"that God punished men for wishing to be wiser ? for wishing to follow him and to learn his pleasure? for wishing that acquisition by which beneficence and charity may be the most luminously and extensively displayed? No, Newton, no. The Jews, who invented this story, were envious of the scientific, for they were ignorant of the sciences. Astronomy, among the rest, was odious to them and hence the fables stuck against the Tower of Babel, the observatory of a better and a wiser people, their enemy, their conqueror. Take care, or you may be hanged for shooting at the stars. If these fictions are believed and acted on, you must conceal your telescope and burn your observations." : On my representing to him the effects of Divine Justice, in casting down to earth the monument of human pride, he said, "The Observatory of Babylon was constructed of unbaked bricks, and upon an alluvial soil. Look at the Tower of Pisa look at every tower and steeple in that city: you will find that they all lean, and all in one direction, that is, toward the river. Some have fallen; many will fall. God would not have been so angry with the Tower of Babel, if it had been built of Portland stone a few weeks' journey to the westward, and you had been as importunate as the Babylonians were, in their attempts at paying him a visit." He expressed his wonder that Bacon, in the reign of James, should have written, "A king is the servant of his people, or else he were without a calling." In other words, whenever he ceases to be the servant of the people, he forfeits his right to the throne. Barrow. Truth sometimes comes unaware upon Caution, and sometimes speaks in public as unconsciously as in a dream. Barrow. Very excellent. I wish, before he cast his invectives against Raleigh, he had reflected more on a doctrine in the next page. "Those that have joined with their honour great travels, cares, or perils, are less subject to envy: for men think that they earn their honours hardly, and pity them sometimes: and pity ever healeth envy.” I am afraid it will be found on examination, that Bacon in his morality was too like Seneca; not indeed wallowing in wealth and vice and crying out against them, but hard-hearted and hypocritical; and I know not with what countenance he could have said, " By indignities men come to dignities." Newton. I have remarked with most satisfaction those sentences in which he appears to have forgotten both the age and station wherein he lived, and to have equally overlooked the base and summit of our ruder institutions. "Power to do good," says he, as Euripides or Phocion might have said, and Pericles might have acted on it, "is the true and lawful end of aspiring; for good thoughts (though God accept them) yet towards men are little better than good dreams, except they be put in act; and that can not be without power and place, as the vantage and commanding ground." And again, "Reduce things to the first institution, and observe wherein and how they have degenerated! But yet ask counsel of both times; of the ancienter time what is best, and of the latter time what is fittest." Barrow. He spoke unadvisedly: for, true as these sentences are, they would lead toward republicanism, if men minded them. Of this however there is as little danger as that the servants of kings should follow the advice he gives afterward. "Embrace and invite helps and advices, touching the execution of thy place; and do not drive away such as bring thee information, as meddlers, but accept of them in good part." Newton. On Seditions, he says the matter is of Newton. Sir, although you desired me rather to investigate and note the imperfections of my author, than what is excellent in him, as you would rather the opaquer parts of the sun, than what is manifest of his glory to the lowest and most insensible, yet, from the study of your writ-"two kinds; much poverty and much disconings, and from the traces of your hand in others, I am sometimes led to notice the beauties of his style. It requires the greatest strength to support such a weight of richness as we sometimes find in him. The florid grows vapid where the room is not capacious, and where perpetual freshness of thought does not animate and sustain it. Unhappily, it seems to have been taken up mostly by such writers as have least invention. tentment." It appears to me that here is only one kind: for much discontentment may spring, and usually does, from much poverty. Barrow. Certainly. He should not have placed cause and effect as two causes. You must however have remarked his wonderful sagacity in this brief essay, which I hesitate not to declare the finest piece of workmanship that ever was composed on any part of government. Take Aristoteles and Machiavelli, and compare the best sections of their works to this, and then you will be able, in some degree, to calculate the superiority of genius in Bacon. Newton. I have not analysed the political works of Aristoteles; but I find in Machiavelli many common thoughts, among many ingenious, many just, many questionable, and many false ones. Barrow. What are you turning over? Do not let me lose anything you have remarked. the acutest that had appeared since the revival of letters. None had reasoned so profoundly on the political interests of society, or had written so clearly or so boldly. Newton. "Money," says my lord, "is like muck; | return of liberty, at another to sit in the portico not