“Cupid and my Campaspe played At cards for kisses--Cupid paid. He stakes his quiver, bows and arrows, His mother’s doves, and team of sparrows: Loses them too: then down he throws The coral of his lip--the Rose Growing on’s cheek (but none knows how); With these the crystal of his brow, And then the dimple of his chin-- All these did my Campaspe win. At last, he set her both his eyes-- She won; and Cupid blind did rise. O Love, has she done this to thee? What shall, alas! become of me?” He puts, too, into imitative jingle of words the song of the Nightingale--(as Bryant has done for the Bobolink); and of the strain of the skylark nothing prettier was ever said than Mr. Lyly says: “How, at Heaven’s gate she claps her wings, The morn not waking--till _she_ sings.” _Francis Bacon._ We go away from singing skylarks to find the next character that I shall cull out from these Elizabethan times to set before you: this is Lord Bacon--or, to give him his true title, Lord Verulam--there being, in fact, the same impropriety in saying Lord Bacon (if custom had not “brazed it so”) that there would be in saying Lord D’Israeli for Lord Beaconsfield. Here was a great mind--a wonderful intellect which everyone admired, and in which everyone of English birth, from Royalty down, took--and ever will take--a national pride; but, withal, few of those amiabilities ever crop out in this great character which make men loved. He can see a poor priest culprit come to the rack without qualms; and could look stolidly on, as Essex, his special benefactor in his youth, walked to the scaffold; yet the misstatement of a truth, with respect to physics, or any matter about which truth or untruth was clearly demonstrable, affected him like a galvanic shock. His biographers, Montagu and Spedding, have padded his angularities into roundness; while Pope and Macaulay have lashed him in the grave. I think we must find the real man somewhere between them; if we credit him with a great straight-thinking, truth-seeking brain, and little or no capacity for affection, the riddle of his strange life will be more easily solved. Spedding,[97] who wrote a voluminous life of Bacon--having devoted a quarter of a century to necessary studies--does certainly make disastrous ripping-up of the seams in Macaulay’s rhetoric; but there remain certain ugly facts relating to the trial of Essex, and the bribe-takings, which will probably always keep alive in the popular mind an under-current of distrust in respect to the great Chancellor.