RELIGIOUS CHARACTER OF LORD BACON. about to religion; for while the mind of man looketh upon second causes scattered, it may sometimes rest in them and go no further; but when it beholdeth the chain of them confederate and linked together, it must needs fly to Providence and Deity." "His belief he has left us in a wellwritten confession of his faith, embracing the usual articles of the Christian religion. His prayers, which are preserved, breathe a spirit of true devotion, in a style and form which are not surpassed by any compositions of that period, in our language. It would be easy to transcribe page after page of his recorded sentiments; and we might trace at every step of his life his profound deference for the theology of the Bible. We do not believe that the Christian religion depends for its evidence on the suffrage of any one philosopher; or on the bright constellation of names which have expressed their profound regard for the truths of revelation. Still a Christian cannot but look with deep interest on the fact that such men as Bacon, and Boyle, and Newton, bowed their mighty intellects to the authority of revelation; came and brought all the rich and varied treasures of their profound investigation, and laid them at the foot of the cross; and spent their lives increasingly impressed with the belief that the God of nature is also the God of the Bible. While we do not claim, that on their authority the Scriptures should be accredited as the word of God, we do claim that they should be allowed to rebuke the flippancy of youthful and unfledged infidelity; that they should be permitted to summon men to inquire, before they pronounce; we claim that their authority is sufficient to call on the youthful skeptic to pause, and to suspect that possibly he may be wrong. When mighty minds like those have left their recorded assent to the truths of the Christian scheme, it is not too much to ask of minds of far less power to sit down and inquire, at least, whether Christianity may not have come from God. When Newton, after having surveyed world on world and measured the heavens, and placed himself for profound inquiry at the head of mankind, sat down in the full maturity of his days, and passed the vigor of his life, and the serene evening of his honored age in the contemplation of the New Testament; when Bacon, after having rescued science from the accumulated darkness and rubbish of two thousand years; after having given lessons to all mankind about the just mode of investigating nature; and after having traversed the circle of the sciences, and gained all that past generations had to teach, and having carried for Essays, Civil and Moral. num; 263 ward the inquiry far into nature, bowed at every step to the authority of the Bible; when Hale, learned in the law, not only believed Christianity to be true, but adorned the Christian profession by a most humble life; when Boerhave, perfectly acquainted with the human frame, and skilled in the healing art, sat with the simplicity of a child at the feet of Jesus Christ; when Locke gave the testimony of his powerful mind to the truth of the Christian religion; when Davy, first of chemists, came on this subject to the same results as the analyzer of light, the inventor of fluxions, and the demonstrator of the theory of gravitation; as the author of the Novum Orgaand the writer of the treatise on the Human Understanding; when each science has thus contributed its founder, its ornament, and its head, as a witness to the truth of the Christian religion, it is not too much to conclude it may be something different from priestcraft and imposture, When we turn from these lights of men-these broad stars that spread their beams over all the firmament of science, and seek after the wandering and dim luminaries of infidelity-when we make a sober estimate of what the high priests of un belief have done for the advancement of science, and the welfare of man, we are struck with the prodigious advance we have made into chilly and tenebrated regions. spirits of another order. as remote almost from science, as from Christianity. We should know where we are as readily by their superficial, but pompous pretensions; by dark, but most confident scientific claims; by erroneous, wandering, but most flippant demands in science, as we do by their infuriated and bitter raging against the claims of the Christian religion. Who are these men? Volney, Diderot, D'Alembert, Voltaire, Paine; Herbert-the best and greatest of them-Shaftsbury, Tindal, Morgan, Bolingbroke, Gibbon, Hume What have they ever done for science? What advances have they ever made? So far as we know, not one of them has any pretensions to what gives immortality to the names of Boyle, Locke, Newton, Bacon, Hale. What valuable fact have they ever presented in science? What new principle have they originated, or illustrated? What department of science have they adorned? Not a man of them has ever trod the regions that constituted the glory of England, and of the world -the regions of profound science; of deep and penetrating investigation of the works of nature. In spite of such inen, science would still have slumbered in the regions of eternal night; and infidelity, but for Christian men, might have swayed a sceptre as she desired, over regions of pro We have passed amid We wander in climes 264 THE MOURNER TO HIS ANGEL BRIDE. found and boundless shades of ignorance and crime. We are accustomed to care little for names and authorities in religion. We believe that religion, natural and revealed, accords with the constitution and course of nature. We believe that it is sustained by a force and compass of argument that can be adduced for the truth of no science. On the ground of the independent and impregnable proof of revealed religion, we are Christians. But there are men who pride themselves on names. There are those whose only reason for an opinion is, that it was held by some illustrious man. None are really so much under the influence of this feeling as the infidel. That Hume was a skeptic; that Gibbon was capable of a sneer; that Paine was a scoffer; that Volney was an atheist, is to them strong as proof of holy writ. Hence they feel that to doubt, is the most exalted state of man; that there is ar gument enough for mortals in a sneer and a jibe; that scoffing becomes a human being; and that to come to the conclusion that man has no Fa ther and no God, that he dies like kindred worms, is the supremacy of felicity, and the perfection of reason. When such have been the apostles and high priests of unbelief-such the hosts which they have mustered, we feel that apart from all argument in the case, we would rather accord with the sentiments of the great luminaries of mankind in science; and that it is not unworthy of reason and elevated thought to suppose, that true religion may be found where we have found every other valuable blessing for mankind; and that the system, attended every where with science, refinement, and art, and that has shed light on the intellect, and honor on the names of Locke, and Boyle, and Bacon, is the system with which God intended to bless men. GOOD ANGELS. BY J. R. ORTON. A BEAUTIFUL child lay sleeping on a bank Dispensed a grateful coolness through the air, He smiled in pleased oblivion. Beside "Thou art my child," She said, "my rose, my robin of the spring, My darling, darling boy! Oh! can it be That thou wilt ever change from what thou art, Suffering, and sorrow, take thee by the hand Her eyes were opened→ And as they looked with tender beaming eyes On her distress, she seemed to hear them say:"Man must be good from choice. We heed him well, And whisper counsel to his erring heart, And point him, constant, to the paths of truth. He must be good from choice. Teach thine own child To heed our admonitions, and this world, With all its woes, shall yield him happiness— The mother clasped her boy, And pressed him, joyous, to her throbbing heart; TORQUATO TASSO. (SEE PLATE.) TASSO and LEONORA!