good except it he spread." I am afraid this of the palace, and trim the new livery of nascent truth would subvert, in the mind of a reflecting princes. If we consider him as a writer, he was man, all that has been urged by the learned author on the advantages of nobility, and even of royalty: for which reason I dare not examine it: only let me, sir, doubt before you, whether "this is to be done by suppressing, or at the least keeping a strait hand upon, the devouring trades of usury, engrossing, great pasturages, and the like." Barrow. I wish he never had used, which he been reading. The great merit of Machiavelli, in often does, those silly words, and the like. Newton. Great pasturages are not trades; and they must operate in a way directly opposite to the one designated. Barrow. I know not whether a manifest fault in reasoning be not sometimes more acceptable than stale and worm-eaten and weightless truths. Heaps of these are to be found in almost every modern writer: Bacon has fewer of them than any. Nicholas Machiavelli is usually mentioned as the deepest and acutest of the Italians: a people whose grave manner often makes one imagine there is more to be found in them than they possess. Take down that volume: read the examples I have transcribed at the end. "The loss of every devotion and every religion draws after it infinite inconveniences and infinite disorders." Inconveniences and disorders would follow, sure enough: the losses, being negatives, draw nothing. "In a well-constituted government, war, peace, and amity, should be deliberated on, not for the gratification of a few, but for the common good. "That war is just which is necessary. "It is a cruel, inhuman, and impious thing, even in war, stuprare le donne, viziare le vergini, &c. 66 Fraud is detestable in everything." These most obvious truths come forward as if he had now discovered them for the first time. He tells us also that "A prince ought to take care that the people are not without food." He says with equal gravity that "Fraud is detestable in everything" and that "A minister ought to be averse from public rapine, and should augment the public weal." It would be an easy matter to fill many pages with flat and unprofitable sentences. I had only this blank one for it; and there are many yet, the places of which are marked, with only the first words. Do not lose your time in looking for them we must not judge of him from these defects. Barrow. Nevertheless, the paper of a boy's cracker, when he has let it off, would be ill-used by writing such stuff upon it as that which you have style, is the avoiding of superlatives. We can with difficulty find an Italian prose-writer who is not weak and inflated by the continual use of them, to give him pomp and energy, as he imagines. Newton. Davila too is an exception. Barrow. The little elegance there is among the Italians, is in their historians and poets: the preachers, the theologians, the ethic writers, the critics, are contemptible in the last degree. Well; we will now leave the Issimi nation, and turn homeward. You will find that Bacon, like all men conscious of their strength, never strains or oversteps. While the Italians are the same in the church and in the market-place, while the preacher and policinello are speaking in the same key and employing almost the same language, while a man's God and his rotten tooth are treated in the same manner, we find at home convenience and proportion. Yet the French have taken more pains than we have done to give their language an edge and polish; and, although we have minds in England more massy and more elevated than theirs, they may claim a nearer affinity to the greater of the ancients. I have been the less unwilling to make this digression, as we are now come nigh the place where we must be slow and circumspect. The subject awes and confounds me. Human reason is a frail guide in our disquisitions on royalty, which requires in us some virtue like unto faith. We can not see into it clearly with the eyes of the flesh or of philosophy, but must humble and abase ourselves to be worthy of feeling what it is. For want whereof, many high and proud spirits have been turned aside from it, by the right hand of God, who would not lead them into its lights and enjoyments, because they came as questioners not as seekers, would have walked when they should have stood, and would have stood when they should have knelt. Newton. Sir, I do not know whether you will condescend to listen with patience to the thoughts Newton. Whenever I have heard him praised, it excited in me by Bacon's observations on the was for vigour of thought. Barrow. He is strongest where he is most perverse. There are men who never show their muscles but when they have the cramp. Newton. Consistency and firmness are not the characteristics of the Florentines, nor ever were. Machiavelli wished at one time to satisfy the man of probity, at another to conciliate the rogue and robber; at one time to stand on the alert for the character of a king. Barrow. He shocked me by what he said before on the fragility of his title: God forbid that common men should talk like the Lord High Chancellor! Newton. I was shocked in a contrary direction, and, as it were, by a repercussion, at hearing him call a king a mortal God on earth: and I do not find anywhere in the Scriptures, that “the living God told him he should die, like a man, lest | he presents? Nothing