pleasures with equanimity? Hence the advice of philosophers – 'Enjoy not, that you may not desire; desire not, that you may not fear' is pusillanimous and cowardly."

The same sentiment is in Plutarch:

"To neglect the procuring of what is necessary or convenient in life for fear of losing it, would be acting a very mean and absurd part; by the same rule a man might refuse the enjoyment of riches or honor or wisdom, because it is possible for him to be deprived of them."-Life of Solon.

RUGGLES'

"With much affected reluctance Edmund gives up the letter, which contains a proposition to put Gloster to death.". Plays of Shakespeare, 196.1

1 Mr. Henry J. Ruggles' work, 'The Plays of Shakespeare, Founded on Literary Forms' (Boston, Houghton, Mifflin, & Co., 1895), from which we have taken some excellent parallelisms, is one of the most valuable ever written in Shakespearean criticism. It is the product of twenty years' study by a trained jurist.

Shake-speare's conception of the circulation of the blood, as well as Bacon's, was that held by scientific medical schools before the time of Servetus; it was such as had been taught by Hippocrates, Galen, and Paracelsus, namely, that the blood ebbs and flows between the heart and the extremities of the body, not by a circuitous motion (outward by the arteries and back by the veins), but to and fro, or up and down, by each route independently. This corresponds to the description of the process given in King John':

"Melancholy

Had baked thy blood and made it heavy-thick,

Which else runs tickling up and down the veins.” — iii. 3.

Neither in Bacon's writings nor in the plays do we find any mention of Servetus or Harvey, but frequent references to Hippocrates, Galen, and Paracelsus in both.

"Of the different functions of the arteries and veins Shakespeare does not seem to have had any knowledge." [Nor did Bacon.] ELZE'S Life of William Shakespeare, p. 400.

Judge Holmes calls attention to a still closer parallelism under this head, as follows:

86

HUMOR AND THE VITAL SPIRIT

From Shake-speare

"Through all thy veins shall run A cold and drowsy humor, which shall seize

From Bacon

"It was a pestilent fever, but, as it seemeth, not seated in the veins or humors; only a malign vapor flew to the heart and seized the Romeo and Juliet, iv. 1 (1597). vital spirit."- History of Henry

Each vital spirit.”

VII. (1621).

Physiological science was then in its infancy, but the same peculiar conceptions of it are found in the two sets of works.

This notion, derived from Plato, is repeatedly expressed both in Bacon and in Shake-speare.

88

CHANCES IN WAR

"Consider, sir, the chance of war;

-

"Consider the varying chances

the day was yours by accident.". of war." - Promus (1594-96). Cymbeline, v. 5 (1623).

"Now good or bad, 't is but the

The above passage from 'King Lear' was first printed in 1608, and the Advertisement touching a Holy War' in 1629, three years after Bacon's death. We know that the latter tract was composed, in the shape in which we now have it, in 1622, but various memoranda, found among Bacon's posthumous papers, show that he had made a study of the subject at different times several years earlier. The context clearly proves that this study was an original one on his part, and wholly independent of anything in 'King Lear.' Bacon's full statement is as follows:

"Let me put a feigned case (and yet antiquity makes it doubtful whether it were fiction or history) of a land of Amazons, where the whole government, public and private, yea, the militia itself, was in the hands of women. . . . And much like were the case, if you suppose a nation where the custom were, that after full age the sons should expulse their fathers and mothers out of their possessions, and put them to their pensions: for these cases, of women to govern men, sons the fathers, slaves free men, are much in the same degree; all being total violations and perversions of the law of nature."

90

EMBLEMS

From Shake-speare "Prospero. Canst thou remember A time before we came to this cell? Miranda. Certainly, sir, I can. Pros. Of anything the image tell me, that

Hath kept thy remembrance."

Tempest, i. 1 (1623).

From Bacon

"Emblem reduceth conceits intellectual to images sensible, which strike the memory more.”—Advancement of Learning (1603-5).