From negligence doth care the vantage reap.

FRANCIS BACON

(1561-1626)

BY CHARLTON T. LEWIS

The startling contrasts of splendor and humiliation which marked the life of Bacon, and the seemingly incredible inconsistencies which hasty observers find in his character, have been the themes of much rhetorical declamation, and even of serious and learned debate.  From Ben Jonson in his own day, to James Spedding the friend of Tennyson, he has not lacked eminent eulogists, who look up to him as not only the greatest and wisest, but as among the noblest and most worthy of mankind:  while the famous epigram of Pope, expanded by Macaulay into a stately and eloquent essay, has impressed on the popular mind the lowest estimate of his moral nature; and even such careful scholars as Charles de Remusat and Dean Church, who have devoted careful and instructive volumes to the survey of Bacon’s career and works, insist that with all his intellectual supremacy, he was a servile courtier, a false friend, and a corrupt judge.  Yet there are few important names in human history of men who have left us so complete materials for a just judgment of their conduct; and it is only a lover of paradox who can read these and still regard Bacon’s character as an unsolved problem.

Mr. Spedding has given a long life of intelligent labor to the collection of every fact and document throwing light upon the motives, aims, and thoughts of the great “Chancellor of Nature,” from the cradle to the grave.  The results are before us in the seven volumes of ’The Letters and the Life of Francis Bacon,’ which form perhaps the most complete biography ever written.  It is a book of absolute candor as well as infinite research, giving with equal distinctness all the evidence which makes for its hero’s dishonor and that which tends to justify the writer’s reverence for him.  Another work by Mr. Spedding, ’Evenings with a Reviewer,’ in two volumes, is an elaborate refutation, from the original and authentic records, of the most damning charges brought by Lord Macaulay against Bacon’s good fame.  It is a complete and overwhelming exposure of false coloring, of rhetorical artifices, and of the abuse of evidence, in the famous essay.  As one of the most entertaining and instructive pieces of controversy in our literature, it deserves to be widely read.  The unbiased reader cannot accept the special pleading by which, in his comments, Spedding makes every failing of Bacon “lean to virtue’s side”; but will form upon the unquestioned facts presented a clear conception of him, will come to know him as no other man of an age so remote is known, and will find in his many-sided and magnificent nature a full explanation of the impressions which partial views of it have made upon his worshipers and his detractors.