The well-known passage in the _Sonnets_ (Bacon’s or Shakspeare’s) And almost thence my nature is subdued To what it works in, like the dyer’s hand, receives curious confirmation from Mr. Smith’s writings. He has studied Bacon’s works so closely and long that he has insensibly infected himself with some of that great man’s peculiarities. It is the vice, says Bacon, in the _Novum Organum_, of high and discursive intellects to attach too much importance to slight resemblances, a vice which leads men to catch at shadows instead of substances. Mr. Smith quotes this saying; yet how must this vice have got possession of his intellect when he drew up that list of “Parallel passages, and peculiar phrases, from Bacon and Shakspeare,” which may be read in his _Bacon and Shakspeare_! Take one instance only:—In the _Life of Henry VII._ occurs this passage: “As his victory gave him the knee, so his purposed marriage with the Lady Elizabeth gave him the heart, so that both knee and heart did truly bow before him”; in _Richard II._ is this line, “Show heaven the humbled heart and not the knee”; and in _Hamlet_ this, “And crook the pregnant hinges of the knee.” Is it possible that Mr. Smith would seriously have us draw any inference from the fact that in these three passages the word “knee” occurs and in two of them the word “heart”? Really, he might as well insist that, because Mr. Swinburne has written “Cry aloud; for the old world is broken” and because Mr. Arnold has declared himself to be “Wandering between two worlds, one dead, the other powerless to be born,” the author of _Dolores_ and the author of the _Stanzas from the Grand Chartreuse_ must be one and the same man! Again, Macaulay has noticed how, contrary to general custom, the later writings of Bacon are far superior to the earlier ones in richness of illustration. It is the same with Mr. Smith. His first pamphlet, though direct and lucid enough, was singularly free from all illustration or ornament of any kind. His next contains passages of wonderful richness and imagination. Bacon, he says, is like an orange-tree, “where we may observe the bud, the blossom, and the fruit in every stage of ripeness, all exhibited in one plant at the same time.” And he goes on in a strain of splendid eloquence:—“The stentorian orator in the City Forum, who, restoring his voice with the luscious fruit, continues his harangue to the applauding multitude, little reflects, that the delicate blossom which grew by its side, and was gathered at the same time, decorates the fair brow of the fainting bride in the far-off village church.” Never surely before has the familiar fruit of domestic life been so poetized since “Bon Gaultier” wrote of the subjects of the Moorish tyrant how they would fain have sympathized with his Christian prisoner:— But they feared the grizzly despot and his myrmidons in steel, So their sympathy descended in the fruitage of Seville.