as a giant doth run his unwearicd course, should, as it were through a languishing faintness, begin to stand and to rest himself; if the moon should wander from her beaten way; the times and seasons of the year blend themselves by disordered and confused mixture; the winds breathe out their last gasp; the clouds yield no rain; the earth be defeated of heavenly influence; the fruits of the earth pine away as children at the withered breasts of their mother, no longer able to yield them relief; what would become of man himself, whom these things now do all serve? See we not plainly that obedience of creatures1 unto the law of nature is the stay of the whole world?

Of Law there can be no less acknowledged than that her seat is the bosom of God, her voice the harmony of the world. All things in heaven and earth do her homage; the very least as feeling her care, and the greatest as not exempted from her power: both angels and men, and creatures of what condition soever, though each in different sort and manner, yet all with uniform consent, admiring her as the mother of their peace and joy.

From Bacon's Essays.

3

Of Great Place.-Men in great place are thrice servants-servants of the sovereign or state, servants of fame, and servants of business; so as they have no freedom, neither in their persons nor in their actions nor in their times. It is a strange desire to seek power and to lose liberty, or to seek power over others and to lose power over a man's self. The rising unto place is laborious, and by pains men come to greater pains; and it is sometimes base, and by indignities men come to dignities. The standing is slippery, and the regress is either a downfall or at least an eclipse, which is a melancholy thing. Nay, men cannot retire when they would, neither will they when it were reason, but are impatient of privateness, even in age and sickness, which require the shadow; like old townsmen that will be still sitting at their street door, though thereby they offer age to scorn. Certainly great persons had need to borrow other men's opinions to think themselves happy, for, it they judge by their own feeling, they cannot find it; but, if they think with themselves what other men think of them, and that other men would fain be as they are, then they are happy as it were by report, when, perhaps, they find the contrary within; for they are the first that find their own griefs, though they be the last that find their own faults.

Certainly men in great fortunes are strangers to themselves; and, while they are in the puzzle of business, they have no time to tend their health either of body or mind. In place there is license to do good and evil, whereof the latter is a curse; for, in evil, the best condition is not to will,' the second not to can. But power to do good is the true and lawful end of aspiring; for good thoughts, though God accept them, yet towards men are little better than good dreams except they be put in act, and that cannot be without power and place as the vantage and commanding ground. Merit and good works are the end of man's motion, and consciences of the same is the accomplishment of man's rest; for if a man can be partaker of God's theatre, he shall likewise be partaker of God's rest.

4

Of Youth and Age.—Young men are fitter to invent than to judge, fitter for execution than for counsel, and fitter for new projects than for settled business; for the experience of age, in things that fall within the compass of it, directeth them, but in new things abuseth them. The errors of young men are the ruin of business, but the errors of aged men amount but to this-that more might have been done, or sooner. Young men, in the conduct and manages of actions, embrace more than they can hold; stir more than they can quiet; fly to the end without consideration of the means and degrees; pursue some few principles which they have chanced upon, absurdly; care not to innovate, which draws unknown inconveniences; use extreme remedies at first; and that, which doubleth all errors, will not acknowledge or retract them, like an unready horse that will neither stop nor turn.

Men of age object too much, consult too long, adventure too little, repent too soon, and seldom drive business home to the full period,' but content themselves with the mediocrity of success. Certainly it is good to compound employments of both; for that will be good for the present, because the virtues of either age may correct the defects of both; and good for succession, that young men may be learners while men in age are actors; and, lastly, good for extern' accidents, because authority followeth old men, and favor and popularity youth; but, for the moral part, perhaps, youth will have the preeminence, as age hath for the politic. A certain rabbin, upon the text, "Your young men shall see visions, and your old men shall dream dreams," inferreth that young men are admitted nearer to God than old, because vision is a clearer revelation than a dream; and, certainly, the more a man drink

1 Desire. 2 Be able. Are not cautious.

3 Consciousness.
7 Extent.

4 Work. 5 Management.
8 The other. • Outward.

eth of the world, the more it intoxicateth; and age doth profit rather in the powers of understanding than in the virtues of the will and affections.

From Bacon's Advancement of Learning.

For the conceit1 that learning should dispose men to leisure and privateness and make men slothful, it were a strange thing if that which accustometh the mind to a perpetual motion and agitation should induce slothfulness; whereas, contrariwise, it may be truly affirmed that no kind of men love business for itself but those that are learned; for other persons love it for profit, as an hireling, that loves the work for the wages; or for honor, as because it beareth them up in the eyes of men, and refresheth their reputation, which otherwise would wear; or because it putteth them in mind of their fortune, and giveth them occasion to pleasure or displeasure; or because it exerciseth some faculty wherein they take pride, and so entertaineth them in good humor and pleasing conceits toward themselves; or because it advanceth any other their ends.

