specimens of their 
 kind; he made their lives a burden to them, and then 
 denounced them as the refuse of humanity when they 
 dared to lift their heads against his insolent assumption 
 of absolute power. They bore it as long as flesh and blood 
 could. For nearly eight years they endured. At last, in 
 December, 1709, things came to a crisis, almost by an 
 accident. 
 
 Bentley had brought forward a proposal for re- 
 distributing the divisible income of the College according 
 to a scheme of his own, one feature of which was that 
 the Master should receive a dividend considerably in 
 excess of his legitimate claims. Even Bentley's authority 
 failed to obtain the acquiescence of the Seniors in this 
 novel interpretation of the maxim, divide et impera.
 
 104 BENTLEY. [CHAP. 
 
 They declined to sanction the scheme. While the 
 discussion was pending, Edmund Miller, a lay Fellow, 
 came up to spend the Christmas vacation at Trinity. As 
 an able barrister, who understood College business, he 
 was just such an ally as the Fellows needed. He found 
 them, he says, 'looking like so many prisoners, which 
 were uncertain whether to expect military execution, or 
 the favour of decimation.' At a meeting of the Master 
 and Seniors, it was agreed to hear Miller, as a represen- 
 tative of the junior Fellows, on the dividend question. 
 Miller denounced the plan to Bentley's face, who replied 
 by threatening to deprive him of his Fellowship. A few 
 days later, an open rupture took place between the 
 Seniors and Bentley, who left the room exclaiming, 
 'Henceforward, farewell peace to Trinity College.' 
 Miller now drew up a declaration, which was signed by 
 twenty-four resident Fellows, including the Seniors. It 
 expressed a desire that Bentley's conduct should be re- 
 presented 'to those who are the proper judges thereof, and 
 in such manner as counsel shall advise.' Bentley, against 
 the unanimous vote of the Seniors, and on a technical 
 quibble of his own, now declared Miller's Fellowship void. 
 Miller appealed to the Vice-Master, who, supported 
 by all the Seniors, replaced him on the list. The Master 
 again struck out his name. Miller now left for London. 
 Bentley soon followed. Both sides were resolved on 
 war. 
 
 Who were 'the proper judges ' of Bentley's conduct? 
 The 46th chapter of Edward YL's Statutes for Trinity 
 College recognised the Bishop of Ely as General Visitor. 
 The Elizabethan Statutes omit this, but in their 40th 
 chapter, which provides for the removal of the Master in 
 case of necessity, incidentally speak of the Bishop as
 
 vii.] BENTLEY AS MASTEK OF TEINITY. 105 
 
 Visitor. Bentley, six years before (1703), had himself 
 appealed to the Bishop of Ely on a point touching the 
 Master's prerogative. No other precedent existed. Act- 
 ing on this, the Fellows, in February, 1710, laid their 
 ' humble petition and complaint' before the Bishop of 
 Ely. They brought, in general terms, a charge of mal- 
 versation against Bentley, and promised to submit 'the 
 several particulars' within a convenient time. Bentley 
 now published a 'Letter to the Bishop of Ely,' in which 
 he made a most gross attack on the collective character 
 of the Fellows, describing their Petition as 'the last 
 struggle and effort of vice and idleness against vertue, 
 learning, and good discipline.' In July, the Fellows pre- 
 sented 'the several particulars' to the Bishop, in the 
 form of an accusation comprising fifty-four counts. The 
 Statute prescribed that an accused Master should be 'ex- 
 amined ' before the Visitor. Hence each of the counts is 
 interrogative. For example : 
 
 ' 221 j)g have you for many Years last past, wasted the College 
 Bread, Ale, Beer, Coals, Wood, Turfe, Sedge, Charcoal, Linnen, 
 Pewter, Corn, Flower, Brawn, and Bran ? &c.' 
 
 ' Klfjcn by false and base Practices, as by threatning to 
 bring Letters from Court, Visitations, and the like ; and at 
 other times, by boasting of your great Interest and Acquaint- 
 ance, and that you were the Genius of the Age, and what 
 great things you would do for the College in general, and for 
 every Member of it in particular, and promising that you 
 would for the future live peaceably with them, and never 
 make any farther Demands, you had prevailed with the Senior 
 Fellows to allow you several hundred Pounds for your Lodge, 
 more than they first intended or agreed for, to the great Dis- 
 satisfaction of the College, and the wonder of the whole Uni- 
 versity, and all that heard of it : 28 &g did you the very next 
 Year, about that time, merely for your own Vanity, require
 
 106 BENTLEY. [CHAP. 
 
 them to build you a new Stair-case in your Lodge ? & 
 they (considering how much you had extorted from them 
 before, which you had never accounted for) did for good reason 
 deny to do it ; 22JI)j| did you of your own Head pull down a 
 good Stair-case in your Lodge, and give Orders and Directions 
 for building a new one, and that too fine for common Use ?' 
 
 '22lf)g did you use scurrilous Words and Language to 
 several of the Fellows, particularly by calling Mr Eden an 
 Ass, and Mr Rashly the College Dog, and by telling Mr Cock 
 he would die in his Shoes ?' 
 
 Dr Moore, the learned Bishop of Ely, was one of the 
 six Commissioners who had nominated Bentley for the 
 Mastership; he sympathised with his studies; and Bentley 
 had been Archdeacon of the diocese since 1701. The 
 judge, then, could hardly be suspected of any bias against 
 the accused. He sent a copy of the accusation to Bentley, 
 who ignored it for some months. In November the 
 Bishop wrote again, requiring a reply by December 18. 
 Bentley then petitioned the Queen, praying that the 
 Bishop of Ely might be restrained from usurping the 
 functions of Visitor. The Visitor of Trinity College, 
 Bentley contended, was the Sovereign. Mr Secretary 
 St John at once referred Bentley's contention to the Law 
 Officers of the Crown, and meanwhile the Bishop was in- 
 hibited from proceeding. This was at the end of 1710. 
 
 Bentley's move was part of a calculation. In 1710 
 the Tories had come in under Harley and St John. Mrs 
 Bentley was related to St John, and also to Mr Masham, 
 whose wife had succeeded the Duchess of Marlborough 
 in the Queen's favour. Bentley reckoned on command- 
 ing sufficient influence to override the Bishop's jurisdic- 
 tion by a direct interposition of the Crown. He was 
 disappointed. The Attorney General and the Solicitor 
 General reported that, in their opinion, the Bishop of Ely
 
 vii.] BENTLEY AS MASTER OF TRINITY. 107 
 
 was Visitor of Trinity College in matters concerning the 
 Master; adding that Bentley could, if he pleased, try 
 the question in a court of law. This was not what 
 Bentley desired. He now wrote to the Prime Minister, 
 Harley, who had recently escaped assassination, and, 
 with the office of Lord High Treasurer, had been created 
 Earl of Oxford. Bentley's letter is dated July 12, 1711. 
 'I desire nothing more,' he writes, ' than that her Majesty 
 would send down commissioners to examine into all 
 matters upon the place,... and to punish where the faults 
 shall be found... I am easy under everything but loss of 
 time by detainment here in town, which hinders me 
 from putting my last hand to my edition of Horace, and 
 from doing myself the honour to inscribe it to your 
 Lordship's great name.' The Premier did his best. Ho 
 referred the report of the Attorney and Solicitor to the 
 Lord Keeper, Sir Simon Harcourt, and Queen's Counsel. 
 In January, 1712, they expressed their opinion that the 
 Sovereign is the General Visitor of Trinity College, but 
 that the Bishop of Ely is Special Visitor in the case of 
 charges brought against the Master. The Minister now 
 tried persuasion with the Fellows. Could they not con- 
 cur with the Master in referring their grievances to the 
 Crown 1 The Fellows declined. A year passed. Bentley 
 tried to starve out the College by refusing to issue a 
 dividend. In vain. The Ministry were threatened with 
 a revision, in the Queen's Bench, of their veto on the 
 Bishop. They did not like this prospect. On April 18, 
 1713, Bolingbroke, as Secretary of State, authorised the 
 Bishop of Ely to proceed. 
 
 Bentley's ingenuity was not yet exhausted. He pro- 
 posed that the trial should be held forthwith at Cambridge, 
 where all the College books were ready to hand. Had
 
 138 BENTLEY. [CHAP. 
 
 this been done, he must certainly have been acquitted, 
 since the prosecutors had not yet worked up their case. 
 Some of the Fellows unwarily consented. But the 
 Bishop appointed Ely House in London as the place of 
 trial, and the month of November, 1713, as the time. 
 Various- causes of delay intervened. At last, in May, 
 1714, the trial came on in the great hall of Ely House. 
 Five counsel, including Miller, were employed for the 
 Fellows, and three for Bentley. Bishop Moore had two 
 eminent lawyers as his assessors, Lord Cowper, an ex- 
 chancellor, and Dr Newton. Public feeling was at first 
 with Bentley, as a distinguished scholar and divine. 
 But the prosecutors had a strong case. An anecdote of 
 the trial is given by Bentley's grandson, Cumberland. 
 One day the Bishop intimated, from his place as judge, 
 that he condemned the Master's conduct. For once, 
 Bentley's iron nerve failed him. He fainted in court. 
 
 After lasting six weeks, the trial ended about the 
 middle of June. Both sides now awaited with intense 
 anxiety the judgment of the Bishop and his assessors. 
 The prosecutors were confident. But week after week 
 elapsed in silence. The Bishop had caught a chill during 
 the sittings. On July 31, he died. The next day, 
 August 1, 1714, London was thrilled by momentous news. 
 Queen Anne was no more. The British Crown had 
 passed to the House of Hanover. Ministers had fallen ; 
 new men were coming to power; the political world 
 was wild with excitement; and the griefs of Trinity 
 College would have to wait. 
 
 Bentley's escape had been narrow. After Bishop 
 Moore's death, the judgment which he had prepared, but 
 not pronounced, was found among his papers. ' By 
 this our definitive sentence, we remove Richard Bentley
 
 vn.] BENTLEY AS MASTER OF TRINITY. 109 
 
 from his office of Master of the College.' Dr Monk 
 thinks that the Bishop had meant this merely to frighten 
 Bentley into a compromise with the Fellows. Possibly : 
 though in that case the Bishop would have had to reckon 
 with the other side. But in any case Bentley must have 
 accepted the Bishop's terms, and these must have been 
 such as would have satisfied the prosecutors. If not 
 ejected, therefore, he would still have been defeated. As 
 it was, he got off scot-free. 
 
 The new Bishop of Ely, Dr Fleetwood, took a different 
 line from his predecessor. The Crown lawyers had held 
 that the Bishop was Special Visitor, but not General 
 Visitor. Dr Fleetwood said that, if he interfered at all, 
 it must be as General Visitor, to do justice on all alike. 
 This scared some of the weaker Fellows into making 
 peace with Bentley, who kindly consented to drop his 
 dividend scheme. In one sense the new Bishop's course 
 was greatly to Bentley's advantage, since it raised the 
 preliminary question over again. Miller vainly tried 
 to move Dr Fleetwood. Meanwhile Bentley was acting 
 as autocrat of the College, dealing with its property and 
 its patronage as he pleased. His conduct led to a fresh 
 effort for redress. 
 
 The lead on this occasion was taken by Dr Colbatch, 
 now a Senior Fellow. From the beginning of the feuds, 
 Colbatch had been a counsellor of moderation, disap- 
 proving much in the stronger measures advocated by 
 Miller. He was an able and accomplished man, whose 
 rigid maintenance of his own principles extorted respect 
 even where it did not command sympathy. Colbatch's 
 early manhood had been expended on performing the 
 duties of private tutor in two families of distinction, 
 and he had returned to College at forty, more convinced
 
 110 BENTLET. [CHAP. 
 
 than ever that it is a mistake to put trust in princes. 
 He was a dangerous enemy because he seemed incapable 
 of revenge ; . it was always on high grounds that he 
 desired the confusion of the wieked ; and he pursued that 
 object with the temperate implacability which belongs to 
 a disappointed man of the world. Since the Bishop of 
 Ely would not act unless as General Visitor, Colbatch 
 drew up a petition, which nineteen Fellows signed, 
 praying that it might be ascertained who was General 
 Visitor. This was encouraged by the Archbishop of 
 Canterbury, Dr Wake, -who described Bentley as ' the 
 greatest instance of human frailty that I know of, as 
 with such good parts and so much learning he can be 
 so insupportable.' The object of the petition was baulked 
 for the time by the delays of the Attorney General, 
 After three years the petition came before the Privy 
 Council in May, 1719. 
 
 Bentley was equal to the occasion. Serjeant Miller had 
 presented the petition, and could withdraw it. For five 
 years Bentley had been making active war on Miller, and 
 renewing the attempt to eject him from his Fellowship. 
 Now, towards the end of 1719, he made peace with him, 
 on singular terms. Miller was to withdraw the petition ; to 
 resign his Fellowship, in consideration of certain payments; 
 and to receive the sum of 400 as costs on account of the 
 former prosecution before Bishop Moore. Miller agreed, 
 Bentley then proposed the compact to the Seniors. Five 
 of the eight would have nothing to say to it. By a 
 series of manoeuvres, however, Bentley carried it at a 
 subsequent meeting. Serjeant Miller received 528 from 
 the College. Who shall describe the feelings of the 
 belligerent Fellows, when the Serjeant's strategy collapsed 
 in this miserable Sedan ? It was he who had made them
 
 vn.] BENTLEY AS MASTER OF TEINITY. Ill 
 
 go to war; it was he who had led them through the 
 mazes of the law; they had caught his clear accents, 
 learned his great language ; and here was the end of it ! 
 But this was not all. If the College is to pay costs on 
 one side, the Master argued, it must pay them on both. 
 Accordingly, Bentley himself received 500 for his own 
 costs in the trial. And, anxious to make hay in this 
 gleam of sunshine, he further prevailed on the Seniors 
 to grant a handsome sum for certain furniture of the 
 Master's Lodge. Bentley had 110 more to fear, at 
 present, from the opposition of an organised party. For 
 the next few years his encounters were single combats. 
 
 Such was the state of affairs in Trinity College. 
 Meanwhile Bentley's relations with the University had 
 come to an extraordinary pass. From the first days of 
 his Mastership, his reputation, his ability and energy had 
 made him influential in Cambridge, though he was not 
 generally popular. We saw that, before his appointment 
 to Trinity, he had taken a leading part in the reparation 
 of the University Press. He continued to show an active 
 interest in its management by serving on occasional 
 committees ; no permanent Press Syndicate was consti- 
 tuted till 1737. Politics were keen at the University in 
 Bentley's time : a division in the academic Senate was 
 often a direct trial of strength between Whig and Tory. 
 When Bentley struck a blow in these University battles, 
 it was almost always with a view to some advantage in. 
 his own College war. Two instances will illustrate this. 
 In June, 1712, when acting as Deputy Vice-Chancellor, 
 Bentley carried in the Senate an address to Queen Anne, 
 congratulating her on the progress of the peace negotia- 
 tions at Utrecht. The address was meant as a manifesto 
 in support of the Tory Ministry, whom the Whigs had
 
 112 BENTLEY. [CHAP. 
 
 just been attacking on this score in the Lords. At that 
 time, Harley, the Tory Premier, was the protector on 
 whom Bentley relied in his College troubles. The 
 irritation of the Whig party in the University may have 
 been one cause of a severe reflection passed on Bentley 
 soon afterwards. The Senate resolved that no Arch- 
 deacon of Ely should thenceforth be eligible as Vice- 
 Chancellor; a decree which, however, was rescinded two 
 years later. Then in 1716 Bentley sorely needed the 
 countenance of the Whig Government against the revived 
 hostilities in Trinity. By a surprise, he carried through 
 the Senate an address to George I. , congratulating him on 
 the recent suppression of the Jacobite risings. A letter 
 of Bentley's describes the Cambridge Tories as being ' in 
 a desperate rage,' not wholly, perhaps, without provo- 
 cation. 
 
 It was shortly before this, in the early days of 
 the Jacobite rebellion, when visions of a Roman. Catholic 
 reign were agitating the public imagination, that 
 Bentley preached before the University, on the fifth of 
 November, 1715, his 'Sermon on Popery,' from which 
 a passage on the tortures of the Inquisition has been 
 transferred by Sterne to the pages of Tristram Shandy, 
 and deeply moves Corporal Trim. Bentley had then 
 lately received the unusual honour of being publicly 
 thanked by the Senate for his reply to ' A Discourse of 
 Free-Thinking ' by Anthony Collins. When the Regius 
 Professorship of Divinity the most valuable in the 
 University fell vacant in 1717, few persons, perhaps, 
 would have questioned Dr Bentley's claims on the 
 grounds of ability and learning. But the Statute had 
 declared that the Professor must not hold any other 
 office in the University or in Trinity College. Two
 
 vii.] BENTLEY AS MASTEE OF TRINITY. 113 
 
 precedents were alleged to show that a Master of Trinity 
 might hold the Professorship, but they were not unex- 
 ceptionable. Of the seven electors, three certainly 
 presumably five were against the Master of Trinity's 
 pretensions. The favourite candidate was Dr Ashton, 
 Master of Jesus ; and there are letters to him which 
 show the strong feeling in the University against his 
 rival. On the whole, most men would have despaired. 
 Not so Bentley. By raising a legal point, he contrived 
 to stave off the election for a few weeks; and then 
 seized a propitious moment. The VicerChancellor was 
 one of the seven electors. It was arranged that Mr Grigg, 
 who held that office, should leave Cambridge for a few 
 days, naming Bentley Deputy Vice-Chancellor. On the 
 day of election, the Master of Trinity was chosen Regius 
 Professor of Divinity by four out of seven votes, one 
 of the four being that of the Deputy Vice-Chancellor. 
 It was in this Candidature that Dr Bentley delivered 
 an admired discourse on the three heavenly witnesses, 
 which denied the authenticity of that text. It is no 
 longer extant, but had been seen by Porson, who himself 
 wrote on the subject. 
 
 This was in May, 1717. Not long afterwards Bentley 
 had occasion to appear publicly in his new character of 
 Regius Professor. Early in October, George I. was 
 staying at Newmarket. On Friday, the 4th, his Majesty 
 consented to visit Cambridge on the following Sunday. 
 There was not much time for preparation, but it was 
 arranged to confer the degree of Doctor of Laws on 
 twenty-seven of the royal retinue, and that of Doctor of 
 Divinity on thirty-two members of the University. 
 On Sunday morning Mr Grigg, the Vice-Chancellor, 
 presented himself at Trinity Lodge, there to await the 
 J. B. I
 
 114 BENTLEY. [CHAP. 
 
 arrival of the Chancellor, 'the proud Duke of Somerset.' 
 Bentley was unprepared for this honour ; he was ' in his 
 morning gown,' busied with meditations of hospitality or 
 of eloquence; in fact, he remonstrated; but Mr Grigg 
 remained. At last the Chancellor came. Bentley was 
 affable, but a little distrait. 'While he entertained the 
 Duke in discourse,' (says one who was present,) 'there 
 stood the Earl of Thomond and Bishop of Norwich, 
 unregarded : and there they might have stood, if one of 
 the Beadles had not touched his sleeve a little ; and then 
 he vouchsafed them a welcome also.' But worse was to 
 come. George I. attended service at King's College 
 Chapel. When it was over, the Yice-Chancellor pro- 
 ceeded to conduct his Majesty back to Trinity College. 
 But Mr Grigg was desirous that royal eyes should behold 
 his own College, Clare Hall, and therefore chose a route 
 which led to a closed gate of Trinity College. Here a 
 halt of some minutes took place in a muddy lane, before 
 word could reach the principal entrance, where Bentley 
 and an enthusiastic crowd were awaiting their Sovereign. 
 These little griefs, however, were nothing to the later 
 troubles which this day's proceedings begat for Bentley. 
 As it was thought that thirty-two new Doctors of 
 Divinity might be too much for the King, Sunday's 
 ceremonial had been limited to presenting a few of them 
 as samples. Bentley, as Regius Professor of Divinity, 
 had done his part admirably. But the next day, when 
 the rest of the doctors were to be ' created ' at leisure, 
 Bentley flatly refused to proceed, unless each of them 
 paid him a fee of four guineas, in addition to the cus- 
 tomary broad -piece. As the degrees were honorary, the 
 claim was sheer extortion. Some complied, others 
 resisted. Conyers Middleton, the biographer of Cicero,
 
 vxi.] BENTLEY AS MASTER OF TBIXITT. 115 
 
 was at this time a resident in Cambridge, though no 
 longer a Fellow of any College. He paid his four guineas, 
 got his D.D. degree, and then sued Bentley for the debt in 
 the Vice-Chancellor's Court, a tribunal of academic juris- 
 diction in such matters. After months of fruitless 
 diplomacy, the Yice-Chancellor reluctantly issued a 
 decree for Bentley's arrest at Middleton's suit. The writ 
 was served on Bentley at Trinity Lodge, not, however, 
 before one of the Esquire Bedells had been treated with 
 indignity. Bail was given for Bentley's appearance 
 before the Court on October 3, 1718. He failed to appear. 
 The Court then declared that he was suspended from all 
 his degrees. A fortnight later, a Grace was offered to 
 the Senate, proposing that Bentley's degrees should be 
 not merely suspended but taken away. Bentley's friends 
 did their utmost. To the honour of the Fellows of 
 Trinity, only four of them voted against him. But the 
 Grace was carried by more than two to one. Nine 
 Heads of Colleges and twenty-three Doctors supported it. 
 When the Master of Trinity learned that he was no 
 longer Richard Bentley, D.D., M.A., or even B.A., but 
 simply Richard Bentley, he said, 'I have rubbed 
 through many a worse business than this.' He instantly 
 bestirred himself with his old vigour, petitioning the 
 Crown, appealing to powerful friends, and dealing some 
 hard knocks in the free fight of pamphlets which broke out 
 on the question. For nearly six years, however, he remain- 
 ed under the sentence of degradation. During that period 
 he brought actions of libel against his two principal ad- 
 versaries, Colbatch, and Conyers Middleton. Colbatch 
 suffered a week's imprisonment and a fine. Middleton 
 was twice prosecuted ; the first time, he had to apologise 
 to Bentley, and pay costs ; the second time he was fined. 
 
 I 2
 
 116 BENTLEY. [CHAP. 
 
 During the years 1720 1723 Bentley had altogether 
 six law-suits in the Court of King's Bench, and gained all 
 of them. The last and most important was against the 
 University, for having taken away his degrees. That 
 act had undoubtedly been illegal. The four judges all 
 took Bentley's part. On February 7, 1724, the Court 
 gave judgment. The University received peremptory 
 direction to restore Bentley's degrees. That command 
 was obeyed, but with a significant circumstance. On 
 March 25, 1724, the Yice-Chancellor was to lay the first 
 stone of the new buildings designed for King's College. 
 In order that Bentley might not participate as a Doctor 
 in the ceremonial, the Grace restoring his degrees was 
 offered to the Senate on March 26. 
 
 Thus, after fifteen years of almost incessant strife, 
 the Master of Trinity had prevailed over opposition both 
 in the College and in the University. He was sixty-two. 
 His fame as a scholar was unrivalled. As a contro- 
 versialist he had proved himself a match, in different 
 fields, for wits, heretics, and lawyers. At Cambridge, 
 where he was now the virtual leader of the Whig party 
 in the Senate, his influence had become pre-eminent. 
 And as if to show that he had passed through all his 
 troubles without stain, it was in this year, 1724, that 
 the Duke of Newcastle wrote and offered him the 
 Bishopric of Bristol, then rather a poor one. Bentley 
 declined it, frankly observing that the revenues of the 
 see would scarcely enable him to attend Parliament. 
 When he was asked what preferment he would accept, 
 'Such,' he answered, 'as would not induce me to desire 
 an exchange.' 
 
 The remainder of this combative life, it might have 
 been thought, would now be peaceful. But the last
 
 TIL] BENTLEY AS MASTEB OF TEINITY. 117 
 
 chapter is the most curious of all. It can be briefly 
 told. Dr Colbatch, the ablest of Bentley's adversaries 
 in Trinity College, had never resigned the purpose of 
 bringing the Master to justice. It had become the 
 object for which he lived : private wrongs had sunk into 
 his mind ; but he believed himself to be fulfilling a public 
 duty. In 1726 he vainly endeavoured to procure in- 
 tervention by the Dean and Chapter of Westminster, on 
 the ground of certain grievances suffered by the West- 
 minster scholars at Trinity College. In 1728 he was 
 more successful. Some Fellows of Trinity joined him in 
 a fresh attempt to obtain a visitation of the College by 
 the Bishop of Ely. There was, in fact, good reason for 
 it. Bentley's rule had become practically absolute, and 
 therefore unconstitutional. While Colbatch's new allies 
 were preparing their measures, death nearly saved them 
 the trouble. George II. had visited Cambridge, and 
 had been received in full state at Trinity College. 
 Bentley, who was subject to severe colds, had caught 
 a chill during the ceremonies of the reception, in the 
 course of which he had been called on to present no 
 fewer than fifty-eight Doctors of Divinity. He was 
 seized with fever. For some days his life was in most 
 imminent danger. But he rallied, and, after taking 
 the waters at Bath, recovered. Five Counsel having 
 expressed an opinion that the Bishop of Ely was General 
 Visitor of the College, Dr Greene, who now held that 
 see, cited Bentley to appear before him. Bentley did 
 so; but presently obtained a rule from the Court of 
 King's Bench, staying the Bishop's proceedings on the 
 ground that the articles of accusation included matters 
 not cognizable by the Bishop. The question of the 
 Bishop's jurisdiction was next brought before the King's
 
 118 BENTLEY. [CHAP. 
 
 Bench. The Court decided that the Bishop was in this 
 cause Visitor, but again stayed his proceedings this 
 time on the ground of a technical informality. The 
 prosecutors now appealed to the House of Lords. The 
 House of Lords reversed the decision of the King's 
 Bench, and empowered the Bishop to try Bentley on 
 twenty of the sixty-four counts which had been pre- 
 ferred. 
 
 After the lapse of nearly twenty years, Bentley was 
 once more arraigned at Ely House. This second trial 
 began on June 13, 1733. On April 27, 1734, the 
 Bishop gave judgment. Bentley was found guilty of 
 dilapidating the College goods and violating the College 
 Statutes. He was sentenced to be deprived of the 
 Mastership. 
 
