poetical passages and lyrical gems which they introduce, and their power of comic characterisation and situation. Their chief failing is a want of heroic passion, a tendency to commonplace, and, perhaps, a weakening of the blank verse, at least for tragedy, by the common use of feminine endings; and their great fault is immorality of scene or plot, and indecency of language. To these, the only "gentlemen" dramatists of their time, a lowering of the moral standard of the Elizabethan drama is distinctly to be charged. It may be said in mitigation of this offence against decency, that they only reflected the morals of their age: the standard was higher in the reign of Elizabeth than in that of James I. Among their best plays, besides the two already named, the following may be included: The Scornful Lady, The Beggar's Bush, The Humorous Lieutenant, The Faithful Shepherdess, the last-named a pastoral (by Fletcher alone) of the class of Jonson's Sad Shepherd and Milton's Comus; the tragedies of Valentinian, The False One, Bonduca, and Thierry and Theodoret; and the comedies of The Little French Lawyer, The Coxcomb, and The Knight of the Burning Pestle. The Two Noble Kinsmen, usually given to Fletcher, is generally allowed to contain traces in language, if not in plot or character, of the great pen of Shakespeare. On the other hand, well-known passages in Shakespeare's Henry VIII. are believed to show traces of the art of Fletcher.

Philip Massinger (1584-1639), in spite of his coarse language, must be regarded in his characterisations as a dramatic moralist. He wrote during the last twenty years of his life nearly forty plays, half of which are lost. He collaborated with other writers. The chief of his plays are The Virgin Martyr, The City Madam, and A New Way to Pay Old Debts. The last-named contains the powerfully drawn character of Sir Giles Over-reach, upon the outwitting of whose greed the plot turns. Massinger's verse is strong and harmonious, and rises naturally with the subject. His comedies, without being dull, are deficient in fun, and his humour is of the grim, almost tragic, cast. He was a scholar of Oxford, but little is known of his life, and he died in such obscurity that he was buried as “a stranger," though possibly the entry in the burial-register of St Saviour's, Southwark, only means that he was not a native of the parish.

James Shirley (1594-1666) is the last of the great Elizabethan line of dramatists. After him come Davenant and Dryden, who belong to quite another school. He was a native of London, and educated at Merchant Taylors' and both Oxford and Cambridge. He became a clergyman, but spent most of his time as a schoolmaster both before and after the closing of the theatres (in 1642), with a brief interlude of soldiering in the Royalist ranks. He was driven from his house by the

Great Fire, and died shortly afterwards on the same day as his wife. He wrote a great deal, and at about the same respectable but never commanding level. Probably his best pieces are The Lady of Pleasure and a tragedy named The Traitor.

PROSE WRITERS.

Francis Bacon, Viscount St Albans (1561-1626)—better known by his popular title of Lord Bacon-was the youngest son of Sir Nicholas Bacon, Lord Keeper, and nephew of Lord Burleigh, Lord Treasurer of England. He was born in London, educated at home, probably under the care of his mother, one of the most learned women of her time, and sent to Trinity College, Cambridge, in his twelfth year. There he continued only three years, being dissatisfied with the course and methods of study. He now turned his attention to the legal profession, and becoming a student of Gray's Inn, was called to the bar at the age of twenty-one. He had previously spent about three years in France, from which country he returned to England on the unexpected death of his father. As his uncle, for some unexplained reason, refused to help him, he was thrown on his own resources, and, combining great legal acumen with oratorical ability, he soon began to make his mark in Parliament, which he had entered in 1584. He offended the Queen by a speech in opposition to the Government, and when the Attorney-Generalship fell vacant, though Bacon's claim to the office was supported by the Earl of Essex, the post was bestowed upon Coke. Thereupon Essex generously presented him with a small estate, of the value of £1800.

Bacon has been accused of ingratitude to Essex, but the cnarge as formulated by Pope, that, for this and later offences which have been preferred against him, he was "the meanest of mankind," has been too readily endorsed by the popular judgment. It is certain that when Essex, by his own headstrong imprudence, fell into disgrace and danger, Bacon did all he could to save him; and it is equally certain that if he had not been commanded to draw up a statement of the treasonable practices of Essex, with which the Queen sought to justify the earl's execution for attempted rebellion in 1601, he would not

have done so of his own accord as it was, his Declaration of the Treasons of Essex failed, from its leniency, to satisfy Elizabeth; and Bacon's Apology for writing the Declaration amply clears him of the accusation of ingratitude.

