125

TRAVEL

Were't not affection chains thy part of experience." - Essay of Travel (1625).

126

Bacon enlarges on this subject in his Historia Vita et Mortis (1623) thus:

man.

say

"I remember when I was a young man at Poictiers in France that I was very intimate with a young Frenchman of great wit, but somewhat talkative, who afterwards turned out a very eminent He used to inveigh against the manners of old men, and that if their minds could be seen as well as their bodies, they would appear no less deformed; and further indulging his fancy, he argued that the defects of their minds had some parallel and correspondence with those of the body."

Many other writers, including Lucretius, have called attention to this relationship between the mind and the body.

Bacon wrote a chapter on Love as a god, declaring him to have been the appetite or desire of matter, or the natural motion of the atom. Accordingly, Love had no progenitor.

"

Absolutely without cause," says Bacon.

"Created out of nothing," says Shake-speare.

132

DUELLING FORBIDDEN BY THE TURKS

Enter Othello and Attendants.
"Othello. What is the matter
here?

Montano. 'Zounds! I bleed still;
I am hurt to the death.
Othello. Why, how now, ho! from
whence ariseth this?

Are we turn'd Turks, and to our-
selves do that
Which heaven hath forbid the
Ottomites?"

Othello, ii. 3 (1622).

"Touching the censure of the Turks of these duels: there was a combat of this kind performed by two persons of quality of the Turks wherein one of them was slain, the other party was convented before the council of Bassaes; the manner of the reprehension was in these words: How durst you undertake to fight one with the other? Are there not Christians enough to kill? Did you not know that whether of you should be slain, the loss would be the Great Seigneour's?'" Charge touching Duels (1613).

Both authors condemned duelling, and both knew that the

practice was forbidden among the Turks.

The word merely in the above quotation from the play is used in its strict Latin sense, merum, wholly.

On the world's stage men and women, without exception, are all players. Shake-speare.

In the theatre of man's life, none are lookers-on.

134 ELIXIR

"How much unlike art thou Mark

Anthony !

Yet, coming from him, that great
medicine hath

With his tinct gilded thee."
Anthony and Cleopatra, i. 5 (1623).

Both authors called the tinct, which was supposed by the alchemists to have the property of transmuting base metals into gold, THE MEDICINE. Both evidently investigated this curious subject, Bacon even expressing the opinion that silver could be produced by artificial means more easily than gold. The true term for the tinct was Elixir.

135

HONORS LIKE GARMENTS

"New honors come upon him, Like our strange garments, cleave not to their mould,

"Queen Elizabeth used to say of her instructions to great officers, 'that they were like garments, straight at first putting on, but did Macbeth, i. 3 (1623). by and by wear loose enough.'" Apothegms (1624).

But with the aid of use."

It is perhaps significant that Bacon took Orpheus, the great musician whose lyre Jupiter placed among the stars, for his own model. He erected a statue of him in the orchard at Gorhambury as " PHILOSOPHY PERSONIFIED."

137

GESTICULATION