 At last the long chase was over and the prey had 
 been run to earth. No shifts or doublings could save 
 him now. It only remained to execute the sentence. 
 The Bishop sent down to Cambridge three copies of his 
 judgment. One was for Bentley. Another was to 
 be posted on the gates of Trinity College. A third 
 was to be placed in the hands of the Vice-Master. 
 
 The fortieth Statute of Elizabeth, on which the judg- 
 ment rested, prescribes that the Master, if convicted by 
 the Visitor, shall be deprived by the agency of the Vice- 
 Master. It has been thought and Monk adopts the 
 view that the word Vice-Master here is a mere clerical 
 error for Visitor. The tenor of the Statute itself first led 
 me to doubt this plausible theory. For it begins by saying 
 that a peccant Master shall first be admonished by the 
 Vice-Master and Seniors: per Vice Magistrum etc...ad- 
 moneatur. If obdurate, he is then to be examined by the 
 Visitor ; and, if convicted, per eundem Vice- Magistrum
 
 vii.] BENTLEY AS MASTER OF TRINITY. 119 
 
 Officio Magistri privetur. This seems to mean : ' let 
 him be deprived by the same Vice-Master who had 
 first admonished him.' The Statute intended to provide 
 for the execution of the sentence by the College it- 
 self, without the scandal of any external intervention 
 beyond the purely judicial interposition of the Visitor. 
 I have since learned that the late Francis Martin, 
 formerly Vice-Master, discussed this point in a short 
 paper (Nov. 12, 1857), which Dr Luard's kindness has 
 enabled me to see. Dr Monk had seen a copy of the 
 statutes in which Visitatorem was written as a correction 
 over Vice-Magistrum. He believed this copy to be the 
 original one : and when in 1846 Martin showed him the 
 really authentic copy with Elizabeth's signature and 
 the Great Seal in the Muniment-room, he at once said, 
 'I never saw that book.' There the words stand clearly 
 Vice-Magrm, as in the statutes of Philip and Mary : 
 there is no correction, superscript or marginal : and the 
 vellum shows that there has been no erasure. The Vice- 
 Master, who takes the chief part in admitting the Master 
 (Stat. Cap. 2), is the natural minister of deprivation. 
 Bentley's Counsel advised the Vice-Master, Dr Hacket, 
 to refrain from acting until he had taken legal opinion. 
 Meanwhile Bentley continued to act as Master, to the 
 indignation of his adversaries, and the astonishment of the 
 world. An examination for College scholarships was going 
 on just then. On such occasions in former years Bentley 
 had often set the candidates to write on some theme 
 suggestive of his own position. Thus, at the height of his 
 monarchy, he gave them, from Virgil, 'No one of this 
 number sJiallgo away without a gift from me': and once, at 
 a pinch in his wars, from Homer, ' Despoil others, but keep 
 hands off Hector.' This time he had a very apposite text for
 
 120 BENTLEY. [CHAP. 
 
 the young composers, from Terence : ' This is your plea 
 now, that I luzve been turned out : look you, there are ups 
 and downs in all things' Dr Hacket, however, had no 
 mind to stand long in the breach; and on May 17, 1734, 
 he resigned the Vice-Mastership. He was succeeded by 
 Dr Richard Walker, a friend on whom Bentley could 
 rely. During the next four years, every resource which 
 ingenuity could suggest was- employed to force Dr 
 Walker into executing the sentence of deprivation on 
 Bentley. A petition was presented by Colbatch's party 
 to the House of Lords, which the peers, after a debate, 
 permitted to be withdrawn. Dr Walker now effected a 
 compromise between Bentley and some of the hostile 
 Fellows. But Colbatch persevered. Three different 
 motions were made in the Court of Kong's Bench ; first, 
 for a writ to compel Dr Walker to act ; next, for a writ 
 to compel the Bishop of Ely to compel Dr Walker to 
 act ; then, for a writ to compel the Bishop to do his own 
 duty as General Visitor. All in vain. On April 22, 
 1738, the Court rejected the last of these applications. 
 
 That day marks the end of the strife begun in Feb- 
 ruary, 1710 : it had thus lasted a year longer than the 
 Peloponnesian War. It has two main chapters. The 
 first is the fourteen years 1 struggle from 1710 to 1724, 
 in which Miller was the leader down to his withdrawal 
 in 1719. The years 1725 1727 were a pause. Then 
 the ten years' struggle, from 1728 to 1738, was organised 
 and maintained by Colbatch. Meanwhile many of the 
 persons concerned were advanced in age. Three weeks 
 after the King's Bench had refused the third mandamus, 
 Bishop Greene died at the age of eighty. Dr Colbatch 
 was seventy-five. Bentley himself was seventy-seven. 
 If he had wanted another classical theme for the candi-
 
 vii.] BENTLEY AS MASTER OF TRINITY. 121 
 
 dates in the scholarship examination, he might have 
 given them 'One man by his delay Jutth restored our 
 fortunes' He was under sentence of deprivation, but 
 only one person could statutably deprive him ; that 
 person declined to move ; and no one could make him 
 move. Bentley therefore remained master of the field 
 and of the College. 
 
 We remember the incorrigible old gentleman in the 
 play, whose habit of litigation was so strong that, 
 when precluded from further attendance on the public 
 law-courts, he got up a little law-court at home, and 
 prosecuted his dog. Bentley's occupation with the 
 King's Bench ceased in April, 1738. In July he 
 proceeded against Dr Colbatch at Cambridge in the 
 Consistorial Court of the Bishop of Ely, for the re- 
 covery of certain payments called 'proxies,' alleged to be 
 due from Colbatch, as Rector of Orwell, to Bentley, as 
 Archdeacon of the diocese. The process lasted eighteen 
 months, at the end of which Dr Colbatch had to pay six 
 years' arrears and costs. 
 
 Looking back on Bentley's long war with the Fellows, 
 one asks, Who was most to blame? De Quincey approves 
 Dr Parr's opinion, expressed long after Bentley's 
 death, that the College was wrong, and Bentley right. 
 But De Quincey goes further. Even granting that 
 Bentley was wrong, De Quincey says, we ought to vote 
 him right, 'for by this means the current of one's 
 sympathy with an illustrious man is cleared of ugly 
 obstructions.' It is good to be in sympathy with an 
 illustrious man, but it is better still to be just. 
 The merits of the controversy between Bentley and 
 the Fellows have two aspects, legal and moral. The 
 legal question is simple. Had Bentley, as Master,
 
 122 BENTLEY. [CHAP. 
 
 brought himself within the meaning of the fortieth 
 Elizabethan Statute, and deserved the penalty of de- 
 privation ? Certainly he had. It was so found on 
 two distinct occasions, twenty years apart, after a 
 prolonged investigation by lawyers. Morally, the first 
 question is : Was Bentley obliged to break the Sta- 
 tutes in order to keep some higher law? He certainly 
 was not. It cannot be shown that the Statutes 
 were in conflict with any project which he entertained 
 for the good of the College ; and, if they had been so, 
 the proper course for him was not to violate them, but 
 to move constitutionally for their alteration. A further 
 moral question concerns the nature of his personal 
 conduct towards the Fellows. This conduct might 
 conceivably have been so disinterested and considerate 
 as to give him some equitable claim on their forbearance, 
 though they might feel bound to resist the course which 
 he pursued. His conduct was, in fact, of an opposite 
 character. On a broad view of the whole matter, from 
 1710 to 1738, the result is this. Legally, the College had 
 been right, and Bentley wrong. Morally, there had 
 been faults on both parts; but it was Bentley's intol- 
 erable behaviour which first, and after long forbearance, 
 forced the Fellows into an active defence of the common 
 interests. The words 'Farewell peace to Trinity College' 
 were pronounced by Bentley. It is not a relevant plea 
 that his academic ideal was higher than that of the men 
 whose rights he attacked. 
 
 The College necessarily suffered for a time from 
 these long years of domestic strife which had become a 
 public scandal. Almost any other society, perhaps, 
 would have been permanently injured. But Trinity 
 College had the strength of unique traditions, deeply
 
 TIL] BENTLEY AS MASTER OF TRINITY. 123 
 
 rooted in the history of the country ; and the excellent 
 spirit shown by its best men, in the time which 
 immediately followed Bentley's, soon dispelled the cloud. 
 When the grave had closed over those feuds, the good 
 which Bentley had done lived in better tests of merit, 
 and in the traditional association of the College with the 
 encouragement of rising sciences. 
 
 Now we must turn to an altogether different side 
 which, throughout these stormy years, is presented by 
 the activity of this extraordinary man.
 
 CHAPTER VIII. 
 
 LITERARY WORK AFTER 1700. HORACE. 
 
 FROM the beginning of 1700 to the summer of 1702 
 Bentley was constantly occupied with University or 
 College affairs. On August 2, 1702, he writes to 
 Graevius at Utrecht : ' You must know that for the last 
 two years I have hardly had two days free for literature.' 
 This was perhaps the longest decisive interruption of 
 literary work in his whole life. Nearly all his subsequent 
 writings were finished in haste, and many of them were 
 so timed as to appear at moments when he had a special 
 reason for wishing to enlist sympathy. But his studies, 
 as distinguished from his acts of composition, appear to 
 have been seldom broken off for more than short spaces, 
 even when he was most harassed by external troubles. 
 His wonderful nerve and will enabled him to concentrate 
 his spare hours on his own reading, at times when other 
 men would have been able to think of nothing but threat- 
 ened ruin. 
 
 His early years at Trinity College offer several in- 
 stances of his generous readiness to help and encourage 
 other scholars. One of these was Ludolph Kiister, a, 
 young "VVestphalian then living at Cambridge, whom 
 Bentley assisted with an edition of the Greek lexico-
 
 CHAP, vin.] LITERARY WORK AFTER 1700. 125 
 
 grapher Suidas, and afterwards with an edition of 
 Aristophanes. Another was a young Dutchman, destined 
 to celebrity, Tiberius Hemsterhuys. Bentley had sent 
 him a kindly criticism on an edition of Julius Pollux, 
 pointing out certain defects of metrical knowledge. The 
 effect on Hemsterhuys has been described by his famous 
 pupil, David Ruhnken. At first he was plunged in 
 despair: then ho roused himself to intense effort. To 
 his dying day he revered Bentley, and would hear 
 nothing against him. The story recalls that of F. Jacobs, 
 the editor of the Greek Anthology, who was spurred into 
 closer study of metre by the censures of Godfrey 
 Hermann. In 1709 John Davies, Fellow of Queens' 
 College, Cambridge, published an edition of Cicero's 
 ' Tusculan Disputations,' with an appendix of critical 
 notes by Bentley. The notes were disparaged in a 
 review called the BibliotJieque Choisie by the Swiss John 
 Le Clerc, then leader of the Arminians in Holland; 
 a versatile but shallow man, who had touched the surface 
 of philosophy, and was now ambitious of figuring on the 
 surface of classical literature. Some months later Lo 
 Clerc edited the fragments of the Greek comic poets, 
 Meiiander and Philemon. Nettled by the review, Bentley 
 wrote his own emendations on 323 of these fragments. 
 He restored them metrically, showing that Le Clerc had 
 mixed them with words from the prose texts in which 
 they occur, and had then cut the compound into lengths 
 of twelve syllables, regardless of scansion. Bentley's 
 manuscript, under the name of ' Phileleutherus Lipsiensis,' 
 was transmitted to a scholar at Utrecht, Peter Burmann, 
 who willingly used the permission to publish it The 
 first edition was sold in three weeks. Le Clerc learned 
 who ' Phileleutherus ' was, and wrote a violent letter to
 
 126 BENTLEY. [CHAP. 
 
 Bentley. Bentley made a caustic reply. He has been 
 charged with denying the authorship. He does not do 
 so : but he shows a mischievous pleasure in puzzling his 
 furious correspondent. 
 
 As early as 1702 Bentley had been meditating an 
 edition of Horace. I translate from his Latin preface 
 his own account of the motive. 
 
 ' When, a few years ago [i. e. in 1700] I was promoted 
 to a station in which official duties and harassing cares, 
 daily surging about me, had distracted me from all deeper 
 studies, I resolved in order that I might not wholly 
 forget the Muses and my old loves to set about editing 
 some writer of the pleasanter sort, comparatively light in 
 style and matter, such as would make in me, rather than 
 claim from me, a calm and untroubled mind ; a work that 
 could be done bit by bit at odd hours, and would brook 
 a thousand interruptions without serious loss. My 
 choice was HORACE ; not because I deemed that I could 
 restore and correct more things in him than in almost 
 any other Latin or Greek author ; but because he, above 
 all the ancients thanks to his merit, or to a peculiar 
 genius and gift for pleasing was familiar to men's 
 hands and hearts. The form and scope of my work I 
 defined and limited thus ; that I should touch only 
 those things which concern the soundness and purity of 
 the text ; but should wholly pass by the mass of those 
 things which relate to history and ancient manners, 
 that vast domain and laboratory of comment.' 
 
 Bentley began printing his Horace, with his own emen- 
 dations embodied in the text and the common readings 
 given at the foot of the page, before he had written the 
 critical notes which were to justify these changes. In 
 August, 1706, he says : 'I have printed three new
 
 viii.] LITEKAEY WOEK AFTEK 1700. 127 
 
 sheets in it this last fortnight, and I hope shall go on to 
 finish by next spring.' Sinister auguries were already 
 heard in certain quarters. 'I do not wonder,' he writes 
 to a friend, 'that some... do talk so wildly about nay 
 Horace... I am assured none of them will write against 
 my notes. They have had enough of me, and will here- 
 after let me alone.' The rumour of Bentley's new 
 labours inspired his old enemy, Dr King, with a satire 
 called 'Horace in Trinity College.' Horace is supposed to 
 have fulfilled his dream of visiting our remote island 
 (visam Britannos), but to have lost the airy form in 
 which he proposed to make that excursion, under the 
 influence of solid cheer supplied to him from the butteries 
 of Trinity College. 
 
 Instead of appearing in the spring of 1707, Bentley's 
 Horace was not ready till December 8, 1711. The 
 summer months were the only part of the year in which 
 he could do much ; and from his preface it would appear 
 that between 1702 and 1 7 1 1 there had been four summers 
 in which he made no progress. The notes on the text 
 fill 448 quarto pages of small print, in double column, 
 at the end of the volume. It is characteristic of Bentley 
 that a great part of these notes were written in about 
 five months July to November, 1711. He says himself 
 that his work was thrown off 'in the first impetus and 
 glow ' of his thoughts, and sent to the press almost before 
 the ink was dry. It was rather his way to brag of this ; 
 but it must be literally true, to a great extent, of the 
 notes. He had his own reasons for haste, and worked 
 at high pressure. The Horace was to be an offering 
 to Harley, who just then was the umpire of Bentley's 
 fortunes. In the dedication to the Tory Premier, Bentley 
 openly announces himself as a converted Whig, by saying
 
 128 BENTLEY. [CHAP. 
 
 that Maecenas did not like Horace the less for having 
 borne arms with Brutus and Cassius ; not a very happy 
 allusion, when one remembers that the poet ran away at 
 Philippi. 
 
 Bentley's Horace is a monumental proof of his 
 ingenuity, learning, and argumentative skill. The notes 
 abound in hints on grammar and metre which have 
 a general value. In reading them one feels, too, the 
 'impetus and glow' of which their author speaks : one 
 feels almost everywhere the powerful genius of the man. 
 But while the Horace shows Bentley's critical method on 
 a large scale and in a most striking form, it illustrates 
 his defects as conspicuously as his strength. Bentley 
 had first displayed his skill by restoring deeply corrupted 
 passages of Greek writers, especially poets. Heroic 
 remedies were required there. With his wide reading, 
 unrivalled metrical knowledge, and keen insight, Bentley 
 had been able to make some restorations which seemed 
 little of short miraculous. Hopeless nonsense, under 
 his touch, became lucid and coherent. The applause 
 which followed these efforts exalted his confidence in his 
 own gift of divination. His mind was confirmed in a bent 
 which kept him constantly on the look-out for possible im- 
 provements of word or phrase in everything that he read. 
 
 Now, Horace was one of the most perilous subjects 
 that Bentley could have chosen. Not so much because 
 the text of Horace, as we have it, is particularly 
 pure. There are many places in which corruption is 
 certain, and conjecture is the only resource. But, owing 
 to his peculiar cast of mind and style, Horace is one 
 of the very last authors whose text- should be touched 
 without absolute necessity. In the Satires and Epistles 
 bis language is coloured by two main influences, subtly
 
 vni.] LITEEAEY WOBK AFTER 1700. HOEACE. 129 
 
 interfused, each of which is very difficult, often impossible, 
 for a modern reader to seize. One is the colloquial idiom 
 of Roman society. The other is literary association, 
 derived from sources, old Italian or Greek, which in many 
 cases are lost. In the Odes, the second of these two 
 influences is naturally predominant; and in them the 
 danger of tampering is more obvious, though perhaps 
 not really greater, than in the Satires or Epistles. Now, 
 Bentley's tendency was to try Horace by the tests of 
 clear syntax, strict logic, and normal usage. He was bent 
 on making Horace 'sound' in a sense less fine, but even 
 more rigorous, than that in which Pope is 'correct.' 
 
 Thus, in the 'Art of Poetry,' Horace is speaking of a 
 critic : ' If you told him, after two or three vain attempts, 
 that you could not do better, he would bid you erase 
 your work, and put your ill-turned verses on the anvil 
 again ' (et male tornatos incudi redder e versus). ' Ill-turned ' 
 'anvil' ! said Bentley : 'what has a lathe to do with an 
 anvil ?' And so, for male tornatos, he writes male 
 ter natos, 'thrice shaped amiss.' Horace elsewhere speaks 
 of verses as incultis.. .et male natis. To Bentley's reading, 
 however, it may be objected that the order of words 
 required by the sense is ter male natos : for male ter natos 
 ought to mean, either 'unhappily thrice-born.' like the 
 soul of a Pythagorean, unfortunate in two migrations ; 
 or 'barely thrice-born' as if, in some process which 
 required three refinements, the third was scarcely 
 completed. And then, if we are not satisfied with the 
 simplest account of tornatos viz., that Horace lapsed 
 into a mixture of common metaphors it admits of a 
 strict defence. The verses have been put on the lathe, 
 but have not been successfully rounded and polished. 
 Then, says' Horace's critic, they must go back to the 
 
 J. B. K
 
 130 BENTLEY. [CHAP. 
 
 anvil, and be forged anew, passing again through that first 
 process by which the rough material is brought into shape 
 for the lathe. Yet Bentley was so sure of his ter natos that 
 persons who doubted it seemed no better than ' moles.' 
 
 Another instance will illustrate the danger of altering 
 touches in Horace which may have been suggested by 
 some lost literary source. In the Odes (in. iv. 45) 
 Horace speaks of Jupiter as ruling 'cities and troubled 
 realms, and gods, and tlie multitudes of men' (urbes... 
 mortalisque turbas). 'Tell me, pray,' cries Bentley, 
 'what is the sense of 'cities' and 'the multitudes 
 of men' ? This is silly mere tautology.' And so he 
 changes urbes, 'cities,' into umbras, 'the shades' of the 
 departed. Now, as Munro has pointed out, Horace 
 may have had in mind a passage in the EpicJiarmus, 
 a philosophical poem by Ennius, of which a few lines 
 remain : where it is said of Jupiter, 'mortalis atque urbes 
 beluasque omnes iuvat.' One or two of Bentley 's 
 corrections are not only admirable but almost certain 
 (as musto Falerno for misto in the Satires II. iv. 19). A 
 few more have reason wholly on their side, and yet are 
 not intrinsically probable. Thus in the Epistles (i. vii. 29) 
 we have the fable of the fox, who, when lean, crept 
 through a chink into a granary, and there grew too fat 
 to get out again. 'To the rescue,' exclaims Bentley, 
 'ye sportsmen, rustics, and naturalists ! A fox eating 
 grain ! ' And so Bentley changes the fox into a field- 
 mouse (volpecula into nitedula). But the old fabulist 
 from whom Horace got the story, meaning to show how 
 cunning greed may overreach itself, had chosen the 
 animal which is the type of cunning, without thinking of 
 the points on which Bentley dwells, the structure of its 
 teeth and its digestive organs.
 
 viii.] LITEEAEY WORK AFTER 1700. HOEACE. 131 
 
 Bentley has made altogether between 700 and 800 
 changes in the text of Horace : in his preface, he recalls 
 19 of these, but adds a new one (rectis oculis for siccis in 
 Odes I. iii. 18 : which convinced Porson). His paramount 
 guide, he declares, has been his own faculty of divination. 
 To this, he says, he has owed more corrections, and correc- 
 tions of greater certainty, than to the manuscripts, in 
 using which, however, where he does use them, he nearly 
 always shows the greatest tact. Now, criticism of a text 
 has only one proper object to exhibit what the author 
 wrote. It is a different thing to show what he might 
 have written. Bentley's passion for the exercise of his 
 divining faculty hindered him from keeping this simple 
 fact clearly before his mind. In the 'Art of Poetry' (60) 
 Horace has : Ut silvae foliis pronos mutantur in annos : 
 'As woods suffer change of leaves with each declining 
 year.' Nothing could be less open to suspicion, foliis 
 being an ordinary ablative of the part affected (like 
 capti auribus et oculis for 'deaf and blind'). Yet Bentley 
 must needs change this good line into one which is 
 bad both in style and in metre : Ut silvis folia privos 
 mutantur in annos, 'as woods have their leaves changed 
 with each year' ; and this he prints in his text. Speak- 
 ing of Bentley's readings in the mass, one may say that 
 Horace would probably have liked two or three of them, 
 would have allowed a very few more as not much better 
 or worse than his own, and would have rejected the 
 immense majority with a smile or a shudder. 
 
 On the other hand, there is a larger sense in which 
 Bentley's Horace is a model of conservative prudence. 
 Recent German criticism has inclined to the view that 
 Horace's works are interpolated not only with spurious 
 passages but with whole spurious poems. Thus Mr O. 
 
 K 2
 
 132 BENTLEY. [CHAP. 
 
 F. Gruppe actually rejects the whole of the beautiful ode, 
 Tyrrhena regum progenies (in. xxix.). Another critic, 
 Mr Hofmann-Peerlkamp, regrets that Bentley's haste 
 blinded him to many interpolations. Haupt, Meineke, 
 Ritschl have favoured the same tendency. The prevail- 
 ing view of English scholarship is that the solitary 
 interpolation in our Horace consists of the eight lines 
 (Lucili, quam sis mendosus <kc.) prefixed to Satire I. 10, 
 and probably as old, or nearly so, as the poem itself. 
 Bentley's suspicions are confined to a few single lines 
 here and there. But there is only one line in all Horace 
 which he positively condemns. It is mainly a point 
 of literary criticism, and is a curious example of his 
 method. I give it in Latin and English (Odes iv. 
 viii. 15) : 
 
 Non celeres fugae 
 
 Reiectaeque retrorsum Hannibalis minae, 
 
 Non incendia Carthaginis impute 
 
 Eius qui domita nomen ab Africa 
 
 Lucratus rediit clarius indicant 
 
 Laudes, quam Calabrae Pierides... 
 Not the swift flight 
 
 And menace backward hurled of Hannibal, 
 
 Not impious Carthage sinking into fire 
 
 So well gives forth his praises, who returned 
 
 With title won from conquered Africa, 
 
 As ye, Calabria's Muses... 
 
 Now, says Bentley, the Scipio (Africanus maior) 
 who defeated Hannibal in the Second Punic War is a 
 different person from the Scipio (Africanus minor) 
 who burned Carthage more than half a century later. 
 How can it be said that the defeat of Hannibal glorifies 
 the destroyer of Carthage ? And so Bentley would leave 
 out the burning of Carthage, and make the whole passage
 
 vin.] LITEEAEY WOEK AFTER 1700.- HORACE. 133 
 
 refer to the conqueror of Hannibal. The answer seems 
 plain. Horace means : ' The glory of the Scipios never 
 reached a higher pinnacle than that on which it was placed 
 by the Calabrian poet Ennius, when he described the de- 
 feat of Hannibal by the elder Africanus ; though that 
 achievement was crowned by the younger Africanus, 
 when he finally destroyed Carthage.' The 'praises' of 
 the younger Africanus are not exclusively his personal 
 exploits, but the glories, both ancestral and personal, 
 of his name. Then Bentley objects to the caesura in 
 Non incendia Carth\aginis impiae. But what of the 
 undoubtedly genuine verse, Dum flagrantla de\torquet 
 ad oscula (Odes n. xii. 25)? 'The preposition de,' he 
 replies, ' is, as it were, separated from the verb torquet, 
 not being a native part of that word.' This might 
 seem a bold plea ; but it shows his knowledge. In old 
 Latin inscriptions the preposition and the rest of the 
 word are often disjoined, for instance, IN VICTO could 
 stand for INVICTO : and Bentley's principle would apply 
 to Horace's Arcanique fides prodiga perllucidior vitro 
 (Odes I. xviii, 16). If, however, Carthaginis has not 
 the privilege of a compound, it may have that of a 
 proper name. The presence of a proper name has been 
 urged in excuse of Mentemque lympJuit\am Mareotico 
 (Od. I. xxxvii. 14), Spectandus in cert[amine Martio 
 (Od. iv. xiv. 17). Bentley does not notice this ground 
 of defence. Finally, he rejects ' Non incendia Cartha- 
 ginis impiae' as a verse of 'manifestly monkish spirit 
 and colour.' 
 
 Bentley was the first modern editor who followed the 
 best ancient authorities in calling the Odes Carmiiia and 
 not Odae, the Satires Sermones and not Satirae. In his 
 preface he endeavours to settle the chronological order of
 
 134 BENTLEY. [CHAP. 
 
 Horace's writings. Previous Horatian critics as Faber, 
 Dacier, Masson had aimed at dating separate poems. 
 Bentley maintains rightly, no doubt that the poems 
 were originally published, as we have them, in whole 
 books. He further assumes with much less probability 
 that Horace composed in. only one style at a time, first 
 writing satires ; then iambics (the ' Epodes ') ; then the 
 Odes, of which book iv. and the Carmen Saeculare 
 came between the two books of Epistles. Bentley's 
 method is too rigid. He argues from the internal 
 evidence too much as if a poet's works were the successive 
 numbers of a newspaper. Yet here, too, though some 
 of his particular views are arbitrary or wrong, he laid 
 down the main lines of a true scheme. 
 
