SIR JOHN DAW. Why, every man that writes in verse is not a poet; you have of the wits that write verses, and yet are no poets they are poets that live by it, the poor fellows that live by it.

DAUPH. Why, would you not live by your verses, Sir John? CLERIMONT. No, 'twere pity he should. A knight live by his verses ! He did not make them to that end, I hope.

DAUPH. And yet the noble Sidney lives by his, and the noble family not ashamed.

CLER. Ay, he profest himself; but Sir John Daw has more caution: he'll not hinder his own rising in the State so much. Do you think he will? Your verses, good Sir John, and no poems.

Sir Philip Sidney was dead when this was written, and the word "lives" is therefore used in a punning sense ("survives").

1

A further illustration of the point occurs in the anonymous play "Sir Thomas More," in one of the scenes which some authorities attribute (in my opinion rightly) to Shakespeare:

SIR THOMAS MORE. Erasmus preacheth gospell against phisicke,

My noble poet.

EARL OF SURREY. Oh, my lord, you tax me

In that word poet of much idlenes :

It is a studie that makes poore our fate;

Poets were ever thought unfitt for state.

The third passage is from a letter by Donne, whose position and circumstances resembled those of Bacon. They were, no doubt, very different men, but, of the two, Donne is in some ways the more representative of the thought of the particular age. The passage comes from a letter dated 14th April 1612, when Donne was about forty:

Of my Anniversaries, the fault that I acknowledge in myself is to have descended to print anything in verse, which, though it have excuse even in our times, by men who profess and practise much gravity; yet I confess I wonder how I declined. to it and do not pardon myself.2

1 See The Shakespeare Apocrypha, collected and edited by C. F. Tucker Brooke.

2 Cited by E. K. Chambers in the "Muses Library" edition of Donne's poems.

E

And lastly, the stately and very diplomatic sonnet addressed to Burghley among the "Verses by the Author to Various Noblemen, etc.," prefixed to the first portion (1590) of the Faerie Queene:

To the right honourable the Lo. Burleigh, Lo. high
Treasurer of England

To you, right noble Lord, whose carefull brest
To menage of most grave affaires is bent:
And on whose mightie shoulders most doth rest
The burdein of this kingdomes governement,

As the wide compasse of the firmament

On Atlas mightie shoulders is upstayd,

Unfitly I these ydle rimes present,

The labor of lost time, and wit unstayd :

Yet if their deeper sence be inly wayd,

And the dim vele, with which from commune vew
Their fairer parts are hid, aside be layd,
Perhaps not vaine they may appeare to you.
Such as they be, vouchsafe them to receave,
And wipe their faults out of your censure grave.

E. S.

Tradition has made Burghley the "villain of the piece" in Spenser's life, and there are passages in the poems which bear out this view, but which no one has ever succeeded in explaining in relation to Spenser's circumstances. The passages in question are eloquent and vivid expressions of disappointment and a querulousness peculiar to this writer. In my opinion, as I shall further endeavour to show, they are an expression of Francis Bacon's feelings in the early days of frustrated ambition. But they are often more in the nature of artistic self-expression than as representing any permanent and deep personal feeling. Francis Bacon had a very sanguine and buoyant temperament. At the same time he was, I believe, responsive to every impression, direct or reflected, and while most reserved in personal intercourse he expressed himself with extraordinary candour and naïveté on paper. I think he could hardly resist the impulse of self-expression, and the methods of secrecy which he devised enabled him to indulge it with

impunity. Even when his attacks take an atrocious form-and they are in places atrocious, however brilliant artistically—the artistic sense always predominates, and there is a marked and curious absence of personal animus. This is due, to my mind, to Bacon's detachment from what, for want of a better term in brief, I may call the individual tie, which, again, was due to the slenderness of his emotions.

