Invisibly bright water! so like air, On looking down I feared thou couldst not bear Jane. I was very childish when I composed them; and, if I had thought any more about the matter, I should have hoped you had been too generous to keep them in your memory as witnesses against me. Ascham. Nay, they are not much amiss for so young a girl, and there being so few of them, I did not reprove thee. Half an hour, I thought, might have been spent more unprofitably; and I now shall believe it firmly, if thou wilt but be led by them to meditate a little on the similarity of situation in which thou then wert to what thou art now in. Jane. I will do it, and whatever else you command; for I am weak by nature and very timorous, unless where a strong sense of duty holdeth and supporteth me. There God acteth, and not his creature. Those were with me at sea who would have been attentive to me if I had seemed to be afraid, even though worshipful men and women were in the company; so that something more powerful threw my fear overboard. Yet I never will go again upon the water. Ascham. Exercise that beauteous couple, that mind and body, much and variously, but at home, at home, Jane! indoors, and about things indoors; for God is there too. We have rocks and quicksands on the banks of our Thames, O lady, such as Ocean never heard of; and many (who knows how soon!) may be engulfed in the current under their garden-walls. Jane. Thoroughly do I now understand you. Yes indeed, I have read evil things of courts; but I think nobody can go out bad who entereth good, if timely and true warning shall have been given. Ascham. I see perils on perils which thou dost not see, albeit thou art wiser than thy poor old master. And it is not because Love hath blinded thee, for that surpasseth his supposed omnipotence; but it is because thy tender heart, having always leant affectionately upon good, hath felt and known nothing of evil. I once persuaded thee to reflect much let me now persuade thee to avoid the habitude of reflection, to lay aside books, and to gaze carefully and stedfastly on what is under and before thee. Jane. I have well bethought me of my duties: O how extensive they are! what a goodly and fair inheritance ! But tell me, would you command me never more to read Cicero and Epictetus and Plutarch and Polybius? The others I do resign: they are good for the arbour and for the gravel-walk: yet leave unto me, I beseech you, my friend and father, leave unto me for my fireside and for my pillow, truth, eloquence, courage, constancy. Ascham. Read them on thy marriage-bed, on thy child-bed, on thy death-bed. Thou spotless undrooping lily, they have fenced thee right well. These are the men for men: these are to fashion the bright and blessed creatures whom God one day shall smile upon in thy chaste bosom. Mind thou thy husband. Jane. I sincerely love the youth who hath espoused me; I love him with the fondest, the most solicitous affection; I pray to the Almighty for his goodness and happiness, and do forget at times, unworthy supplicant the prayers I should have offered for myself. Never fear that I will disparage my kind religious teacher, by disobedience to my husband in the most trying duties. Ascham. Gentle is he, gentle and virtuous: but time will harden him: time must harden even thee, sweet Jane! Do thou, complacently and indirectly, lead him from ambition. Jane. He is contented with me and with home. Ascham. Ah Jane! Jane! men of high estate grow tired of contentedness. Jane. He told me he never liked books unless I read them to him: I will read them to him every evening: I will open new worlds to him richer than those discovered by the Spaniard: I will conduct him to treasures, O what trea sures! on which he may sleep in innocence and peace. Ascham. Rather do thou walk with him, ride with him, play with him, be his faery, his page, his everything that love and poetry have invented; but watch him well; sport with his fancies; turn them about like the ringlets round his cheek; and if ever he meditate on power, go toss up thy baby to his brow, and bring back his thoughts into his heart by the music of thy discourse. Teach him to live unto God and unto thee; and he will discover that women, like the plants in woods, derive their softness and tenderness from the shade. LORD BACON AND RICHARD HOOKER. Bacon. Hearing much of your worthiness and wisdom, Master Richard Hooker, I have besought your comfort and consolation in this my too heavy affliction: for we often do stand in need of hearing what we know full well, and our own balsams must be poured into our breasts by another's hand. As the air at our doors is some times more expeditious in removing pain and heaviness from the body than the most farfetched remedies would be, so the voice alone of a neighbourly and friendly visitant may be more effectual in assuaging our sorrows, than whatever is most forcible in rhetoric and most recondite in wisdom. On these occasions we can not put our selves in a posture to receive the latter, and still less are we at leisure to look into the corners of our store-room, and to uncurl the leaves of our references. As for Memory, who, you may tell me, would save us the trouble, she is footsore enough in all conscience with me, without going further back. Withdrawn as you live from court and courtly men, and having ears occupied by better reports than such as are flying about me, yet