 Bentley's Horace immediately brought out half-a- 
 dozen squibs, none of them good, and one or two more 
 serious attacks. John Ker, a schoolmaster, assailed 
 Bentley's Latinity in four Letters (1713); and some 
 years later the same ground was taken by Richard 
 Johnson who had been a contemporary of Bentley's at 
 Cambridge, and was now master of Nottingham School 
 in his Aristarchus Anti-Bentleianus (1717). The fact is 
 that Bentley wrote Latin as he wrote English, with 
 racy vigour, and with a wealth of trenchant phrases; 
 but he was not minutely Ciceronian. The two critics 
 were able to pick some holes. One of Bentley's 
 slips was amusing ; he promises the readers of his 
 Horace that they will find purity of idiom in his 
 Latin notes, and calls it sermonis puritatem which 
 happens not to be pure Latin. In 1721 a rival Horace 
 was published by Alexander Cunningham, a Scottish 
 scholar of great learning and industry. His emendations 
 are sometimes execrable, but often most ingenious. His
 
 vni.] LITEEAEY WORK AFTER 1700,-HORACE. 135 
 
 work is marred, however, by a mean spite against Bentley, 
 whom he constantly tries to represent as a plagiarist or 
 a blunderer, and who ignored him. 
 
 The first edition of Bentley 's Horace (1711) went off 
 rapidly, and a second was required in 1712. This was 
 published by the eminent firm of Wetstein at Amster- 
 dam. Paper and printing were cheaper there an im- 
 portant point when the book was to reach all scholars. 
 Thomas Bentley, the nephew, brought out a smaller 
 edition of the work in 1713, dedicating it with logical 
 propriety to Harley's son. The line in the Dunciad 
 (u. 205), ' Bentley his mouth with classic flatt'ry opes,' 
 is fixed by Warburton on Thomas Bentley, ' a small 
 critic, who aped his uncle in a little Horace.' Among 
 other compliments, Bentley received one or two which he 
 could scarcely have anticipated. Le Clerc, whom he had 
 just been lashing so unmercifully, wrote a review in the 
 JBibliotheque Choisie which was at once generous and 
 judicious. Bentley also received a graceful note from 
 Atterbury, now Dean of Christ Church. ' I am indebt- 
 ed to you, Sir,' says the Dean, ' for the great pleasure 
 and instruction I have received from that excellent per- 
 formance ; though at y e same time I cannot but own to 
 you the uneasyness I felt when I found how many things' 
 in Horace there were, which, after thirty years' acquaint- 
 ance with him, I did not understand.' There is much 
 of Horace in that.
 
 CHAPTER IX. 
 
 OTHER CLASSICAL STUDIES. TERENCE. 
 M ANIL I US. HOMER. 
 
 ONE of Bentley's few intimate friends in the second 
 half of his life was Dr Richard Mead, an eminent 
 physician, and in other ways also a remarkable man. 
 After graduating at the University of Padua, which, 
 as Cambridge men will remember, had been the second 
 alma mater of Dr John Caius, Dr Mead began practice 
 at Stepney in 1696. He rose rapidly to the front 
 rank of his profession, in which he stood from about 
 1720 to his death in 1754. Dibdin describes him with 
 quaint enthusiasm. 'His house was the general re- 
 ceptacle of men of genius and talent, and of everything 
 beautiful, precious or rare. His curiosities, whether 
 books, or coins, or pictures, were laid open to the public; 
 and the enterprising student and experienced antiquary 
 alike found amusement and a courteous reception. He 
 was known to all foreigners of intellectual distinction, and 
 corresponded both with the artisan and the potentate.' 
 
 In 1721 Bentley being in London at the time 
 Mead gave him a copy of a Greek inscription just 
 published by the accomplished antiquary, Edmund 
 Chishull, who had been chaplain to the English Factory
 
 CHAP, ix.] OTHER CLASSICAL STUDIES. 137 
 
 at Smyrna. A marble slab, about 8 feet 7 inches high 
 and 18 inches broad, had been found in the Troad. It 
 is now in the British Museum. This slab had supported 
 the bust of a person who had presented some pieces of 
 plate to the citizens of Sigeum; on the upper part, an 
 inscription in Ionic Greek records the gifts ; lower down, 
 nearly the same words are repeated in Attic Greek, with 
 the addition, ' Aesopus and his brothers made me.' 
 Beiitley dashed off a letter to Mead ; there had been no 
 bust at all, he said ; the two inscriptions on the slab were 
 merely copied from two of the pieces of plate ; the artists 
 named were the silversmiths. He was mistaken. The 
 true solution is clearly that which has since been given 
 by Kirchhoff. The Ionic inscription was first carved by 
 order of the donor, a native of the Ionic Proconnesus : 
 the lower inscription was added at Sigeum, where 
 settlers had introduced the Attic dialect, on its being 
 found that the upper inscription could not easily be read 
 from beneath : Aesopus and his brothers were the stone- 
 cutters. Yet Bentley's letter incidentally throws a flash 
 of light 011 a point not belonging to its main subject. 
 A colossal statue of Apollo had been dedicated in Delos 
 by the islanders of Naxos. On the base are these 
 words : OFYTOAIQOEMIANAPIASKAITOSSEAAS. Bentley read 
 this (rJoFvrov [ TCXUTOV] XtOov ftp.', avSpias KCU TO a<j!>e'Aas, 
 an iambic trimeter (with hiatus) : 'I am of the same 
 stone, statue and pedestal.' 
 
 After this instance of rashness, it is right to record 
 a striking success. In 1728 Chishull published an in- 
 scription from copies made by the travellers Spon and 
 Wheeler. Bentley, in a private letter, suggested some 
 corrections ; but Chishull, who saw the criticisms with- 
 out knowing the author, demurred to some of "them,
 
 138 BENTLET. [CHAP. 
 
 thinking that the copies could not have been so in- 
 exact. Some years later the stone itself was brought 
 to England. It then appeared that the copies had been 
 wrong, and that Bentley's conjectural reading agreed in 
 every particular with the marble itself. That marble 
 is in the British Museum : it was found at the ancient 
 Chalcedon on the Bosporus, opposite Constantinople, and 
 had supported a statue of Zeus Ourios, i.e. 'Zeus the 
 giver of fair winds.' He had a famous temple in that 
 neighbourhood, at the mouth of the Black Sea, where 
 voyagers through the straits were wont to make their 
 vows. The inscription (3797 in the Corpus) consists of 
 four elegiac couplets, of which the style would justify 
 us in supposing that they were at least as old as the 
 age of Alexander : I translate them : 
 
 ZEUS, the sure guide who sends the favouring gale, 
 Claims a last vow before ye spread the sail : 
 If to the Azure Rocks your course ye urge, 
 Where in the strait Poseidon lifts the surge, 
 Or through the broad JSgean seek your home, 
 Here lay your gift and speed across the foam. 
 Behold the god, whose wafting breath divine 
 All mortals welcome : Philon raised the sign. 
 
 It was shortly before his death in 1742 that this 
 proof of his acuteness was given to the world (by John 
 Taylor), along with another. A Persian manuscript bore 
 the date ' Yonane (Ionian) 1504': Bentley showed that 
 this was reckoned from the foundation of the dynasty 
 of Seleucidae 'Ionian' being the general oriental name 
 for 'Hellene' and meant the year 1193 of our era. 
 
 In 1724 an edition of Terence was published by Dr 
 Francis Hare. Bentley had long meditated such a work. 
 He was never a jealous man. But he had a good deal of
 
 ix.] OTHER CLASSICAL STUDIES. TERENCE. 139 
 
 the feeling expressed by the verse, 'Shame to be mute 
 and let barbarians speak.' He put forth all his powers. 
 At the beginning of 1726 that is, some eighteen 
 months after the appearance of Hare's Terence 
 Bentley's came out. And it was not Terence only. 
 Hare had promised the Fables of Phaedrus, and Bentley 
 forestalled him by giving these in the same volume; 
 also the 'Sentences' (273 lines) of the so-called Publius 
 Syrus. 
 
 The Terence is one of Bentley's titles to fame. Any 
 attempt to criticise such an author's text demands a 
 knowledge of his metres. Bentley was the first modern, 
 who threw any clear light on the metrical system of 
 the Latin dramatists. Here, as in other cases, it is 
 essential to remember the point at which he took up 
 the work. Little or nothing of scientific value had 
 been done before him. The prevalent view had been 
 based on that of Priscian, who recognised in Terence 
 only two metres, the iambic and the trochaic, the metre 
 of which the basis is ^ , and that of which it is w. 
 Every verse was to be forced into one or other of these 
 moulds, by assuming all manner of 'licences' on the part 
 of the poet. Nay, Priscian says that in his time some 
 persons denied that there were any metres in Terence 
 at all ! (quosdam vel abnegare esse in Terentii comoediis 
 metro). In the preface to an edition of Terence which 
 appeared almost simultaneously with Bentley's, the 
 Dutch editor, Westerhof, alludes ironically to a hint in 
 Bentley's Horace (Sat. n. v. 79) that it was possible to 
 restore the Terentian metres; a sneer which it was 
 Westerhof's fate to expiate by compiling the index for 
 Bentley's second edition when it was published at 
 Amsterdam in 1727. The scholars of the sixteenth cen-
 
 140 BENTLEY. [CHAP. 
 
 tury who had treated the subject Glareanus, Erasmus, 
 Faernus had followed the 'licence' theory. Bentley's 
 object was to reclaim as much as possible from this 
 supposed realm of 'licence,' and enlarge the domain of 
 law. He points out, first, the variety of Terence's 
 metres, and illustrates each by an English verse. He 
 then defines certain metrical differences between Roman 
 Comedy, as in Terence, and Roman epic poetry, as in 
 Virgil. The characteristic of Bentley's views on Terentian 
 metre consisted in taking account of accent ('prosody' in 
 the proper sense), and not solely of quantity. To judge 
 from some of Bentley's emendations in poetry, his ear 
 for sound was not very fine ; but his ear for rhythm was 
 exact. Guided by this, he could see that the influence 
 of accent in Roman Comedy sometimes overruled the 
 epic and lyric canons of quantitative metre. In one 
 case, however, his attention to accent led him into an 
 erroneous refinement. In Latin, he says, no word of 
 two or more syllables is accented on the last syllable: 
 thus it is virum, not virum. Comic poets, he urges, 
 writing for popular audiences, had to guard as much as 
 possible against laying a metrical stress on these final 
 syllables which could not support an accent. In the 
 iambic trimeter they could not observe this rule every- 
 where. But Terence, said Bentley, always observes it in 
 the third foot. As an example, I may take this verse : 
 
 Ultro dd | me ven|it un|icam |l gnatam | suam : 
 where the rule, though broken in the 5th foot, is kept 
 in the 3rd. But Bentley seems not to have noticed 
 that this is a result of metre, not of accent : it is due to 
 the caesura. 
 
 Bentley corrected the text of Terence in about a 
 thousand places ('mille, opinor, locis,' he says), chiefly
 
 ix.] OTHER CLASSICAL STUDIES. TERENCE. 141 
 
 on metrical grounds. Yet in every scene of every play, 
 according to Ritschl, he left serious blemishes. That 
 only shows what was the state of the field in which 
 Bentley broke new ground. His work must not be 
 judged as if he propounded a complete metrical doctrine. 
 Rather he threw out a series of original remarks, right 
 in some points, wrong in others, pregnant in all. G. 
 Hermann and Ritschl necessarily speak of Bentley's 
 labours on Terence with mingled praise and censure ; 
 both, however, do full justice to the true instinct with 
 which he led the attack on the problem. Modern studies 
 in Latin metre and pronunciation have advanced the 
 questions treated by Bentley to a new stage ; but his 
 merit remains. He was the pioneer of metrical know- 
 ledge in its application to the Latin drama. 
 
 A word of mention is due to the very curious Latin 
 speech which Bentley has printed in his Terence after 
 the sketch of the metres. It was delivered by him on 
 July 6, 1725, when, as Regius Professor of Divinity, he 
 had occasion to present seven incepting doctors in that 
 faculty. He interprets the old symbols of the doctoral 
 degree, the cap, the book, the gold ring, the chair 
 ('believe those who have tried it no bench is so hard') ; 
 and congratulates the University on the beneficence of 
 George I. It has been wondered why Bentley inserted 
 this speech in his Terence. Surely the reason is evident. 
 He had recently been restored to those degrees which 
 had been taken from him by the Cambridge Senate in 
 1718. He seizes this opportunity of intimating to the 
 world that he is once more in full exercise of his functions 
 as Regius Professor of Divinity. 
 
 It was in his seventy-seventh year (1739) that 
 Bentley fulfilled a project of his youth by publishing an
 
 142 BENTLEY. [CHAP. 
 
 edition of Manilius. At the age of twenty-nine (1691) 
 he had been actively collecting materials, and had even 
 made some progress with the text. In 1727 we find that 
 this work, so long laid aside, stood first on the list of 
 promises to be redeemed : and in 1736 it was ready for 
 press. A proposal for publishing it was made to Bentley 
 by a London ' Society for the Encouragement of Learning,' 
 which aimed at protecting authors from booksellers. 
 Bentley declined. The Manilius was printed in 1739 by 
 Henry Woodfall. It is a beautiful quarto ; the frontis- 
 piece is Vertue's engraving of Thornhill's portrait of 
 Bentley, aetat. 48 (1710); a good engraving, though a 
 conventional benignity tames and spoils that peculiar 
 expression which is so striking in the picture at Trinity 
 College. 
 
 Manilius is the author of an epic poem in five books, 
 called Astronomical but popular astronomy is subordinate, 
 in his treatment, to astrology. Strangely enough, the 
 poet's age was so open a question with the scholars of 
 the seventeenth century that Gevarts actually identified 
 him with Theodorus Mallius, consul in 399 A.D., whom 
 Claudian panegyrises. The preface to Bentley's edition, 
 written by his nephew Richard, rightly assigns Manilius 
 to the age of Augustus, though without giving the inter- 
 nal proofs. These are plain. Book I. was finished after 
 the defeat of Varus (A. D. 9), and Book iv. before the 
 death of Augustus (A. D. 14). F. Jacob, in his edition of 
 the poet (rec. Berlin 1846), understands a verse in Book 
 V. (512) as referring to the restoration by Tiberius of 
 Pompey's Theatre, after it had been burnt down in 22 
 A. D. But, according to the marble of Ancyra, Augustus 
 also had repaired that theatre at a great cost, and took 
 credit for allowing the name of Pompey to remain in the
 
 ix.] OTHER CLASSICAL STUDIES. MANTLIUS. 143 
 
 dedicatory inscription, instead of replacing it by his own. 
 Clearly it is to this that the words of Manilius allude, 
 Hinc Pompeia manent veteris inonimenta triumphi, 
 implying a compliment not only to the munificence, but 
 to the magnanimity, of Augustus. There is no reason, 
 then, for doubting that the whole poem was composed, 
 or took its present shape, between A.D. 9 and A.D. 14. 
 The poet gives no clue to his own origin, but his style 
 has a strongly Greek tinge. 
 
 Scaliger pronounced him ' equal in sweetness to Ovid, 
 and superior in majesty ; ' a verdict which Bentley cites 
 with approval. To most readers it will be scarcely in- 
 telligible. Where Manilius deals with the technical 
 parts of astronomy, he displays, indeed, excellent in- 
 genuity; but, in the frequent passages where he imitates 
 Lucretius, the contrast between a poet and a rhetorician 
 is made only more glaring by an archaic diction. The 
 episode of Andromeda and Perseus, in his fifth book, and 
 a passage on human reason in the second, were once 
 greatly admired. To show him at his best, however, 
 I should rather take one of those places where he ex- 
 presses more simply a feeling of wonder and awe com- 
 mon to every age. ' Wherefore see we the stars arise in 
 their seasons, and move, as at a word spoken, on tlie 
 paths appointed for them ? Of whom there is none 
 that hastens, neither is there any that tarries behind. 
 Why are the summer nights beautiful with these, that 
 change not, and the nights of winter from of old ? These 
 things sire not the work of chance, but t/ie order of a God 
 most high.' 
 
 Bentley's treatment of the text sometimes exhibits 
 all his brilliancy : thus in Book v. 737 the received 
 text had
 
 144 BENTLEY. [CHAP. 
 
 Sic etiam magno quaedam respondere mundo 
 Haec Natura facit, quae cadi condidit orbem. 
 
 This respondere had even been quoted to show that 
 the poem was post-classical. The MSS. have not Haec, 
 but QUAM : not caeli but CAELO : and one good MS. has 
 MUNDO EST. Bentley restores : 
 
 Sic etiam in magno quaedam RESPUBLICA mundo est, 
 Quam Natura facit, quae caelo condidit URBEM. 
 
 ' So also in the great firmament there is a commonwealth, 
 wrought by Nature, who hath ordered a city in the 
 heavens.' Respondere arose from a contraction resp. 
 And urbem is made certain by the next verses, which 
 elaborate the comparison of the starry hierarchy to the 
 various ranks of civic life. But this, Bentley's last 
 published work, shows a tendency from which his earlier 
 criticism was comparatively free. Not content with 
 amending, he rejects very many verses as spurious. The 
 total number is no less than 170 out of 4220 lines which 
 the poem contains. In the vast majority of cases, the 
 ground of rejection is wholly and obviously inadequate. 
 As an example of his rashness here, we may take 
 one passage, which, I venture to think, he has not under- 
 stood. At the beginning of Book iv. Manilius is reciting 
 the glories of Rome. 
 
 Quid referam Cannas admotaque moenibus arnia ? 
 Varronemque fuga magnum (quod vivere possit 
 Postque tuos, Thrasimene, lacus) Fabiumque morando ? 
 Accepisse iugum victas Carthaginis arces? 
 
 'Why should I tell of Cannae, and of (Carthaginian) arms 
 carried to the walls of Rome 1 Why tell of Varro, great in his 
 flight, . . . and Fabius, in his delay ? Or how the conquered 
 towers of Carthage received our yoke ?' 
 
 Varro's ' flight ' is his escape from the field of Cannae,
 
 ix.] OTHER CLASSICAL STUDIES. MANILIUS. 145 
 
 after which he saved the remnant of the Roman army. 
 The words, quod vivere possit Postque tuos, Thrasimene, 
 locus, are untranslateable. Bentley seems to have under- 
 stood : ' in that he can live, and that, too, after the 
 battle at Lake Thrasimene : ' but, to say no more, que 
 forbids this. And then he rejects the whole line, 
 Accepisse arces. Why ? Because ' yokes ' are put on 
 peoples, not on ' towers ' ! Now the oldest manuscript 
 (Gemblacensis) has not vivere, but VINCERE : the MSS. 
 have not quod (a conjecture), but QUAM. They have 
 also MORANTEM (not morando\ VICTAE (not victas). I 
 should read : 
 
 Quid referam Cannas admotaque moenibus anna? 
 
 Varronemque fuga magnum, Fabiumque morantem ? 
 
 Postque tuos, Thrasimene, lacus QUOM VINCERE POSSET, 
 
 Accepisse iugum victae Carthaginis arces ? 
 ' and that, though after the fight by thy waters, Thrasimene, 
 she could hope to conquer, the towers of conquered Carthage 
 received our yoke.' 
 
 The words 'quom vincere posset' allude to the im- 
 minent peril of Rome after Hannibal's great victory at 
 Lake Thrasimene, when the fall of the city seemed in- 
 evitable if the conqueror should march upon it. (Cp. 
 Liv. xxn. 7 f.) 
 
 It remains to speak of another labour which Bentley 
 was not destined to complete, but which, even in its 
 comparatively slight relics, offers points of great interest 
 his Homer. 
 
 The first trace of Homeric criticism by Bentley 
 occurs in a letter which he wrote to his friend Davies, of 
 Queens' College, just after Joshua Barnes had published 
 his edition of the Iliad and Odyssey (1711). Barnes, 
 who was unreasonably offended with Bentley, refers in 
 
 J. B. L
 
 146 BENTLET. [CHAP. 
 
 his preface to a certain 'hostile person/ a very Zoilus. 
 ' If he mean me/ says Bentley, ' I have but dipped yet 
 into his notes, and yet I find everywhere just occasion of 
 censure.' Bentley then shows that Barnes had made an 
 arbitrary change in a line of the Iliad (avrdp for d\Xd in 
 XIV. 101), through not seeing that a reading which had 
 stood in all former editions, and which had puzzled the 
 Greek commentator Eustathius, was a mere blunder 
 (aTroTTTavtovcnv for a.iroTra.Trra.v(.ovcnv). In 1713 Bentley 
 published his ' Remarks ' on the ' Discourse of Free- 
 Thinking' by Anthony Collins. Collins had spoken 
 of the Iliad as 'the epitome of all arts and sciences/ 
 adding that Homer ' designed his poem for eternity, 
 to please and instruct mankind.' ' Take my word for 
 it/ says Bentley, 'poor Homer, in those circumstances 
 and early times, had never such aspiring thoughts. He 
 wrote a sequel of songs and rhapsodies, to be sung by 
 himself for small earnings and good cheer, at festivals 
 and other days of merriment ; the Ilias he made for the 
 men, and the Odysseis for the other sex. These loose 
 songs were not collected together in the form of an epic 
 poem till Pisistratus's time, above [2nd edition : 1st, 
 about] 500 years after.' There is some ambiguity in the 
 phrase, 'a sequel of songs and rhapsodies.' It seems 
 improbable that Bentley meant, ' a connected series.' 
 
 When Bentley wrote this, the origin of the Homeric 
 poems had not yet become a subject of modern contro- 
 versy. It would be unfair to press his casual utterance 
 as if it were a carefully defined statement. Yet it is 
 interesting to note the general outlines of the belief 
 which satisfied a mind so bold and so acute. He 
 supposes, then, that a poet named Homer lived about 
 1050 B. c. This poet 'wrote' (by which, perhaps, he
 
 rr.] OTHER CLASSICAL STUDIES. HOMER. 147 
 
 meant no more than 'composed') both the Iliad and 
 the Odyssey. But neither of them was given to the 
 world by Homer as a single epic. Each consisted 
 of many short lays, which Homer recited separately. 
 These lays circulated merely as detached pieces, until 
 they were collected about 550 B. C. into the two epics 
 which we possess. 
 
 Seventy-two years later F. A. Wolf published his 
 Prolegomena. The early epic poetry of Greece, Wolf 
 argues, was transmitted by oral recitation, not by 
 writing. But our Iliad and Odyssey could not have 
 been composed without writing. We must conclude, 
 then, that the Homeric poems were originally, in 
 Bentley's phrase, ' a sequel of songs and rhapsodies.' 
 These ' loose songs ' were first written down and ar- 
 ranged by the care of Peisistratus. Thus Bentley's 
 sentence contains the germ of the view which Wolf 
 developed. Yet it would be an error to conceive Bentley 
 here as an original sceptic, who threw out the first 
 pregnant hint of a new theory. Bentley's relation to 
 the modern Homeric question is of a different kind. 
 The view which he expresses was directly derived by him 
 from notices in ancient writers ; as when Pausanias says 
 that the Homeric poems, before their collection by 
 Peisistratus, had been ' scattered, and preserved only by 
 memory : some here, some there.' Cicero, Plutarch, 
 Diogenes Laertius, the Platonic Hipparchus, Heracleides 
 Ponticus, were other witnesses to whom Bentley could 
 appeal. 
 
 He brought forward and approved that old tradition 
 at a time when the original unity of each epic was the 
 received belief. It was not till the latter part of the 
 eighteenth century that the passion for returning from 
 
 L2
 
 148 BENTLET. [CHAP. 
 
 'art' to 'nature' prepared a welcome for the doctrine 
 that the Iliad and the Odyssey are parcels of primitive 
 folk-songs. But then we note the off-hand way in which 
 Bentley's statement assumes points which have since 
 vexed Homeric research. He assumes that the Iliad 
 and Odyssey are made up of parts which were originally 
 intended for detached recitations : an inference to which 
 the structure of the poems is strongly adverse. He ac- 
 cepts without reserve the tradition regarding Peisistratus. 
 By the ancient saying that the Iliad was written for 
 men and the Odyssey for women, Bentley probably under- 
 stood no more than that the Iliad deals with war, and 
 the Odyssey with the trials of a true wife. There is, 
 indeed, a further sense in which we might say that the 
 Iliad, with its historical spirit, was masculine, and the 
 Odyssey, with its fairy-land wonders and its .tender pathos, 
 more akin to das Ewigweibliche : but we cannot read that 
 meaning into Bentley's words. He seems to have found 
 no such difference between the characters of the two epics 
 as constrained him to become a ' separator.' He had not 
 felt, what is now so generally admitted, that the Odyssey 
 bears the marks of a later time than the Iliad. Briefly, 
 then, we cannot properly regard Bentley as a forerunner 
 of the Homeric controversy on its literary or historical 
 side, preeminently as his critical gifts would have fitted 
 him to take up the question. He knew the ancient 
 sources on which Wolf afterwards worked, but he had 
 not given his mind to sifting them. Bentley's connec- 
 tion with Homeric criticism is wholly on the side of the 
 text, and chiefly in regard to metre. 
 
 In 1726 Bentley was meditating an edition of 
 Homer, but intended first to finish his labours on the 
 New Testament. In 1732 he definitely committed him-
 
 ix.] OTHER CLASSICAL STUDIES. HOMER. 149 
 
 self to the Homeric task. At that time the House of 
 Lords had before it the question whether the Bishop of 
 Ely could try Bentley. As the Horace had been 
 dedicated to Harley, so the Homer was to be dedicated 
 to Lord Carteret, a peer who was favourable to the 
 Master of Trinity's cause, and who encouraged the design 
 by granting or procuring the loan of manuscripts. In 
 1734 we find Bentley at work on Homer. But, though 
 he made some progress, nothing was published. Trinity 
 College possesses the only relics of his Homeric work. 
 