can be more pedantic than the whole of the sixteenth section." he should be proud, and flatter himself that God had, with his name, imparted unto him his nature also." Surely, sir, God would repent as heartily of having made a king, as we know he repented of having made a man, if it were possible his king should have turned out so silly and irrational a creature. However vain and foolish, he must find about him, every day, such natural wants and desires as could not appertain to a God. I made the same remark to my visitor, who said calmly, "Bacon in the next sentence hath a saving grace; and speaketh as wisely and pointedly as ever he did. He says, 'Of all kind of men, God is the least beholden to them; for he doth most for them, and they do ordinarily least for him.' A sentence not very favourable to their admission as pastors of the people, and somewhat strong against them as visible heads of the Church. But, Mr. Newton, you will detect at once a deficiency of logic in the words, That king that holds not religion the best reason of state, is void of all piety and justice, the supporters of a king.' Supposing a king soundly minded and well educated. . a broad supposition, and not easily entering our preliminaries.. may not he be just, be pious, be religious, without holding his religion as the best reason of state, or the best guide in it? Must he be void of all piety, and all justice, who sometimes thinks other reasons of state more applicable to his purposes than religion? Psalms and sack-cloth are admirable things; but these, the last expedients of the most contrite religion, will not always keep an enemy from burning your towns and violating your women, when a few pieces of cannon, and loftiness of spirit instead of humiliation, will do it." He went on, and asserted that the king is not the sole fountain of honour, as he is called in the Essay, and cannot be more fairly entitled so, than the doctors in Convocation. He remarked that the king had not made him master of arts; which dignity, he said, requires more merit than the peerage; whereupon he named several in that order, of whose learning or virtues I never heard mention, and even of whose titles I thought I never had, until he assured me I must, and expressed his wonder that I had forgotten them. When he came to the eighth section, he is the life of the law,' "the law leads a notoriously bad life," said he, "and therefore I would exempt his Majesty from the imputation: and indeed if he animateth the dead letter, making it active toward all his subjects,' the parliament and other magistratures are useless. In the ninth paragraph he makes some accurate observations, but ends weakly. He that changeth the fundamental laws of a kingdom, thinketh there is no good title to a crown but by conquest.' What! if he changes them from the despotic to the liberal? if, knowing the first possession to have been obtained by conquest, he convokes the different orders of his people, and requests their assent to the statutes "The fool hath said in his heart there is no God.' It is not said, 'the fool hath thought in his heart."" No, nor is it necessary; for, to say in his heart, is to think within himself, to be intimately convinced. "It appeareth in nothing more, that atheism is rather in the lip than in the heart of man, than by this, that atheists will ever be talking of that their opinion, as if they fainted in it within themselves, and would be glad to be strengthened by the consent of others: nay more, you shall have atheists strive to get disciples, as it fareth with other sects." So great is my horror at atheists, that I would neither reason with them nor about them; but surely they are as liable to conceit and vanity as other men are, and as proud of leading us captive to their opinions. I could wish the noble author had abstained from quoting Saint Bernard, to prove the priesthood to have been, even in those days, more immoral than the laity; and I am shocked at hearing that "learned times," especially with peace and prosperity, tend toward atheism. Better blind ignorance, better war and pestilence and famine. . . Barrow. Gently, gently! God may forgive his creature for not knowing him when he meets him; but less easily for fighting against him, after talking to him and supping with him; less easily for breaking his image, set up by him at every door and such is man; less easily for a series of fratricides. . and such is war. : Newton. I am wrong and here again let me repeat the strange paradox of my visitor, rather than hazard another fault. In the words about Superstition he agreed that Bacon spoke wisely: "It were better to have no opinion of God at all, than such an opinion as is unworthy of him; for the one is unbelief, the other is contumely." "And here," remarked my visitor, "it is im- | possible not to look back with wonder on the errors of some among the wisest men, following the drift of a distorted education, or resting on the suggestions of a splenetic disposition. I am no poet, and therefore am ill qualified to judge the merits of the late Mr. Milton in that capacity; yet, being of a serious and somewhat of a religious turn, I was shocked greatly more at his and the danger would be little in adducing them: for the current runs violently in a contrary direction, and will have covered everything with slime and sand before atheism can have her turn against it. deity than at his devil. I