insoluble abstract questions or in the sterilities of scholastic disputation. We may remark, too, as a strong confirmation of the truth of the above, that, in those sciences which are independent of experiments and proceed by the efforts of contemplation and reasoning alone-as theology, for example, or pure geometrythe ancients were as fully advanced, relatively speaking, as we are at this moment. The glory of Bacon is founded upon an union of speculative power with practical utility which had never been so combined before. He neglected nothing as too small, despised nothing as too low, by which our happiness could be augmented in him, above all, were combined boldness and prudence, the most intense enthusiasm, and the plainest commonsense. He could foresee triumphs over nature far surpassing the wildest dreams of imagination, and at the same time warn posterity against the most trifling ill consequences that would proceed from a neglect of his rules. It is probable that Bacon generally wrote the first sketch of his works in English; but he himself expressed his distrust of Bacon's the employment of the vulgar tongue, and afterwards preference for Latin. translated them into what he considered the more permanent form of Latin, the language of science and even of diplomacy. He is reported to have employed the services of many young men of learning as secretaries and translators : among these the most remarkable was Hobbes, afterwards so celebrated as the author of the Leviathan. The style in which the Latin books of the Instauratio were given to the world, although certainly no model of classical purity, is weighty, vigorous, and picturesque. Bacon's Essays " (1597). $13. At the same time, Bacon's English writings, if short, are very numerous; and among them unquestionably the most important is the little volume of Essays, the first edition of which he published in 1597. It was reprinted several times with additions, and, in its final form, appeared in 1625. These are short papers on an immense variety of subjects, from grave questions of morals and policy down to the arts of amusement and the most trifling accomplishments; and in them appears, in a manner far more casily grasped by ordinary intellects than the style of his elaborate philosophical works, that wonderful union of depth and variety which characterises Bacon. The intellectual activity which they display is literally portentous; and their immense multiplicity and aptness of unexpected illustration only finds its own level in the originality with which Bacon manages to treat the most worn-out and commonplace subject, such, for instance, as friendship or gardening. No author was ever so concise as Bacon; and in his mode of writing there is that remarkable quality which gives to the style of his greatest contemporary, Shakespeare, so strongly marked an individuality —that is, a combination of intellect and imagination, the closest reasoning in the boldest metaphor, the condensed brilliancy of Lesser an illustration identified with the development of thought. It is this that renders both the dramatist and the philosopher at once the richest and the most concise of writers. Many of Bacon's essays-the inimitable discourse on Studies, for example-are absolutely oppressive from the amount of thought which they condense into the closest possible compass. He wrote also a Latin essay on The Wisdom of the Ancients works. (1609) in which, endeavouring to explain the political and moral truths concealed in the mythology of the classical ages, he exhibits an ingenuity which Macaulay characterises as almost morbid; an unfinished romance, The New Atlantis (1627), which was intended to embody his own dreams of a philosophical millennium; a History of Henry VII (1622); and a vast number of state papers, judicial decisions, and other professional writings. All these are marked by the same vigorous, weighty, and rather ornamented style which is to be found in the Instauratio, and are among the finest specimens of the English language at the period of its highest majesty and perfection. ROBERT § 14. In every nation there may be found a small number of writers who, in their life, in the objects of their studies, and in the form and manner of their productions, bear an obvious stamp of eccentricity. No country has been more prolific in such exceptional individualities than England, and in no age so much as in the sixteenth century and the years immediately following. There cannot be a more striking example of this small and curious class than the famous ROBERT BURTON, whose character and writings were equally odd. He was a native of Leicestershire, and went to school at Sutton Coldfield. He was an undergraduate at Brasenose, and obtained a studentship at Christ Church in 1599. The greater part of his life was passed at Oxford in reading and digesting what he read. He held the living of St. Thomas the Martyr in Oxford; and, during part of his life was vicar of Walesby, in the Lincolnshire Wolds, and rector of Segrave, near Loughborough. He probably seldom visited either of these two last. It was at Oxford that he died. His death gave rise to several foolish rumours. His belief in astrology, and the fact that he had cast his own horoscope, produced the story that he committed suicide in order that his death might tally with his own predictions. Others said, more vaguely, that he fell a victim to that melancholy which he had so minutely described, overlooking the fact that his idea of melancholy was far more humorous and embraced much more than the traditional meaning given to the word. Anatomy of Anatomy of Melancholy, first published in 1621, and Melancholy" purporting to be written by "Democritus, junior," is (1621). a strange combination of the most extensive and outof-the-way reading with a great power of observation and a peculiar kind of grave saturnine humour. The object of the "The The writer was to give a complete monograph upon melancholy, to point out its causes, its symptoms, its treatment, and its cure : but the descriptions given of its various phases are written in so curious and pedantic a style, accompanied by so great a variety of quaint observation, and illustrated by such a mass of quotations from a crowd of authors, principally those medical writers of the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries of whom to-day not one man in a thousand has ever heard, that the Anatomy possesses an irresistible charm for anyone who has once fallen under its fascination. The enormous amount of curious quotation with which Burton has encrusted almost every paragraph and line of his work has rendered him the favourite study of some who wish to appear learned at a small expense; and his pages have served as a quarry from which a multitude of authors have borrowed, often without any acknowledgment, much of their material, just as the great Roman feudal families plundered the Coliseum to construct their frowning fortress-palaces. Burton's tomb in Christ Church bears the astrological scheme of his own nativity, and an inscription eminently characteristic of the man: "Hic jacet Democritus, junior, cui