 First, there is a copy of H. Estienne's folio Poetae 
 Graeci. In this Bentley had read through the Iliad, 
 Odyssey, and Homeric Hymns, writing very brief notes 
 in the margin, which are either his own corrections, 
 or readings from manuscripts or grammarians. In the 
 Hymns the notes become rarer; and it is evident that 
 all were written rapidly. This is the book which Trinity 
 College sent in 1790 to Gottingen, for the use of Heyne, 
 who warmly acknowledges the benefit in the preface to 
 his edition of the Iliad. Secondly, a small quarto manu- 
 script book contains somewhat fuller notes by Bentley 
 on the first six books of the Iliad. These notes occupy 
 43 pages of the book, ceasing abruptly at verse 54 of 
 Iliad vn. Lastly, there is the manuscript draft of 
 Bentley 's notes on the digamma, the substance of which 
 has been published by J. W. Donaldson in his New 
 Cratylus. 
 
 The distinctive feature of Bentley's Homeric work is 
 the restoration of the digamma. Bentley's discovery was 
 too much in advance of his age to be generally received 
 otherwise than with ridicule or disbelief. Even F. A Wolf r 
 who yielded to few in his admiration of the English critic, 
 could speak of the digamma as merely an illusion which,
 
 150 BENTLEY. [CHAP. 
 
 in old age, mocked the genius of Bentley (senile ludibriutn 
 ingenii Bentleiani). At the present day, when the 
 philological fact has so long been seen in a clearer light, 
 it is easy to underrate the originality and the insight 
 which the first perception of it showed. 
 
 In reading Homer, Bentley had been struck by such 
 things as these. The words, 'and Atreides tJie king,' are 
 in Homer, Atreides te anax. Now the e in te would 
 naturally be cut off before the first a in anax, making 
 t'anax. But the poet cannot have meant to cut it off, 
 since that Avould spoil the metre. Why, then, was 
 he able to avoid cutting it off 1 ? Because, said Bentley, in 
 Homer's time the word anax did not begin with a vowel : 
 it was vanax. Many old writers mention a letter which 
 had disappeared from the ordinary Greek alphabet. 
 Its sound had been like the Latin v, that is, probably, 
 like our w. Its form was like r : which, to Greek eyes, 
 suggested their letter gamma, r, with another gamma on 
 its shoulders : and so they called this r the ' double 
 gamma/ the digamma. Several words are specified by the 
 old grammarians as having once begun with this digamma. 
 Bentley tried the experiment of replacing it before such 
 words where they occurred in Homer. Very often, 
 he found, this explained a gap (or 'hiatus'), like that in 
 Atreides te anax. He came to the conclusion that, 
 when the Homeric poems were composed, this letter was 
 still used, and that it should always be prefixed, in 
 Homer, to those words which once had it. 
 
 The first hint of this idea occurs in Bentley's copy 
 (now at Trinity College) of the 'Discourse of Free- 
 Thinking' by Anthony Collins, which Bentley was reading 
 and annotating in 1713. On a blank leaf at the end he 
 has written :
 
 ix.] OTHER CLASSICAL STUDIES. HOMER. 151 
 
 Homer's 8/ya^a Aeolicum to be added, otvos, Folvos, 
 viiiu : a Demonstration of this, because Folvos has always 
 preceding it a vowel : so olvoirorafrv. 
 
 Bentley's view was noticed by his friend Dr Samuel 
 Clarke, in the second volume of his Iliad, published 
 posthumously in 1732. In the same year came forth 
 Bentley's edition of Paradise Lost, in which he had 
 occasion to quote Homer. There the digamma makes its 
 modern debut in all the majesty of a capital F, for which 
 printers now use the sign F. It was the odd look of such 
 a word as Feros that inspired Pope with the lines in the 
 Dunciad : Bentley speaks : 
 
 Eoman and Greek grammarians ! know your better, 
 Author of something yet more great than letter ; 
 While tow'ring o'er your alphabet, like Saul, 
 Stands our digamma, and o'ertops them all. 
 
 Bentley had thrown a true and brilliant light 011 the 
 text of Homer. But, as was natural then, he pushed his 
 conclusion too far. The Greek Foinos is the same as 
 vinum and wine. Homer, Bentley thought, could no 
 more have said oinos, instead of voinos, than Romans 
 could say inum, or Englishmen ine. Accordingly, he set 
 to work to restore this letter all through the Homeric 
 poems. Often it mended the metre, but not seldom it 
 marred it ; and then Bentley was for changing the text. 
 A single instance will give some idea of his task. In Iliad 
 I. 202 we have the words hubrin Ide (vftpw "8y), (that thou 
 mayest) 'see the insolence.' This word ide was originally 
 vide : its stem vid is that of the Latin video and our writ. 
 Homer, said Bentley, could have written nothing but vide. 
 And so, to make the metre right, he reads a different 
 word (o/3|js). Now let us see what this involves. This 
 stem vid is the parent of several words, very frequent
 
 152 
 
 BENTLEY. 
 
 [CHAP. 
 
 in Homer, for seeing, seeming, knowing, form, etc. On 
 Bentley's view, every one of these must always, in Homer, 
 begin with F. The number of changes required can 
 easily be estimated by anyone who will consult Prender- 
 gast's Concordance to the Iliad, Dunbar's to the Odyssey 
 and Homeric Hymns. I do not guarantee the absolute 
 precision of the following numbers, but they are at least 
 approximately correct. I find that about 832 derivatives 
 of the stem vid occur in the Iliad, Odyssey, and Hymns. 
 By F I denote those cases in which the metre requires 
 the digamma: by N, those in which the metre excludes 
 it : by Q, those cases which prove nothing : 
 
 
 Total. 
 
 F 
 
 N 
 
 Q 
 
 Iliad 
 
 357 
 
 205 
 
 81 
 
 71 
 
 Odyssey ... 
 
 376 
 
 220 
 
 76 
 
 80 
 
 Hymns .... 
 
 99 
 
 38 
 
 34 
 
 27 
 
 
 832 
 
 463 
 
 191 
 
 178 
 
 So, for this one root vid, Bentley would have been 
 compelled to amend the text of Homer in about 191 
 places. The number of digammated roots in Homer is 
 between 30 and 40 ; no other is so prolific as vid; but a 
 consistent restoration of the digamma would require 
 change in at least several hundreds of places; and often 
 under conditions which require that the changes, if any, 
 should be extremely bold. Bentley's error consisted in 
 regarding the digamma as a constant element, like any 
 other letter in the radical parts of the words to which 
 it had once been prefixed. It was not this, but rather 
 the ghost of a vanished letter, which, in Homeric metre,
 
 ix.] OTHEE CLASSICAL STUDIES. HOMER. 153 
 
 fitfully haunts its ancient seats. Nor is it the only such 
 ghost. When Bentley found that, in Homer, the word 
 <os, 'as,' can be treated as if it began with a consonant, 
 he wrote F <os : but the lost initial was not the spirant 
 v : it was Y : for o>s is merely the ablative of o-s, the 
 Sanskrit ydt. 
 
 Apart from the restoration of the digamma, the relics 
 of Beritley's work on Homer present other attempts at 
 emendation. These are always acute and ingenious ; but 
 the instances are rare indeed in which they would now 
 commend themselves to students. I give a few specimens 
 below, in order that scholars may judge of their general 
 character*. The boldness with which Bentley was disposed 
 
 * I. From Bentley's MS. notes in the margin of the Homer. 
 
 Odyssey I. 23 f AXX' 6 f^v AlOioiras iJ.erfKla.6e ri]\60' ebvras, | 
 AlQiotras, rol di^Ga dfSaiarai, ^<7%arot avSpuv). ' legendum AlOloirts: 
 si vera lectio H. Z. 396.' (Ovyarrjp /ueyaX^ropos 'Herluvos, | 'Herliav, 
 6s tvaiev, K.T.\.) [Lucian speaks of 'Attic solecisms,' deliberate 
 imitations, by late writers, of the irregular grammar found in 
 Attic writers: surely this is a gratuitous 'Homeric solecism.'] 
 29. (/jivjcraTO yap Kara OV/MV d/j.v/j.ovos AlylffOoio.) Bentley con- 
 jectures Kara vow CLVOTJ/JLOVOS. 51. 6ea 5" ev SU/MOTI vatei ' Bust. not. 
 fv dufj-ara valfi pro vulg. dwfj.a<ri, sed lego 0ta 5' ev irorvia vaici. 
 iwaifi absolute, ut kwalovai II. i. 154, 296. Sic Od. E. 215 earn 
 compellens Hbrva. &ea. KOV Su/jiara evatfv sed <rWos. Ibidem.' [i.e. 
 Bentley objects to the word Sw/uaro because Calypso lived in a cave. 
 But eV Sw^aro vatei is unquestionably right.] 
 
 II. From his MS. book of notes on Iliad I vii. 64. 
 
 Iliad in. 46 17 rot&ffSe iuv. Amabant, credo, Hiatus; non 
 solum tolerabant. Dedit poeta ^ TOIOUTOS ewv. 212 (pvOovs Kal 
 fj.rjSea vafftv v<paivov.) Casaubonus ad Theocritum c. ix. corrigit 
 %<}>a.ivov. Eecte. f<f>aivov /JLV&OVS, in concione loquebantur. Sic H. 
 <f. 295, Nrjirie, (J-I/JK^TI. ravra vo^/j.ara ipalv evl S^fj.^. 357. (Sid fj^v 
 ao-TTt'Soj ^\0e <f>aeivr)s o{lpi/j.ov (yxs-) Saepe redit hie versiculus 
 qui si vere ab Homero est, Licentia nescio qua pronuntiabitur Ala 
 fji>, ut 'A/ses/Apes. Non enim tribrachys pro Dactylo hie ponitur
 
 154 BENTLEY. [CHAP. 
 
 to correct Homer may be illustrated by a single example. 
 Priam, the aged king of Troy, is standing beside Helen 
 on the walls, and looking forth on the plain where 
 warriors are moving. He sees Odysseus passing along 
 the ranks of his followers, and asks Helen who that is. 
 ' His arms lie on the earth that f eedeth many : but he 
 himself, like a leader of the flock (/mAos ws), moves along 
 the ranks of men ; yea, I liken him to a young ram with 
 thick fleece, that passeth through a great flock of white 
 sheep.' Bentley, thinking that ws must be fws, had to 
 get rid of KTtXos somehow. ' Never yet,' says Bentley, 
 'have I seen a ram ordering the ranks of men. And 
 what tautology ! He moves along, like a ram : and I 
 compare him to a ram !' And so he changes the ram into 
 a word meaning ' unarmed' (writing avrap i/aXos cwv 
 instead of O.VTOS 8e /mAos cos), because the arms of Odys- 
 seus are said to be lying on the ground. 
 
 Bentley had done first-rate work on some authors who 
 would have rewarded him better than Homer, better 
 than Horace or Manilius. It was his habit to enter 
 collations of manuscripts, or his own conjectures, in 
 the margins of his classical books. Some of these 
 books are at Cambridge. Many more are in the British 
 Museum. The Gentleman's Magazine for 1807 relates 
 how Kidd found 60 volumes, formerly Bentley's, at 
 the London bookseller Lackington's, to whom they had 
 been sold by Cumberland, and from whom they were at 
 once bought for the Museum by the Trustees. The com- 
 plete list of the Bentley books in the British Museum 
 
 ad exprimendam Hastae celeritatem, non magis quam Molossua 
 pes trium longarum ad tarditatem exprimendam. Quid si legat 
 quis, Aiairpo ^v, pede Proceleusmatico, ut 'capitibu' nutantes 
 pinus,' 'Parietibus textum caecis iter.'
 
 ix.] OTHEB CLASSICAL STUDIES. 155 
 
 comprises (omitting duplicates) 70 works. All, or nearly 
 all, the manuscript notes which enrich these volumes 
 have now been printed somewhere. The notes on 
 Lucan, whom Bentley had intended to edit, were 
 published by Cumberland in 1760. Among the most 
 ingenious emendations are those on Nicander, the Greek 
 physician of Colophon (circ. 150 B.C.), whose epic on 
 venomous bites (Theriaca) Bentley had annotated at the 
 request of Dr Mead. But the province of Greek and 
 Roman literature in which these remains most strikingly 
 illustrate Bentley's power is, on the whole, that of the 
 comic drama. 
 
 He had sent Krister his remarks on two plays of 
 Aristophanes, the Plutus and Clouds. All the eleven 
 comedies have his marginal notes in his copy of Froben's 
 edition, now in the British Museum. These notes were 
 first published by G. Burges in the Classical Journal 
 XI. xiv. For exact scholarship, knowledge, and brilliant 
 felicity, they are wonderfully in advance of anything 
 which had then been done for the poet. Person is said 
 to have felt the joy of a truly great scholar on finding 
 that his own emendations of Aristophanes had been 
 anticipated, in some seventy instances, by the predecessor 
 whom he so highly revered. Bentley's emendations of 
 Plautus are also very remarkable. They have been 
 published, for the first time, by Mr E. A. Sonnenschein, 
 in his edition of the Captivi (1880), from the Plautus 
 in the British Museum which Bentley used; it is the 
 second edition of Pareus (Frankfurt, 1623). All our 
 twenty comedies have been touched more or less,- the 
 number of Bentley's conjectures in each ranging from 
 perhaps 20 to 150 or more. 
 
 As in Aristophanes, so in Plautus, Bentley sometimes
 
 156 BENTLEY. [CHAP. ix. 
 
 anticipated the best thoughts of later critics. Such coinci- 
 dences show how much he was in advance of his age. 
 Those conjectures of Bentley's which were afterwards 
 made independently by such men as Porson or Ritschl 
 were in most cases certain; in Bentley's day, however, 
 they were as yet beyond the reach of everyone else. 
 Nor must we overlook his work on Lucretius. That 
 library of Isaac Voss which Bentley had vainly sought 
 to secure for Oxford carried with it to Leyden the two 
 most important MSS. of Lucretius, one of the 9th 
 century (Munro's A), another of the 10th (B). Bentley 
 had to work without these. His notes, first completely 
 published in the Glasgow edition of Wakefield (1813), 
 fill only 22 octavo pages in the Oxford edition of 1818. 
 But their quality has been recognised by the highest 
 authority. Munro thinks that Bentley, if he had had the 
 Leyden MSS., 'might have anticipated what Lachmann 
 did by a century and a half.' Another labour also, in 
 another field, descended from Bentley to Lachmann : of 
 that we must now speak.
 
 CHAPTER X. 
 
 THE PROPOSED EDITION OF THE NEW TESTAMENT. 
 
 DR JOHN MILL published in 1707 his edition of the 
 Greek Testament, giving in foot-notes the various read- 
 ings which he had collected by the labour of thirty years. 
 To understand the impression which this work produced, 
 it is necessary to recall the nature of its predecessors. 
 The Greek text of the New Testament, as then generally 
 read, was ultimately based on two sixteenth century 
 editions ; that of Erasmus (Basel, 1516), which had been 
 marked by much carelessness and that due chiefly to 
 Stunica, in the ' Complutensian ' Polyglott (so called 
 from Complutum, or Alcala de Henares) of Cardinal 
 Ximenes, printed in 1514, and probably published in 
 1522. The folio edition printed by Robert Estienne at 
 Paris in 1550 was founded on the text of Erasmus. 
 The Elzevir editions, of which the first appeared in 
 1624, gave the text of Estienne as imperfectly revised 
 by the reformer Beza. The second Elzevir edition (1633) 
 declared this to be ' the text now received by all.' 
 Hence it came to be known as the ' Received Text.' 
 
 The existence of various readings, though a well- 
 known, was hardly a prominent fact. Some had been
 
 158 BENTLEY. [CHAP. 
 
 given in the margin of the folio Estienne ; Beza had 
 referred to others ; more had been noticed by Walton in 
 the Greek Testament of his Polyglott (1657), and by 
 Bishop Fell in his small edition (1675). The sources of 
 textual evidence generally had been described and dis- 
 cussed with intelligence and candour by the French 
 scholar Simon (1689 95). But Mill's edition was the 
 first which impressed the public mind by marshalling a 
 great array of variants, roughly estimated at thirty 
 thousand. In his learned Prolegomena Mill often ex- 
 pressed opinions and preferences, but without supplying 
 any general clue to the labyrinth exhibited in his critical 
 notes. 
 
 The alarm felt in some quarters is strikingly shown 
 by Whitby's censure of Mill's edition (1710), in which he 
 goes so far as to affirm that the ' Received Text ' can be 
 defended in all places where the sense is affected (in Us 
 omnibus locis lectionem textus defendi posse), and that 
 even in matters ' of lesser moment ' it is ' most rarely ' 
 invalidated. On the other hand, anti-Christian writers 
 did not fail to make capital of a circumstance which they 
 represented as impugning the tradition. Thus Anthony 
 Collins, in his ' Discourse of Free-Thinking,' specially 
 dwelt on Mill's 30,000 variants. In his published reply 
 to Collins (1713), Bentley pointed out that such variants 
 are perfectly compatible with the absence of any essen- 
 tial corruption, while he insisted on the value of critical 
 studies in their application to the Scriptures. Dr Hare, 
 in publicly thanking Bentley for this reply, urged him to 
 undertake an edition of the New,, Testament. Undoubt- 
 edly there was a wide-spread feeling that some systema- 
 tic effort should be made towards disengaging a standard 
 text from the variations set forth by Mill.
 
 x.] PEOPOSED EDITION OF THE NEW TESTAMENT. 159 
 
 Three years later (1716), Bentley received a visit 
 from John James Wetstein, a Swiss, related to the 
 Amsterdam publishers who had reprinted Bentley's 
 Horace. Wetstein was then on leave of absence from 
 his duties as a chaplain in the Dutch army. For 
 years he had devoted himself with rare ardour to those 
 critical studies of the New Testament which were after- 
 wards embodied in his edition (1751 2). He had re- 
 cently collated some Greek MSS. in the Library of Paris. 
 ' On hearing this ' Wetstein writes Bentley ' urged me 
 to publish my collations, with his aid. I pleaded my 
 youth, and the shortness of my leave of absence ; I asked 
 him to undertake the work himself, and to use my col- 
 lections. At length I moved the great critic to entertain 
 a design of which he seemed to have had no thought be- 
 fore that of editing the New Testament.' 
 
 It is assumed by Tregelles that Wetstein was mis- 
 taken in supposing that Bentley had not previously con- 
 templated an edition. Bentley's studies on the New 
 Testament dated, it is true, from his earliest manhood ; 
 there are traces of them in his Letter to Mill (1691), no 
 less than in his reply to Collins ; he had already collated 
 the Alexandrine MS., and had been using the 'Codex 
 Bezae ' (his ' Cantabrigiensis,' belonging to the University 
 Library) since 1715. But it does not follow that Wet- 
 stein's statement is not accurate. The fact that Bentley 
 was deeply studying a subject is never sufficient to prove 
 that he meant to write upon it. 
 
 Now, at any rate, the plan was definitely formed, and 
 Wetstein returned to Paris, in order to aid it by further 
 collations. In April, 1716, Bentley announced his pro- 
 ject in a remarkable letter to the Archbishop of Canter- 
 bury, Dr Wake. Monk hints, though he does not say,
 
 160 BENTLEY. [CHAP. 
 
 that Bentley's object was ' to interest the public,' in view 
 of imminent law proceedings. I quite agree with Mr 
 A. A. Ellis, the editor of Bentleii Critica Sacra, that in 
 this case there is no real ground for such a suggestion. 
 Bentley's enthusiasm for the work was sincere, as his 
 correspondence with "Wetstein abundantly shows ; he did 
 not bring his scheme before the public till 1720 ; and his 
 object in addressing the Primate was no other than that 
 which he states, viz., to learn whether the project was 
 likely to be encouraged. After sketching his plan, he 
 observes to Dr Wake that it might be made for ever im- 
 possible by a fire in the Royal Library of Paris or London. 
 It is startling to read this foreboding, expressed in 1716. 
 Fifteen years later, a fire actually broke out at night in 
 the King's Library, then lodged at Abingdon House, 
 Westminster, when the Cottonian Genesis was seriously 
 damaged. An eyewitness of the scene has described 
 Bentley hurrying out of the burning Library, in his 
 night-gown and his great wig, with the most precious of 
 his charges, the Alexandrine manuscript of the Greek 
 Bible, under his arm. 
 
 The Archbishop's reply to Bentley is not extant, but 
 appears to have been favourable. For the next four 
 years (1716 20) Bentley continued to gather materials. 
 Wetstein was not his only ally. David Casley, the 
 Deputy King's Librarian, worked for him in the libraries 
 of Oxford. More important still was the aid of John 
 Walker, a Fellow of Trinity College, who went to Paris 
 in 1719, and passed nearly a year there in collating 
 manuscripts. Walker was most kindly received by the 
 Benedictines of St Maur, with whom Bentley had already 
 been placed in communication by Wetstein. They pro- 
 vided him with a room in their monastery at St Germain
 
 x.] PROPOSED EDITION OF THE NEW TESTAMENT. 161 
 
 des Pres, procured collations from the Benedictines of 
 Angers, and personally aided his work in their own 
 library. 
 
 Walker returned from Paris in 1720. Bentley now 
 published his ' Proposals for Printing,' in which he 
 explains the principles of his edition. He observes that 
 the printed texts of the New Testament, Greek and 
 Latin, are based on comparatively recent manuscripts. 
 His aim has been to recover from older Latin manu- 
 scripts the text of the Latin 'Vulgate' as formed by 
 Jerome [about 383 A. D.], and to compare this with the 
 oldest Greek manuscripts. Jerome's version was not only 
 strictly literal, but aimed at representing the very order 
 of the Greek words. Where it agrees with our oldest 
 Greek manuscripts, there, Bentley argues, we may 
 recognise the Greek text as received by the Church at 
 the time of the Council of Nice (325 A. D.) 'and two 
 centuries after.' This test will set aside about four-fifths 
 of those 30,000 various readings which ' crowd the pages' 
 of the editions. The text of the New Testament can be 
 fixed ' to the smallest nicety.' As corroborative evidence, 
 Bentley further proposes to use the Syriac, Coptic, Gothic, 
 and ^Ethiopic versions (in which Walton's Polyglott 
 would help him), and the citations by the Greek and 
 Latin Fathers, within the first five centuries. Those 
 centuries are to be the limit of the various readings 
 which his foot-notes will exhibit. And he reassures the 
 public mind on a point which might well occasion 
 uneasiness. 'The author is very sensible, that in the 
 Sacred Writings there's no place for conjectures or emen- 
 dations.' He will not 'alter one letter in the text' 
 without the authorities given in the notes, but will 
 relegate conjectural criticism to the Prolegomena. The 
 
 J. B. M
 
 162 BENTLEY. [CHAP. 
 
 work is to be 'a Charter, a Magna Charta, to the whole 
 Christian Church ; to last when all the ancient MSS. 
 here quoted may be lost and extinguished.' As a 
 specimen of his edition, Bentley subjoined the last 
 chapter of Revelation, with notes supporting those 
 readings which he restores to the text, while the 'received' 
 readings, when displaced, are given in the margin. 
 
 The 'Proposals' had scarcely appeared when they 
 were anonymously attacked by Dr Conyers Middleton, 
 who was then in the midst of his feud with Bentley. 
 This was the year of the South-Sea scheme, and Dr 
 Middleton allowed himself to write of ' Bentley 's Bubble.' 
 Bentley's reply founded on the supposition that his 
 assailant was Coibatch was still more deplorable. Mid- 
 dleton then printed, with his name, ' Some Further 
 Remarks,' criticising the 'Proposals' more in detail, and 
 on some points with force. Coibatch writes to Middleton : 
 'According to all that I can speak with or hear from, 
 you have laid Bentley flat upon his back.' Bentley 
 writes to Atterbury (now Bishop of Rochester) : 'I scorn 
 to read the rascal's book ; but if your Lordship will send 
 me any part which you think the strongest, I will under- 
 take to answer it before night.' 
 
 Meanwhile the public subscription invited by the 
 ' Proposals' already amounted, in 1721, to two thousand 
 pounds. Amid many distractions, Bentley was cer- 
 tainly continuing to digest his materials. At some 
 time before August, 1726, he received a most im- 
 portant accession to them. The 'Vatican' manu- 
 script which contains the Greek Testament in capital 
 letters as far as the middle of Hebrews ix. was col- 
 lated for Bentley by an Italian named Mico. Thomas 
 -Bentley, the nephew, being at Rome in 1726, tested
 
 x.] PKOPOSED EDITION OF THE NEW TESTAMENT. 163 
 
 Mice's work in three chapters, but did not, as has 
 been supposed, make a complete independent collation. 
 Subsequently the Vaticanus was again collated for 
 Bentley, so far as concerned traces of hands other than 
 'the first,' by the Abb6 Rulotta, whose services were 
 procured by the Baron de Stosch, then employed in 
 Italy by the British Government to watch the Pretender. 
 Rulotta's collation reached Bentley in July, 1729. Its 
 accuracy, as compared with that of Angelo Mai, was 
 recognised by Tischendorf, when he saw it at Trinity 
 College in 1855. In that same summer of 1729 Bentley 
 was making inquiries regarding a manuscript, in the 
 Library of the University of Dublin, which contains the 
 text of the three witnesses (1 John v. 7, 8) : it is that 
 which is known, from the name of the donor, as the 
 Codex Montfortianus, and is not older than the fifteenth 
 century. Considerable uneasiness appears to have been 
 felt, after the issue of Bentley's 'Proposals,' at the 
 prospect of his omitting that text, against which he 
 had decided in his lost dissertation of 1717. It is un- 
 necessary to remind readers that more recent criticism 
 has finally rejected the words, for which there is no 
 evidence in Latin before at least the latter part of the 
 fifth century, and none in any other language before the 
 fourteenth. 
 
