Nor is each of Spenser's knights (although upon his own strength and skill assisted by divine grace depends the issue of his strife), a solitary knight-errant. The poet is not without a sense of the corporate life of humanity. As the virtues are linked one to another by a golden chain, so is each noble nature bound to his fellows. Arthur is the succourer of all; all are the servants of Gloriana. Spenser would seem to have longed for some new order of lofty, corporate life, a later Round Table, suitable to the Elizabethan age. If it were a dream, more fitted for Faery-Land than for England of the sixteenth century, we may perhaps pardon Spenser for belief in incalculable possibilities of virtue; for he had known Sidney, and the character of Sidney seems forever to have lived with him inspiring him with inextinguishable faith in man. With national life Spenser owned a sympathy which we do not expect to find in the mediæval romances of Arthur, written before England had acquired an independent national character, nor in Bunyan's allegory, which does not concern itself with affairs of earthly polity, and which came into existence at a period of national depression, a time when the political enemies of England were her religious allies. But in the days of Elizabeth the nation had sprung up to a consciousness of new strength and vitality, and its political and religious antagonists, Spain and the Papacy, were identical. Faery Land with Spenser is indeed no dream world; it lies in no distant latitude. His epic

abounds with contemporary political and religious feeling. The combat with Orgoglio, the stripping of Duessa, the death of Kirkrapine could have been

written only by an Englishman and a Protestant possessed by no half-hearted hatred towards Spain and

the Papal power. Spenser's views on Irish politics,

which interested him so nearly, are to be discovered in the Legend of Arthegall with hardly less clearness than in his prose dialogue upon the Present State of Ireland.

Further, in his material life, Spenser appears to have had a sufficient hold upon positive fact. During the same year, in which, for the second time, he became a lover, the year during which he wooed his Elizabeth, and recorded his despairs and raptures in the Italian love-philosophy of the Amoretti, the piping and pastoral Colin Clout exhibited suit for three ploughlands, parcels of Shanballymore, and was alleged to have "converted

a great deal of corn elsewhere "to his proper use." Neither love nor poetry made him insensible to the substantial though minor fact of ploughlands of Shanballymore. With measureless dominion in Faery Land he yet did not disdain a slice of the forfeited estate of the Earl of Desmond. Some powerful hostility hindered his court-preferment; and the grievance finds a place in Spenser's verse. His own material life he endeavoured, not altogether successfully, to render solid and prosperous. The intention of his great poetical acheivement is one which, while in a high sense religious, is at the same time eminently positive. A complete development of noble human character for active uses, not a cloistered virtue, is that which Spenser looked upon as most needed for God and man. Such a design is in harmony with the spirit of England in the days of

B

Elizabeth. To be great and to do great things seemed better than to enter the Celestial City, and forget the City of Destruction; better than to receive in ecstacy the vision of a divine mystery, or to be fed with miraculous food. In Spenser these ethics of the Elizabethan age arrived at a self-conscious existence.

Let us, remaining at the same point of view, glance now at Bacon and the scientific movement. Bacon and Shakspere stand far apart. In moral character and in gifts of intellect and soul we should find little resemblance between them. While Bacon's sense of the presence of physical law in the universe was for his time extraordinarily developed, he seems practically to have acted upon the theory that the moral laws of the world are not inexorable, but rather by tactics and dexterity may be cleverly evaded. Their supremacy was acknowledged by Shakspere in the minutest as well as in the greatest concerns of human life. Bacon's superb intellect was neither disturbed nor impelled by the promptings of his heart. Of perfect friendship or of perfect love he may, without reluctance, be pronounced incapable. Shakspere yielded his whole being to boundless and measureless devotion. Bacon's ethical writings sparkle with a frosty brilliance of fancy, playing over the worldly maxims which constituted his wisdom for the conduct of life. Shakspere reaches to the ultimate truths of human life and character through a supreme and indivisible energy of love, imagination, and thought. Yet Bacon and Shakspere belonged to one great movement of humanity. The whole endeavour of Bacon in science is to attain the fact, and to

ascend from particular facts to general. He turned away with utter dissatisfaction from the speculating in vacuo of the middle ages. His intellect demanded positive knowledge; he could not feed upon the wind. From the tradition of philosophy and from authority he reverted to nature. Between faith and reason Bacon set a great and impassable gulf. Theology is something too high for human intellect to discuss. Bacon is profoundly deferential to theology, because, as one cannot help suspecting, he was profoundly indifferent about it. The schoolmen for the service of faith had summoned human reason to their aid, and Reason, the ally, had in time proved a dangerous antagonist. Bacon, in the interest of science, dismissed faith to the unexceptionable province of supernatural truths. To him a dogma of theology was equally credible whether it possessed an appearance of reasonableness or appeared absurd. The total force of intellect he reserved for subjugating to the understanding the world of positive fact.

As the matter with which Bacon's philosophy concerns itself is positive, so its end is pre-eminently practical. The knowledge he chiefly valued was that which promised to extend the dominion of man over nature, and thus to enrich man's life. Hi: conception of human welfare was large and magnificent; yet it was wanting in some spiritual elements which had not been lost sight of in earlier and darker times. To human welfare, thus conceived in a way somewhat materialistic, science is to minister. And the instruments of science by which it attains this end are the purely natural instruments of observation, experiment, and inference. Devotion to

the fact, a return from the supernatural to the strictly natural and human, with a practical, mundane objectthese are the characteristics of the Elizabethan movement in science.*

Let us now turn to the religious movement in England. That movement cannot be said to have had, like the Reformation movement in Germany, a central point of vitality and sustenance in the agony of an individual conscience. Nor was it guided like the movement in France by a supreme organising power-theological and political, capable of large, if somewhat too logically rigid, ideal conceptions. The dogma of Anglicanism is not like Calvinistic dogma, the expression and development of an idea; it becomes intelligible only through recollection of a series of historical events,-the balance of parties, compromises with this side and with that, the exigencies of times and seasons. But if England had neither a Luther nor a Calvin, she had Cranmer and Hooker. The religious revolution of France in the sixteenth century, like the political revolution of 1789, though it sent a strong wave of moral feeling through Europe, failed to sustain itself. Its uncompromising ideality kept it too much out of relation with the vital, concrete, and ever-altering facts of human society. The English reformation on the other hand, if less presentable in logical formula to the intellect, was, like English political freedom as com

* Mr Spedding's estimate of Bacon differs much from that given above; and Mr Spedding has the best right of any living person to speak of Bacon. One must, however, remain faithful to one's own impression of facts, even when that impression is founded on partial (yet not wholly insufficient) knowledge.