it, like a bruised reed, yet
soaring beyond all his misfortunes to study the highest problems, and
bequeathing his knowledge for the benefit of future ages! Can such a
man be stigmatized as "the meanest of mankind"? Is it candid and just
for a great historian to indorse such a verdict, to gloss over Bacon's
virtues, and make like an advocate at the bar, or an ancient sophist, a
special plea to magnify his defects, and stain his noble name with an
infamy as deep as would be inflicted upon an enemy of the human race?
And all for what?--just to make a rhetorical point, and show the
writer's brilliancy and genius in making a telling contrast between the
man and the philosopher. A man who habitually dwelt in the highest
regions of thought during his whole life, absorbed in lofty
contemplations, all from love of truth itself and to benefit the world,
could not have had a mean or sordid soul. "As a man thinketh, so is he."
We admit that he was a man of the world, politic, self-seeking,
extravagant, careless about his debts and how he raised money to pay
them; but we deny that he was a bad judge on the whole, or was
unpatriotic, or immoral in his private life, or mean in his ordinary
dealings, or more cruel and harsh in his judicial transactions than most
of the public functionaries of his rough and venal age. We admit it is
difficult to controvert the charges which Macaulay arrays against him,
for so accurate and painstaking an historian is not likely to be wrong
in his facts; but we believe that they are uncandidly stated, and so
ingeniously and sophistically put as to give on the whole a wrong
impression of the man,--making him out worse than he was, considering
his age and circumstances. Bacon's character, like that of most great
men, has two sides; and while we are compelled painfully to admit that
he had many faults, we shrink from classing him among bad men, as is
implied in Pope's characterization of him as "the meanest of mankind."

We now take leave of the man, to consider his legacy to the world. And
here again we are compelled to take issue with Macaulay, not in regard
to the great fact that Bacon's inquiries tended to a new revelation of
Nature, and by means of the method called _induction_, by which he
sought to establish fixed principles of science that could not be
controverted, but in reference to the _ends_ for which he labored. "The
aim of Bacon," says Macaulay, "was utility,--fruit; the multiplication
of hum