 Here in the summer of 1729 it has usually been 
 said, as by Monk, that all vestige of the proposed 
 edition ends. A slight but interesting trace, however, 
 carries us three years further. From a marginal note 
 in a copy of the quarto New Testament of Geneva (1620), 
 preserved in the Wake collection at Christ Church, 
 Oxford, it appears that John Walker was still making 
 collations in 1732. These, it cannot be doubted, were
 
 164 BENTLET. [CHAP. 
 
 auxiliary to Bentley's edition, for which the 'Proposals' 
 designate Walker as 'overseer and corrector of the press.' 
 Seven years more of working life remained to Bentley, 
 before the paralytic seizure which overtook him in 1739. 
 Why was his edition never completed and published ? 
 We need not pause on the curiously inadequate reason 
 suggested by Wetstein that Bentley resented the refusal 
 of the Government to remit the duty on foreign paper 
 which he desired to import. The dates alone refute 
 that, for the incident occurred in 1721. Probably the 
 answer is to be sought in a combination of two principal 
 causes, the worry of litigation which harassed him from 
 1729 to 1738 ; and a growing sense of complexity in the 
 problem of the text, especially after he became better 
 acquainted with the Vatican readings. 
 
 Bentley's materials were bequeathed by him to his 
 nephew Richard, possibly in the hope that they might be 
 edited and published. Nothing was done, however. Dr 
 Richard Bentley returned the subscriptions, and at his 
 death in 1786 bequeathed his uncle's collections to Trinity 
 College, where they have since been preserved. Several 
 volumes contain the collations made by Bentley himself or 
 by his various assistants including Mice's and Rulotta's 
 collations of the Vaticanus. The point which Bentley's 
 critical work had reached is best shown by a folio copy 
 of the Greek and Latin Vulgate (Paris, 'apud Claudium 
 Sonnium,' 1628). 'Having interleaved it' he writes to 
 Wetstein 'I have made my essay of restoring both 
 text and version [i. e. both Greek and Latin] ; and they 
 agree and tally even to a miracle ; but there will be 
 (as near as I can guess) near 6000 variations, great and 
 little, from the received Greek and Latin exemplars.' 
 The notes on the interleaved pages are in Bentley's hand-
 
 x.] PROPOSED EDITION OF THE NEW TESTAMENT. 165 
 
 writing from the beginning to the end of the New 
 Testament. He used this volume as a general register 
 of results obtained by his collations, the readings of 
 the Vaticanus, which came to him after nearly all the 
 rest, being added in paler ink. It is from this folio 
 that Mr Ellis prints (besides excerpts) the whole of the 
 Epistle to the Galatians, in his Bentleii Critica Sacra 
 (1862) ; though it is to be observed that we cannot assume 
 Bentley's final acceptance of the text, as there printed, 
 except in the points on which he has expressly touched. 
 The notes on Revelation xxii. stand in the folio verbatim 
 as they were printed in the 'Proposals' of 1720. Speak- 
 ing generally of the work exhibited by the folio, we may 
 say that its leading characteristics are two ; wealth 
 of patristic citation, and laborious attention to the order 
 of words. It may further be observed that there does 
 not appear to be any trace of that confident temerity by 
 which Bentley's treatment of the classics was so often 
 marked. Had his edition been published, the promise 
 made in the 'Proposals' would, in all probability, have 
 been strictly kept. Conjectural criticisms would have 
 been confined to the Proleyomeiia. 
 
 A question of great interest remains. What was the 
 value of the principle on which Bentley founded his 
 design, and how far has that principle been fruitful in 
 later work ? Bentley's undertaking (as briefly defined in 
 his letter to Dr Wake) was, 'to give an edition of the 
 Greek Testament exactly as it was in the best exemplars 
 at the time of the Council of Nice' (325 A.D.). He saw 
 that, for this, our ultimate witnesses are the Greek 
 manuscripts nearest in age to that time. But it 
 might still be asked : How can we be sure that these 
 oldest Greek manuscripts represent a text generally
 
 166 BENTLEY. [CHAP. 
 
 received at the time when they were written 1 Bentley 
 replied : I compare them with the oldest received Latin 
 translation that I can find. Such a received Latin version 
 must have represented a received Greek text. Where it 
 confirms our oldest Greek manuscripts, there is the 
 strongest evidence that their text is not merely ancient, 
 but also is that text which the Church received at the 
 time when the Latin version was made. The evidence 
 of the Fathers, and of ancient versions other than Latin, 
 may help to confirm the proof. 
 
 These, then, are the two features of Bentley's concep- 
 tion : the appeal from recent documents to antiquity, 
 viz. to the first five centuries ; and the appeal to Greek 
 and Latin consent. 
 
 In the particular application of these ideas, Bentley 
 laboured under certain disadvantages which were either 
 almost or altogether inseparable from the time at which 
 he worked. First, it was then scarcely possible that he 
 should adequately realise the history of the Greek text 
 previous to his chosen date, the Council of Nice. The 
 Alexandrine manuscript, of the fifth century, containing 
 the whole of the New Testament in Greek capital 
 letters, had been presented to Charles I. by Cyril 
 Lucar, the Patriarch of Constantinople, in 1628. This 
 was believed to be, as Bentley calls it, ' the oldest and 
 best in the world.' It was regarded as the typical 
 ancient manuscript, not only by the earlier English 
 editors, Walton, Fell and Mill, but by Bengel in his 
 edition of 1734. This view has since been modified by 
 data, some of which were not then, available. Not 
 less than two or three generations before the Council 
 of Nice (325 A.D.), according to the more recent in- 
 vestigations, two influential types of text had already
 
 xj PROPOSED EDITION OF THE NEW TESTAMENT. 167 
 
 diverged from the apostolic original. These have been 
 called the ' Western ' and the ' Alexandrian.' Both are 
 ' Pre-Syriaii ' to use the convenient term adopted by 
 Dr Westcott and Dr Hort in distinction from the 
 'Syrian' Greek text formed at Aiitioch at some time 
 between 250 and 350 A.D. The 'Syrian' text was 
 eclectic, drawing on both the aberrant Pre-Syrian types, 
 'Western' and 'Alexandrian,' as well as on texts in- 
 dependent of those two aberrations. In a revised form, 
 the Syrian text finally prevailed ; a result due partly to 
 the subsequent contraction of Greek Christendom, partly 
 to its centralisation at Constantinople, the ecclesiastical 
 daughter of Antioch. 
 
 Four manuscripts of the ' uncial ' class (written in 
 capitals, as distinguished from ' cursive ') stand out as 
 the oldest Greek copies of the New Testament. Two 
 belong probably to the middle of the fourth century. 
 One of these is the Vatican manuscript, of which 
 Bentley had no detailed knowledge at the time when he 
 published his 'Proposals.' Its text is Pre-Syrian, and 
 thus far unique, that in most parts it is free from both 
 Western and Alexandrian corruptions. The other fourth- 
 century manuscript is the Sinaitic, of which the New 
 Testament portion first came into Tischendorf's hands in 
 1859. This also is Pre-Syrian, but with elements both 
 Western and Alexandrian. The Codex Alexandrinus, 
 which Bentley's age deemed the oldest and best, is 
 fundamentally Syrian in the Gospels : in the other books 
 it is still partially Syrian, though Pre-Syrian readings, 
 Western and Alexandrian included, are proportionally 
 more numerous. Thus it contains throughout at least 
 one disturbing element which is absent from the Sinaitic, 
 and at least three which in most of the books are absent
 
 168 BENTLEY. [CHAP. 
 
 from the Vaticanus. The fourth of the oldest uncials is 
 one which "Wetstein twice collated at Paris for Bentley, 
 that known as the Codex Ephraemi, because some 
 writings attributed to Ephraem Syrus have been traced 
 over the New Testament. It is coeval with the Alex- 
 andrinus, belonging to the fifth century ; and, while 
 partly Syrian, it also contains much derived from the 
 earlier texts. In addition to the general but erroneous 
 belief as to the unique value of the Alexandrine manu- 
 script, a singular accident (noticed by Dr Hort) must 
 have greatly strengthened Bentley's belief in the decisive- 
 ness of the agreement between that document and the 
 Vulgate. Jerome, in preparing the Vulgate, appears to 
 have used a Greek manuscript which happened to have 
 many peculiar readings in common with the Alexandrinus, 
 and to have been partly derived from the same original. 
 The reader will now be able to imagine the effect 
 which must have been gradually wrought on Bentley's 
 mind, as he came to know the Vaticanus better. With 
 his rare tact and insight, he could hardly fail to perceive 
 that this was a document of first-rate importance, yet 
 one of which the evidence could not be satisfactorily 
 reconciled with the comparatively simple hypothesis 
 which he had based 011 the assumed primacy of the 
 Alexandrine. For his immediate purpose, it was of far 
 less importance that he was partly in error as to his 
 Latin standard. His view on that subject is connected 
 with a curious instance of his boldness in conjectural 
 criticism. Referring to 'interpretation.es' or versions 
 of the Bible, Augustine once says, 'Let the Italian 
 (Itala) be preferred to the rest, since it combines greater 
 closeness with clearness' (De Doctr. Chr, n. 15). Bentley, 
 with a rashness which even he seldom exceeded, declared
 
 x.] PROPOSED EDITION OF THE NEW TESTAMENT. 169 
 
 that the 'Italian version is a mere dream:' I tola, in 
 Augustine, should be 'ilia. Archbishop Potter's iisitata, 
 viewed merely as an emendation, was far more intrinsi- 
 cally probable; but Cardinal Wiseman's arguments in 
 his letters (1832 3), reinforced by Lachmann's illus- 
 trations, have placed it beyond reasonable doubt that 
 Augustine really Avrote Itala. As to his meaning, all 
 that is certain is that he intended to distinguish this 
 ' Italian ' text from the ' African ' (codices Afros) which 
 he mentions elsewhere. Of a Latin version, or Latin 
 versions, prior to Jerome's which was a recension, with 
 the aid of Greek MSS., not a new and original version 
 Bentley could scarcely know anything. The documents 
 were first made . accessible in Bianchini's Evangeliarium 
 Quadruplex (1749), and the Benedictine Sabatier's Bibli- 
 orum Sacrorum Latitiae Versiones Antiqiiae (1751). It 
 must be remembered, however, that Bentley's aim was 
 to restore the text as received in the fourth century; 
 he did not profess to restore the text of an earlier age. 
 
 Bentley's edition would have given to the world the 
 readings of all the older Greek MSS. then known, and 
 an apparatus, still unequalled in its range of authorities, 
 for the text of the Latin Vulgate New Testament: 
 but it would have done more still Whatever might 
 have been its defects, it would have represented the 
 earliest attempt to construct a text of the New Testament 
 directly from the most ancient documents, without refe- 
 rence to any printed edition. A century passed before 
 such an attempt was again made. Bentley's immediate 
 successors in this field did not work on his distinctive 
 lines. In 1726 Bengel's Greek Testament was almost 
 ready for the press, and he writes thus : ' What princi- 
 pally holds me back is the delay of Bentley's promised
 
 170 BENTLEY. [CHAP. 
 
 edition... Bentley possesses invaluable advantages; but 
 he has prepossessions of his own which may prove 
 very detrimental to the Received Text : ' this ' received 
 text' being, in fact, the Syrian text in its mediaeval 
 form. Bengel's text, published at Tubingen in 1734, 
 was not based on Bentley's principles, though the value 
 of these is incidentally recognised in his discussions. 
 Wetsteiii's edition of 17512 supplied fresh materials; 
 in criticism, however, he represents rather a reaction 
 from Bentley's view, for his tendency was to find 
 traces of corruption in any close agreement between the 
 ancient Greek MSS. and the ancient versions. Gries- 
 bach prepared the way for a properly critical text 
 by seeking an historical basis in the genealogy of the 
 documents. 
 
 But it was Lachmann, in his small edition of 1831, 
 who first gave a modified fulfilment to Bentley's de- 
 sign, by publishing a text irrespective of the printed 
 tradition, and based wholly on the ancient authorities. 
 Lachmann also applied Bentley's principle of Greek and 
 Latin consent. As Bentley had proposed to use the 
 Vulgate Latin, so Lachmann used what he deemed the 
 best MSS. of the Old Latin, combined with some Latin 
 Fathers and with such Greek MSS. as were manifestly of 
 the same type. Lachmann compared this group of wit- 
 nesses from the West with the other or ' Eastern ' Greek 
 authorities; and, where they agreed, he laid stress on 
 that agreement as a security for the genuineness of read- 
 ings. Bentley had intended to print the Greek text and 
 the Vulgate Latin side by side. Lachmann, in his larger 
 edition (1840 1852), so far executed this plan as to 
 print at the foot of the page a greatly improved Vulgate 
 text, based chiefly on the two oldest MSS. For Lach-
 
 x.] PEOPOSED EDITION OF THE NEW TESTAMENT. 171 
 
 mann, however, the authority of the Vulgate was only 
 accessory (' Hieronymo pro se anctore non utimur'), on 
 account of the higher antiquity of the Old Latin. Those 
 who taunted Lachmann with ' aping ' Bentley ( 'simia 
 Bentleii ') misrepresented both. It is to Lachmann and 
 to Tregelles that we primarily owe the revived knowledge 
 and appreciation in this country of Bentley's labours on 
 the New Testament, to which Tischendorf also accords 
 recognition in his edition of 1859. 
 
 Bentley's place in the history of sacred criticism agrees 
 with the general character of his work in other provinces. 
 His ideas were in advance of his age, and also of the 
 means at his disposal for executing them. He gave an 
 initial impulse, of which the effect could not be destroyed 
 by the limitation or defeat of his personal labours 
 After a hundred years of comparative neglect, his con- 
 ception reappeared as an element of acknowledged value 
 in the methods of riper research. The edition of the 
 New Testament published last year (1881) by Dr Westcott 
 and Dr Hort represents a stage of criticism which neces- 
 sarily lay beyond Bentley's horizon. Yet it is the maturest 
 embodiment of principles which had in him their earliest 
 exponent; and those very delays which closed over his 
 great design may in part be regarded as attesting his 
 growing perception of the rule on which the Cambridge 
 Editors so justly lay stress; ' Knowledge of documents 
 should precede final judgement upon readings.'
 
 CHAPTER XL 
 
 ENGLISH STYLE. EDITION OF PARADISE LOST. 
 
 As a writer of English, Bentley is represented by 
 the Dissertation on Phalaris, the Boyle Lectures, the 
 Remarks on a Discourse of Free -thinking, sermons, and 
 letters. These fall mainly within the period from 1690 
 to 1730. During the earlier half of Bentley's life the 
 canon of polite prose was Dryden or Temple; during 
 the latter half it was Addison. Bentley's English is 
 stamped, as we shall see, with the mind of his age, but 
 has been very little influenced by any phase of its 
 manner. His style is thoroughly individual; it is, in fact, 
 the man. The most striking trait is the nervous, homely 
 English. ' Commend me to the man that with a thick 
 hide and solid forehead can stand bluff against plain 
 matter of fact.' 'If the very first Epistle, of nine lines 
 only, has taken me up four pages in scouring, what a 
 sweet piece of work should I have of it to cleanse all 
 the rest for them !' ' Alas, poor Sophist ! 'twas ill luck 
 he took none of the money, to fee his advocates lustily; 
 for this is like to be a hard brush.' The ' polite ' writers 
 after the Restoration had discarded such English as vulgar ; 
 and we have seen that Boyle's Oxford friends complained
 
 CHAP, xi.] ENGLISH STYLE. 173 
 
 of Bentley's ' descending to low and mean ways of speech.' 
 But, if we allow for the special influence of scriptural 
 language on the Pilgrim's Progress, Bentley drew from 
 the same well as John Bunyan, who died when Bentley 
 was sixteen. Yet Bentley's simple English is racy in 
 a way peculiar to him. It has the tone of a strong mind 
 which goes straight to the truth; it is pointed with the 
 sarcasm of one whose own knowledge is thorough and 
 exact, but who is accustomed to find imposture wrapped 
 up in fine or vague words, and takes an ironical delight 
 in using the very homeliest images and phrases which 
 accurately fit the matter in hand. No one has excelled 
 Bentley in the power of making a pretentious fallacy 
 absurd by the mere force of translation into simple 
 terms ; no writer of English has shown greater skill in 
 touching the hidden springs of its native humour. 
 
 Here Bentley is the exponent, in his own way, of 
 a spirit which animated the ago of Addison and Pope, 
 the assertion of clear common sense,- -the desire, 
 as Mr Leslie Stephen says, 'to expel the mystery 
 which had served as a cloak for charlatans.' Bentley's 
 English style reflects, however, another side on which he 
 was not in sympathy with the tendencies of contem- 
 porary literature. A scholar of profound learning and 
 original vigour had things to say which could not 
 always be said with the sparkling ease of coffee-house 
 conversation. Bentley's colloquialism is that of strenuous 
 argument, not that of polished small talk. As an out- 
 ward symbol of his separateness from the ' wits,' we 
 may observe his use of the Latin element in English. 
 The sermons of Jeremy Taylor, whose life closed soon 
 after Bentley's began, abound in portentous Latin words, 
 longanimity, recidivation, coadunation. Bentley haa
 
 174 BENTLEY. [CHAP. 
 
 nothing like these ; yet the Boyle party, who charged his 
 style with vulgarity, charged it also with pedantry. 
 
 He answers this in the Dissertation on Phalaris. ' If 
 such a general censure had been always fastened upon 
 those that enrich our language from the Latin and 
 Greek stores, what a fine condition had our language 
 been in ! 'Tis well known, it has scarce any words, 
 besides monosyllables, of its native growth ; and were 
 all the rest imported and introduced by pedants?... 
 The words in my book, which he excepts against, are 
 commentitious, repudiate, concede, aliene, vernacular, timid, 
 negoce, putid, and idiom; every one of which were in 
 piint, before I used them j and most of them, before I 
 was born.' We note in passing that all but three of this 
 list commentitious, putid, negoce have lived; and we 
 remember De Quincey's story about negoce, that when 
 he was a boy at school (about the year 1798) the use of 
 this word by the master suggested to him that otium cum 
 dignitate might be rendered ' oce in combination with 
 dignity,' which made him laugh aloud, and thereby for- 
 feit all ' oce ' for three days. Then Bentley remarks that 
 the ' Examiner's ' illustrious relative, Robert Boyle, had 
 used ignore and recognosce ' which nobody has yet 
 thought fit to follow him in.' It is curious to find De 
 Quincey saying, in 1830, that ignore is Irish, and obsolete 
 in England 'except in the use of grand juries ;' and even 
 in 1857, it seems, some purists demurred to it. ' I would 
 rather use, not my own words only, but even these too ' 
 Bentley concludes 'than that single word of the Exa- 
 miner's, cotemporary, which is a downright barbarism. 
 For the Latins never use co for con, except before a 
 vowel, as coequal, coeternal ; but, before a consonant, they 
 either retain the N, as contemporary, constitution; or
 
 xi.] ENGLISH STYLE. 175 
 
 melt it into another letter, as collection, comprehension. 
 So that the Examiner's cotemporary is a word of his 
 coposition, for which the learned world will cogratulate 
 him.' 
 
 Bentley's view as to the probable future of the Eng- 
 lish language appears from another place in the Disserta- 
 tion. ' The great alterations it has undergone in the 
 two last centuries [1500 1700] are principally owing to 
 that vast stock of Latin words which we have trans- 
 planted into our own soil : which being now in a manner 
 exhausted, one may easily presage that it will not have 
 such changes in the two next centuries. Nay, it were 
 no difficult contrivance, if the public had any regard to 
 it, to make the English tongue immutable, unless here- 
 after some foreign nation shall invade and overrun us.' 
 This is in seeming contrast with Bentley's own descrip- 
 tion of language as an organism liable to continual 
 change, ' like the perspiring bodies of living creatures in 
 perpetual motion and alteration.' But the inconsistency, 
 I think, is only apparent. He refers to the English 
 vocabulary as a whole. By 'immutable' he does not 
 mean to exclude the action of time on details of form or 
 usage, but rather points to such a standard as the French 
 Academy sought to fix for the French language. Since 
 the end of the seventeenth century, the ordinary English 
 vocabulary has lost some foreign words, and acquired 
 others ; on the whole, the foreign element has probably 
 not gained ground. Here is a rough test. Mr Marsh 
 has estimated the percentage of English to non-English 
 words in several English classics. Swift's is about 70 
 (in one essay, only 68) ; Gibbon's, 70 ; Johnson's, 72 ; 
 Macaulay's, 75. Bentley's own average would, I think, 
 be nearly, if not quite, as high as Macaulay's, and for a
 
 176 BENTLEY. [CHAP. 
 
 like reason ; his literary diction was comparatively close 
 to the living speech of educated men in his day. This, 
 indeed, is a marked feature of all Bentley's work, what- 
 ever the subject or form may be ; the author's personality 
 is so vividly present in it that it is less like writing than 
 speaking. 
 
 As in Shakspere, we meet with those faults of 
 grammar which people were apt to make in talking, 
 or which had even come to be thought idiomatic, through 
 the habit of the ear. Bentley can say, ' neither of these 
 two improvements are registered,' 'those sort of requests,' 
 'I'll dispute with nobody about nothing' (meaning, 
 ' about anything'), ' no goat had been there neither.' 
 This sympathy with living speech, and comparative 
 negligence of rigid syntax, may help us to see how 
 Bentley's genius was in accord with Greek, the voice 
 of life, rather than with Latin, the expression of law. 
 The scholarly trait of Bentley's style is not precise com- 
 position, but propriety in the use of words, whether of 
 English or of Latin growth. Some of these Latinisms, 
 though etymologically right, seem odd now: 'an acuteness 
 familiar to him,' i.e. peculiarly his own : ' excision' for 
 ' utter destruction :' 'a plain and punctual testimony,' 
 i.e. just to the point. Yet, on the whole, Bentley's 
 vocabulary contains a decidedly larger proportion of pure 
 English than was then usual in the higher literature. 
 No one is less pedantic. At his best he is, in his own 
 way, matchless : at his worst, he is sometimes rough or 
 clumsy ; but he is never weak, and never anything else 
 than natural. His style in hand-to-hand critical combat 
 as in the Phalaris Dissertation is that by which he is 
 best known. I may here give a short specimen of a dif- 
 ferent manner, from a Sermon which he preached at
 
 .j ENGLISH STYLE. 177 
 
 St James's in 1717. He is speaking on the words, 'none 
 of us liveth to himself (Romans xiv. 7) : 
 
 Without society and government, man would be found in 
 a worse condition than the very beasts of the field. That 
 divine ray of reason, which is his privilege above the brutes, 
 would only serve in that case to make him more sensible of 
 his wants, and more uneasy and melancholic under them. 
 Now, if society and mutual friendship he so essential and 
 necessary to the happiness of mankind, 'tis a clear conse- 
 quence, that all such obligations as are necessary to maintain 
 society and friendship are incumbent on every man. No one, 
 therefore, that lives in society, and expects his share in the 
 benefits of it, can be said to live to himself. 
 
 No, he lives to his prince and his country ; he lives to his 
 parents and his family ; he lives to his friends and to all under 
 his trust; he lives even to foreigners, under the mutual sanc- 
 tions and stipulations of alliance and commerce ; nay, he lives 
 to the whole race of mankind : whatsoever has the character of 
 man, and wears the same image of God that he does, is truly 
 his brother, and, on account of that natural consanguinity, has 
 a just claim to his kindness and benevolence .... The nearer 
 one can arrive to this universal charity, this benevolence to 
 all human race, the more he has of the divine character im- 
 printed on his soul; for God is love, says the apostle; he 
 delights in the happiness of all his creatures. To this public 
 principle we owe our thanks for the inventors of sciences and 
 arts; for the founders of kingdoms, and first institutors of 
 laws ; for the heroes that hazard or abandon their own lives 
 for the dearer love of their country ; for the statesmen that 
 generously sacrifice their private profit and ease to establish 
 the public peace and prosperity for ages to come. 
 
 And if nature's still voice be listened to, this is really not 
 only the noblest, but the pleasantest employment. For though 
 gratitude, and a due acknowledgment and return of kindness 
 received, is a desirable good, and implanted in our nature by 
 God himself, as a spur to mutual beneficence, yet, in the 
 J. B. N
 
 178 BENTLEY. [CHAP. 
 
 whole, 'tis certainly much more pleasant to love than to be 
 beloved again. For the sweetness and felicity of life consists 
 in duly exerting and employing those sociable passions of the 
 soul, those natural inclinations to charity and compassion. 
 And he that has given his mind a contrary turn and bias, 
 that has made it the seat of selfishness and of unconcernment 
 for all about him, has deprived himself of the greatest com- 
 fort and relish of life. Whilst he foolishly designs to live to 
 himself alone, he loses that very thing which makes life itself 
 desirable. So that, in a word, if we are created by our Maker 
 to enjoy happiness and contentment in our being ; if we are 
 born for society, and friendship, and mutual assistance ; if we 
 are designed to live as men, and not as wild beasts of the 
 desert ; we must truly say, in the words of our text, that none 
 of us liveth to himself. 
 
 It will be noticed that in the above extract there are 
 no sentences of unwieldy length, no involved construc- 
 tions, such as usually encumbered the more elaborate 
 prose of the seventeenth century. Comparatively short 
 sentences, and lucid structure, are general marks of 
 Bentley's English ; and here, again, he reflects the desire 
 of his age for clearness. It has been said that the special 
 work of the eighteenth century was to form prose style. 
 Bentley has his peculiar place among its earlier masters. 
 
 Mention is due to the only English verses which he is 
 known to have written after boyhood. When Johnson 
 recited them, Adam Smith remarked that they were 
 'very well; very well.' 'Yes, they are very well, Sir,' 
 said Johnson : ' but you may observe in what manner 
 they are well. They are the forcible verses of a man 
 of strong mind, but not accustomed to write verse; 
 for there is some uncouthness in the expression.' A 
 Trinity undergraduate had written a graceful imitation 
 of Horace's Ode, Angitstam amice pauperiem pati (in. ii.);
 
 XL] ENGLISH STYLE. 179 
 
 with which Bentley was so much pleased that he straight- 
 way composed a parody on it. The gist of the young 
 man's piece is that an exemplary student is secure of 
 applause and happiness ; Bentley sings that he is pretty 
 sure to be attacked, and very likely to be shelved. The 
 choice of typical men is interesting ; Newton, and the 
 geologist, John Woodward, for science ; Selden, for erudi- 
 tion ; for theological controversy, Whiston, whom the 
 University had expelled on account of his Arianism. 
 (The following is Monk's version : Boswell's differs in a 
 few points, mostly for the worse ; but in v. 11 rightly 
 gives ' days and nights ' for ' day and night. ') 
 
 Who strives to mount Parnassus' hill, 
 
 And thence poetic laurels bring, 
 Must first acquire due force and skill, 
 
 Must fly with swan's or eagle's wing. 
 
