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In the De Augmentis Bacon devotes several aphorisms to the consideration of obsolete laws. He regards such laws as a source of danger in the influence which they naturally exert on the public mind regarding all law. To repeal them from time to time was the one great practical reform which he constantly urged upon the government, and it is the identical reform which the author of 'Measure for Measure' sought to illustrate and enforce in that play. Bacon advised the frequent appointment of commissions to do this work; the Duke in the play actually appoints one.

Judge Holmes calls attention to the fact that both authors make the possession of "power and place" a necessary condition to the accomplishment of this end. "Good thoughts are little better than good dreams, except they be put in act; and that cannot be without power and place," says Bacon.

"I have deliver'd to Lord Angelo,

A man of stricture and firm abstinence,

My absolute power and place here in Vienna,"

says the Duke.

48

VACUUM

"The air which, but for vacancy,
Had gone to gaze on Cleopatra
too,

And made a gap in nature."
Anthony and Cleopatra, ii. 2 (1623).

"There is no vacuum in nature, either in space at large, or in the pores of bodies."- History of Dense and Rare (1623).

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Bacon's mind was in a curious state of vacillation regarding the theory of a vacuum in nature. At first he thought that the atoms of which a body is composed must vibrate in a vacuum, as he could not otherwise conceive how bodies contract and expand. This was in 1603. In 1620, when he published the Novum Organum, he said he was in doubt on the subject; but three years later we find him distinctly and emphatically rejecting the theory of a vacuum, whether applied to bodies in space or to the internal constitution of bodies. It is this last state of his mind which is reflected in Anthony and Cleopatra' of the same date.

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Cardinal Beaufort is represented in the drama as having been accessory to the murder of Duke Humphrey, and afterwards (in the above) as “questioning and torturing" himself on the verge (forerunning) of “final despair."

50

THE NOXIOUS IN STUDIES

"The prince but studies his companions

Like a strange tongue, wherein to gain the language.

"There are neither teeth, nor stings, nor venom, nor wreaths and folds of serpents which ought not to be known. Let no man fear

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Bacon refers to this act of presumption several times in his writings, and to the evil effects that flow from it. He mentions twice the case of Timotheus, the Athenian, who, "after he had, in the account he gave to the state of his government, often interlaced this speech, And in this Fortune had no part,' never prospered in anything he undertook afterwards."

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Bacon also cites an instance of the same kind from the life of Julius Cæsar. When it was reported to Cæsar that the omens were unpropitious for his going to the Senate, he was heard to mutter, "They will be auspicious when I will." His death immediately followed.

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A sentiment uttered by Tacitus in his Annals. Bacon quoted the Latin sentence containing it, in the 'Advancement of Learning' (1605), but with an entire misconception of its meaning. He then rendered it thus: "The man who easily believes rumors will as easily manufacture additions to them." Later in life, however, he seems to have gained a better insight into the passage, the true signification of which, enlarged into a proverb, is, that untruthful persons credit even their own lies. It is so given both in the 'History of Henry VII.' (1621) and in the 'Tempest' (1623). The qualification

that a lie is to be repeated many times as a condition precedent to such belief is not in Tacitus, but is peculiar alike to Bacon and to Shake-speare, as above.

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Will bless it and approve it with learning to flatter it."-De Aug

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Measure for Measure, i. 1 (1623). better than good dreams, except

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