and

Vexing the dull ear of a drowsy man."

"Life's but a walking shadow; a poor player,
That struts and frets his hour upon the stage,
And then is heard no more: it is a tale

Told by an idiot, full of sound and fury
Signifying nothing."

Macbeth Act V. 5

The original version in our Prayer Book is as follows:

"For when Thou art angry, all our days are gone: we bring our years to an end, as it were a tale that is told.”

There is nothing great or brilliant about this translation of the XCth Psalm. How unlike is the reflection of the Psalmist's poetic fire upon Bacon, compared with the effect it produced upon Milton, in the hymn which he ascribes to our first parents; or upon Thomson, in the hymn with which he closes the "Seasons;" or upon Coleridge, in the great Psalm which swelled from his harp, as he struck it to the music of the Arveiron, and in the light of the morning-star; or upon St. John of Damascus, in the celebrated hymn sung after mid

night on Easter morning, during the symbolic ceremony of lighting the tapers; one verse of which, I cannot refrain from quoting as a contrast to Bacon's XCth.

Now let the heavens be joyful; let earth her song begin ;
Let the round world keep triumph, and all that is therein;
Invisible or visible, their notes let all things blend ;
For Christ the Lord hath risen, our joy that hath no end!

Nathaniel Holmes can be ingenuous as well as ingenious. He alludes to Bacon's metrical version of the Psalms, giving the world to understand that the Philosopher had compiled in metre the Book of Psalms, whereas he only wrote a paraphrastic version of seven of the Psalms of David.

Here are four of Bacon's line's from his translation of the CIVth Psalm :

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

these must refer to the first Verse, which is here given from the original

"Bless the Lord, O my Soul. O Lord my God,

thou art very great; Thou art clothed with honour and majesty."

Bacon, here, with his "Line upon Line" is far behind his contemporaries, and he does not shine forth as brightly as in his prose, which is, at times, full of poetic beauty; his rhyme in this instance has taken away all the Psalmist's ecstasy, much in the same way that Pope takes all the sublimity out of Homer.

Is such poetry as this, "making up for the lost time with this age," which Bacon deplores, and which he "would be glad, as God shall give him leave, to recover it with posterity." ?— Could Bacon, with all his vanity and love of fame, write such an Epilogue after his poetry as Horace did after completing a considerable collection of lyrical pieces?

66

Exegi monumentum ære perennis

Regalique situ pyramidum altius ;" &c.

thus translated by Lord Lytton: :

"I have built a monument than bronze more lasting, Soaring more high than regal pyramids,

Which nor the stealthy gnawing of the rain drop

Nor the vain rush of Boreas shall destroy; Nor shall it pass away with the unnumbered Series of ages and the flight of time.

I shall not wholly die."

How different is the master-hand of Shakspere when he alludes to some Scriptural text, or rather, reproduces some leading truths of Scripture; he dose not paraphrase after Bacon's fashion, neither does he metaphrase. Whether the religious sentiments scattered throughout his plays are his own personal sentiments, or merely such as he, in his dramatic art would cause his personages to utter, is foreign to my present inquiry. Suffice it to say his parallels with the Scriptures are not mere truisms, Platonisms, Euphonisms.-There is little of the letter in them, but there is great abundance of the spirit; a few instances will be enough:*

* The allusions to Scripture in the Essays of Bacon are many; they were necessary in some instances to support and confirm his own profound conclusions, but in the works of Bacon the expressions of religious sentiment do not seem to belong so much to the author as they do, in Shakspere, who sometimes "delays

and

my

My lovers and my friends stand aloof from my sore;
kinsmen stand afar off

Psalm XXXVIII. 2.

-Those you make your friends,

And give your hearts to, when they once perceive

the action of the drama to give a more full and ́emphatic expression to a religious idea."

In connection with this, we may call attention to a circumstance mentioned in William Aldis Wright's Preface to The Advancement of Learning :

'In February, 1591-2 (Bacon then being 31 years of age) his brother Anthony came to live in Grey's Inn, and from the motherly solicitude of Lady Bacon for her eldest son's religious welfare, we learn that Francis was negligent in the use of family prayers, and was not to be held up as a pattern to his brother, or resorted to for counsel in such matters.”

Shakspere, in his 32nd year, had written The Merchant of Venice, of which Schlegel, in his Lectures on Dramatic Literature, says “it is one of Shakspere's most perfect works." In it is that beautiful apostrophe of Portia's on the quality of Mercy, unparallelled by any author ancient or modern.

Bacon's Essays, written when the author was 45 years old, treat of Great Place, of Boldness, of Goodness, and Goodness of Nature, of Nobility, of Atheism, of Superstition, of Travel, of Empire, of Counsel, &c., but not of Mercy.

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