Again : "Nemesis is described as wing'd; because of the sudden and unforeseen revolutions of things": and in the play, this sudden revolution and change of things is introduced in these lines: — "Cap. All things, that we ordained festival, And all things change them to the contrary." -Act IV. Sc. 5. And again, the story continues: — "Nemesis is distinguished also with a crown; in allusion to the envious and malignant nature of the vulgar; for when the fortunate and the powerful fall, the people commonly exult and set a crown upon the head of Nemesis "; which shows itself in the play, thus: "Nurse. Shame come to Romeo! Jul. Blister'd be thy tongue, For such a wish! He was not born to shame: Upon his brow shame is asham'd to sit; For 't is a throne where honour may be crown'd Sole monarch of the universal Earth."— Act III. Sc. 2. The story proceeds: — "The spear in her right hand relates to those whom she actually strikes and transfixes. And if there be any whom she does not make victims of calamity and misfortune, to them she nevertheless exhibits that dark and ominous spectre, in her left: for mortals must needs be visited, even when they stand at the summit of felicity, with images of death, diseases, misfortunes, perfidies of friends, plots of enemies, changes of fortune and the like; even like those Ethiops in the phial." And the play makes use of all this even to the phial full of Ethiops, spectres, and images of death, thus: "Jul. Or hide me nightly in a charnel-house, And hide me with a dead man in his shroud; Things that to hear them told have made me tremble; And I will do it without fear or doubt, Like death, when he shuts up the day of life; And then awake as from a pleasant sleep.- Act IV. Sc. 1. - Act IV. Sc. 3. "And certainly." continues Bacon with the fable, "when I have read that chapter of Caius Plinius in which he has collected the misfortunes and miseries of Augustus Cæsar, him whom I thought of all men the most fortunate, and who had moreover a certain art of using and enjoying his fortune, and in whose mind were no traces of swelling, of tightness, of softness, of confusion, or of melancholy, (insomuch that once he had determined to die voluntarily,)—great and powerful must this goddess be, I have thought, when such a victim was brought to the altar." And of this swelling, tightness, softness, confusion, melan choly, and voluntary dying, and the splendid victim of this powerful goddess brought to the altar, we have some unmistakable exhibition in this play; and these misfortunes and miseries of Nemesis appear again in Romeo's speech to the Apothecary, all these several topics falling in at the proper time and place, and in such form as the course of the drama requires : "Rom. Art thou so base and full of wretchedness, Then be not poor, but break it, and take this."-Act V. Sc. 1. But Nemesis more particularly represents the dark and secret judgment of God; and, continues Bacon, in the fable: "This Nemesis of the Darkness (the human not agreeing with the divine judgment) was matter of observation even among the heathen. which difference of the divine and human judgment creeps into the end of the play thus: Prince. See, what a scourge is laid upon your hate, Act V. Sc. 3. "Fri. Peace, ho! for shame! confusion's cure lives not In these confusions. Heaven and yourself Had part in this fair maid; now Heaven hath all; And all the better is it for the maid: Your part in her you could not keep from death, But Heaven keeps his part in eternal life. Dry up your tears, and stick your rosemary In all her best array bear her to the church; 1 This play seems to have undergone considerable emendation subsequently to the quarto of 1597, which, in place of this and the preceding line, reads as follows: "Upon thy back hangs ragged miserie, And starved famine dwelleth in thy cheeks." See White's Shakes., X. 182; Notes, 189. For though fond Nature bids us all lament, Yet nature's tears are reason's merriment." — Act IV. Sc. 5. § 5. SCIENCE OF MATTER. The general scope of Bacon's theory of universals was essentially and at bottom the same with that of the higher modern philosophy: its end was to be Philosophy itself. His discussions concerning the nature of cause and form make it clear that he had arrived, substantially, at the transcendental conceptions of both. Forms, as anything separate and distinct from the real essence of things and those fundamental and eternal laws of thought under which essence takes form, were mere fictions of the imagination; and matter, as anything distinct from the last and positive power and cause of nature, was simply a fantastic superstition. "His form and cause conjoined" in the ghost exactly illustrate the metaphysical conception of the true nature of matter and form, cause and effect, noumena and phenomena, and the mode and manner of action and operation of that uncaused power that creates all things; that is to say, that it is, in fact and reality, a power of the nature of the power of thought, wholly, as the only actual substance, essence, or matter, eternally in activity, under laws which are necessary laws of all possible thinking, divine or human, and in reference to the divine mind, identical with the laws of nature or physics so far, and in the modes of thought only, giving therein the substances of all created things and their forms, together with the order, particular distribution, movement, and total plan, moral fitness, perfection, and artistic beauty, exhibited in the entire providential scheme and purpose in the creation of any universe, past, present, or future: whence comes for us, in the study and contemplation of the past and present universe that lies open before us as the book of God's works so far, a foreground and promise of the certain (so far as certain), the possible, and the probable continuation thereof in the future; an uncreated thinking Power, thinking His universe. And so he imagined it possible for the Creator to bring the disembodied spirit or ghost into view of the physical eye of Hamlet. Not that this was possible in actual human experience, but that by a certain poetic license, the thing might be conceived in the mind as possible in the artistically creative manner in which the imagination works. A strictly scientific observation of facts in external nature clearly proves that it would be utterly impossible for the human eye, organized and constructed as it is, actually to see and perceive any object, substance, or thing whatever so thin and ethereal in its nature as the spiritual form of a disembodied soul must be; though such a spiritual creation, on the metaphysical principles which Bacon had laid down and expounded, and in accordance with exact scientific thinking, too, might have a real existence in nature as a finite created object, or subject, and a substantial thing, existing in time and space as a part of the existent universe, though invisible to mortal eyes: It is an honest ghost, that let me tell you." — Act I. Sc. 5. Nevertheless, even Hamlet himself was not quite sure of The spirit that I have seen May be the Devil: and the Devil hath power (As he is very potent with such spirits) Abuses me to damn me. I'll have grounds More relative than this: the play 's the thing, Wherein I'll catch the conscience of the King."— Act II. Sc. 2. The natural eye, when the sunlight streams in at a window, or some small crevice, can see very fine particles of dust floating in the air, which are wholly invisible beyond the stream of light: yet this dust is a gross cloud of solid particles, compared with the air itself, which, though |