 Who Nature's treasures would explore, 
 
 Her mysteries and arcana know, 
 Must high, as lofty NEWTON, soar, 
 
 Must stoop, as delving WOODWARD, low. 
 
 Who studies ancient laws and rites, 
 
 Tongues, arts, and arms, all history, 
 Must drudge, like SELDEX, days and nights, 
 
 And in the endless labour die. 
 
 Who travels* in religious jarrs, > trarails 
 
 Truth mix'd with error, shade with rays, 
 Like WHISTOX, wanting pyx and stars, 
 
 In ocean wide or sinks or strays. 
 
 But grant our hero's hope, long toil 
 
 And comprehensive genius crown, 
 All sciences, all arts his spoil, 
 
 Yet what reward, or what renown? 
 
 N 2
 
 180 BENTLEY. [CHAP. 
 
 ENVY, innate in vulgar souls, 
 
 Envy steps in and stops his rise; 
 Envy with, poison'd tarnish fouls 
 
 His lustre, and his worth decries. 
 
 He lives inglorious or in want, 
 
 To college and old books confin'd; 
 Instead of learn' d, he's call'd pedant; 
 
 Dunces advanc'd, he's left behind : 
 Yet left content, a genuine stoic he, 
 Great without patron, rich without South-sea. 
 
 The third line from the end is significant. He 
 had been mentioned for a bishopric once or twice, but 
 passed over. In 1709, when Chichester was vacant, 
 Baron Spanheim and the Earl of Pembroke (then Lord 
 High Admiral) had vainly used their interest for Bentley. 
 We have seen that in 1724 about two years after these 
 verses were written he declined the see of Bristol. 
 
 Now we must consider Bentley's criticisms on 
 Paradise Lost. In 1725 an edition of that poem had 
 appeared with a Life of Milton by Elijah Fenton 
 (1683 1730), who helped Pope in translating the 
 Odyssey. Fenton incidentally suggested some correc- 
 tions of words which, he thought, might have taken the 
 place of other words similar in sound. This seems to 
 have put Bentley on his mettle : at any rate, he is said 
 to have meditated notes in 1726. His edition of Para- 
 dise Lost appeared in 1732, and is said to have been im- 
 mediately due to a wish expressed by Queen Caroline 
 ' that the great critic should exercise his talents upon an 
 edition' of Milton, ' and thus gratify those readers who 
 could not enjoy his celebrated lucubrations on classical 
 writers.' It may safely be assumed, however, that the 
 royal lady did not contemplate any such work as our
 
 xi.] EDITION OF PARADISE LOST. 181 
 
 Aristarchus produced. Probably she thought that the 
 learning, especially classical learning, which enters so 
 largely into Milton's epic would afford a good field for 
 illustrative commentary to a classical scholar. 
 
 ' 'Tis but common justice ' Bentley's preface begins 
 ' to let the purchaser know what he is to expect in 
 this new edition of Paradise Lost. Our celebrated Au- 
 thor, when he compos'd this poem, being obnoxious to the 
 Government, poor, friendless, and, what is worst of all, 
 blind with a gutta serena, could only dictate his verses to 
 be writ by another.' The amanuensis made numerous 
 mistakes in spelling and pointing; Bentley says that he has 
 tacitly corrected these merely clerical errors. But there 
 was a more serious offender than the amanuensis; namely, 
 the editor. This person owes his existence to Bentley's 
 vigorous imagination. ' The friend or acquaintance, 
 whoever he was, to whom Milton committed his copy 
 and the overseeing of the press, did so vilely execute that 
 trust, that Paradise under his ignorance and audacious- 
 ness may be said to be twice lost.' This editor is respon- 
 sible for many careless changes of word or phrase : for 
 instance : 
 
 on the secret top 
 Of Horeb or of Sinai 
 
 'secret' is this editor's blunder for 'sacred.' Bentley 
 gives 48 examples of such culpable carelessness. But 
 even that is not the worst. ' This suppos'd Friend 
 (call'd in these Notes the Editor), knowing Milton's bad 
 circumstances' the evil days and evil tongues profited 
 by them to perpetrate a deliberate fraud of the most 
 heartless kind. Having a turn for verse-writing, he 
 actually interpolated many lines of his own : Bentley 
 gives 66 of them as examples. They can always be
 
 182 BENTLEY. [CHAP. 
 
 'detected by their own silliness and unfitness.' So much 
 for the half-educated amanuensis and the wholly de- 
 praved editor. But Milton himself has made some 
 'slips and inadvertencies too:' there are 'some incon- 
 sistences [sic] in the system and plan of his poem, for 
 want of his revisal of the whole before its publication.' 
 Sixteen examples are then given. These are beyond 
 merely verbal emendation. They require ' a change both 
 of words and sense.' Bentley lays stress on the fact that 
 he merely suggests remedies for the errors due to Milton 
 himself, but does not ' obtrude ' them : adding, ' it is 
 hoped, even these will not be found absurd, or disagreeing 
 from the Miltonian character ; ' and he quotes from 
 Virgil : ' I, too, have written verses : me also the shep- 
 herds call a singer; but I will not lightly believe them.' 
 This is perhaps the only thing in the preface that 
 distinctly suggests senility : it afterwards gave rise to 
 this doggrel : 
 
 How could vile sycophants contrive 
 A lie so gross to raise, 
 
 Which even Bentley can't believe, 
 
 Though spoke in his own praise ? 
 
 The preface concludes with a glowing tribute to Milton's 
 great poem. Labouring under all this ' miserable de- 
 formity by the press,' it could still charm, like 'Terence's 
 beautiful Virgin, who in spite of neglect, sorrow, and 
 beggarly habit, did yet appear so very amiable.' There 
 is some real pathos in the following passage, remarkable 
 as the only one (so far as I know) in Bentley's writings 
 where he alludes to the long troubles of his College 
 life as causes of pain, and not merely of interruption : 
 
 But I wonder not so much at the poem itself, though 
 worthy of all wonder ; as that the author could so abstract his
 
 .] EDITION OF PARADISE LOST. 183 
 
 thoughts from his own troubles, as to be able to make it ; 
 that confin'cl in a narrow and to him a dark chamber, sur- 
 rounded with cares and fears, he could spatiate at large through 
 the compass of the whole universe, and through all heaven 
 beyond it ; could survey all periods of time, from before the 
 creation to the consummation of all things. This theory 
 [i.e. contemplation], no doubt, was a great solace to him in 
 his affliction ; but it shows in him a greater strength of spirit, 
 that made him capable of such a solace. And it would 
 almost seem to me to be peculiar to him ; had not experience 
 by others taught me, that there is that power in the human 
 mind, supported with innocence and conscia, virtus; that can 
 make it quite shake off all outward uneasinesses, and involve 
 itself secure and pleas'd in its own integrity and entertain- 
 ment. 
 
 Bentley appears to have fully anticipated the strong 
 prejudice which his recension of Milton would have to 
 meet. Forty years ago, he says, ' it would have been pru- 
 dence to have suppress'd' it, 'for fear of injuring one's 
 rising fortune.' But now seventy years admonished him 
 to pay his critical debts, regardless of worldly loss or gain. 
 ' I made the Notes extempore, and put them to the press 
 as soon as made; without any apprehension of growing 
 leaner by censures or plumper by commendations.' So 
 ends the preface. 
 
 Bentley's work on Milton is of a kind wiiich can be 
 fairly estimated by a few specimens, for its essential cha- 
 racter is the same throughout. We need not dwell on 
 those ' inconsistencies in the plan and system of the poem' 
 which Bentley ascribes to Milton himself. Some of these 
 are real, others vanish before a closer examination ; but 
 none of those which really exist can be removed without 
 rewriting the passages affected. Bentley admits this; 
 and to criticise his changes would be merely to compare
 
 184 BENTLEY. [CHAP. 
 
 the respective merits of Milton and Bentley as poets. 
 Nor, again, need we concern ourselves with those alleged 
 faults of the amanuensis in spelling and pointing which 
 are tacitly corrected. The proper test of Bentley's work, 
 as a critical recension of Paradise Lost, is his treatment 
 of those blemishes which he imputes to the supposed 
 * editor.' These are of two kinds, wilful interpolations 
 and inadvertent changes. An example of alleged inter- 
 polation is afforded by the following passage (Par. Lost 
 I. 338 355), where the fallen angels are assembling at 
 the summons of their leader : 
 
 As when the potent rod 
 Of Amram's son, in Egypt's evil day, 
 Waved round the coast, up-called a pitchy cloud 
 Of locusts, warping on the eastern wind, 
 That o'er the realm of impious Pharaoh hung 
 Like Night, and darkened all the land of Nile; 
 So numberless were those bad Angels seen 
 Hovering on wing under the cope of Hell, 
 'Twixt upper, nether, and surrounding fires; 
 Till, as a signal given, the uplifted spear 
 Of their great Sultan waving to direct 
 Their course, in even balance down they light 
 On the firm brimstone, and fill all the plain : 
 A multitude like which the populous North 
 Poured never from her frozen loins to pass 
 Rhene or the Danaw, when her barbarous sons 
 Came like a deluge on the South, and spread 
 Beneath Gibraltar to the Libyan sands. 
 
 The last five lines are rejected by Bentley as due to 
 the fraudulent editor. Here is his note : 
 
 After he [Milton] had compared the Devils for number 
 to the cloud of locusts that darken'd all Egypt, as before to 
 the leaves that cover the ground in autumn [v. 302, ' Thick
 
 xi.] EDITION OP PARADISE LOST. 186 
 
 as autumnal leaves that strew the brooks In Vallombrosa '], 
 'tis both to clog and to lessen the thought, to mention here 
 the Northern Excursions, when all human race would be 
 too few. Besides the diction is faulty ; frozen loins are im- 
 proper for populousness ; Gibraltar is a new name, since those 
 inroads were made ; and to spread from thence to the Libyan 
 sands, is to spread over the surface of the sea. 
 
 It would be idle to multiply instances of ' interpola- 
 tion :' this is a fair average sample. I will now illustrate 
 the other class of 'editorial' misdeeds, careless altera- 
 tions. Book vi. 509 : 
 
 up they turned 
 
 Wide the celestial soil, and saw beneath 
 The originals of Nature in their crude 
 Conception ; sulphurous and nitrous foam 
 They found, they mingled, and, with subtle art 
 Concocted and adusted, they reduced 
 To blackest grain, and into store conveyed. 
 
 Bentley annotates : 
 
 It must be very subtle Art, even in Devils themselves, 
 to adust brimstone and saltpetre. But then he mentions only 
 these two materials, which without charcoal can never make 
 gunpowder. 
 
 Here, then, is the last part of the passage, rescued 
 from the editor, and restored to Milton : 
 
 sulphurous and nitrous foam 
 They pound, they mingle, and with sooty chark 
 Concocted and adusted, they reduce 
 To blackest grain, and into store convey. 
 Let us take next the last lines of the poem (XIL 
 641 f.) : 
 
 They, looking back, all the eastern side beheld 
 Of Paradise, so late their happy seat, 
 Waved over by that flaming brand; the gate 
 With dreadful faces thronged and fiery arms.
 
 186 BENTLEY. [CHAP. 
 
 Some natural tears they dropped, but wiped them soon ; 
 The world was all before them, where to choose 
 Their place of rest, and Providence their guide. 
 They, hand in hand, with wandering steps and slow, 
 Through Eden took tlieir solitary way. 
 
 Addison had remarked that the poem would close 
 better if the last two lines were absent. Bentley, without 
 naming Addison, to whom he alludes as 'an ingenious and 
 celebrated writer,' deprecates their omission. ' Without 
 them Adam and Eve would be left in the Territory and 
 Suburbane of Paradise, in the very view of the dreadful 
 faces' At the same time, Bentley holds that the two lines 
 have been gravely corrupted by the editor. These are 
 his grounds : 
 
 Milton Hells us before, that Adam, upon hearing Michael's 
 predictions, was even surcharg'd with joy (xu. 372); was 
 replete with joy and wonder (468) ; was in doubt, whether he 
 should repent of, or rejoice in, his fall (475) ; was in great 
 peace of thought (558) ; and Eve herself was not sad, but full 
 of consolation (620). Why then does this distich dismiss our 
 first parents in anguish, and the reader in melancholy? And 
 how can the expression be justified, 'with wand'ring steps 
 and slow"? Why wandering? Erratic steps? Very im- 
 proper : when in the line before, they were guided by Provi- 
 dence. And why slow ? when even Eve profess'd her readi- 
 ness and alacrity for the journey (614) : ' But now lead on; 
 In me is no delay.' And why ' their solitary way ' ? All 
 words to represent a sorrowful parting? when even their 
 former walks in Paradise were as solitary as their way now : 
 there being nobody besides them two, both here and there. 
 Shall I therefore, after so many prior presumptions, presume 
 at last to offer a distich, as close as may be to the author's 
 words, and entirely agreeable to his scheme ? 
 
 Then hand in hand with social steps their way 
 Through Eden took, with heatfnly comfort cheer 'd.'
 
 XL] EDITION OF PARADISE LOST. 187 
 
 The total number of emendations proposed by Bent- 
 ley in Paradise Lost rather exceeds 800. Not a word 
 of the received text is altered in his edition; but 
 the parts believed to be corrupt are printed in italics, 
 with the proposed remedy in the margin. Most of the 
 new readings aim at stricter propriety in the use of 
 language, better logic, or clearer syntax, briefly, at 
 'correctness.' It is a significant fact that Pope liked 
 many of them, and wrote 'pulchre,' 'bene,' 'recte' oppo- 
 site them in his copy of Bentley's edition, in spite of 
 that line in the Dunciad which describes our critic as 
 having 'humbled Milton's strains.' But even where we 
 concede that the new reading is what Milton ought to 
 have given, we can nearly always feel morally certain 
 that he did not give it. I have found only one instance 
 which strikes me as an exception. It is in that passage 
 of Book VI. (332) which describes Satan wounded by the 
 sword of the archangel Michael : 
 
 from the gash 
 
 A stream of nectarous humour issuing flowed 
 Sanguine, such as celestial Spirits may bleed. 
 
 ' Nectar ' is the wine of the gods ; Homer has another 
 name for the etherial juice which flows in their veins. 
 Thus when Diomedes wounds the goddess Aphrodite : 
 ' The immortal blood of the goddess flowed forth, even 
 ichor, such as flows in tJte veins of blessed gods' (Iliad 
 v. 389). For 'nectarous' Bentley proposed ' ichorous.' 
 The form of Milton's verse 'such as celestial Spirits 
 may bleed ' indicates that he was thinking of the Iliad, 
 and no poet was less likely than Milton to confuse 
 ' nectar ' with ' ichor.' Bentley's correction, if not true, 
 deserves to be so.
 
 188 BENTLET. [CHAP. 
 
 Johnson has characterised Bentley's hypothesis of the 
 ' editor ' in well-known terms : ' a supposition rash and 
 groundless, if he thought it true; and vile and pernicious, 
 if, as is said, he in private allowed it to be false.' 
 Bentley cannot be impaled on the second horn of the 
 dilemma. No one who has read his preface, or, who un- 
 derstands the bent of his mind, will entertain the idea that 
 he wished to impose on his readers by a fiction which he 
 himself did not believe. Monk has another explanation. 
 'The ideal agency of the reviser of Paradise Lost was 
 only a device to take off the odium of perpetually con- 
 demning and altering the words of the great poet... At 
 the same time, he was neither deceived himself, nor in- 
 tended to deceive others.' But Monk has not observed 
 that a passage in Bentley's preface expressly excludes 
 this plausible view. ' If any one ' (says Benfcley) ' fancy 
 this Persona of an editor to be a mere Fantom, a Fiction, 
 an Artifice to skreen Milton himself; let him consider 
 these four and sole changes made in the second edition : I. 
 505, v. 638, xi. 485, 551.... If the Editor durst insert his 
 forgeries, even in the second edition, when the Poem and 
 its Author had slowly grown to a vast reputation; what 
 durst he not do in the first, under the poet's poverty, 
 infamy, and an universal odium from the royal and 
 triumphant party]' The Paradise Regained and the 
 Samson Agonistes are uncorrupted, Bentley adds, because 
 Milton had then dismissed this editor. 
 
 There can be no doubt, I think, that Bentley's theory 
 of the depraved editor was broached in perfect good 
 faith. True, he supposes this editor to have taken fewer 
 liberties with Book xii., an assumption which suited 
 his desire to publish before Parliament met. But that is 
 only an instance of a man bringing himself to believe
 
 xi.] EDITION OF PARADISE LOST. 189 
 
 just what he wishes to believe. How he could believe 
 it, is another question. If he had consulted the Life of 
 Milton by the poet's nephew, Edward Phillips (169-i), he 
 would have found some adverse testimony. Paradise 
 Lout was originally written down in small groups of some 
 ten to thirty verses by any hand that happened to be 
 near Milton at the time. But, when it was complete, 
 Phillips helped his uncle in carefully revising it, with 
 minute attention to those matters of spelling and pointing 
 iii which the amanuensis might have failed. The first 
 edition (1667), so far from being 'miserably deformed 
 by the press,' was remarkably accurate. As Mr Masson 
 says, 'very great care must have been bestowed on 
 the revising of the proofs, either by Milton himself, or 
 by some competent person who had undertaken to see 
 the book through the press for him. It seems likely 
 that Milton himself caused page after page to be read 
 over slowly to him, and occasionally even the words to 
 be spelt out.' Bentley insists that the changes in the 
 second edition of 1674 were due to the editor. Phillips 
 says of this second edition : ' amended, enlarg'd, and 
 differently dispos'd as to the number of books ' [xn. 
 instead of x., books vii. and x. being now divided] ' by 
 his own hand, that is by his own appointment.' But the 
 habit of mind which Bentley had formed by free conjec- 
 tural criticism was such as to pass lightly over any such 
 difficulties, even if he had clearly realised them. He felt 
 confident in his own power of improving Milton's text ; 
 and he was eager to exercise it. The fact of Milton's 
 blindness suggested a view of the text which he adopted; 
 not, assuredly, without believing it; but with a belief 
 rendered more easy by his wish. 
 
 Bentley's Paradise Lost raises an obvious question.
 
 190 BENTLEY. [CHAP. 
 
 "We know that his emendations of Milton are nearly 
 all bad. The general style of argument which he applies 
 to Milton is the same which he applies to the classical 
 authors. Are his emendations of these also bad ? I 
 should answer: Many of his critical emendations, es- 
 pecially Latin, are bad : but many of them are good in 
 a way and in a degree for which Paradise Lost afforded 
 no scope. It is a rule applicable to most of Bentley's 
 corrections, that their merit varies inversely with the 
 soundness of the text. "Where the text seemed altogether 
 hopeless, he was at his best; where it was corrupted, but not 
 deeply, he was usually good, though often not convincing ; 
 where it was true, yet difficult, through some trick (faulty 
 in itself, perhaps) of individual thought or style, he was 
 apt to meddle overmuch. It was his forte to make rough 
 places smooth; his foible, to make smooth places rough. 
 If Paradise Lost had come to Bentley as a manuscript 
 largely defaced by grave blunders and deeply-seated cor- 
 ruptions, his restoration of it would probably have de- 
 served applause. The fact that his edition was regarded 
 as a proof of dotage, shows how erroneously his contem- 
 poraries had conceived the qualities of his previous work. 
 Bentley's mind was logical, positive, acute ; wonderfully 
 acute, where intellectual problems were not complicated 
 with moral sympathies. Sending flashes of piercing in- 
 sight over a wide and then dim field, he made discoveries; 
 among other things, he found probable or certain answers 
 to many verbal riddles. His 'faculty of divination' 
 was to himself a special source of joy and pride: nor 
 unnaturally, when we recall its most brilliant feats. But 
 verbal emendation was only one phase of his work : and, 
 just because it was with him a mental indulgence, almost 
 a passion, we must guard against assuming that the
 
 xi.1 EDITION OF PARADISE LOST. 191 
 
 average success with which he applied it is the chief 
 criterion of his power. 
 
 The faults of Bentley's Paradise Lost are, in kind, 
 the faults of his Horace, but are more evident to an 
 English reader, and are worse in degree, since the 
 English text, unlike the Latin, affords no real ground 
 for suspicion. The intellectual acuteness which marks 
 the Horace is present also in the notes on Paradise 
 Lost, but seldom wins admiration, more often appears 
 ridiculous, because the English reader can usually see 
 that it is grotesquely misplaced. A great and characteris- 
 tic merit of Bentley's classical work, its instructiveness 
 to students of a foreign language and literatui-e, is neces- 
 sarily absent here. And the book was got ready for the 
 press with extreme haste. Still, the editor of Paradise 
 Lost is not the Horatian editor gone mad. He is merely 
 the Horatian editor showing increased rashness in a still 
 more unfavourable field, where failure was at once so 
 gratuitous and so conspicuous as to look like self-caricature, 
 while there was no proper scope for the distinctive qualities 
 of his genius. As to poetical taste, we may at least make 
 some allowance for the standards of the 'correct' period; 
 let us think of Johnson's remarks on Milton's versifica- 
 tion, and remember that some of Bentley's improvements 
 on Milton were privately admired by Pope.
 
 CHAPTER XII. 
 
 DOMESTIC LIFE. LAST YEARS. 
 
 AT the age of thirty-eight, when explaining his delay to 
 answer Charles Boyle, Bentley spoke of his own ' natural 
 aversion to all quarrels and broils.' This has often, 
 perhaps, been read with a smile by those who thought of 
 his later feuds. I believe that it was quite true. Bentley 
 was a born student. He was not, by innate impulse, 
 a writer, still less an aspirant to prizes of the kind for 
 which men chiefly ~ wrangle. But his self-confidence had 
 been exalted by the number of instances in which he had 
 been able to explode fallacies, or to detect errors which had 
 escaped the greatest of previous scholars. He became a 
 dogmatic believer in the truth of his own instinctive 
 perceptions. At last, opposition to his decrees struck 
 him as a proof of deficient capacity, or else of moral 
 obliquity. This habit of mind insensibly extended itself 
 from verbal criticism into other fields of judgment. He 
 grew less and less fit to deal with men on a basis of 
 equal rights, because he too often carried into official or 
 social intercourse the temper formed in his library by 
 intellectual despotism over the blunders of the absent or 
 the dead. He was rather too apt to treat those who dif-
 
 CHAP, xii.] DOMESTIC LIFE. LAST YEAES. 103 
 
 fered from him as if they were various readings that had 
 cropped up from ' scrub manuscripts,' or ' scoundrel 
 copies,' as he has it in his reply to Middleton. He liked 
 to efface such persons as he would expunge false concords, 
 or to correct them as he would remedy flagrant instances 
 of hiatus. This was what made him so specially unfit for 
 the peaceable administration of a College. It was hard 
 for him to be primus inter pares, first among peers, but 
 harder still to be primus intra parietes, to live within 
 the same walls with those peers. The frequent personal 
 association which the circumstances of his office involved 
 was precisely calculated to show him constantly on his 
 worst side. He would probably have made a better bishop, 
 though not, perhaps, a very good one, just because 
 his contact would have been less close and continual with 
 those over whom he was placed. Bentley had many of 
 the qualities of a beneficent ruler, but hardly of a consti- 
 tutional ruler. If he had been the sole heir of Peisistratus, 
 he would have bestowed the best gifts of paternal govern- 
 ment on those Athenian blacksmiths to whom he compared 
 Joshua Barnes, and no swords would have been wreathed 
 with myrtle in honour of a tyrannicide. 
 
 This warm-hearted, imperious man, with affections 
 the stronger because they were not diffuse, was seen to 
 the greatest advantage in family life, either because his 
 monarchy was undisputed, or because, there, he could 
 reign without governing. His happy marriage brought him 
 four children, Elizabeth and Joanna, a son, William, 
 who died in earliest infancy, and Richard, the youngest, 
 born in 1708, who grew to be an accomplished but 
 eccentric and rather aimless man; enough of a dilettante 
 to win the good graces of Horace Walpole, and too little 
 of a dependent to keep them. 
 
 j. B. o
 
 194 BENTLEY. [CHAP. 
 
 It is pleasant to turn from the College feuds, and to 
 think that within its precincts there was at least such a 
 refuge from strife as the home in which these children 
 grew up. The habits of the Bentley household were 
 simple, and such as adapted themselves to the life of an 
 'indefatigable student. Bentley usually breakfasted alone 
 -in his library, and, at least in later years, was often not 
 visible till dinner. When the Spectator was coming out, 
 he took great delight in hearing the children read it aloud 
 to him, and as Joanna told her son 'was so particularly 
 amused by the character of Sir Roger de Coverley, that he 
 took his literary decease most seriously to heart.' After 
 evening prayers at ten, the family retired, while Bentley, 
 'habited in his dressing-gown,' returned to his books. In 
 1708 his eyes suffered for a short time from reading at 
 night; but he kept up the habit long afterwards. The 
 celebrated 'Proposals for Printing' the Greek Testament 
 were drawn up by candle-light in a single evening. 
 Latterly, he had a few intimate friends at Cambridge, 
 some five or six Fellows of the College, foremost among 
 whom was Hichard Walker, and three or four other 
 members of the University; just as in London his 
 intercourse was chiefly with a very small and select 
 group, Newton, Dr Samuel Clarke, Dr Mead, and a few 
 more. 'His establishment,' says his grandson, 'was 
 respectable, and his table affluently and hospitably served.' 
 'Of his pecuniary affairs he took 110 account; he had 
 no use for money, and dismissed it entirely from his 
 thoughts.' Mrs Bentley managed everything. Can this 
 be the Bentley, it will be asked, who built the staircase 
 and the hen-house, and who practised extortion on the 
 Doctors of Divinity \ The fact seems to be as Cumberland 
 puts it, that Bentley had no love of money for its own
 
 HI.] DOMESTIC LIFE. LAST YEARS. 195 
 
 sake. Many instances of his liberality are on record, 
 especially to poor students, or in literary matters. But 
 lie had a strong feeling for the dignity of his station, and 
 a frank conviction that the College ought to honour itself 
 by seeing that his surroundings were appropriate ; and he 
 had also a Yorkshireman's share of the British dislike to 
 being cheated. Bentley's total income was, for his position, 
 but moderate, and his testamentary provision for his 
 family was sufficiently slender to exempt him from the 
 charge of penurious hoarding. 
 