know not what interest | many stronger arguments in support of Bacon: he could have in making Satan so august a creature, and so ready to share the dangers and sorrows of the angels he had seduced. I know not, on the other hand, what could have urged him to make the better ones so dastardly, that, even at the voice of their Creator, not one among them offered his service to rescue from eternal perdition the last and weakest of intellectual beings. Even his own Son sate silent, and undertook the mission but slowly, although the trouble was momentary if compared with his everlasting duration, and the pain small if compared with his anterior and future bliss. Far be it from me," cried he... Newton. If atheism did never perturb states, as Bacon asserts, then nothing is more unjust than to punish it by the arm of the civil power. It was impolitic in him to remind the world that it was peaceful and happy for sixty years together, while those who ruled it were atheists; when we must acknowledge that it never has been happy or peaceful for so many days, at a time, under the wisest and most powerful (as they call the present observation and the fact be true, and if it also be true that the most rational aim of man is happiness, then must it follow that his most rational wish, and, being his most rational, therefore his most innocent and laudable, is the return of such times. Barrow. Did he cry so? then I doubt what-one) of the Most Christian kings. For, if the ever he said; for those are precisely the words that all your sanctified rogues begin their lies with. Well, let us hear however what he asserted. Newton. "Far be it from me, Mr. Newton, to lessen the merits of our Divine Redeemer. I, on the contrary, am indignant that poets and theologians should frequently lean toward it." Barrow. Did he look at all indignant? Newton. He looked quite calm. Barrow. We will go forward to the Essay On Empire. Newton. I do not think the writer is correct in Barrow. Ha! I thought so. I doubt your saying that " kings want matter of desire." friend's sincerity. Newton. He is a very sincere man. Barrow. We will discourse another time upon this. I meant only. . what we may easily elucidate when we meet again. At present we have threefourths of the volume to get through. Newton. Atheism leaves a man to sense, to philosophy, to natural piety, to laws, to reputation: all which may be guides to an outward moral virtue, though religion were not: but superstition dismounts all these, and erecteth an absolute monarchy in the minds of men: therefore atheism did never perturb states." Again, "We see the times inclined to atheism .. as the times of Augustus Cæsar. . were civil times but superstition hath been the confusion of many states." I wish the noble author had kept to himself the preference he gives atheism over superstition: for, if it be just, as it seems to be, it follows that we should be more courteous and kind toward an atheist, than toward a loose catholic or rigid sectary. Barrow. I see no reason why we should not be courteous and kind toward men of all persuasions, provided we are certain that, neither by their own inclination nor by the instigation of another, they would burn us alive to save our souls, or invade our conscience for the pleasure of carrying it with them at their girdles. Atheism would make men have too little to do with others: superstition makes them wish to have too much. Atheism would make some fools: superstition makes many madmen. Atheism would oftener be in good humour than superstition is out of bad. I could bring many more and Wherever there is vacuity of mind, there must either be flaccidity or craving; and this vacuity must necessarily be found in the greater part of princes, from the defects of their education, from the fear of offending them in its progress by interrogations and admonitions, from the habit of rendering all things valueless by the facility with which they are obtained, and transitory by the negligence with which they are received and holden. "Princes many times make themselves desires, and set their hearts upon toys; sometimes upon a building; sometimes upon erecting of an order; sometimes upon obtaining excellency in some art or feat of the hand." On which my visitor said, "The latter desire is the least common among them. Whenever it does occur, it arises from idleness, and from the habitude of doing what they ought not. For, commendable as such exercises are, in those who have no better and higher to employ their time in, they are unbecoming and injurious in kings; all whose hours, after needful recreation and the pleasures which all men share alike, should be occupied in taking heed that those under them perform their duties." Barrow. Bacon lived in an age when the wisest men were chosen, from every rank and condition, for the administration of affairs. Wonderful is it, that one mind on this subject should have pervaded all the princes in Europe, not excepting the Turk, and that we can not point out a prime minister of any nation, at that period, deficient in sagacity or energy.