Francis Bacon at the time. It refers, in my belief, to the necessity under which he found himself of following private practice at the Bar, and to the fact that owing to the general indifference to letters he was unable to find an audience except by sinking below what he regarded as the best.1 The poem seems to have been written in a mood of depression, possibly (as I shall show in a moment) in consequence of the death of Tarlton, which took place in September 1588. The state of the public stage is denounced, and other conditions, presumably those of Leicester House, when the great lord of it was alive, and the writer was still young, are looked back to with regret. The person referred to as "that same gentle spirit" (as a writer for the stage, if words mean anything) is represented as sitting "in idle Cell," namely, in the seclusion of his own habitation. That this is intended for the author himself is made still clearer by the similar expressions in the Ruines of Time, where Colin Clout (who is, admittedly, the author) is bidden to rouse himself, "at length awake for shame." That poem bears evidence of being the later one of the two. » 2 1 Bacon had no taste for private practice at the Bar, the detail probably proving irksome to him; also it was not work which was held in the same repute as it is now. Cf. Donne, Satire 2, where men who choose "lawpractice for mere gain" are denounced. Donne himself read law in Lincoln's Inn, but gave it up for secretarial work. In a letter to Lord Keeper Egerton in 1597 Bacon writes: "I know very well . . . that in practising the law I play not my best game; which maketh me accept it with a nisi quod potius"; to Essex he wrote in 1595, after his failure to obtain the Solicitorship, "For means, I value that most; and the rather because I am purposed not to follow the practice of the law . . . and my reason is only because it drinketh too much time, which I have dedicated to better purposes"; and to his uncle, Lord Burghley, in 1580, at the very outset of his career, he sent a letter "to commend unto your Lordship the remembrance of my suit," adding that "although it must be confessed that the request is rare and unaccustomed, yet if it be observed how few there be which fall in with the study of the common laws, either being well left or friended, or at their own free election, or forsaking likely success in other studies of more delight and no less preferment, or setting hand thereunto early without waste of years; upon such survey made, it may be my case may not seem ordinary, no more than my suit, and so more beseeming unto it." All this disposes of the statements which are sometimes made that Bacon was too much occupied with professional duties to have had time for literary work on a large scale. 2 Cf. the title of Greene's Menaphon, published in 1589, "Camilla's alarum to slumbering Euphues in his melancholie Cell at Silexedra." To come to Tarlton. Tarlton, as every one knows, enjoyed an extraordinary popularity as a comedian and jester, and was a great favourite of Queen Elizabeth. The writer of the article about him in the Dictionary of National Biography states that, on the authority of an annotated copy of the 1611 edition of the Teares of the Muses, Tarlton has been identified with the "pleasant Willy" of the poem, and that the name "Willy Willy" was used at the time as an appellation implying affectionate familiarity. The writer further states that tradition asserts that Tarlton was dissipated, poor though regularly earning money, that he died at Shoreditch in the house of Emma Ball, a woman of bad reputation, and was buried in St. Leonard's Church on the same day [from which it has been inferred that he died of the plague], that his wife, Kate, was unfaithful to him, and that by her he left an only child, a boy of about six years. I mention these particulars as they seem to me to furnish the basis for Harvey's extraordinary account (in my opinion fictitious) of Robert Greene's death. After Tarlton's death, a book, without date, printed in or before 1590 and after September 1588, was published by one styling himself "an old companion of his, Robin Goodfellow," entitled "Tarletons Newes out of Purgatorie." It was followed, in 1590, by a book entitled "The Cobler of Canterburie, or An Invective against Tarltons Newes out of Purgatorie." The former and part of the latter were reprinted for the Shakespeare Society by J. H. Halliwell in 1844. The authors are unknown, but it has, apparently, been suggested, though only as a conjecture, that the author of the first may be Nashe. From "Greene's Vision," a work attributed to Greene, but of uncertain authorship, it appears that the Cobler of Canterburie had been attributed to him, which made him "passing melancholy." In the dialogue with Chaucer and Gower, whom he sees in a vision, the author gives the following description of the book: But now of late there came foorth a booke called the "Cobler of Canterburie," a merry work, and made by some madde fellow, containing pleasant tales, a little tainted with scurrilitie, such, reverend Chawcer, as yourselfe set foorth in your journey to Canterbury. This is a correct description of the book (the title being deceptive), except that Chaucer's "scurrilitie" is less deliberate than that of this book, which was probably written with a view to making some money. Greene adds that it was incerti authoris, but from the way he discusses it (apart from other indications) it is evident, to my mind, that the author of the "Vision" was also the author of