So that as it is said of untrue valors, that some men's valors are in the eyes of them that look on; so such men's industries are in the eyes of others, or at least in regard of their own designments: only learned men love business as an action according to nature, as agreeable to health of mind as exercise is to health of body, taking pleasure in the action itself and not in the purchase; so that of all men they are the most indefatigable, if it be towards any business which can hold or detain their mind. And if any man be laborious in reading and study and yet idle in business and action, it groweth from some weakness of body or softness of spirit and not of learning. Well may it be that such a point of a man's nature may make him give himself to learning, but it is not learning that breedeth any such point in his nature.

And that learning should take up too much time or leisure, I answer, the most active or busy man that hath been or can be hath (no question) many vacant times of leisure, while he expecteth the tides and returns of business, and then the question is but how those spaces and times of leisure shall be filled and spent, whether in pleasures or in studies; as was well answered by Demosthenes to his adversary, Eschines, that was a man given to pleasure and told him that his orations did smell of the lamp. "Indeed," said Demosthenes, "there is a great difference between the things that you and I do by lamp-light." So as no man need doubt that learning will expulse business, but rather it will keep

1 Conception. Privacy. Designs. Acquisition. Fear. Drive out.

and defend the possession of the mind against idleness and pleasure, which otherwise at unawares may enter to the prejudice of both.

Again, for that other conceit that learning should undermine the reverence of laws and government, it is assuredly a mere depravation1 and calumny, without all shadow of truth. For to say that a blind custom of obedience should be a surer obligation than duty taught and understood-it is to affirm that a blind man may tread surer by a guide than a seeing man can by a light. And it is without all controversy that learning doth make the minds of men gentle, generous, maniable, and pliant to government; whereas ignorance makes them churlish, thwart and mutinous: and the evidence of time doth clear this assertion, considering that the most barbarous, rude, and unlearned times have been most subject to tumults, seditions, and changes.

2

And as to the judgment of Cato the Censer, he was well punished for his blasphemy against learning, in the same kind wherein he offended; for, when he was past threescore years old, he was taken with an extreme desire to go to school again and to learn the Greek tongue, to the end to peruse the Greek authors; which doth well demonstrate that his former censure of the Grecian learning was rather an affected gravity than according to the inward sense of his own opinion. And as for Virgil's verses, though it pleased him to brave the world in taking to the Romans the art of empire and leaving to others the arts of subjects; yet so much is manifest that the Romans never ascended to that height of empire till the time they had ascended to the height of other arts.

LESSON 21.

THE LATER POETRY OF THE ELIZABETHAN LITERATURE, 1579-1603. EDMUND SPENSER.66 The later Elizabethan poetry begins with the Shepheardes Calender of SPENSER. Spenser was born in London, 1552, and educated at Merchant Taylor's School and at Cambridge, which he left at the age of twenty-four. His early boyhood was passed in London, and he went frequently to an English home among the glens of Lancashire. He returned thither after he left Cambridge, and fell in love with a 'fair widowe's daughter of the glen,' whom

1 Slander.

• Perverse. 2 Manageable.

5
4 Make clear. " Opinion.

he called Rosalind. His love was not returned, and her coldness drove him southward.

His college friend, Gabriel Harvey, made him known to Leicester, and probably, since Harvey was 'Leicester's man,' to Philip Sidney, Leicester's nephew; and it was at Sidney's house of Penshurst that the Shepheardes Calender was made, and the Faerie Queen begun. The publication of the former work in 1579 at once made Spenser the first poet of the day, and its literary freshness was such that men felt that, for the first time since Chaucer, England had given birth to a great poet. It was a pastoral poem, divided into twelve eclogues, one for each month of the year. Shepherds and shepherd life were mixed in its verse with complaints for his lost love, with a desire for Church reform, with loyalty to the Queen. It marks the strong love of old English poetry by its reference to Chaucer, though it is in form imitated from the French pastoral of Clément Marot. The only tie it really has to Chaucer is in the choice of disused English words and spelling, a practice of Spenser's which somewhat spoils the Faerie Queen. The Puritanism of the poem does not lie in any attack on the Episcopal theory, but in an attack on the sloth. and pomp of the clergy, and in a demand for a nobler moral life. It is the same in the Faerie Queen.

THE FAERIE QUEEN.-The twelve books of this poem were to represent the twelve moral virtues, each in the person of a knight who was to conquer all the separate sins and errors which were at battle with the virtue he personified. In Arthur, the king of the company, the Magnificence of the whole of virtue was to be represented, and he was at last to arrive at union with the Faerie Queen, that divine glory of God to which all human thought and act aspired. This was Spenser's Puritanism-the desire after a perfectly pure life for State and Church and Man. It was opposed in State and Church, he held, by the power of Rome, which he paints as Duessa, the falsehood which wears the garb of truth, and who