hing was man. "What a piece of work is a man,"
cries Hamlet; "how noble in reason; how infinite in faculty; in form and
moving how express and admirable; in action how like an angel; in
apprehension how like a god; the beauty of the world; the paragon of
animals!" It is the wonder of man that spreads before us as the poet
pictures the wide speculation of Hamlet, the awful convulsion of a great
nature in Othello, the terrible storm in the soul of Lear which blends
with the very storm of the heavens themselves, the awful ambition that
nerved a woman's hand to dabble itself with the blood of a murdered
king, the reckless lust that "flung away a world for love." Amid the
terror and awe of these great dramas we learn something of the vast
forces of the age from which they sprang. The passion of Mary Stuart,
the ruthlessness of Alva, the daring of Drake, the chivalry of Sidney,
the range of thought and action in Raleigh or Elizabeth, come better
home to us as we follow the mighty series of tragedies which began in
"Hamlet" and ended in "Coriolanus."

[Sidenote: Bacon.]

Shakspere's last dramas, the three exquisite works in which he shows a
soul at rest with itself and with the world, "Cymbeline," "The
Tempest," "Winter's Tale," were written in the midst of ease and
competence, in a house at Stratford to which he withdrew a few years
after the death of Elizabeth. In them we lose all relation with the
world or the time and pass into a region of pure poetry. It is in this
peaceful and gracious close that the life of Shakspere contrasts most
vividly with that of his greatest contemporary. If the imaginative
resources of the new England were seen in the creators of Hamlet and the
Faerie Queen, its purely intellectual capacity, its vast command over
the stores of human knowledge, the amazing sense of its own powers with
which it dealt with them, were seen in the work of Francis Bacon. Bacon
was born in 1561, three years before the birth of Shakspere. He was the
younger son of a Lord Keeper, as well as the nephew of Lord Burleigh,
and even in childhood his quickness and sagacity won the favour of the
Queen. Elizabeth "delighted much to confer with him, and to prove him
with questions: unto which he delivered himself with that gravity and
maturity above his years that her Majesty would often term him 'the
young Lord Keeper.'" Even as a boy at college he expressed his dislike
of the Aristotelian philosophy, as "a philosophy only stro