It was not till the reign of James I. that Bacon began to rise to a high position of political and professional influence. In 1603 he was knighted. In 1605 he published, with a dedication to the king, his famous Advancement of Learning: he had previously published, in 1597, the first edition of his Essays. Even under James, Bacon's rise was at first very slow. Solicitor-General in 1607, he became at last (1613) Attorney-General, on the promotion, which he himself had advised, of his rival Coke to a judgeship. In 1616 Coke, who had taken the popular side against the king, was dismissed from office; and Bacon rose on the downfall of Coke. In 1617 he became Lord Keeper, in 1618 he was created Baron Verulam and appointed Lord Chancellor of England, and in 1621 he was raised to the peerage, with the title of Viscount St Albans. Meantime his reputation as a philosopher who had discovered a Novum Organum for scientific research was spreading. Yet it was in the year of his greatest power and eminence that he fell. The cause of it was undoubtedly the personal envy and hatred of Coke. The charge brought against him was that of taking bribes for the perversion of justice. Bacon acknowledged the acceptance of presents from litigants, but denied that he had at any time let it influence his decisions. There is absolutely no reason to doubt his denial. And this may be said in palliation of his admitted guilt, that in accepting presents from suitors at his tribunal, he was doing no more than his predecessors in office had been in the practice of doing. Bacon had an unusually strong temptation to continue the imprudent, if not iniquitous, practice, in the circumstance that he was a poor man involved inextricably in debt, and at the same time, from his luxurious nature, utterly incapable of economy. He was declared guilty, deposed, fined, and imprisoned. The imprisonment was only nominal-two or three days in the Tower-the fine was cancelled, and Bacon was forgiven; but he was banished from London and the Court. He made a wise use of his compulsory retirement from public life, but seems to have had good reason, in his retention of the king's favour, to cherish the hope of complete restoration. In the meanwhile he gave his attention to philosophical and literary work.

And it was his devotion to science that at last and quite unexpectedly brought his life to a premature close. One wintry day in March 1626, when out driving, he caught a deadly chill by experimenting with snow upon the carcass of a fowl. The illness came upon him so suddenly that his coachman, in alarm, drove him to the nearest convenient house, which happened to be Lord Arundel's, and there, in a few days, he died of feverish cold.

Bacon's works are partly in Latin and partly in English. Of the English language as a medium of thought he had a poor opinion, which the language has avenged, for it is only his English works that are now read. He wrote in Latin that he might reach beyond provincial England to the ears of Continental scholars. His English works consist of The Advancement of Learning, 1605; miscellaneous Essays, numbering in the enlarged edition of 1625 fifty-eight in all; and a History of Henry VII., published 1622. Bacon's style in these works is clear, picturesque, and pithy. The Essays deal with very various subjects, but all have the attraction of being connected with human nature. The expression could not be more condensed if the author had been trying to pack as much matter as possible into the smallest possible space. The collection is an endless storehouse of suggestive ideas. Bacon's Latin works are mainly two: The New Atlantis—a story, like Utopia, of a model commonwealth in the Southern seas; and the Instauratio Magna Scientiarum (the Great Instauration of the Sciences). This great philosophic work was left incomplete by its author. Its divisions are given, and the scope of the whole is indicated. The divisions are-1, De Augmentis Scientiarum (an enlargement of his English treatise The Advancement of Learning); 2, Novum Organum; 3, Sylva Sylvarum; 4, Scala Intellectus; 5, Prodromi; and 6, Philosophia Secunda. In the first part or section of the work the field of knowledge is surveyed and laid out. the second the new method for the attainment of knowledge is unfolded, the method of Induction, proceeding on the two principles of observation and experiment. In the third some materials and facts from the phenomena of nature are brought together for the new method to operate upon. In the fourth the art or operation of induction, which is the essential part of the new method, is illustrated. In the fifth a foretaste or specimen

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anticipations of the New Philosophy are given. The sixth part is merely named.

The Chrysostom of England, and more "golden-mouthed " than John of Antioch, being indeed the most eloquent of divines of any age or country, Jeremy Taylor (1613-1667) was born of humble parents in Cambridge, educated as a sizar at Caius College in that university town from his thirteenth to his twentieth year, and on entering the Church, for which his natural piety and charity fitted him no less than his learning and eloquence, had the good fortune to come under the notice of Archbishop Laud-the steady patron of learning and piety-and was by that prelate recommended to an Oxford fellowship, and presented to the living of Uppingham. Here Taylor had not been settled more than seven years when the Civil War began, and he was driven from his rural rectory by the Puritans of Rutlandshire, with whom in politics he had no sympathy. He became a chaplain in the king's army, and continued in that wandering office until the defeat at Naseby, in 1645, destroyed the last hopes of the Royalists. He suffered imprisonment, not once only, in the king's cause; but for the thirteen years which preceded the Restoration he lived a free, happy, and busy life in an obscure Welsh village, where he kept school, married a small heiress, and wrote nearly all his books, and certainly his best ones. 1660 he was appointed to the Irish bishopric of Down and Connor, but the see became "a place of torment" to him from the unrelenting opposition which the Ulster Presbyterians offered to his spiritual views and claims. He retained the dignity, however, till his death in 1667.

In

Taylor's works include his Life of Christ, a course of sermons entitled Golden Grove, and his famous and ever popular Holy Living and Holy Dying. His style is singularly rich and ornate, continually lit up with illustrative similes, which are often poems in miniature. The sentences are often loose and illogically connected, and his mannerism of "So have I seen" in introducing a comparison is a common flaw on the surface of pure and exalted eloquence. He has been called "the Shakespeare of prose" and "the Spenser of divinity": all agree that he is one of the greatest prose writers of our country.