haply so hard a case as mine, befalling a man heretofore not averse from the studies in which you take delight, may have touched you with some concern. Hooker. I do think, my Lord of Verulam, that, unhappy as you appear, God in sooth has foregone to chasten you, and that the day which in his wisdom he appointed for your trial, was the very day on which the King's Majesty gave unto your ward and custody the great seal of his English realm. And yet perhaps it may be, let me utter it without offence, that your features and stature were from that day forward no longer what they were before. Such an effect do power and rank and office produce even on prudent and religious men. A hound's whelp howleth if you pluck him up above where he stood: man, in much greater peril from falling, doth rejoice. You, my Lord, as befitteth you, are smitten and contrite, and do appear in deep wretchedness and tribulation to your servants and those about you; but I know that there is always a balm which lies uppermost in these afflictions, and that no heart rightly softened can be very sore. Bacon. And yet, Master Richard, it is surely no small matter to lose the respect of those who looked up to us for countenance; and the favour of a right learned king; and O Master Hooker! such a power of money! But money is mere dross. I should always hold it so, if it possessed not two qualities; that of making men treat us reverently, and that of enabling us to help the needy. about, but your knowledge is far higher, your experience richer. Our wits are not always in blossom upon us. When the roses are overcharged and languid, up springs a spike of rue. Mortified on such an occasion! God forefend it! But again to the business. . I should never be over-penitent for my neglect of needy gentlemen who have neglected themselves much worse. They have chosen their profession with its chances and contingencies. If they had protected their country by their courage or adorned it by their studies, they would have merited, and, under a king of such learning and such equity, would have received in some sort their reward. I look upon them as so many old cabinets of ivory and tortoise-shell, scratched, flawed, splintered, rotten, defective both within and without, hard to unlock, insecure to lock up again, unfit to use, Bacon. Methinks it beginneth to rain, Master Richard. What if we comfort our bodies with a small cup of wine, against the ill-temper of the air. Wherefore, in God's name, are you af frightened? Hooker. Not so, my Lord; not so. . Hooker. Why, indeed, since your Lordship interrogates me. I looked, idly and imprudently, into that rich buffet; and I saw, unless the haze of the weather has come into the parlour, or my sight is the worse for last night's reading, no fewer than six silver pints. Surely six tables for company are laid only at coronations. Bacon. There are many men so squeamish that forsooth they would keep a cup to themselves, and never communicate it to their nearest and best friend; a fashion which seems to me offensive in an honest house, where no disease of ill repute ought to be feared. We have lately, Master Richard, adopted strange fashions; we have run into the wildest luxuries. The Lord Leicester, I heard it from my father.. God forefend it should ever be recorded in our history. . when he re-entertained Queen Elizabeth at Kenilworth Castle, laid before her Majesty a fork of pure silver. I the more easily credit it, as Master Thomas Coriatt doth vouch for having seen the same monstrous sign of voluptuousness at Venice. We are surely the especial favourites of Providence, when such wantonness hath not melted us quite away. After this portent, it would otherwise have appeared incredible that we should have broken the Spanish Hooker. The respect, I think, of those who spect us for what a fool can give and a rogue can take away, may easily be dispensed with; but it is indeed a high prerogative to help the needy; and when it pleases the Almighty to deprive us of it, let us believe that he foreknoweth our inclination to negligence in the charge entrusted to us, and that in his mercy he hath removed from us a most fearful responsibility. Bacon. I know a number of poor gentlemen Armada. to whom I could have rendered aid. Hooker. Have you examined and sifted their worthiness? Bacon. Well and deeply. Hooker. Then must you have known them long before your adversity, and while the means of succouring them were in your hands. Bacon. You have circumvented and entrapped me, Master Hooker. Faith! I am mortified: you the schoolman, I the schoolboy! Hooker. Say not so, my Lord. Your years indeed are fewer than mine, by seven or there Pledge me hither comes our wine. [To the Servant. Dolt! villain! is not this the beverage I reserve for myself? The blockhead must imagine that Malmsey runs in a stream under the ocean, like the Alpheus. Bear with me, good Master Hooker, but verily I have little of this wine, and I keep it as a medicine for my many and growing infirmities. You are healthy at present: God in his infinite mercy long maintain you so! Weaker drink is more wholesome for you. The lighter ones of France are best accommodated by Nature to our constitutions, and therefore she has placed them so within our reach, that we have only to stretch out our necks, in a manner, and drink them from the vat. But this Malmsey, this Malmsey, flies from centre to circumference, and