this book. Bacon was in great financial difficulties at this time. It appears that he was doing very little in the way of private practice at the Bar, though he may have earned something, so far as that was possible in those days, by his pen. The two books, Tarletons Newes and The Cobler of Canterburie, which are collections of tales, are, in my opinion, certainly by the same hand, and I am equally certain that the hand is Bacon's. The name of Tarlton is used to secure attention, and advantage is taken of the popularity of the first book to hang another on to it, under the pretext of getting up a controversy. There was no public press at that time, books were rigorously censored, and it is my belief that Bacon invented opponents in order to find scope for writing on both sides of a question, and for the pleasure of controversial satire.1 He also took such opportunities to "advertise" and "review" his own work, sometimes in the spirit of burlesque, sometimes of dispassionate criticism, often in strains of eloquent and even prodigious eulogy, which, for the most part, was probably seriously intended. My view as to the authorship of these two books is based mainly on the similarity of style, a style which is absolutely individual and unlike that of any other writer, except those (and there are many of them) who can be recognised as "Prosopopeias," or impersonations, under which Bacon came before the world. 1 Cf. the motto at the end of the first of the Harvey Foure Letters (1592): "Miserrima Fortuna, quae caret inamico." As regards The Cobler of Canterburie I may cite the following remarkable parallel : In Spenser's Sonnet 53 we read: The Panther, knowing that his spotted hyde Doth please all beasts, but that his looks them fray, To let them gaze, whylest he on them may pray. In "The Old Wives Tale" in The Cobler of Canterburie occurs the following: In a farre country there dwelled sometime a Gentleman of good parentage, called Signor Mizaldo, who had to his wife a very faire and beautifull Gentlewoman. And as the beasts most greedily gaze at the Panthers skin, and the birds at the Peacocks plumes: so every faire feminine face is an adamant to draw ye objects of mens eyes to behold the beauties of women. In Lilly's Euphues (Anatomy of Wit) reference is made to the same curious notion: Howe frantick are those louers which are carried away with the gaye glistering of the fine face? . . . of so little value with the wise, that they accompt it a delicate baite with a deadly hooke a sweet Panther with a deuouring paunch, a sower poyson in a silver potle.-Arber Reprint, p. 54. [Of flatterers who prey on young gentlemen.] Wherefore if ther be any Fathers that would haue his children nurtured and brought vp in honestie, let him expell these Panthers which haue a sweete smel, but a deuouring mind.-Ibid. p. 49. Compare the following examples, among others, from Greene : The Panther with his painted skin and his sweet breath.— Mamillia. The Panther, which having made one astonished with his faire sight, seeketh to devoure him with bloudy pursute.—Arbasto. I come now to Tarletons Newes out of Purgatorie. The book consists of amusing tales from Italian and, I suppose, other sources, in a setting which begins thus: Sorrowing, as most men doo, for the death of Richard Tarlton the woonted desire to see plaies left me, in that although I saw as rare showes, and heard as lofty verse, yet I injoyed not those wonted sports that flowed from him, as from a fountaine of pleasing and merry conceits. For although he was only superficially seene in learning, having no more but a bare insight into the Latin tung, yet he had such a prompt wit, that he seemed to have that salem ingenij, which Tullie so highly commends in his Oratorie. Well, howsoever, either naturall or artificiall, or both, he was a mad merry companion, desired and loved of all, amongst the rest of whose wel wishers myselfe, being not the least, after his death I mourned in conceite, and absented myselfe from all plaies, as wanting that merrye Roscius of plaiers, that famosed all comedies so with his pleasant and extemporall invention. The author falls asleep in a field by the "Theatre and sees Tarlton's ghost, who tells him tales. The last one, "The Tale of the Two Lovers of Pisa," is an accomplished piece of writing, and, in some of the incidents, it resembles The Merry Wives of Windsor. The book ends as follows: Faith, and because they knew I [Tarlton] was a boone companion, they appointed that I should sit and play jigs all day on my tabor to the ghosts without cesing, which hath brought me into such use, that I now play far better than when I was alive; for proof thou shalt hear a hornpipe; with that, putting his pipe to his mouth, the first stroke he struck I started, and with that I waked, and saw such a concourse of people through the fields, that I knew the play was doon; whereupon, rising up, and smiling at my dream, after supper took my pen, and as neer as I could set it down, but not halfe so plesantly as he spoke it; but, howsoever, take it in good part, and so farewell. This, I feel sure, is the "pleasant Willy" whom the poet in the Teares of the Muses laments as "dead of late," and for whom he "mourned in conceite," ie. in the world of his imagination. He could not write for sorrow. Compare Hamlet's lament for Yorick: "Alas, poor Yorick! I knew him, Horatio: a fellow of infinite jest, of most excellent fancy he hath borne me on his back a thousand times" (v. 1). Complaints" bears the title of The next of the "Complaints |