 At one time Mrs Beiitley and the children used to 
 make an annual journey to London, where the Master 
 of Trinity, as Royal Librarian, had official lodgings at 
 Cotton House. Then there was an occasional visit to the 
 Bernards in Huntingdonshire, or to Hampshire, after 
 Elizabeth, the eldest daughter, had married Mr Humphrey 
 Hidge of that county; and this was as much variety as 
 the wisdom of our ancestors desired. At Cambridge 
 Bentley took scarcely any exercise, except in pacing up 
 and down a terrace-walk by the river, which was made 
 when the Master's garden was laid out in 1717. We 
 hear, however, of his joining a fishing expedition to Over, 
 a place about six miles from Cambridge, though some 
 may doubt whether Bentley had the right temperament 
 for that pursuit. After middle age ho was peculiarly 
 liable to severe colds, a result of sedentary life, 
 and was obliged to avoid draughts as much as possible. 
 From 1727 he ceased to preside in the College Hall 
 at festivals : and at about the same time he nominated 
 a deputy at the 'acts' in the Divinity School. In 1729 it 
 was complained that for many years he had discontinued 
 his attendance in the College Chapel. One incident has 
 good evidence. On an evening in 1724, just after his 
 
 o2
 
 196 BENTLEY. [CHAP. 
 
 degrees had been restored, he went to the Chapel ; 
 the door-lock of the Master's stall was so rusty that he 
 could not open it. Here are some contemporary verses 
 preserved by Granger : 
 
 The virger tugs with fruitless pains ; 
 The rust invincible remains. 
 Who can describe his woful plight, 
 Plac'd thus in view, in fullest light, 
 A spectacle of mirth, expos'd 
 To sneering friends and giggling foes ? 
 Then first, as 'tis from fame receiv'd, 
 (But fame can't always be believ'd,) 
 A blush, the sign of new-born grace, 
 Gleam'd through the horrors of his face. 
 He held it shameful to retreat, 
 And worse to take the lower seat. 
 The virger soon, with nimble bound, 
 At once vaults o'er the wooden mound, 
 And gives the door a furious knock, 
 Which forc'd the disobedient lock. 
 
 After 1734 he practically ceased to attend the meetings 
 of the Seniority : the last occasion on which he presided 
 was Nov. 8, 1737. His inability or reluctance to leave 
 his house is shown in 1739 by a curious fact. A Fellow 
 of a College had been convicted of atheistical views by a 
 private letter which another member of the same society 
 had picked up in the quadrangle, and read. The meeting 
 of the Vice-Chancellor's Court at which sentence was to 
 be passed was held at Trinity Lodge. Dr Monk regards 
 this as 'a compliment to the father of the University,' but 
 there was also a simpler motive. Only eight Heads of 
 Houses had attended in the Schools ; nine were required 
 for a verdict ; and, feeling the improbability of Bentley 
 coming to them, they went to Bentley. On seeing the
 
 xii.] DOMESTIC LIFE. LAST YEARS. 197 
 
 accused a puny person the Master of Trinity observed, 
 ' What ! is that the atheist ? I expected to have seeu 
 a man as big as Burrough the beadle !' Sentence was 
 passed expulsion from the University. 
 
 It seems to have been soon after this, in 1739, that 
 Bentley had a paralytic stroke, not a severe one, 
 however. He was thenceforth unable to move easily 
 without assistance, but we have his grandson's authority 
 for saying that Bentley ' to the last hour of his life possessed 
 his faculties firm and in their fullest vigour.' He called 
 himself Markland says 'an old trunk, which, if you 
 let it alone^ will last a long time ; but if you jumble it 
 by moving, will soon fall to pieces.' 
 
 Joanna Bentley, the second daughter, was her father's 
 favourite child, 'Jug' was his pet-name for her, and 
 she seems to have inherited much of his vivacity, with 
 rather more of his turn for humorous satire than was 
 at that period thought quite decorous in the gentle sex. 
 Her son seems inclined to apologise for it ; and Dr 
 Monk, too, faintly hints his regret. At the age of eleven, 
 she was the 'Phoebe' of a Pastoral in the Spectator, the 
 'Colin' being John Byrom, B. A., of Trinity; and, after 
 causing several members of the College to sigh, and a 
 few to sing, Joanna was married, in 1728, to Denison 
 Cumberland, of Trinity, a grandson of the distinguished 
 Bishop of Peterborough. Their son, Richard Cumberland, 
 was a versatile author. Besides novels, comedies, and 
 an epic poem, he wrote the once popular Observer, and 
 Anecdotes of Spanish Painters. Goldsmith called him 
 'the Terence of England;' Walter Scott commented on 
 his tendency 'to reverse the natural and useful practice 
 of courtship, and to throw upon the softer sex the task of 
 wooing;' but Cumberland's name has no record more
 
 198 BENTLEY. [CHAP. 
 
 pleasing than those Memoirs to which we chiefly owe our 
 knowledge of Bentley's old age. 
 
 It was early in 1740 that death parted the old man 
 from the companion who had shared so many years of 
 storm or sunshine beyond the doors, but always of happi- 
 ness within them. Richard Cumberland was eight years 
 old when Mrs Bentley died. ' I have a perfect recollec- 
 tion of the person of my grandmother, and a full impres- 
 sion of her manners and habits, which though in some 
 degree tinctured with hereditary reserve and the primi- 
 tive cast of character, were entirely free from the hy- 
 pocritical cant and affected sanctity of the Oliverians.' 
 (Her family, the Bernards, were related to the Cromwells.) 
 A most favourable impression is given by a letter one 
 of those printed by Dr Luard at the end of Rud's Diary 
 in which she discusses the prospect (in 1732) of the 
 College case being decided against Bentley. Her life 
 had been gentle, kindly, and unselfish : her last words, 
 which her daughter Joanna heard, were, ' It is all 
 bright, it is all glorious.' Dreary indeed must have been 
 Bentley's solitude now, but for his daughters. Elizabeth 
 had returned to her father's house after the death of her 
 husband, Mr Ridge; and henceforth Mrs -Cumberland 
 was much at Trinity Lodge, with her two children, 
 Richard, and a girl somewhat older. And now we get 
 the best possible testimony to the loveablo elements in 
 Bentley's nature, the testimony of children. ' He Avas 
 the unwearied patron and promoter of all our childish 
 
 sports I have broken in upon him many a time' (says 
 
 Cumberland) ' in his hours of study, when he would put 
 his book aside, ring his hand-bell for his servant, and be 
 led to his shelves to take down a picture-book for my 
 amusement. I do not say that his good-nature always
 
 in.] DOMESTIC LIFE. LAST TEAKS. 189 
 
 gained its object, as the pictures which his books gene- 
 rally supplied me with, were anatomical drawings of 
 dissected bodies,... but he had nothing better to produce.' 
 ' Once, and only once, I recollect his giving me a gentle . 
 rebuke for making a most outrageous noise in the room 
 over his library, and disturbing him in his studies ; I had 
 no apprehension of anger from him, and confidently 
 answered that I could not help it, as I had been at 
 battledore and shuttlecock with Master Gooch, the 
 Bishop of Ely's son.' (This was the Dr Gooch who, 
 as Vice-Chancellor, had suspended Bentley's degrees.) 
 'And I have been at this sport with his father,' he re- 
 plied ; ' but thine has been the more amusing game ; so 
 there's no harm done.' The boy's holidays from his 
 school at Bury St Edmund's were now often spent at 
 Trinity Lodge, and in the bright memories which they 
 left with him his grandfather was the central figure. ' I 
 was admitted to dine at his table, had my seat next to 
 his chair, served him in many little offices.' Bentley 
 saw what pleasure these gave the boy, and invented 
 occasions to employ him. 
 
 Bentley's ' ordinary style of conversation was natu- 
 rally lofty ' his grandson says. He also used thou and 
 thee more than, was usually considered polite, and this gave 
 his talk a somewhat dictatorial tone. ' But the native 
 candour and inherent tenderness of his heart could not 
 long be veiled from observation, for his feelings and 
 affections were at once too impulsive to be long repressed, 
 and he too careless of concealment to attempt at quali- 
 fying them.' Instances of his good-nature are quoted 
 which are highly characteristic in other ways too. At 
 that time the Master and Seniors examined candidates 
 for Fellowships orally as well as on paper. If Bentley
 
 200 BENTLEY. [CHAP. 
 
 saw that a candidate was nervous, he ' was never known, 
 to press him,' says Cumberland ; rather he ' would take 
 all the pains of expounding on himself and credit the 
 embarrassed youth with the answer. Once a burglar 
 who had stolen some of Bentley's plate was caught ' with 
 the very articles upon him,' and ' Commissary Greaves' 
 was for sending him to gaol. Bentley interposed. ' Why 
 tell the man he is a thief] lie knows that well enough, 
 without thy information, Greaves. Hark ye, fellow, 
 thou see'st the trade which thou hast taken up is an. 
 unprofitable trade ; therefore get thee gone, lay aside an 
 occupation by which thou can'st gain nothing but a 
 halter, and follow that by which thou may'st earn an 
 honest livelihood.' Everybody remonstrated, but the 
 burglar was set at large. This was a thoroughly Bent- 
 leian way of showing how the quality of mercy can bless 
 him that gives and him that takes. He never bestowed 
 a thought on the principle ; he was preoccupied by his 
 own acute and confident perception that this man would 
 not steal again ; and he disposed of Commissary Greaves 
 as if he had been a mere gloss, a redundant phrase due 
 to interpolation. 
 
 Next to the Vice-Master, Dr Walker to whom in 
 1739 the duties of Master were virtually transferred 
 Bentley's most frequent visitors were a few scholars, 
 such as Jeremiah Markland, an ingenious critic, with a 
 real feeling for language, Walter Taylor, the Regius 
 Professor of Greek, John Taylor, the well-known 
 editor of Lysias and Demosthenes ; and the two nephews, 
 Thomas and Richard Bentley.' At seventy, he learned 
 to smoke ; and he is believed to have liked port, but to 
 have said of claret that 'it would be port if it could.' 
 He would sometimes speak of his early labours and aims,
 
 xji.] DOMESTIC LIFE. LAST YEARS. 201 
 
 but the literary subject uppermost in his mind seems to 
 have been his Homer. One evening, when Eichard 
 Cumberland was at the Lodge in his holidays, his 
 schoolmaster, Arthur Kinsman, called with Dr "Walker. 
 Kinsman ' began to open his school-books upon Bentley, 
 and had drawn him into Homer; Greek now rolled in 
 torrents from the lips of Bentley,... in a strain delect- 
 able, indeed, to the ear, but not very edifying to poor 
 little me and the ladies.' 
 
 In March, 1742 about four months before Bentley's 
 death the fourth book of the Dunciad came out, with 
 Pope's highly-wrought but curiously empty satire on the 
 greatest scholar then living in England or in Europe. 
 Bentley heads an academic throng who offer homage at 
 the throne of Dulness: 
 
 Before them march'd that awful Aristarch, 
 Plow'd was his front with many a deep remark; 
 His hat, which never vaiPd to human pride, 
 Walker with rev'rence took, and laid aside. 
 
 Then Bentley introduces himself to the goddess as 
 
 Thy mighty scholiast, whose unwearied pains 
 Made Horace dull, and humbled Milton's strains. 
 
 The final touch ' Walker, our hat ! ; nor more he 
 deign'd to say' was taken from a story current then. 
 Philip Miller, the botanist, had called on Bentley at 
 Trinity Lodge, and after dinner plied him with classical 
 questions until Bentley, having exhausted such mild hints 
 as 'drink your wine, Sir!', exclaimed, 'Walker! my 
 hat' and left the room. Cumberland remembers the 
 large, broad-brimmed hat hanging on a peg at the back 
 of Bentley's arm-chair, who sometimes wore it in his 
 study to shade his eyes; and after his death it could
 
 202 BENTLEY. [CHAP. 
 
 be seen in the College-rooms of the friend with whose 
 name Pope has linked it. 
 
 Pope had opened fire on Bentley long before this. 
 The first edition of the Dunciad (1728) had the line 
 ' Bentley his mouth with classic fiatt'ry opes' but in the 
 edition of 1729 'Bentley' was changed to Welsted : and 
 when after Bentley's death his name was once more 
 placed there, it was explained as referring to Thomas Bent- 
 ley, the nephew. Then in the ' Epistle to Arbuthnot ' 
 (1735) Pope coupled Bentley with the Shaksperian critic 
 Theobald, 'Tibbalds' rhyming to 'ribalds;' and in the 
 Epistle imitating that of Horace to Augustus (1737), after 
 criticising Milton, adds : 
 
 Not that I'd lop the beauties from his book, 
 Like slashing Bentley with his desp'rate hook. 
 
 Some indignant protest from Thomas Bentley seems 
 to have roused Pope's ire to the more elaborate attack in 
 the fourth book of the Dunciad. Why did Pope dislike 
 Bentley ? ' I talked against his Homer ' this was Bent- 
 ley's own account of it ' and the portentous cub never 
 foi'gives.' It is more likely that some remarks had been 
 repeated to Pope, than that Bentley should have said to 
 the poet at Bishop Atterbury's table, ' A pretty poem, Mr 
 Pope, but you must not call it Homer.' This was gossip 
 dramatising the cause of the grudge. Then Pope's 
 friendship with Atterbury and Swift would lead him to 
 take the Boyle view of the Phalaris affair. And War- 
 burton, Pope's chief ally of the Dunciad period, felt to- 
 wards Bentley that peculiar form of jealous antipathy 
 with which an inaccurate writer on scholarly subjects 
 will sometimes regard scholars. After Bentley's death, 
 Warburton spoke of him as 'a truly great and injured 
 man,' &c. ; before it, he invariably, though timidly, dis-
 
 xii.] DOMESTIC LIFE. LAST TEARS. 203 
 
 paraged him. Swift never assailed Bentley after the 
 Talc, of a Tub. But Arbuthnot, another member of 
 the Scriblerus Club, parodied Bentley 's Horace and 
 Phaedrus in the Miscellanies of 1727; and published a 
 supplement to Gulliver's Travels, describing ' The State of 
 Learning in the Empire of Lilliput.' ' Bullum is a tall 
 raw-boned man, I believe near six inches and a half hi"h : 
 
 * O " 
 
 from his infancy he applied himself with great industry 
 to the old Blefuscudian language, in which he made such a 
 progress that he almost forgot his native Lilliputian' an 
 unlucky stroke, seeing that Bentley' s command of English 
 was one of his marked gifts. This, however, is charac- 
 teristic of all the satire directed against Bentley by the 
 literary men who allowed a criticism of taste, but treated 
 a criticism of texts as soulless pedantry. There is plenty 
 of banter, but not one point. And the cause is plain, 
 they understood nothing of Bentley' s' work. Take Pope's 
 extended satire in the fourth Dunciad. It is merely a 
 series of variations, as brilliant and as thin as Thalberg's 
 setting of ' Home, sweet home,' on the simple theme, ' dull 
 Bentley.' A small satellite of Pope, one David Mallet, 
 wrote a ' Poem on Verbal Criticism,' in which he greets 
 Bentley as ' great eldest-born of Dulness ' ! Mallet de- 
 serves to be remembered with Garth. 
 
 In June, 1742, having completed eighty years and 
 some months, Bentley was still able to examine for 
 the Craven University Scholarships, when Christopher 
 Smart was one of the successful competitors. A few 
 weeks later the end came. His grandson tells it thus. 
 ' He was seized with a complaint ' (pleuritic fever, it was 
 said) ' that in his opinion seemed to indicate a necessity 
 of immediate bleeding; Dr Heberden, then a young phy- 
 sician practising in Cambridge, was of a contrary opinion,
 
 204 BENTLEY. [CHAP. 
 
 and the patient acquiesced.' Bentley died on July 14, 
 1742. Dr Wallis, of Stamford an old friend and ad- 
 viser who was summoned, but ai-rived too late said that 
 the measure suggested by the sufferer was that which he 
 himself would have taken. 
 
 Bentley was buried in the chapel of Trinity College, 
 on the north side of tho communion-rails. The Latin 
 oration then customary was pronounced by Philip Yonge, 
 afterwards Public Orator, and Bishop of Norwich. The 
 day of Bentley's funeral was that on which George Baker 
 left Eton for King's College, the eminent physician to 
 whom it was partly due that Cambridge became the Uni- 
 versity of Person. The small square stone in the pave- 
 ment of the College Chapel bears these words only : 
 
 II. S. E. [Sanctj 
 
 BICHARDUS BENTLEY S. T. P. E. J*g 
 
 Ohiit xiv. Jul. 1742. K ^ iui 
 Miaiia 80. 
 
 The words Magister Collegii would naturally have 
 been added to the second line : but in the view of those 
 Fellows who acknowledged the judgment of April, 1738, 
 the Mastership had since then been vacant. In the hall 
 of the College, where many celebrated names are com- 
 memorated by the portraits on the walls, places of honour 
 are assigned to Bacon, Barrow, Newton, and Bentley. 
 The features of the great scholar speak with singular 
 force from the canvas of Thornhill, who painted him 
 in his forty-eighth year, the very year in which his 
 struggle with the College began. That picture, Bentley's 
 own bequest, is in the Master's Lodge. The pose of the 
 head is haughty, almost defiant ; the eyes, which are 
 large, prominent, and full of bold vivacity, have a light
 
 xii.] DOMESTIC LIFE. LAST YEARS. 205 
 
 in them as if Bentley were looking straight at an impos- 
 tor whom he had detected, but who still amused him; 
 the nose, strong and slightly tip-tilted, is moulded as if 
 nature had wished to show what a nose can do for the 
 combined expression of scorn and sagacity; and tho 
 general effect of the countenance, at a first glance, is one 
 which suggests power frank, self-assured, sarcastic, and, 
 I fear we must add, insolent : yet, standing a little 
 longer before the picture, we become aware of an essential 
 kindness in those eyes of which the gaze is so direct and 
 intrepid; we read in the whole face a certain keen vera- 
 city ; and the sense grows, this was a man who could 
 hit hard, but who would not strike a foul blow, and whoso 
 ruling instinct, whether always a sure guide or not, was 
 to pierce through falsities to truth.
 
 CHAPTER XIII. 
 
 BENTLEY'S PLACE IN THE HISTORY OF 
 SCHOLARSHIP. 
 
 IT will not be the object of these concluding pages to 
 weigh Bentley's merits against those of any individual 
 scholar in past or present times. The attempt, in such a 
 case, to construct an order of merit amuses the competitive 
 instinct of mankind, and may be an interesting exercise 
 of private judgment, but presupposes a common measure 
 for claims which are often, by their nature, incommen- 
 surable. A more useful task is to consider the nature of 
 Bentley's place hi that development of scholarship which 
 extends from the fifteenth century to our own day. Cau- 
 tion may be needed to avoid drawing lines of a delusive 
 sharpness between periods of which the characteristics 
 rather melt into each other. The fact remains, however, 
 that general tendencies were successively prevalent in 
 a course which can be traced. And Bentley stands in 
 a well-marked relation both to those who preceded and to 
 those who followed him. 
 
 At his birth in 1662 rather more than two centuries 
 had elapsed since the beginning of the movement which was 
 to restore ancient literature to the modern world. During 
 the earlier of these two centuries from about 1450 to
 
 .CH. xiii.] PLACE IN THE HISTORY OF SCHOLARSHIP. 207 
 
 1550 the chief seat of the revival had been Italy, which 
 thus retained by a new title that intellectual primacy 
 of Europe which had seemed on the point of passing 
 from the lands of the south. Latin literature engrossed 
 the early Italian scholars, who regarded themselves as 
 literary heirs of Rome, restored to their rights after 
 ages of dispossession. The beauty of classical form came 
 as a surprise and a delight to these children of the 
 middle age ; they admired and enjoyed ; they could not 
 criticise. The more rhetorical parts of silver Latinity 
 pleased them best; a preference natural to the Italian 
 genius. And meanwhile Greek studies had remained in 
 the background. The purest and most perfect examples 
 of form, those which Greek literature affords, were 
 not present to the mind of the earlier Renaissance. 
 Transalpine students resorted to Italy as for initiation 
 into sacred mysteries. The highest eminence in classical 
 schohu'ship was regarded as a birthright of Italians. The 
 small circle of immortals which included Poggio and 
 Politian admitted only one foreigner, Erasmus, whose 
 cosmopolitan tone gave no wound to the national 
 susceptibility of Italians, and whose conception, though 
 larger than theirs, rested on the same basis. That basis 
 was the imitatio veterum, the literary reproduction of 
 ancient form. Erasmus was nearer than any of his 
 predecessors or contemporaries to the idea of a critical 
 philology. His natural gifts for it are sufficiently 
 manifest. But his want of critical method, and of the 
 sense which requires it, appears in his edition of the 
 Greek Testament. 
 
 In the second half of the sixteenth century a new- 
 period is opened by a Frenchman of Italian origin, 
 Joseph Scaliger. Hitherto scholarship had been busy
 
 203 BENTLEY. [CHAP. 
 
 with the form of classical literature. 'The new effort is 
 to comprehend the matter. By his Latin compositions 
 and translations Scaliger is connected with the Italian 
 age of Latin stylists. But his most serious and cha- 
 racteristic work was the endeavour to frame a critical 
 chronology of the ancient world. He was peculiarly 
 well-fitted to effect a transition from the old to the new 
 aim, because his industry could not be reproached with 
 dulness. 'People had thought that {esthetic pleasure 
 could be purchased only at the cost of criticism,' says 
 Bernays; 'now they saw the critical workshop itself lit 
 up with the glow of artistic inspiration.' A different 
 praise belongs to Scaliger's great and indefatigable con- 
 temporary, Isaac Casaubon. His groans over Athenaeus, 
 which sometimes reverberate in the brilliant and faithful 
 pages of Mr Pattison, appear to warrant Casaubon's com- 
 parison of his toils to the labours of penal servitude 
 ('catenati in ergastulo labores 1 }. Bernhardy defines the 
 merit of Casaubon as that of having been the first to 
 popularise a connected knowledge of ancient life and 
 manners. Two things had now been done. The charm 
 of Latin style had been appreciated. The contents of 
 ancient literature, both Latin and Greek, had been sur- 
 veyed, and partly registered. 
 
 Bentley approached ancient literature on the side 
 which had been chiefly cultivated in the age nearest to 
 his own. When we first find him at work, under 
 Stilliiigfleet's roof, or in the libraries of Oxford, he is 
 evidently less occupied with the form than with the 
 matter. He reads extensively, making indexes for his 
 own use ; he seeks to possess the contents of the classical 
 authors, whether already printed or accessible only in 
 manuscript. An incident told by Cumberland is sug-
 
 MIL] PLACE IN THE HISTORY OF SCHOLARSHIP. 209 
 
 gestive. Bentley was talking one day with his favour- 
 ite daughter, when she hinted a regret that he had 
 devoted so much of his time to criticism, rather than to 
 original composition. He acknowledged the justice of tho 
 remark. 'But the wit and genius of those old heathens,' 
 he said, 'beguiled me: and as I despaired of raising 
 myself up to their standard upon fair ground, I thought 
 the only chance I had of looking over their heads was to 
 get upon their shoulders.' These are the words of a man 
 who had turned to ancient literature in tho spirit of 
 Scaliger rather than in that of the Italian Latinists. 
 
 But in the Letter to Mill, when Bentley was only 
 twenty-eight, we perceive that his wide reading had al- 
 ready made him alive to the necessity of a work which no 
 previous scholar had thoroughly or successfully undertaken. 
 This work was the purification of the classical texts. 
 They were still deformed by a mass of errors which could 
 not even be detected without the aid of accurate 
 knowledge, grammatical and metrical. The great scholars 
 before Bentley, with all their admirable merits, had in 
 this respect resembled aeronauts, gazing down on a 
 beautiful and varied country, in which, however, tho 
 pedestrian is liable to be stopped by broken bridges or 
 quaking swamps. These difficulties of the ground, to 
 which Bentley's patient march had brought him, engaged 
 his first care. No care could hope to be successful this 
 he saw clearly unless armed with the resources which 
 previous scholarship had provided. The critic of a text 
 should command tho stylist's tact in language, and also 
 the knowledge of the commentator. In the Latin preface 
 lo his edition of Horace, Beutley explains that his work 
 is to be textual, not illustrative ; and then proceeds : 
 
 All honour to the learned men who have expatiated in the 
 field of commentary. They have done a most valuable work, 
 
 J. B. P
 
 210 BENTLEY. [CHAP. 
 
 which would now have to be done from the beginning, if they 
 had not been beforehand ; a work without which my reader 
 cannot hope to pass the threshold of these present labours. 
 That wide reading and erudition, that knowledge of all Greek 
 and Latin antiquity, in which the commentaries have their very 
 essence, are merely subordinate aids to textual criticism. A 
 man should have all that at his fingers' ends, before he can 
 venture, without insane rashness, to pass criticism on any 
 ancient author. But, besides this, there is need of the keenest 
 judgment, of sagacity and quickness, of a certain divining tact 
 and inspiration (divinandi quadam peritia et pavTiKf]}, as was 
 said of Aristarchus, a faculty which can be acquired by no 
 constancy of toil or length of life, but comes solely by the gift 
 of nature and the happy star. 
 
 Let it be noted that Bentley's view is relative to his 
 own day. It is because such men as Casaubon have gone 
 before that he can thus define his own purpose. Learning, 
 inspired by insight, is now to be directed to the attainment 
 of textxial accuracy. Bentley's distinction, is not so much 
 the degree of his insight, rare as this was, but rather 
 his method of applying it. It might be said : Bentley 
 turned the course of scholarship aside from grander 
 objects, philosophical, historical, literary, and forced it 
 into a narrow verbal groove. If Bentley's criticism had 
 been verbal only which it was not such an objection 
 would still be unjust. We in these days are accustomed 
 to Greek and Latin texts which, though they may be still 
 more or less unsound, are seldom so unsound as largely to 
 obscure the author's meaning, or seriously to mar our 
 enjoyment of his work as a work of art. But for this 
 state of things we have mainly to thank the impulse given, 
 by Bentley. 
 