* Yet that even the greatest, so * There is a remark in a preceding Essay which could not be noticed in the text. "As for the acquaintance which is to be sought in travel, that which is most of all profitable, is acquaintance with much greater than any we have had since among us, did not come up to the standard he had fixed, is evident enough. "The wisdom," says he, " of all these latter times in princes' affairs, is rather fine deliveries, and shifting of dangers and mischiefs when they are near, than solid and grounded courses to keep them aloof: but this is but to try masteries with fortune. And let men beware how they neglect and suffer matter of trouble to be prepared; for no man can forbid the spark, nor tell whence it may come." Newton. Sir, it was on this passage that my friend exclaimed, "The true philosopher is the only true prophet. From the death of this, the brightest in both capacities, a few years opened the entire scroll of his awful predictions. Yet age after age will the same truths be disregarded, even though men of a voice as deep, and a heart less hollow, should repeat them. Base men must raise new families, though the venerable edifice of our constitution be taken down for the abutments; and broken fortunes must be soldered in the flames of war blown up for the occasion." On this subject he himself is too lax and easy. Among the reasons for legitimate war, he reckons the embracing of trade. He seems unwilling to speak plainly, yet he means to signify that we may declare war against a nation for her prosperity: a prosperity raised by her industry, by the honesty of her dealings, and by excelling us in the quality of her commodity, in the exactness of workmanship, in punctuality, and in credit. Barrow. Hell itself, with all its jealousy and malignity and falsehood, could not utter a sentence more pernicious to the interests and improvement of mankind. It is the duty of every state, to provide and watch that not only no other in its vicinity, but that no other with which it has dealings, immediate or remoter, do lose an inch of territory or a farthing of wealth by aggression. Princes fear at their next door rather the example of good than of bad. Correct your own ill habits, and you need not dread your rival's. Let him have them, and wear them every day, if indeed a christian may propose it, and they will unfit him for competition with you. Newton. I now come to the words, On Counsel. "The doctrine of Italy, and practice of France, in some kings' times, hath introduced cabinet councils; a remedy worse than the disease." Cabinet council! It does indeed seem a strange apposition. One would sooner have expected cabinet cards and counters, cabinet miniature pictures.. or what not! Barrow. Isaac! if you had conversed, as I have, the secretaries and employed men of embassadors; for so, in travelling in one country, he shall suck the experience of many." This, whatever it may appear to us, was not ludicrous nor sarcastic when Bacon wrote it, but might be applied as well to the embassadors and secretaries of England as of other states. with some of those persons who constitute such councils, you would think the word cabinet quite as applicable to them, as to cards or counters, or miniature pictures, or essences, or pots of pomatum. Newton. How then, in the name of wonder, are the great matters of government carried on? Barrow. Great dinners are put upon the table, not by the entertainer but by the waiters. There are usually some dextrous hands accustomed to the business. The same weights are moved by the same ropes and pulleys. There is no vast address required in hooking them, and no mighty strength in the hawling. Newton. I have taken but few notes of some admirable things in my way to the Essay On Cunning. Barrow. I may remind you hereafter of some omissions in other places. Newton. I find Bacon no despiser of books in men of business, as people mostly are. Barrow. Because they know little of them, and fancy they could manage the whole world by their genius. This is the commonest of delusions in the shallows of society. Well doth Bacon say, "There be that can pack the cards and yet can not play well; so there are some that are good in canvasses and factions that are otherwise weak men." Fortunate the country that is not the dupe of these intruders and bustlers, who often rise to the highest posts by their readiness to lend an arm at every stepping-stone in the dirt, and are found as convenient in their way as the candle-snuffers in gaming-houses, who have usually their rouleau at the service of the half-ruined. Newton. I am sorry to find my Lord High | Chancellor wearing as little the face of an honest man as doth one of these. Barrow. How so? Newton. He says, "If a man would cross a business, that he doubts some other would handsomely and effectually move, let him pretend to wish it well, and move it himself in such sort as may foil it." What must I think of such counsel ? Barrow. Bacon, as I observed before, often forgets his character. Sometimes he speaks the language of truth and honesty, with more freedom than a better man could do safely again, be teaches a lesson of baseness and roguery to the public, such as he could intend only for the pri vate ear of some young statesman, before his rehearsal on the stage of politics. The words from the prompter's book have crept into the text, and injure the piece. Bacon might not have liked to cancel the directions he had given so much to his mind: instead of which, he draws himself up and cries austerely, “But these small wares and petty points of cunning are infinite, and it were a good deed to make a list of them: | for nothing doth more hurt in a state than that cunning men pass for wise." Newton. He has other things about wisdom in |