makes youthful blood boil. Hooker. Of a truth, my knowledge in such matters is but spare. My Lord of Canterbury once ordered part of a goblet, containing some strong Spanish wine, to be taken to me from his table, when I dined by sufferance with his chaplains, and, although a most discreet prudent man, as befitteth his high station, was not so chary of my health as your Lordship. Wine is little to be trifled with, physic less. The Cretans, the brewers of this Malvasy, have many aromatic and powerful herbs among them. On their mountains, and notably on Ida, grows that dittany which works such marvels, and which perhaps may give activity to this hot medicinal drink of theirs. I would not touch it, knowingly: an unregarded leaf, dropped into it above the ordinary, might add such puissance to the concoction, as almost to break the buckles in my shoes: since we have good and valid authority, that the wounded hart, on eating thereof, casts the arrow out of his haunch or entrails, although it stuck a palm deep. Bacon. When I read of such things I doubt them. Religion and politics belong to God and to God's vicegerent the King: we must not touch upon them unadvisedly: but if I could procure a plant of dittany on easy terms, I would persuade my apothecary and my gamekeeper to make some experiments. Hooker. I dare not distrust what grave writers have declared, in matters beyond my knowledge. Bacon. Good Master Hooker, I have read many of your reasonings; and they are admirably well sustained added to which, your genius has given such a strong current to your language as can come only from a mighty elevation and a most abundant plenteousness. Yet forgive me, in God's name, my worthy Master, if you descried in me some expression of wonder at your simplicity. We are all weak and vulnerable somewhere: common men in the higher parts; heroes, as was feigned of Achilles, in the lower. You would define to a hair's breadth, the qualities, states, and dependencies, of Principalities, Dominations, and Powers; you would be unerring about the Apostles and the Churches; and 'tis marvellous how you wander about a potherb. Hooker. I know my poor weak intellects, most noble Lord, and how scantily they have profited by my hard painstaking. Comprehending few things, and those imperfectly, I say only what others have said before, wise men and holy; and if, by passing through my heart into the wide world around me, it pleaseth God that this little treasure shall have lost nothing of its weight and pureness, my exultation is then the exultation of humility. Wisdom consisteth not in knowing many things, nor even in knowing them thoroughly; but in choosing and in following what conduces the most certainly to our lasting happiness and true glory. And this wisdom, my Lord of Verulam, cometh from above. Bacon. I have observed among the well-informed and the ill-informed nearly the same quantity of infirmities and follies: those who are rather the wiser keep them separate, and those who are wisest of all keep them better out of sight. Now examine the sayings and writings of the prime philosophers; and you will often find them, Master Richard, to be untruths made to resemble truths. The business with them is to approximate as nearly as possible, and not to touch it: the goal of the charioteer is evitata fervidis rotis, as some poet saith. But we who care nothing for chants and cadences, and have no time to catch at applauses, push forward over stones and sands straightway to our object. I have persuaded men, and shall persuade them for ages, that I possess a wide range of thought unexplored by others, and first thrown open by me, with many fair inclosures of choice and abstruse knowledge. I have incited and instructed them to examine all subjects of useful and rational inquiry: few that occurred to me have I myself left untouched or untried: one however hath almost escaped me, and surely one worth the trouble. Hooker. Pray, my Lord, if I am guilty of no indiscretion, what may it be? Bacon. Francis Bacon. Lest it be thought that authority is wanting for the strong expression of Hooker on the effects of dittany, the reader is referred to the curious treatise of Plutarch on the reasoning faculties of animals, in which (near the end) he asks, "Who instructed deer wounded by the Cretan arrow to seek for dittany? on the tasting of which herb the bolts fall immediately from their bodies." GENERAL LACY AND CURA MERINO. Merino. General, we have fought in the same cause, and I shall be sorry if our sentiments at last diverge. What is peace if there be not concord? Lacy. Enthusiasm makes way for reflection, and reflection leads to that concord which we both desire. We think first of our wrongs and afterward of our rights. Injustice may become, where there is anything to be stirred, a lighter evil to the sufferer than to the worker. Merino. We talk of the people and of parliaments, and, as it appears to me, are blindly fol lowing the restless and changeful French. In fact we are ready in our politics to build up a tower of Babel. Shall these unbelievers persuade us that they are the cleverest people in the world, by sweetening us a cup of chocolate with a bunch of turnips or a truss of hay, or by whipping us off a leg while we are saying an ave-maria? Let GENERAL LACY AND CURA MERINO. them instruct us in surgery and chemistry, but | should not be sorry if the madness, as you call