But Lucifer and Beelzebub now stand with Mephistophiles before him; hold him to his bond; will show him pastime. They introduce to him the seven deadly sins. Chorus explains now to the people that we shall see Faustus next at Rome, and straightway the pomp of the Court of Rome is marshalled out for mockery. Pope Adrian in supreme pride ascends his chair, by using for a footstool Saxon Bruno, whom the Emperor appointed. Adrian will depose the Emperor, and curse his people. Then Faustus and Mephistophiles beguile him in his policy; scatter confusion in his Court; snatch, being invisible, his dishes and his cup; box his ears; and beat the friars, who come in with bell, book, and candle to sing maledictions on them. Other scenes follow to represent incidents in the life for which a soul was paid. Touches of farce lie by the tragic scenes. Then Faustus is in his study again. His end is near. To some of his scholars he shows a fair vision of Helen. They depart. An old man enters who, with loving words, warns Faustus of his peril. Faustus despairs. Mephistophiles gives him a dagger. "Oh, stay!" cries the old man— "Oh, stay, good Faustus, stay thy desperate steps; I see an angel hover o'er thy head, He repents, yet he despairs; he cannot escape from the toils of Mephistophiles. Helen is brought to him between Cupids. He leaves the stage worshipping her, and then the thunder rolls; the Powers of Evil enter, and from the background Lucifer and Beelzebub keep grim watch over their victim. With changed looks Faustus parts from his scholars, and they leave him to his last agony on earth. The poet makes its horror felt. The good and evil angels speak again. His good angel sets before him and the audience, while music sounds, a vision of the heavenly throne among the saints, which he has forfeited. His evil angel then sets before him and the audience a vision of that “vast perpetual torture-house to which he goes- "Those that are fed with sops of flaming fire Were gluttons, and loved only delicates, And laughed to see the poor starve at their gates. The clock strikes eleven, and the terror of the last hour is then painted. In language drawn from Scripture, Faustus cries in his despair "Mountains and hills, come, come, and fall on me! And hide me from the heavy wrath of heaven! No! Then will I run headlong into the earth. Gape earth! Oh, no, it will not harbour me!" The terror grows, and the clock strikes the half-hour. Faustus now cries in his anguish- "Cursed be the parents that engendered me! No, Faustus, curse thyself, curse Lucifer That hath deprived thee of the joys of heaven." The clock strikes twelve, and the audience sees the terrible fulfilment of the bond. The grave personage who, as Chorus, had withdrawn the curtain, then enters to draw it again, saying "Cut is the branch that might have grown full straight, And burnéd is Apollo's laurel bough That some time grew within this learnéd man. Faustus is gone; regard his hellish fall, Whose fiendful fortune may exhort the wise Only to wonder at unlawful things Whose deepness doth entice such forward wits To practise more than heavenly power permits." Thus Marlowe in his first two plays set forth the ruin of a human pride that turns away from God. "Blaspheming Tamburlaine" was not the work of a blaspheming poet. It was a picture of the pride of self-dependent fleshly power and its vanity, as Faustus was a picture of the pride of selfdependent intellect, commending in its epilogue a simple trust in God. Depths of religious feeling were stirred when this was the new play, and the last great event in the real world had been the defeat of the Spanish Armada. Francis CHAPTER VIII. EARLIER YEARS OF FRANCIS BACON-NOVELS AND PAMPHLETS-THE MARPRELATE CONTROVERSY. FRANCIS BACON, three years and three months older than William Shakespeare, was the son of Queen Elizabeth's Lord Keeper, Sir Nicholas Bacon, and was born in London, at York House, in the Strand, on the twenty-second of January, 1561. Sir William Cecil, afterwards Lord Burghley, and Sir Nicholas Bacon, married two daughters of Sir Anthony Cooke. The sister, Anne, married by Sir Nicholas, was his second wife. She was an educated woman, with strong religious feeling, who took deep interest in the reformation of the Church, and inclined to the Puritan side in later questions of its internal policy. It was she who translated Jewel's "Apology" into English.