'places us indeed in another world, and that world is gay and animated, and perpetually excites our wonder but we feel a want of kindred sympathy with its inhabitants-their language is not our language; their feelings are not our feelings; their hearts not our hearts. . . In the great poet there must be a harmony of truth and fiction; Calderon has only the latter his grandeur and strength must be governed and regulated by propriety; Calderon riots without restraint or control. . Calderon therefore may create an ardent burst of enthusiasm ; but it will soon burn itself out will have many admirers, but few lovers of his poetry. He will have appeared before us like a splendid procession, which we should lament not to have seen, but which, when the novelty is passed and curiosity satiated, we shall scarcely wish to pass again before us'.

he

With the passing of Calderon from the stage Spanish literature itself passed away. It burned brightly for two hundred years. Its effective history is contained between 1492 and 1681. For consider the significance of these dates. At the end of the fifteenth century (indeed, in 1492 precisely) the Spaniard, Columbus, discovered America, and Spain, whatever her debt to Moorish and Hebrew culture, asserted the national principle of Spain for the Spanish by her overthrow of the Moors and her expulsion of the Jews. At the end of the seventeenth century, within a few years of Calderon's death, the death of King Charles II, the last of the Habsburg kings of Spain, led to the accession of Philip of Anjou, grandson of the roi Soleil, King Louis XIV of France. King Philip's diminished inheritance was confirmed in 1713 by the terms of the Treaty of Utrecht, which closed the war of the Spanish succession; and

between these extremes, accordingly, 1492 and 1713, lies the Imperial glory which was Spain, and the roll of great writers who enhanced it. The new king looked backward across the Pyrenees to the French Court which he had left. A brand-new Spanish Academy was founded in 1714, after the model of the Académie française, and the old-type ideals of Spanish chivalry were finally submerged.

We venture to emphasize this connection between Spanish history and Spanish literature, not in order to support a disputed theory of criticism, but because we believe it to be true that Spanish literature, as an expression of the Spanish genius, reached its natural term when Philip V succeeded Charles II. The Empire-builders of Spain had been filled with the spirit of their times. Garcilasso was not alone in wielding the sword and the pen; Cervantes was wounded at Lepanto, Lope de Vega sailed with the Armada. The Empire was already breaking to pieces at the time of Calderon's death, and its final fracture was sustained in the Spanish-American War, 1898. Since 1713, Spanish books have been written in plenty, foreign ideas have been assimilated, new ideas have been conceived. Scholars have thronged the academies; historians have worked at the old chronicles; poets, novelists, and dramatists have added their stores to the past. But Spanish literature among the literatures of Europe was written between 1500 and 1700; the literature of Cid and Amadis, of pecaro and Quixote, of auto and Arcady, of capa y espada and punctilio, of piety, philosophy, and learning.

It may be that, in the new Europe to arise out of the new wars, a greater Spain will renew, between her mountains and her sea, the lavish ornaments of style and the happy faculty of wit which men prize in her noble past. There are still giants to be slain,

still illusions to be pricked, still castles to be built. And if two centuries of comparative silence prove the ample preparation for a fresh epoch of world-literature on the classic soil of storied Spain, none would welcome it more gladly than the people, who, though they fought with her, shared with her in the sixteenth century the primacy of art and letters.

Of

FRANCIS BACON,

who died in 1626, we shall not presume to write at length, at least as far as his philosophy is concerned.

If we try to reconstruct the past, what, after all, would appear the task of a philosopher in the Renaissance? He found a mass of unrelated data, resting on miscellaneous evidence, and in conflict more often than not-this was the crucial difficultywith an authority as incompetent as it was irrelevant, but negligible only at extreme peril. Plainly, his most pressing business would be arrangement rather than research. He would want to establish a method of proof applicable to all departments of knowledge, and so to justify wisdom to its seekers. Specialization would follow in due course. The minute sub-division of the field, where each group drives its special studies to a conclusion with a place made ready for it, is a system from which we must look back to the conditions of the sixteenth century, when Bacon, in his high and noble phrase, took all knowledge for his province. It was an attempt, prodigious even then, to gather the harvest of Humanism from the four quarters of its industry. But, prodigious though it was, it was necessitated by the requirements of the age. The future of research in all branches demanded. a chart of the sciences and a logic or scientific method. These demands, pre-requisite for the demolition of consecrated errors and fallacies, Bacon set himself to

supply in his part-Latin, part-English Instauratio Magna (or Great Beginning) of philosophy, which included The Advancement of Learning (English, 1605 : revised in Latin, 1623) and the Novum Organum (or New Instrument), 1620, and other works.

Hallam tells us of Bacon's philosophy that no books prior to these

carried mankind so far on the way to truth. None had obtained so thorough a triumph over arrogant usurpation without seeking to substitute another; and he may be compared with those liberators of nations, who have given them laws by which they might govern themselves, and retained no homage but their gratitude'.

We need not annotate this passage. Bacon founded the inductive method, and kept it true to the poles of experience and observation. He exposed the idola or fallacies of the mind, and distributed them into groups of common consent (tribus), of personal obscurantism (specus), of vulgar language (fori), and of false systems (theatri). And his ripe harvest of Philosophy left ample gleanings for the essayist.

Unfortunately, it has to be added that Bacon, whose master-brain mapped out the order of human knowledge, failed in common worldly wisdom. He became Lord Chancellor in 1619, and was raised to the peerage as Baron Bacon and Viscount St. Albans. Two years afterwards he fell from power, and risked the forfeiture of his honours, on a charge of bribery and corruption. King James I, whom he had served too obsequiously, remitted the imprisonment and the fine, but he could not remit the shame, and the most we can say in mitigation is that Court memoirs of the age are full of evidence to the temptations in which statesmen and courtiers moved.

We turn with greater pleasure to Bacon's Essays, which, with his New Atlantis, are his claim to repute as a man of letters. The profit of learning to literature is always indirect. Its conclusions, in the final resort, become axioms of general knowledge, and illuminate tracts of art outside of their special domain. This was Tennyson's way with the chemistry and physics of the nineteenth century; and this may almost be said to have been Bacon's way with himself, the essayist's utilizing the philosopher's. For, properly, Bacon's Essays are little more than an elaboration of entries made in his commonplace books. They were written up from notes that occurred to him in the preparation of his learned works. Civil and moral counsels' is his own description of their contents, and they came home', he declared, to men's business and bosoms'. They are essays in secular thought, and, as attempts at definition and induction, at transitory moralizing, and so forth, they differ from Montaigne's Essais in their pithy and proverbial form. They discussed all kinds of common topics: Truth, Death, Revenge, Love, Great Place, Friendship, Gardens, to mention a few of the fifty-eight titles included in the 1625 edition, which was reprinted from 1597 and 1602; and they were characterized time after time by exceptional vigour and depth. We submit half a dozen examples, by which the bulk may be judged―

6

Revenge is a kind of wild justice'.

'Many a man's strength is in opposition'. 'Houses are built to live in and not to look on '. 'All rising to great place is by a winding stair '. 'Reading maketh a full man, conference a ready man, and writing an exact man'.

Suspicions among thoughts are like bats among birds; they ever fly by twilight'.