When men are wanting, we address the animal creation; and rather than have none to partake of our feelings, we find sentiment in the musick of birds, the hum of insects, and the low of kine: nay, we call on rocks and streams and forests to witness and share our emotions. Hence the royal shepherd, sojourning in caves and solitary wastes, calls on the hills to rejoice, and the floods to clap their hands and he lonely poet, wandering in the deep recesses of uncultiated nature, finds a temple in every solemn grove, and wells his chorus of praise with the winds that bow the lof¡y cedars. And can he, who, not satisfied with the wide range of animated existence, calls for the sympathy of the nanimate creation, refuse to worship with his fellow men Can he who bids "Nature attend," forget to "join every iving soul" in the universal hymn ? Shall we suppose companions in the stillness of deserts, and shall we overlook them amongst friends and townsmen? It cannot be! Social worship, for the devout heart, is not more a duty than it is a real want.

LESSON XLV.

Dialogue between Lord Bacon and Shakspeare.—BLACKWOOD'S MAGAZINE.*

Lord Bacon, (in his study.) Now, my pen, rest awhile. l'he air of this dark and thought stirring chamber must not De breathed too long at a time, lest my wits grow sluggish y reason of too much poring. I will go forth and walk. But first let me restore to their shelves these wormwood schoolmen. Come, gray-beard Aristotle, mount thou first, ind tell the spiders not to be astonished if their holes are larkened, for a seraphick doctor is about to follow. Scotus and Ramus, why these dog-ears? It was once a different sort. And now, as I lift each book, methinks its cumbrous eaves club all their syllogisms, and conspire to weigh down hat feeble arm, which has just been employed in transcribag the Novum Organon. Alas! that folly and falsehood should be so hard to grapple with-but he that hopes to

*This dialogue was abridged by the editor of "The Scrap Book" from a Series of Essays in Blackwood's Edinburgh Magazine, entitled "Time's Magick Lantern.”

.

make mankind the wiser for his labours must not be soon tired. My single brain is matched against the errours of thousands; and yet every time I return to reflect upon the laws of nature, she meets my thoughts with a more palpa ble sanction, and a voice seems to whisper from the midst of her machinery, that I have not inquired in vain.—Ho who waits in the antichamber there? Does any one desire an audience?

Page. The Queen has sent unto your lordship, Mr. Will. iam Shakspeare the player.

Bacon. Indeed!-I have wished to see that man. Show him in. Report says, her majesty has lately tasked him t write a play upon a subject chosen by herself. Good-mor row, Mr. Shakspeare.

Shakspeare. Save your lordship! here is an epistle from her majesty.

Bacon. (Reads.) "The Queen desires, that as Mr. Shaks peare would fain have some savour of the Queen's own. poor vein of poesy, he may be shown the book of sonnets, written by herself, and now in the keeping of my Lor Chancellor, who indeed may well keep what he hath s much flattered; although she does not command him to hid it altogether from the knowing and judicious."

Shakspeare. How gracious is her majesty! Sure the pen, for which she exchanges her sceptre, cannot choose bu drop golden thoughts.

Bacon. You say well, Mr. Shakspeare. But let us sit down and discourse awhile. The sonnets will catch no harm by our delay, for true poetry, they say, hath a bloom which time cannot blight.

Shakspeare. True, my lord. Near to Castalia there bubbles also a fountain of petrifying water, wherein the muses are wont to dip whatever posies have met the approval of Apollo; so that the slender foliage, which originally sprung forth in the cherishing brain of a true poet, becomes hardened in all its leaves, and glitters as if it were carved out of rubies and emeralds. The elements have afterwards no power over it.

so.

Bacon. Such will be the fortune of your own productions. Shakspeare. Ah, my lord! do not encourage me to hopeI am but a poor unlettered man, who seizes whatever rude conceits his own natural vein supplies him with, upon the enforcement of haste and necessity; and therefore I fear that such as are of deeper studies than myself, will

ind many flaws in my handiwork to laugh at both now and hereafter.

Bacon. He that can make the multitude laugh and weep as you do, Mr. Shakspeare, need not fear scholars.-A head naturally fertile and for getive is worth many libraries, inasmuch as a tree is more valuable than a basket of fruit, or a good hawk better than a bag full of game, or the little purse which a fairy gave to Fortunatus more inexhaustible than all the coffers in the treasury. More scholarship might have sharpened your judgement, but the particulars wherecf a character is composed, are better assembled by force of imagination than of judgement, which, although it perceive. coherences, cannot summon up materials, nor melt them into a compound, with that felicity which belongs to imagi nation alone.