* Sir Nicholas Bacon had by his former wife six children, and by his second wife two, Anthony and Francis. Anthony was two years older than Francis, who was thus the youngest of eight in a household living sometimes in London, at York House, sometimes at Gorhambury, near St. Albans. In April, 1573, when Anthony was fourteen and Francis twelve, the two boys were entered as fellowcommoners at Trinity College, Cambridge. Anthony was always in weak health; when he went to college his eyesight was in danger, and through his after-life he was lame. Of Francis Bacon's career at college, ending in his sixteenth *E. W." viii. 201, 202. year, we have only two notes. They are from Dr. William Rawley, his chaplain of after-days. One is that Queen Elizabeth "delighted much then to confer with him, and to prove him with questions; unto which he delivered himself with that gravity and maturity above his years, that Her Majesty would often term him 'the young Lord Keeper.' Being asked by the queen how old he was, he answered with much discretion, being then but a boy, 'That he was two years younger than Her Majesty's happy reign;' with which answer the queen was much taken." The other record is this: "Whilst he was commorant in the University, about sixteen years of age (as his lordship hath been pleased to impart unto myself), he first fell into the dislike of the philosophy of Aristotle; not for the worthlessness of the author, to whom he would ascribe all high attributes, but for the unfruitfulness of the way; being a philosophy (as his lordship used to say) only strong for disputations and contentions, but barren of the production of works for the benefit of the life of man; in which mind he continued to his dying day." Anthony and Francis Bacon, who were to be trained for diplomatic life, were, as sons of a judge, admitted ancients at Gray's Inn in June, 1576. In the following September Sir Amyas Paulet went to Paris to succeed Dr. Dale as English ambassador, and Francis Bacon went with him as one of his suite, to begin in France his training to diplomacy. Those were in France the first days of the League. Charles IX. died within two years after the Massacre of St. Bartholomew. His brother, the Duke of Anjou, licentious and effeminate, became king, as Henry III. In February, 1575, the Huguenots, under the Prince of Condé, signed a league with the liberal Catholics, under the Marshal de Damville. The Duke of Alençon also joined the insurgents in the south; and in 1576 Henry of Navarre, afterwards to be Henry IV., escaped from the surveillance of Catherine and joined the conflict. Full concession to the Reformers was extorted, and obtained in May, 1576. This roused the Catholics. Seeing what had been done by the strength of one league, they resolved upon a combination of their own; and Henry, the young Duke of Guise, who was now leader of the Catholics, organised, by means of the association of the clergy and Jesuits throughout the country, a great Catholic League, which in a few months enrolled thirty thousand members. It was a confederation to maintain the Church in its old form, the king's authority, and that of the head of the league, by whose ambition the king's authority was threatened. This league was just formed when Francis Bacon, a youth of sixteen, was first in Paris with Sir Amyas Paulet. He was in the summer and autumn of 1577 with Sir Amyas in the French Court at Poitiers. After a little more than two years of this training in France to diplomatic life, there came a cloud over the pros pects of Bacon, in the year 1579. In the February of that year his father died, after a few days' illness, before completing the provision he had meant to make for the younger son by his second marriage. Anthony succeeded to much of his father's landed property, with the reversion of Gorhambury after his mother's death. A son by the first marriage disputed unsuccessfully the large provision made for Anthony, who lived chiefly in France for the next twelve years, making himself useful to his uncle Burghley. Francis Bacon, eighteen years old at the time of his father's death, came to London at the end of March, with commendations to the queen from Sir Amyas Paulet, and settled down at Gray's Inn to study of the law as a profession. In 1579, then, we have Spenser, aged about twentyseven, publishing his first book, "The Shepheardes Calender;" Lyly, aged twenty-five or twenty-six, publishing |