vitam dedit et mortem melancholia "-and this, perhaps, has had something to do with the misconceptions about his end. § 15. Our notice of the prose writers of this remarkable period would be incomplete without the mention of two distinguished philosophers. By far the less important of these is LORD HEREDWARD HERBERT, LORD HERBERT OF CHERBURY, BERT OF the elder brother of George Herbert. His curious CHERBURY and, so far as regards its detail, extravagant auto- (1583-1648). biography was brought to light (1764) by Horace Walpole; and, although an interesting piece of reading, is not very remarkable as a masterpiece of style. Lord Herbert himself was a man of fashion, and was employed in the diplomatic service. From 1619 to 1624, with a short interval, he was ambassador at Paris. At the end of his life he deserted the Royalist party and joined the Roundheads in a most discreditable way. It was during his life in Paris that he published his chief work, the De Veritate (1624), which, with its sequels, was an elaborate pleading in favour of Deism, of which he was one of the earliest partisans in England. He also wrote a Life of Henry VIII (1649), not published till after his death, which is certainly a valuable monument of grave and vigorous prose, although its historical merit is diminished by the author's strong partiality in favour of Henry's character. Although by profession a freethinker, Lord Herbert gives indications of an intensely enthusiastic religious mysticism; and there is proof that he imagined himself, on more than one occasion, the object of miraculous communications by which the Deity confirmed the doctrines maintained in his books. But in force of demonstration and clearness and precision of language, none of the English metaphysicians have surpassed THOMAS HOBBES, whose work really belongs to the latest period of Caroline prose. Hobbes was a man of extraordinary mental activity, and, during the whole of his long life, was as re THOMAS markable for the power as for the variety of his philosophical speculations. His theories had an incalculable influence on the opinions, not only of English, but also of continental thinkers, for nearly a century; and, although, since then, that influence has been much weakened by the errors and sophistries which are mingled in many of Hobbes' works, and undermine his authority in some important and arduous branches of abstract speculation -the great question of free-will and necessity is a case in point-it is doubtful whether any later investigations have thrown new light upon the principles established by him. He was born at Malmesbury in Wiltshire, and was Life. educated, from 1603 to 1608, at Magdalen Hall, Oxford; after which he travelled abroad as tutor to William Cavendish, son of the future first Earl of Devonshire. On his return, he became intimate, through the Cavendish family's influence, with the most distinguished men of his day. His pupil succeeded his father as Earl of Devonshire in 1626, but lived only two years: it was in the year of his death, 1628, that Hobbes dedicated to him his translation (1629) of Thucydides. Subsequently, as tutor to the third Earl of Devonshire, he passed some years in France and Italy, where he was in constant communication with the most illustrious scientists of his timefor example, Descartes, Galileo, and Harvey. His life was, however, uneventful: in 1646 he became mathematical tutor to Charles II, who gave him a pension at the Restoration; but, from his final return to England in 1653 till his death in 1679, he lived at Chatsworth, enjoying the protection of the Devonshire family. His books were very numerous. After the Thucydides came his De Cive, printed privately in 1642 and not published in full till 1647. In 1650 appeared an English essay On Human Nature and the Latin treatise De Corpore Politico, which was enlarged in 1655 and translated into English in 1656. The famous Leviathan, incorporating much of the material of the two preceding works, came out in 1651. Its arguments on free-will were attacked by Bramhall, then Bishop of Derry; and Hobbes answered his critic in a Letter of Liberty and Necessity, which was published in 1654. In 1655 he entered upon a futile mathematical controversy, which lasted more than twenty years, with Dr. John Wallis, who held the Savilian chair of Geometry at Oxford. His collected works were brought out at Amsterdam in 1668. Four years later, at the age of eighty-four, he wrote a curious Latin poem on his own life, and, in 1674-5 he published a verse translation of the Iliad and Odyssey. His Behemoth, a history of the Civil War from 1640 to 1660, appeared surreptitiously in 1679. None of his books, however, can compare with the Leviathan, The "Leviathan" a treatise in favour of monarchical government, whose arguments, however, may be applied with equal force to the defence of despotism. Although Hobbes was extremely bold in speculation, his predilections took this turn because he held that since, in his opinion, human nature was essentially ferocious and corrupt, the iron restraint of (1651). arbitrary power was alone sufficient to bridle its passions. This theory naturally flowed from the fundamental principle of his moral system-viz. that the primum mobile of all our actions is selfish interest. Attributing every action, then, to intellectual calculation, and thus either entirely ignoring or not allowing sufficient influence to the moral elements and affections, which play at least an equal part in the drama of life, Hobbes fell into so narrow and one-sided a view of our motives that his theory is only half true. His reading was not extensive, but was singularly profound and in the various branches of science and literature which he cultivated we see that clearness of view and vigour of comprehension which is often found in men of few books. The treatise On Human Nature and the Letter of Liberty and Necessity, are, of all his works, incontestably the two in which the closeness of his logic and the purity and clearness of his style are most visible, and the correctness of his deductions are least mingled with error. His two purely political treatises, which we have mentioned as containing, in their Latin form, the elements of Leviathan, are remarkable for the cogency of their arguments, although many of the results at which the author struggles to arrive are now no longer considered capable of deduction from the premises. Hobbes often has been confounded with the enemies of religion. This is Hobbes' the result of a misconception of his doctrines, which are indeed materialistic, but neither professedly atheistic nor in antagonism to Christian theology. And, although Hobbes' ethical principles are in his own case partly the offspring of a cold and timorous disposition, nevertheless, the selfish theory of human actions, when divested of the limitations that confine the motive of self to those low and shortsighted views of interest generally associated with it, no more necessitates an immoral line of argument than any other system intended to illustrate the mysteries of our moral nature. ethical position. |