Shakspeare. My lord, thus far I know, that the first glimpse and conception of a character in my mind is always engendered by chance and accident. We shall suppose, for instance, that I am sitting in a tap-room, or standing in a tennis-court. The behaviour of some one fixes my attention. I note his dress, the sound of his voice, the turn of his countenance, the drinks he calls for, his questions and retorts, the fashion of his person, and, in brief, the whole out-goings and in-comings of the man. These grounds of speculation being cherished and revolved in my fancy, it becomes straightway possessed with a swarm of conclusions and beliefs concerning the individual. In walking home, I picture out to myself, what would be fitting for him to say or do upon any given occasion, and these fantasies being recalled at some after period, when I am writing a play, shape themselves into divers mannikins, who are not long of being nursed into life. Thus comes forth Shallow, and Slender, and Mercutio, and Sir Andrew Aguecheek.

Bacon. These are characters who may be found alive in But how frame you such interlocutors as Bru

the streets.

tus and Coriolanus?

Shakspeare. By searching histories, in the first place, my lord, for the germ. The filling up afterwards comes rather from feeling than observation. I turn myself into a Brutus or a Coriolanus for the time; and can, at least in fancy, partake sufficiently of the nobleness of their nature, to put proper words into their mouths. Observation will not supply the poet with every thing. He must have a stock of exalted sentiments in his own mind.

1

Bacon. In truth, Mr. Shakspeare, you have observed the world so well, and so widely, that I can scarce believe you ever shut your eyes. I too, although much engrossed with other studies, am, in part, an observer of mankind. Their dispositions, and the causes of their good or bad fortune, cannot well be overlooked even by the most devoted questioner of physical nature. But note the difference of habitudes. No sooner have I observed and got hold of particulars, than they are taken up by my judgement to be commented upon, and resolved into general laws. Your imagination keeps them to make pictures of. My judgement, if she find them to be comprehended under something already known by her, lets them drop, and forgets them; for which reason, a certain book of essays, which I am writing, will be small in bulk, but I trust not light in substance. Thus do men severally follow their inborn dispositions.

Shakspeare. Every word of your lordship's will be an adage to after times. For my part, I know my own place, and aspire not after the abstruser studies: although I can give wisdom a welcome when she comes in my way. But the inborn dispositions, as your lordship has said, must not be warped from their natural bent, otherwise nothing but sterility will remain behind. A leg cannot be changed into an arm. Among stage-players, our first object is to exercise a new candidate, until we discover where his vein lies.

Bacon. I am told that you do not invent the plots of your own plays, but generally borrow them from some common book of stories, such as Bocaccio's Decameron, or Cynthio's Novels. That practice must save a great expenditure of thought and contrivance.

Shakspeare. It does, my lord. I lack patience to invent the whole from the foundation.

Bacon. If I guess aright, there is nothing so hard and troublesome as the invention of coherent incidents; and yet, methinks, after it is accomplished, it does not show so high ́a strain of wit as that which paints separate characters and objects well. Dexterity would achieve the making of a plot better than genius, which delights not so much in tracing a curious connexion among events, as in adorning a fantasy with bright colours, and eking it out with suitable appendages. Homer's plot hangs but ill together. It is indeed no better than a string of popular fables and superstitions, caught up from among the Greeks; and I believe that hey who, in the time of Pisis'trătus, collected this poem,

did more than himself to digest its particulars. His praise must therefore be found in this, that he reconceived, amplified, and set forth, what was but dimly and poorly conceived by common men.

Shakspeare. My knowledge of the tongues is but small, on which account I have read ancient authors mostly at second hand. I remember, when I first came to London, and began to be a hanger-on at the theatres, a great desire grew in me for more learning than had fallen to my share at Stratford; but fickleness and impatience, and the bewilderment caused by new objects, dispersed that wish into empty air. Ah, my lord, you cannot conceive what a strange thing it was for so impressible a rustick, to find himself turned loose in the midst of Babel! My faculties wrought to such a degree, that I was in a dream all day long. My bent was not then toward comedy, for most objects scemed noble and of much consideration. The musick at the theatre ravished my young heart; and amidst the goodly company of spectators, I beheld, afar off, beauties who seemed to out-paragon Cleopatra of Egypt. Some of these primitive fooleries were afterwards woven into Romeo and Juliet.

Bacon. Your Julius Cæsar and your Richard the Third please me better. From my youth upward I have had a brain politick and discriminative, and less prone to marvelling and dreaming than to scrutiny. Some part of my juvenile time was spent at the court of France, with our ambassador, Sir Amias Paulet; and, to speak the truth, although I was surrounded by many dames of high birth and rare beauty, I carried oftener Machiavelli* in my pocket than a book of madrigals, and heeded not although these wantons made sport of my grave and scholar-like demeanour. When they would draw me forth to an encounter of their wit, I paid them off with flatteries, till they forgot their aim in thinking of themselves. Michael Angelo said of Painting, that she was jealous, and required the whole man, undivided. I was aware how much more truly the same thing might be said of Philosophy, and therefore cared not how much the ruddy complexion of my youth was sullied over the midnight lamp, or my outward comeliness sacrificed to my inward advancement.

Shakspeare. Speaking of bodily habitudes, is it true that your lordship swoons whenever the moon is eclipsed, ever though unaware of what is then passing in the heavens ?

*Pronounced Mac-e-a-vell-yc.