it, There are many forms of government, but only Lacy. Here, Señor Cura, we agree perfectly. Prosperity has made them so giddy, adversity can not sober them. The varnish that once covered their sharp and shallow character, cracked off in the dogdays of the Revolution, and they have lost the greatest of their virtues, their hypocrisy. Although I have fought against them and against their partisans, while they were under the same banners, yet I would gladly see all Spaniards in amity and at home. The French faction, as you call it, fought for the same object as we did. Merino. How! they fought for our beloved as evidently as whoever is above this room is out Ferdinand? Lacy. They fought for our beloved Spain, for her independence, for her freedom. Ought they to be persecuted because they were betrayed? Should we murder a man because he has fallen into a pit? or starve him to death because he has gone for bread to another baker than ours? and liberty is surely, like bread, an article of the first necessity to a Spaniard. Merino. They followed not their lawful king. Lacy. Did we did any wise man? Did not all implore him to remain? did not all deprecate and detest that lowest of degradation which he neither scorned nor shunned, but ran into and (courted? of this room. If men will outlaw themselves by overt acts, we are not to condemn those who remove them by the means least hazardous to the public peace. If even my daughter brought forth a monster, I could not arrest the arm that should smother it: and monsters of this kind are by infinite degrees less pernicious than such as rise up in society by violation of law. In regard to a Chamber of Peers, Spain does not contain the materials. What has been the education of our grandees? how narrow the space between the hornbook and sanbenito? The English are All conamazed, and the French are indignant, that we have not imitated their constitutions. stitutions formed for the French are provisionary. Merino. It was God's will. As for those rebels, Whether they trip or tumble, whether they step the finger of God... Lacy. Prythee, Señor Cura, let God's finger alone. Very worthy men are apt to snatch at it upon too light occasions: they would stop their tobacco-pipes with it. If Spain, in the opinion of our late opponents, could have obtained a free constitution by other means, they never would have joined the French. True, they persisted: but how few have wisdom or courage enough to make the distinction between retracting an error and deserting a cause! He who declares himself a party-man, let his party profess the most liberal sentiments, is a registered and enlisted slave: he begins by being a zealot and ends by being a dupe: he is tormented by regret and anger: yet is he as incapable from shame and irresolution of throwing off the livery under which he sweats and fumes, as was that stronger one, more generously mad, the garment empoisoned with the life-blood of the Centaur. Merino. How much better is it to abolish parties by fixing a legitimate king at the head of affairs! Lacy. The object, thank God, is accomplished. Ferdinand is returning to Madrid, if perverse men do not mislead him. Merino. And yet there are Spaniards wild enough to talk of Cortes and Chambers of Peers. Lacy. Of the latter I know nothing: but I know that Spain formerly was great, free, and happy, by the administration of her Cortes: and as I prefer in policy old experiments to new, I or slide, the tendency is direct to slavery: none but a most rigid Government will restrain them from cruelty or from mischief: they are scourged into good humour and starved into content. I have read whatever I could find written on the English constitution: and it appears to me, like the Deity, an object universally venerated, but requiring a Revelation. I do not find the House of Peers, as I expected to find it, standing between the king and people. Throughout a long series of years, it has been only twice in opposition to the Commons: once in declaring that the slavetrade ought not to be abolished; again in declaring that those who believe in transubstantiation are unfit to command an army or to decide a cause. Merino. Into what extravagances does infidelity lead men, in other things not unwise. Blessed virgin of the thousand pains! and great Santiago of Compostella! deign to bring that benighted nation back again to the right path. Lacy. On Deity we reason by attributes, on government by metaphors. Wool or sand, embodied, may deaden the violence of what is discharged against the walls of a city: hereditary aristocracy hath no such virtue against the assaults of despotism, which on the contrary it will maintain in opposition to the people. Since its power and wealth, although they are given by the king, must be given from the nation: the one has not an interest in enriching it, the other has. All the countries that ever have been con quered, have been surrendered to the conqueror in their magnificence and splendour, have seen by the aristocracy, stipulating for its own pro- things more lovely and more glorious than them. perty, power, and rank, yielding up the men, selves. The throne of God is a speck of darkness, cattle, and metals, on the common. Nevertheless, if you compare it with the heart that beats only in every nation the project of an upper chamber will be warmly cherished. The richer aspire to honours, the poorer to protection. Every family