rary good name and reputation slipping from him, he desired more eagerly to leave something behind him at his death which should last and which men might recall with words of praise after they had forgotten his weaknesses.. For my name and memory," so he writes in his last will, "I leave it to men's charitable speeches, and to foreign nations and the next ages." "1 Writing in 1623 to his friend Tobie Matthew, Bacon says that his chief occupation was then to have those works which he had formerly published, as that of Advancement of Learning, that of Henry 7th, that of the Essays, being retractate and made more perfect, well translated into Latin by the help of some good pens which forsake me not. For these modern languages will at one time or other play the bank-rowtes with books; and since I have lost much time with this age, I would be glad as God shall give me leave to recover it with posterity." 72 With the help of these "good pens," who did most of the work, the task was carried to completion-an unnecessary task, as time has shown, since the interest of posterity in Bacon's English writings has not been kept alive by the Latin translations of them, nor have these translations sufficient interest or distinction to make them important in their own right. They have done no harm, however, and Bacon's weakness with respect to them must simply be cast, in Sir Walter Raleigh's phrase, in the sum of human

error.

With Bacon this survey of the origins of English prose may appropriately come to an end. Though he takes his place among the writers of classic English prose largely by virtue of one book, his position there is secure. His Essays are the earliest original writing in English prose which has

held a place in the general, one might almost say in the popular, interest of readers of English since the time of their composition. But whatever Bacon's relative rank may be, whether he was the greatest prose writer in his time or not, he takes an important place in the history of English prose as marking the close of the age of experiment and discovery. With him English prose has definitely found itself, has been not merely discovered but conquered. It is true that Bacon did not realize the varied possibilities of English prose as amply as some of its later masters have done, but his limitations were those which his nature, not the command of the technic of his art, imposed upon him. His profundity of thought, his poet's imagining of abstractions, above all the sense of the reality and truth of the intellectual world in which he moved and had his being, all these Bacon has adequately transferred to the forms of English speech. His writing, perhaps, lacks warmth and feeling, but in emphasizing the virtues of prose composition he also brought into relief its characteristic weakness. Bacon's endeavor was to be honest and clear in writing, to avoid the self-deception and the floundering to which human nature is prone. He takes his stand with the moderns upon a platform of independent thinking and an independent and intelligent mastery of his art. Like the writer with whom this discussion began, to attain freedom Bacon became something of an iconoclast. Wiclif scorned to quote "holy doctors," and Bacon would away with the intellectual support of the ancients so dearly loved of all Renascence writers and scholars, away also with their superficial ornament. Both were moderns in their day, though Wiclif's reaction against medievalism and scholastic authority naturally seems much more remote from present interest than Bacon's rejection of philosophical abstractions in favor of truth as realized in experience, and of classical oratorical

authority in favor of less literary and external standards of expression.

Bacon is distinctly with the moderns in his attitude toward the technic of writing. For technical skill as a means to a reasonable end, he had the highest respect. But technical skill as an exercise in virtuosity, or employed merely to realize the dream of an English style as good as that of Cicero, or of Cæsar or of Tacitus, seemed to him worthless and even reprehensible. The message came first in his estimation, and the arts of style were to be employed to make the message clear and effective, never to make it more pleasing than in justice it should be. This distrust of fine writing in English prose has not grown weaker with the passing of time. Prose has been, as Bacon would have it be, the servant of mankind, not merely an ornament of his state or a solace for his idler moments. As it has had various tasks to perform, so English prose has been made flexible to its different applications. Bacon had no theory of a fixed and standard form of prose, of an elaborated professionally literary style such as the Euphuists and Arcadianists, or such even as learned writers like Hooker, set up as their ideal. With Bacon prose took its place among the practical, not the theoretical virtues. It was not something to be imposed upon English life and culture, it was an inherent and changing element in that developing life and culture, an emanation not an acquisition. Time alone, it is true, could have made possible such opinions as Bacon held. He could rest satisfied with the product of the life of his day because English culture had at last reached the age of maturity. It had assimilated much in the generations since Wiclif and Chaucer, and it had learned by many errors as well as by some successes. Bacon's wisdom was manifested in his realization of the riches which lay at his very door. He saw himself not as a

dæmonic being, rapt with a divine frenzy into the fiery clouds of inspiration and speaking and writing a language, not of men but of the gods. His Pegasus was his intelligence, a well-disciplined and governed intelligence. He placed English prose where English writers ever since have labored to keep it, in the everyday world of established experience, of good order, and of sound sense. The source of eloquence in prose he found not in the elevation of art above nature, but in the just expression of all that is best and most worthy of expression within the heart and mind of man.

INDEX