The danger of public expression of opinion was also another motive for secrecy and disguise. It must not be overlooked that, after Whitgift's "Star Chamber Decree " (January 1586), for many years no manuscript could be set up in type without the licence of the Archbishop or the Bishop of London. The penalties, where they were enforced, involved the printer in ruin the destruction of his press, six months' imprisonment, and prohibition to trade. Similar precautions, in the interests of morality as well as public policy, were maintained on the oral side, players being licensed to a few leading men with great establishments; otherwise they were treated as rogues and vagabonds. In Bacon's lifetime the Italian Giordano Bruno, who appears to have resembled him in many ways in intellect and aims, was burned at the stake for his opinions. Ket, a clergyman, sometime a fellow of a college in Cambridge, was burned at Norwich in 1589 for alleged unitarian and otherwise eccentric opinions. A reference to the French marriage cost Stubbs and his publisher the loss of their right hands. Under James, Ben Jonson and two other playwrights narrowly escaped the pillory and mutilation for a reference to the Scotch which gave offence to the king. In these circumstances is it conceivable that any printer could have been induced to publish Mother Hubberds Tale unless he was assured of powerful protection? No doubt the licence would protect him up to a point, but how could a man like Spenser, or the "Printer" in his absence, have got such a piece past the censor? It is of course conceivable that the official who read it failed to understand its significance, and that in the case of the Ruines of Time, where a

similar and more open attack on Burghley occurs, he may have overlooked the stanza. But this seems very improbable in the circumstances. With Bacon, however,

the case was different. He was an old pupil and friend of Whitgift; he was generally in sympathy with his views of Church government, or at least was always ready to support them as representing the policy of constituted authority; his pen was employed officially in connection with the "Martin" controversy (1588-89),1 and I have no doubt myself that it was placed at Whitgift's service unofficially in some of the brilliant pamphlets, in the vein of popular ridicule, which appeared in reply to the Martinist press. In that case there were confidences, for mutual advantages, between the Archbishop and his old pupil, and a request from the latter to let a book pass the censorship would be acceded to on trust. The safety of the printer would lie in the fact that Burghley could not take proceedings without exposing his nephew, the son of his old friend and ally, and disgracing his wife's family. Spenser, whose name (as I consider) was used, was protected by his obscurity and the inaccessibility of his habitation.

I have not entered much into the question of social feeling, and the aversion which is commonly felt or has been in the past—by men of rank or position from being identified as writers by profession. The stories in this connection about Congreve and Gibbon are well known. In the time of Queen Elizabeth class opinion was pre

1 See Spedding, Life, i. : "Advertisement touching the Controversies of the Church of England" (p. 70 sq.). Letter to Whitgift (p. 96). Letter of Sir Francis Walsingham to an official of the French Government, which Spedding regards (I have no doubt rightly) as Bacon's work (p. 97).

2 Since this was written I have noticed a statement by Simpson that at this time Greene and Nashe were employed by Bancroft to lampoon Martin Marprelate (The School of Shakspere, 1878, p. 363). I see it also stated in the Dictionary of National Biography, under "Bancroft," that it was "mainly through his vigilance that the printers of the Marprelate tracts were detected.

He is also said to have originated the idea of replying to the tracts in a like satirical vein, as was done by Thomas Nash and others (see Pappe with a Hatchett, An Almond for a Parrot, etc.) with considerable success. It could be shown, I think, with much greater probability that Bacon was the originator of this idea. Bancroft was Whitgift's right-hand man.

sumably not less sensitive, and though Bacon was not a man of "family," he was born in a high social position, and was ambitious to shine in the great world. A man who is openly engaged in spiritual work is disliked in a position of authority or social eminence, and is, indeed, unsuited for it. Moreover, in such circumstances, there is a decency in reticence. Bacon's interests, however, were too wide, and his mind was too active, for him to accept the isolation of the contemplative life; therefore, on that side, he devised means of concealment; or rather concealment was, with him, a second nature, because, as I shall endeavour to show in the following pages, he began to practise it as a boy. I am inclined to think also that, in the case of great genius, either from its sensitiveness, or from a consciousness of ill-adaptability to human surroundings, there is an instinct of selfconcealment.

A word may be said here as to Spenser's literary remains, or, rather, the absence of them. In this matter we find the same phenomenon as in the case of Shakespeare. According to the writers of the article in the Dictionary of National Biography, "Eight documents among the Irish State Papers, dating between 1581 and 1589, bear Spenser's signature, and one, his reply to the inquiries of the Commissioners appointed in 1589 to report on the plantation of Munster, is a holograph." Beyond this, there is not a line of correspondence or manuscript of any kind. Considering who the people were whom Spenser knew, and apparently knew intimately, and that he regarded his residence in Ireland as an exile, he had every inducement to keep up a correspondence with London, so far as such a thing was then possible. Moreover he was a most facile writer, the Faerie Queene being said to be the longest poem in the world.1

1 According to Prof. Craik (Spenser and his Poetry, 1845) it contains approximately 35,000 lines, being "nearly as long as the Iliad and Odyssey both, with the Aeneid to boot."