 In Bentley's time very many Latin authors, and 
 nearly all Greek authors, were known only through texts 
 teeming witli every fault that could spring from a
 
 xm.] PLACE IN THE HISTOKY OF SCHOLARSHIP. 211 
 
 .scribe's ignorance of grammar, metre, and sense. Sup- 
 pose a piece of very bad English handwriting, full 
 of erasures and corrections, sent to be printed at a 
 foreign press. The foreign printer's first proof would bo 
 likely to contain some flagrant errors which a very slight 
 acquaintance with our language would suffice to amend, 
 and also many other errors which an Englishman could 
 correct with more or less confidence, but in which a 
 foreign corrector of the press would not even perceive 
 anything amiss. In 1700 most of the classical texts, 
 especially Greek, were very much what such a proof-sheet 
 would be if only those flagrant errors had been removed 
 wLich a very imperfect knowledge of English would 
 reveal. Relatively to his contemporaries, Bentley might 
 be compared with the Englishman of our supposed case, 
 and his predecessors with the foreign correctors of the press. 
 Space fails for examples, but I may give one. An 
 epigram of Callimachus begins thus ; 
 
 v8i/fto9, <' 17? uAa XLTOV lirfXQtuv 
 /xeyaXovs t'^e^uyev SavtW, 
 
 This hud been taken to mean : l Eudemus dedicated 
 to tlie Samothracian gods that ship on which, after crossing 
 a smooth sea, he escaped from great storms [reading AavatSi/] 
 of the Danai/ i.e. such storms as ^Eneas and his com- 
 panions suffered ; or perhaps, storms off the coast of the 
 Troad. Bentley changed one letter only (X to <r, giving 
 fTTta-Owv), and ehowed the true meaning. 'Eudemua 
 dedicated to the Samothracian gods that salt-cellar from 
 which Ite ate frugal salt until he had escaped from tJie 
 troublous waves of usury.' Eudemus was not an adven- 
 turous mariner, but an impecunious person who had 
 literally adopted the advice of the Greek sage, 'Borrow 
 from thyself by reducing thy diet,' and had gradually
 
 212 BENTLEY. [CHAP. 
 
 extricated himself from debt by living on bread and 
 salt. 
 
 The pleader for large views of antiquity, who is 
 inclined to depreciate the humbler tasks of verbal 
 criticism, will allow that the frequency of such misap- 
 prehensions was calculated to confuse. It was not 
 always, indeed, that Bentley drew the veil aside with so 
 light a touch ; but he has a reason to give. ' I would 
 have you remember, it is immeasurably more difficult to 
 make emendations at this day (in 1711) than it was in 
 former years. Those points which a mere collation of the 
 manuscripts flashed or forced upon the mind have generally 
 been seized and appropriated ; and there is hardly anything 
 left, save what is to be extracted, by insight alone, from 
 the essence of the thought and the temper of the style. 
 Hence, in my recension of Horace, I give more things on 
 conjecture than through the help of manuscripts ; and 
 unless I am wholly deceived, conjecture has usually been 
 the safer guide. Where readings vary, the very repute of 
 the manuscript often misleads, and provokes the desire of 
 change. But if a man is tempted to propose conjectures 
 against the witness of all the manuscripts, Fear and Shame 
 pluck him by the ear ; his sole guides are reason, the 
 light from the author's thoughts, and their constraining 
 power. Suppose that one or two manuscripts furnish 
 a reading which others discountenance. It is in vain, 
 that you demand belief for your one or two witnesses 
 against a multitude, unless you bring as many arguments 
 as would almost suffice to prove the point of themselves, 
 without any manuscript testimony at all. Shake off, then, 
 the exclusive reverence for scribes. Dare to have a 
 mind of your own. Gauge each reading by the mould of 
 the writer's expression and the stamp of his style ; then, 
 and not sooner, pronounce your verdict.'
 
 xin.] PLACE IN THE HISTORY OF SCHOLARSHIP. 213 
 
 No school of textual criticism, however conservative, 
 has denied that conjecture is sometimes our sole resource. 
 Bentley differs from the principles of more recent 
 criticism chiefly in recognising less distinctly that 
 conjecture should be the last resource. Great as was 
 his tact in the use of manuscripts, he had, as a rule, 
 too little of that respect for diplomatic evidence which 
 appears, for instance, in Kitschl's remark that almost 
 any manuscript will sometimes, however rarely, deserve 
 more belief than we can give even to a conjecture which is 
 intrinsically probable. The contrast, here, between Bent- 
 ley's procedure and that of Casaubon, whose caution is 
 often more in the spirit of modern textual science, may 
 be illustrated by one example. Some verses of the poet 
 Ion stood thus in the texts of the geographer Strabo : 
 
 EvySotSa fj.ev yf/v XCTTTOS Eupurou /cAuSw 
 
 Boiam'as c^copi<r* CIKTT/S, e/cre/Avwv 
 
 TTpOS Kp^Td TTOpOfJiOV. 
 
 When Casaubon had made the necessary change eV 
 rffjuav, he held his hand. 'I can point out,' said 
 Casaubon, 'that this place is corrupt: amend it I can- 
 not, without the help of manuscripts.' Not so Bentley : 
 ho confidently gives us, aKrrjv fKrep.wv \ Trpo(3\i]Ta 7rop0/xo>. 
 Now, if Casaubon was ineffectual, Bentley was precipi- 
 tate. Nothing, surely, was needed but to shift BOKDTUXS 
 from the beginning to the end of its verse. If we sup- 
 pose that the words Trpo? Kpr/ro, iropOpov belonged to what 
 precedes, and not (as is quite possible) to something now 
 lost which followed, then we get a clear sense, expressed 
 in a thoroughly classical form. 'The narrow waters of 
 the Euripus have parted Euboea from the Boeotian shore, 
 so shaping it (CKTC/AWJ/), that it looks toward the Cretan 
 sea:' i.e. the island of Euboea runs out in a S.E.S. 
 direction. Ancient writers often denote aspect by naming
 
 214 BENTLEY. [CHAP. 
 
 a region, though distant and invisible, towards which a 
 land looks. Thus Herodotus describes a part of the north 
 Sicilian coast as that which 'looks towards Tyrrhenia' 
 (717305 Tvpcrrjvirjv rerpap.fjif.viff). Milton imitates this device : 
 Where the great vision of the guarded Mount 
 Looks towards Namancos and Bayona's hold. 
 I never understood how Milton came to write those 
 lines till I thought of seeking a clue in Camden (of 
 whom there is another trace in Lyddas) ; and he gave 
 it. Speaking of the Cornish coast adjacent to St 
 Michael's Mount, Camden remarks, ' there is no other 
 place in this island that looks towards Spain.' This fact 
 was present to Milton's mind, and he wished to work it 
 in ; then he consulted Mercator's Atlas, where he found 
 the town of Namancos marked near Cape Finisterre, and 
 the Castle of Bayona also prominent ; these gave him his 
 ornate periphrasis for ' Spain.' 
 
 Though Bentley had little poetical taste, it was in 
 poetry that he exercised his faculty of emendation, not 
 only with most zest, but with most success. The reason 
 is simple. Metre enabled Bentley to show a know- 
 ledge in which no predecessor had equalled him ; it 
 also supplied a framework which limited his rashness. 
 In prose, his temerity was sometimes wanton. We have 
 seen (chapter x.) how his ilia would have swept Itala 
 from the text of Augustine. One other instance may be 
 given. Seneca compares a man who cannot keep his 
 temper to one who cannot control his limbs. 'Aegros 
 scimus nervos esse, cum invitis nobis moventur. Senex 
 aut infirmi corporis est, qui, cum ambulare vult, currit.' 
 'We know that something is wrong with our nerves, 
 when they act against our will. It is only an old man, 
 or an invalid, who, when he means to walk, runs.' By 
 'currit,' Seneca describes a well-known symptom of
 
 xiir.] PLACE IN THE HISTORY OP SCHOLARSHIP. 215 
 
 degeneration in the nervous system, which modern 
 medical science terms 'festination.' 'Now/ says Bent- 
 ley, 'I do not seo how this feeble person can show 
 such agility. Clearly currit should be corruit. Ho 
 tries to walk and tumbles down.' Bentley did not 
 observe that the sentence just before proves ' currit' to bo 
 right : ' Speed is not to be desired,' says Seneca, ' unless 
 it can be checked at our pleasure,... and reduced from a 
 run to a, walk ' (a cursu ad gradum reduci). Of previous 
 scholars, tho best-skilled in metro was Scaliger. Yet 
 Scaliger's acquaintance with the metres of the classical 
 age was by no means accurate ; thus his anapaests have 
 the same fault as those of Buchanan and Grotius ; and the 
 iambic verses which he prefixed to his work De Emenda- 
 tione Temporum have two metrical mistakes in four lines. 
 While invariably mentioning Casaubon with the respect 
 due to so great a name, Bentley has more than once occasion 
 to indicate the false quantities which his conjectures in- 
 volve. Thus a line of Sophocles, as given by Suidas, 
 begins with the words TrtTrXovs (' robes ') rericrat. What is 
 revwrai ? Casaubon followed by Meursius and by Gataker 
 (one of the best English Hellenists before Bentloy) 
 proposed Krcricrai, ' to comb ' or 'card.' Pointing out that 
 this will not do, since the second syllable must be long, 
 Bentley restores TreVXovs re vfja-at, 'and to weave robes.' 
 
 As a commentator, he deals chiefly, though not 
 exclusively, with points of grammar or metre bearing on 
 the criticism of the text. Here ho has two merits, each 
 in a high degree ; he instructs and suggests. The notes 
 on Horace and Manillas, for example, constantly fail to 
 persuade, but seldom fail to teach. It is to be wished 
 that Bantley had written commentary, not merely in 
 support of emendations, but continuously illustrating the 
 language and matter of classical authors. If such a
 
 216 . BENTLET. [CHAP. 
 
 commentary had been added to his critical notes on 
 Aristophanes, the whole must have been a great work 
 His power in general commentary is best seen in his 
 treatment of particular points raised by his argument 
 on the Letters of Phalaris. Take, for instance, his 
 remarks on the sophist's use of Trpovoia. to mean ' divine 
 Providence,' and of O-TOLX^OV as ' a natural element ; ' 
 where he shows that, before Plato, the former was 
 used only of human forecast, and the latter to denote a 
 letter of the alphabet : or, again, his remark on such 
 phrases as Aeyercu, 'it is said' that Greek writers com- 
 monly use such phrases, not to intimate doubt, but, on tho 
 contrary, where the literary witnesses are more numerous 
 than can conveniently be enumerated. Other comments 
 are of yet larger scope. Thus, speaking of the fact that 
 most ecclesiastical writers place the date of Pythagoras too 
 low, he notices the need of allowing for a general disturb- 
 ing cause, the tendency to represent Greek antiquity as 
 more recent than Jewish. Answering the objection that 
 a Greek comedy would not have admitted a glaring 
 anachronism, Bentley reminds Boyle that, in one of these 
 comedies, Hercules comes on the scene with his private 
 tutor, who gives him his choice of several standard works, 
 including Homer ; but the young hero chooses a treatise 
 on ccokery which was popular in the dramatist's time. 
 Some of Bentley's happiest comments of this kind occur 
 in his reply to Anthony Collins, who in his 'Discourse of 
 Free-Thinking' had appealed to the most eminent of the 
 ancients. Here, for instance, is a remark on Cicero's 
 philosophical dialogues. ' In all the disputes he intro- 
 duces between the various sects, after the speeches are 
 ended, every man sticks where he was before; not one con- 
 fVert is made (as is common in modern dialogue), nor 
 .brought over in the smallest article. For he avoided that
 
 xni.] PLACE IN THE HISTOEY OF SCHOLARSHIP. 217 
 
 violation of decorum ; he had observed, in common life, 
 that all persevered in their sects, and maintained every 
 nostrum without reserve.' 
 
 Bentley's 'higher criticism' of ancient history, 
 chronology, philosophy, literature is mainly represented 
 by the dissertation on Phalaris : but his calibre can also 
 be estimated by his sketchy treatment of particular topics 
 in the reply to Collins and in the Boyle Lectures. Of 
 the scholars before Bentley, Usher and Selden might be 
 partly compared with him in this province ; but the 
 only one, perhaps, who had built similar work on a com- 
 parable basis of classical learning was Scaliger. In 
 Bentley's estimation, to judge by the tone of his references 
 to Scaliger, no one stood higher. With all the differences 
 between Bentley and Scaliger, there was this essential 
 resemblance, that both men vivified great masses of 
 learning by ardent, though dissimilar, genius : 
 Spiritus intus alit, totamque infusa per artus 
 Mens agitat molem, et magno se in corpore miscet. 
 "While Scaliger had constantly before him the concep- 
 tion of antiquity as a whole to be mentally grasped, 
 Bentley's criticism rested on a knowledge more complete 
 in detail ; it was also conducted with a closer and more 
 powerful logic. The fact which has told most against the 
 popular diffusion of Bentley's fame is that he is so much 
 greater than any one of his books. Probably many 
 school-boys have passed through a stage of secretly won- 
 dering why so much was thought of this Bentley, known 
 to them only as the proposer of some rash emendations 
 on Horace. Bentley's true greatness is not easily under- 
 stood until his work has been surveyed in its entirety, 
 with a clear sense of the time at which it was done ; until 
 the original learning and native power of his method are 
 appreciated apart from the sometimes brilliant, sometimes
 
 218 BENTLEY. [CHAP. 
 
 faulty result ; until, in short, the letter of his record is lit 
 up for us by the living force of his character and mind. 
 
 What has been the nature of Bentley's influence on 
 the subsequent course of scholarship ] In the first place it 
 cannot be properly said that he founded a school. That 
 phrase may express the relation of disciples to the master 
 who has personally formed them, as Ruhnken belongs to 
 the school of Hemsterhuys ; or, where there has been no 
 personal intercourse, it may denote the tradition of a 
 well-defined scope or style; as the late Richard Shilleto 
 (in his masterly edition of Demosthenes ' On the Em- 
 bassy,' for instance) belongs to the school of Porson. 
 Wolf said that if Cambridge had required Bentley to 
 lecture on classics, he would probably have left a more 
 distinct impress on some of those who came after him. 
 Though the tone of Wolf's remark is more German than 
 English, it applies with pecxiliar point to Bentley, in 
 whom the scholar was before all things the man, and 
 who often writes like one who would have preferred to 
 speak. But neither thus, nor by set models of literary 
 achievement, did Bentley create anything so definite or 
 so narrow as a school. Goethe used the word 'daemonic' 
 to describe a power of mind over mind which eludes 
 natural analysis, but seems to involve a peculiar union of 
 keen insight with moral self-reliance. In the sphere of 
 scholarship, the influence which Bentley's spirit has exerted 
 through his writings might be called a great 'daemonic' 
 energy, a force which cannot be measured, like that, for 
 instance, of Porson, by the positive effect of particular 
 discoveries ; a force which operates not only by the written 
 letter, but also, and more widely still, by suggestion, sti- 
 mulus, inspiration, almost as vivid as could be communi- 
 cated by the voice, the countenance, the apprehended 
 nature of a present teacher.
 
 xm.] PLACE IN THE HISTOEY OF SCHOLARSHIP. 219 
 
 Bentlcy's influence has flowed in two main streams, 
 the historical and literary criticism of classical antiquity, 
 as best seen in the dissertation on Phalaris; the verbal 
 criticism, as seen in his work on classical texts. Holland, 
 and then Germany, received both currents. Wolf's in- 
 quiry into the origin of the Homeric poems, !Niebuhr's 
 examination of Roman legends, are the efforts of a criti- 
 cism to which Bentley's dissertation on Phalaris gave the 
 first pattern of method. On the other hand, Hermann's 
 estimate of Bentley's Terence is one of the earlier tes- 
 timonies to the effect which Bentley's verbal criticism 
 had exercised ; and Professor Nettleship has told us that 
 the late Maurice Haupt, in his lectures at Berlin on 
 the Epistles of Horace, ranked Bentley second to no other 
 scholar. "We, Bentley's countrymen, have felt his in- 
 fluence chiefly in the way of textual criticism. The his- 
 torical and literary criticism by which he stimulated such 
 men as Wolf was comparatively unappreciated in England 
 until its effects returned upon this country from Germany. 
 Bunsen could justly say, 'historical philology is the dis- 
 covery of Bentley, the heritage and glory of German 
 learning.' At Cambridge, Bentley's home, where Mark- 
 land, Wasse, and John Taylor had known him personally, 
 it was natural that the contemporary view of his merits 
 should be coloured by his own estimate ; and he considered 
 verbal emendation as his own forte. This opinion pre- 
 vailed in the Cambridge tradition, which fi-om Markhmd 
 and Taylor passed into the school of Person. It was 
 in vain that Richard Dawes disparaged Bentley's textual 
 criticism. Warburton and Lowth were more successful 
 in prejudicing English opinion against other aspects of 
 his work. That his labours on the Greek Testament were 
 so little known in England from his death to Lachmann's 
 time, is chiefly due to the fact (noticed by Tregelles) that
 
 220 BENTLET. [CHAP. 
 
 Bishop Marsh, in translating Michaelis, omitted the passage 
 relating to Bentley. But while English recognition was 
 thus limited, Holland honoured him by the mouths of 
 Ruhnken and Yalckenaer. And the memoir of Bentley 
 by F. A. Wolf may be regarded as registering an esti- 
 mate which Germany has not essentially altered. 
 
 The place of Bentley in literature primarily depends 
 on the fact that he represents England among a few great 
 scholars, of various countries, who helped to restore classical 
 learning in Europe. Nor is he merely one among them ; 
 he is one with whom an epoch begins. Erasmus marks 
 the highest point reached in the sixteenth century by the 
 genial study of antiquity on its literary side. Scaliger 
 expresses the effort, at once erudite and artistic, to com- 
 prehend antiquity as a whole in the light of verified 
 history. Casaubon embodies the devoted endeavour to 
 comprehend ancient society in the light of its recorded 
 manners, without irradiating or distui'bing the effect by 
 any play of personal thought or feeling. With Bentley 
 that large conception of antiquity on the 'real' side is 
 still present, but as a condition tacitly presupposed, not 
 as the evident guide of his immediate task. He feels the 
 greatness of his predecessors as it could be felt only by 
 their peer, but sees that the very foundations on which 
 they built the classical books themselves must be ren- 
 dered sound, if the edifice is to be upheld or completed. 
 He does not disparage that ' higher ' criticism in which his 
 own powers were so signally proved ; rather his object is 
 to establish it firmly on the only basis which can securely 
 support it, the basis of ascertained texts. His labours 
 were fruitful both in Greek and in Latin. However we 
 may estimate his felicity in the two languages respectively, 
 it cannot be said that he gave to either a clear preference 
 over the other.
 
 xm.] PLACE IN THE HISTORY OF SCHOLARSHIP. 221 
 
 This is distinctive of his position relatively to the 
 general course of subsequent scholarship. During the 
 latter part of the eighteenth century several causes 
 conspired to fix attention upon Greek. The elastic freedom 
 of the Greek language and literature, of Greek action and 
 art, was congenial to the spirit of that time, insurgent as 
 it was against traditional authority, and impatient to 
 find a reasonable order of life by a return to nature. 
 Wolf, in 1795, touched a chord which vibrated through- 
 out Europe when he claimed the Iliad and the Odyssey as 
 groups of songs which in a primitive age had spoken 
 directly to the hearts of the people. His theory, raising 
 a host of special questions, stimulated research in the 
 whole range of that matchless literature which begins with 
 Homer. The field of Greek studies, as compai-ed with 
 Latin, was still comparatively fresh. Latin had long been 
 familiar as the language which scholars wrote, or even 
 spoke ; and the further progress of Latin learning was 
 delayed by the belief that there was little more to learn. 
 Greek, on the other hand, attracted acute minds not only 
 by its intrinsic charm, but by the hope of discovery ; the 
 Greek scholar, like the Greek sailor of old, was attended 
 by visions of treasures that might await him in the 
 region of the sunset. 
 
 Porson was born in 1759 and died in 1808. In his 
 life-time, and for more than a generation after his death, 
 scholars were principally occupied with Greek. Among 
 many eminent names, it would be enough to mention 
 Wyttenbach, Brunck, Hermann, Boeckh, Lobeck, Bekker, 
 Elmsley, Dobree, Blomfield, Gaisford, Thirlwall. In 
 Latin scholarship, Heyne's Virgil was perhaps the most 
 considerable performance of Person's day. Then Niebuhr 
 arose, and turned new currents of ink-rest towards Rome. 
 His examination of early Roman tradition did much the
 
 222 BENTLEY. [CHAP. 
 
 same work for Latin which Wolf's Homeric theory had 
 done for Greek. Ideas of startling novelty stimulated 
 the critical study of a whole literature ; and the value of 
 the impulse was independent of the extent to which the 
 ideas themselves were sound. Niebuhr's thoughts, like 
 Wolf's, were given to the world in a propitious hour. 
 Wolf broached views welcome to the mind of the 
 Revolution ; Niebuhr proposed a complex problem of 
 fascinating interest at a moment when intellectual 
 pursuits were resumed with a new zest after the exhaustion 
 of the Napoleonic wars. And then, at no long interval, 
 came the works which may be regarded as fundamental 
 in the recent Latin philology, those of Lachmann, 
 Ritschl, Mommsen. 
 
 Bentley's name is the last of first-rate magnitude 
 which occurs above the point at which Greek and Latin 
 studies begin to diverge. His critical method, his 
 pregnant ideas have influenced the leaders of progress 
 in both fields. Wolf's memoir of Bentley has been 
 mentioned. Niebuhr also speaks of him as towering like 
 a giant amid a generation of dwarfs. His genius was 
 recognised by Ritschl as by Porsoii. It is still possible 
 to ask, Was Bentley stronger in Greek or in Lutin 1 I 
 have heard a very eminent scholar say, in Latin : the 
 general voice would probably say, in Greek : and this is 
 hardly disputable, if our test is to be success in textual 
 criticism. Bentley has given few, if any, Latin emenda- 
 tions so good as his best on Aristophanes, Callimachus, 
 Nicauder and some other Greek authors. Yet the 
 statement needs to be guarded and explained. In 
 Bentley's time, Latin studies were more advanced than 
 Greek. Bentley's emendations, as a general rule, are best 
 when the text is worst. The Greek texts, in which the 
 first harvest had not yet been reaped, offered him a
 
 xiii.] PLACE IN THE HISTORY OF SCHOLARSHIP. 223 
 
 better field than the Latin. His personal genius, with 
 its vivacity somewhat impatient of formula, was also 
 more Greek than Latin ; his treatment of Greek usually 
 seems more sympathetic; but it might be doubted 
 whether his positive knowledge of the Latin language 
 and literature was inferior. If it is said that there are 
 flaws in his Latin prose, it may be replied that we have 
 none of his Greek prose. 
 
 The gain of scholarship during the last fifty years 
 has been chiefly in three provinces, study of manu- 
 scripts, study of inscriptions, and comparative philology. 
 The direct importance of archaeology for classical learn- 
 ing has of late years been winning fuller recognition 
 to the advantage of both. In Bentley's time no one of 
 these four studies had yet become scientific. That very 
 fact best illustrates the calibre of the man who, a century 
 and a half ago, put forth principles of textual criticism 
 afterwards adopted by Lachmann ; merited the title, 
 ' first of critics,' from such an editor of Greek inscriptions 
 as Boeckh ; divined the presence of the digamma in tho 
 text of Homer; treated an obscure branch of numis- 
 matics with an insight which the most recent researches, 
 aided by new resources, recognise as extraordinary. 
 Bentley's qualities, mental and moral, fitted him to be a 
 pioneer over a wide region, rather than, like Person, the 
 perfect cultivator of a limited domain ; Bentley cleared 
 new ground, made new paths, opened new perspectives, 
 ranged through the length and breadth of ancient litera- 
 ture as Hercules, in tho Trachiniae of Sophocles, claims 
 to have roamed through Hellas, sweeping from hill, luko 
 and forest those monstrous forms before which superstition 
 had quailed, or which helpless apathy had suffered to 
 infest the dark places of tho land. 
 
 Probably tho btucly of classical antiquity, in tho
 
 224 BENTLEY. [CHAP. xni. 
 
 largest sense, has never been more really vigorous than it 
 is at the present day. If so, it is partly because that 
 study relies no longer upon a narrow or exclusive pre- 
 scription, but upon a reasonable perception of its proper 
 place among the studies which belong to a liberal 
 education ; ' and because the diffusion of that which is 
 specially named science has at the same time spread abroad 
 the only spirit in which any kind of knowledge can be 
 prosecuted to a result of lasting intellectual value. While 
 every year tends to refine the subdivision of labour in 
 that vast field, Bentley's work teaches a simple lesson 
 which is still applicable to every part of it. The literary 
 activity of the present day has multiplied attractive 
 facilities for becoming acquainted with the ancient classics 
 at second hand. Every sensible person will rejoice 
 that such facilities exist; they are excellent in their 
 own way. Only it is important not to forget the 
 difference between the knowledge at second hand and 
 the knowledge at first hand, whether regard is had to 
 the educational effect of the process, or to the worth of 
 the acquisition, or to the hope of further advance. Even 
 with a Bentley's power, a Bentley could have been made 
 only by his method, by his devoted and systematic 
 study, not of books about the classics, but of the classical 
 texts themselves; by testing, at each step, his compre- 
 hension of what he read ; by not allowing the mere 
 authority of tradition to supersede the free exercise of 
 independent judgment ; and by always remembering that 
 the very right of such judgment to independence must 
 rest on the patience, the intelligence, the completeness 
 with which the tradition itself has been surveyed. 
 
 CAMBRIDGE: FEINTED BT c. /. CLAY, M.A. AT THE UNIVERSITY PRESS.
 
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