ease. He died on the 2 23rd of April, 1616, and was buried in the parish church.

He possessed, as no other poet has ever possessed, the power of putting himself in the place of others,-of picturing what any given person would say and do under any given circumstances. And not only did he possess this power with regard to real men and women,

but also with regard to imaginary beings. If there were fairies, witches, and ghosts, we feel that they would speak and act just as Shakespeare makes his fairies, witches, and ghosts speak and act.

Each change of many-coloured life he drew,
3 Exhausted worlds, and then imagined new;
4 Existence saw him spurn her bounded reign,
And panting Time toiled after him in vain.*
* Johnson.

"Shakespeare's language and versification are like the rest of him. He has a magic power over words they come winged at his bidding, and seem to know their places."* ." In all his finest passages, to alter is to

spoil; no other word, no other order than his, ever seems to do.

1 Contemporary, a person living at the same time. 223rd of April, possibly his birthday. 3 exhausted worlds, etc. When he had drawn all real persons, he drew imaginary. 4 existence saw, etc. The things that did exist were not subjects enough for him.

* Hazlitt.

FRANCIS BACON.

SPENSER and Shakespeare were only two of the great poets who flourished in Elizabeth's time. Marlowe, Beaumont and Fletcher, and Ben Jonson, second only to them, must at present be passed over with mere mention; while a host of others but little inferior to those cannot even be mentioned.

When the greatest poet of the world was lying in his cradle, one of the greatest philosophers of the world was a child of three. Francis, the son of Sir Nicholas Bacon, one of Queen Elizabeth's most trusted advisers, was born in 1561. When old enough he became a barrister. He acquired considerable fame in his profession, and was appointed to several offices under the Crown, finally (fifteen years after the accession of James I.) to the office of Lord Chancellor. In those days a judge's pay was chiefly made up of the fees of those who brought cases before him, and the Lord Chancellor was in the habit of receiving presents from the winning party after a suit was settled. It seems that Bacon went further, and took money when the suits were still unsettled. He maintained that only when justice was on their side did he give judgment in favour of those who had brought him gifts, but he was accused of receiving bribes, and found guilty. He was stripped of all his offices, and sentenced to pay a heavy fine.

After his disgrace he devoted his whole time to what had hitherto been the work of his spare hours,studying and writing. Early in life he had come to believe that philosophy, as then taught, was wrong in its methods and barren of practical results,-that, indeed, it was barren of practical results because it was

wrong in its methods. "Men," he said, "have sought to make a world from their own 2 conceptions, and to draw from their own minds all the materials which they employ; but if instead of doing so they had consulted experience and observation, they would have had facts and not opinions to reason about, and might have

3 ultimately arrived at the knowledge of the laws which govern the material world." There is his method Observe! observe! observe! and when you have a sufficiently large number of observations, draw your conclusions from them. It is in the Novum Organum, the second part of his great Latin work, that his views

are set forth at length. His most popular book, the Essays," is in English.

Pope calls Bacon—

The wisest, brightest, meanest of mankind,

and he does not fall far short of meriting two-thirds of the description.

1

Inferior, lower, of less merit. 2 in the end.

3

conception, idea. ultimately,

MILTON.

BACON died in 1626, about the time that John Milton was putting forth his earliest poems. Born in London in 1608, he was educated at St. Paul's School and at Cambridge. His friends meant to make him a clergyman, but his strong Puritan opinions made him unwilling to enter the church. He felt "that by labour and patient study" he could fit himself to "leave something so written to after-times as they should not willingly let die.”

On quitting the University he retired to his father's country house at Horton, near Windsor, where he spent five years in preparing for his life work. Then, further to fit himself, he travelled in Italy, but hearing, at Naples, of the differences between Charles and his people, he returned. He thought it base to be travelling for pleasure abroad while his countrymen were contending for liberty at home.

When war broke out he did not wield a sword on behalf of Parliament, but he wielded a pen which, in his hand, was mightier than the sword. He wrote 1 pamphlet after pamphlet attacking the opposite party or defending his own. They served their purpose at the time, but Milton's fame would not greatly suffer