of wealth and respectability wishes to count a peer among its relatives, and, where the whole number is yet under nomination, everyone may hope it. Those who have no occasion for protectors, desire the power of protecting; and those who have occasion for them, desire them to be more efficient. Despotism sits nowhere so secure as under the effigy and ensigns of Freedom. You would imagine that the British peers have given their names to beneficent institutions, wise laws, and flourishing colonies: no such thing: instead of which, a slice of meat between two slices of bread derives its name from one; a tumble of heels over head, a feat performed by beggar-boys on the roads, from another. The former, I presume, was a practical commentator on the Roman fable of the belly and the members, and maintained with all his power and interest the supremacy of the nobler part; and the latter was of a family in which the head never was equivalent to the legs. Others divide their titles with a waistcoat, a bonnet, and a boot; the more illustrious with some island inhabited by sea-calves. Merino. I deprecate such importations into our monarchy. God forbid that the ermine of his Catholic Majesty be tagged with the sordid tail of a monster so rough as feudality! Lacy. If kings, whether by reliance on external force, by introduction of external institutions, or by misapplication of what they may possess within the realm, show a disposition to conspire with other kings against its rights, it may be expected that communities will, some secretly and others openly, unite their moral, their intellectual, and, when opportunity permits it, their physical powers against them. If alliances are holy which are entered into upon the soil usurped, surely not unholy are those which are formed for defence against all kinds and all methods of spoliation. If men are marked out for banishment, for imprisonment, for slaughter, because they assert the rights and defend the liberties of their country, can you wonder at seeing, as you must ere long, a confederacy of free countries, formed for the apprehension or extinction of whoever pays, disciplines, or directs, under whatsoever title, those tremendous masses of human kind, which consume the whole produce of their native land in depopulating another? Is it iniquitous or unnatural that laws be opposed to edicts, and constitutions to despotism? O Señor Merino! there are yet things holy all the barbarians and all the autocrats in the universe cannot make that word a byword to the Spaniard. Yes, there may be holy alliances; and the hour strikes for their establishment. This beautiful earth, these heavens and beats constantly to pour forth its blood for the preservation of our country! Invincible Spain! how many of thy children have laid this pure sacrifice on the altar! The Deity hath accepted it: and there are those who would cast its ashes to the winds! If ever a perverseness of character, or the perfidy taught in courts, should induce a king of Spain to violate his oath, to massacre his subjects, to proscribe his friends, to imprison his defenders, to abolish the representation of the people, Spain will be drawn by resentment to do what Policy in vain has whispered in the ear of Generosity. She and Portugal will be one: nor will she be sensible of disgrace in exchanging a prince of French origin for a prince of Portuguese. There is a north-west passage to the golden shores of Freedom; and, if pirates infest the opener seas, brave adventurers will cut their way through it. Let kings tremble at nothing but their own fraudu lence and violence; and never at popular assemblies, which alone can direct them unerringly. Merino. Educated as kings are, by pious men, servants of God, they see a chimera in a popular assembly. Lacy. Those who refuse to their people a national and just representation, calling it a chimera, will one day remember that he who purchases their affections at the price of a chimera, purchases them cheaply: and those who, having promised the boon, retract it, will put their hand to the signature directed by a hand of iron. State after state comes forward in asserting its rights, as wave follows wave; each acting upon each; and the tempest is gathering in regions where no murmur or voice is audible. Portugal pants for freedom, in other words is free. With one foot in England and the other in Brazil, there was danger in withdrawing either: she appears however to have recovered her equipoise. Accus tomed to fix her attention upon England, wisely will she act if she imitates her example in the union with Ireland; a union which ought to cause no other regret than in having been celebrated so late. If on the contrary she believes that national power and prosperity are the peculiar gifts of independence, she must believe that England was more powerful and prosperous in the days of her heptarchy than fifty years ago. Algarve would find no more advantage in her independence of Portugal, than Portugal would find in continuing detached from the other portions of our peninsula. There were excellent reasons for declaring her independence at the time; there now are better, if better be possible, for a coalition. She, like ourselves, is in danger of losing her colonies: how can either party by any other means retrieve its loss? Normandy and Brittany, after centuries of war, joined the other provinces of France: more centuries of |