aws of England, a History of England
under the Princes of the House of Tudor, a body of National History, a
Philosophical Romance. He made extensive and valuable additions to his
Essays. He published the inestimable TREATISE DE AUGMENTIS SCIENTIARUM.

Did these labors of Hercules fill up his time to his contentment, and
quiet his appetite for work? Not entirely:

The trifles with which he amused himself in hours of pain and languor
bore the mark of his mind. THE BEST JEST-BOOK IN THE WORLD is that which
he dictated from memory, without referring to any book, on a day on
which illness had rendered him incapable of serious study.

Here are some scattered remarks (from Macaulay) which throw light
upon Bacon, and seem to indicate--and maybe demonstrate--that he was
competent to write the Plays and Poems:

With great minuteness of observation he had an amplitude of
comprehension such as has never yet been vouchsafed to any other human
being.

The ESSAYS contain abundant proofs that no nice feature of character,
no peculiarity in the ordering of a house, a garden, or a court-masque,
could escape the notice of one whose mind was capable of taking in the
whole world of knowledge.

His understanding resembled the tent which the fairy Paribanou gave
to Prince Ahmed: fold it, and it seemed a toy for the hand of a lady;
spread it, and the armies of the powerful Sultans might repose beneath
its shade.

The knowledge in which Bacon excelled all men was a knowledge of the
mutual relations of all departments of knowledge.

In a letter written when he was only thirty-one, to his uncle, Lord
Burleigh, he said, "I have taken all knowledge to be my province."

Though Bacon did not arm his philosophy with the weapons of logic, he
adorned her profusely with all the richest decorations of rhetoric.

The practical faculty was powerful in Bacon; but not, like his wit,
so powerful as occasionally to usurp the place of his reason and to
tyrannize over the whole man.

There are too many places in the Plays where this happens. Poor old
dying John of Gaunt volleying second-rate puns at his own name, is a
pathetic instance of it. "We may assume" that it is Bacon's fault, but
the Stratford Shakespeare has to bear the blame.

No imagination was ever at once so strong and so thoroughly subjugated.
It stopped at the first check from good sense.

In truth, much of Bacon's life was passed in a visionary world--amid
things as strange as any