- - names that suggest a train of saddest associations, hopes crushed, hearts overburdened with sorrow, genius wrung with the tortures of neglect, suspense, and irremediable sorrow. Tasso's is the most mournful history in the annals of genius. The child of sorrow from his birth, ever misunderstood, bitten with the keenest tooth of ingratitude, driven to despair and insanity, yet in the intervals of suffering emitting the pure flame of exquisite genius and gentlest love, he is the chief of that category of unfortunates to whose wail the world listens with a subdued and tender awe, and which includes such names as Rousseau, Cowper, and Kirke White. The outline we can give of his life, as illustrative of our beautiful print, can hardly bring into view the peculiar traits of experience and history that made his life what it was. It may serve as at least an incentive to a more extended view of his life and It was after the expatriated party to whom Bernardo, the father of Torquato Tasso, belonged, had planned an unsuccessful attack upon Naples, that the mother and sister of the poet were received into a convent, and the young Torquato was sent to Rome to join his father; who, an exile on a bed of sickness, and in deep poverty, was solacing himself, amidst his misfortunes, by preparing a volume of poems for the press. The boy was then in his tenth year, and his heart swelled with intense sorrow at taking, what proved to be, a last leave of his beloved mother. He recorded his feelings in the following sonnet, which some of his biographers assert to have been written at this early age, but to which others, with more probability, assign a later date: "Relentless fortune in my early years, Removes me from a mother's tender breast: Th' endearments of maternal love to find! At Rome, the young Tasso continued to prosecute his studies with unwearied assiduity, while his presence soothed and consoled his father. Who can paint the anguish of both when, in 1556, the intelligence of the death of a wife and mother so truly beloved as theirs reached them? She had never seen her husband since his original proscription several years before, and her last illness was so brief and violent, that Bernardo doubted whether it were poison, or a broken heart, that cut her off in the prime of her years. "Torquato," said his father, one day, “I feel we could yet taste earthly happiness, had we our beloved Cornelia with us; but our hard destiny removes her from us." "Yes, father," said the boy, "there is no one here like my sister; some girls of her age whom I meet are merry and playful as she was, but their eyes do not glisten and their cheeks glow at the sound of ancient verses, as hers used to do when I walked with her at sunset near our own Naples. Oh! when shall I see her again ?" A few hours after, Bernardo received a letter announcing the determination of those relations who had assumed the guardianship of his daughter, to marry her, at the age of fifteen, to a gentleman of Sorrento, of narrow fortune, but honorable birth. The father's ambition revolted from this union, which he yet lacked power to prevent. His fond day-dream had ever been to see her united to a husband worthy of her, according to his somewhat unpoetical estimate of worth, with whom she should live near himself. In a letter to her, written a short time before, he says:-"Sweet and tranquil to me will be old age, when I shall see (as I hope it may be the will of God) myself perpetuated in your little ones, with my very features impictured on their countenances. Death will then appear to me less terrible when, beholding you in honor and in peace, enjoying the love of your husband, and the delights derived from the affections of your children, you shall close with pale hands these eyes of mine. And surely it is due to a dear father to receive the last kisses, the last tears, and every other pious and tender office, from a dutiful and loving daughter." TORQUATO TASSO. Now his hopes seemed cast down for ever; and his feeling of bitter disappointment was shared by Torquato. The boy, at his father's dictation, wrote to Signora Vittoria Colonna, complaining bitterly of his uncle's cruelty in forcing this match upon his sister, and imploring her interference to prevent its completion. "It is hard," says the letter, "to lose one's fortune; but the degradation of blood is much harder to bear. My poor old father has only us two; and, since fortune has robbed him of his property, and of a wife whom he loved as his own soul, suffer not rapacity to deprive him of his beloved daughter, in whose bosom he hoped to finish tranquilly the few last years of his old age. We have no friends at Naples; our relations are our enemies, and, on account of the circumstances of my father's situation, every one fears to take us by the hand." Notwithstanding this remonstrance, the marriage took place, and in the end both father and son were reconciled to it; first for Cornelia's sake, and afterward for her husband's, as he proved a worthy and kind consort, with whom she lived happily, and by whom she had several children. Time passed on, and fresh commotions in Italy rendered Bernardo and his son once more homeless wanderers. Invited by the Duke of Urbino, they sojourned for a time at Pesaro, when a mutual attachment sprang up between the young heir to the dukedom and the friendless Torquato. At length, in his seventeenth year, he was placed by his father at Padua, to study jurisprudence. The result of his midnight vigils was a romantic poem, in twelve cantos, called Rinaldo. Timidly, yet proudly, the lad presented the first fruits of his genius to his father, who himself was a veteran in the field of song. With a smile and a sigh he looked at his son's performance. "It is well, Torquato," he said, "passing well; but knowest thou not that a lawyer should care fully avoid philosophy and poetry? They will draw thee away from the severe duties of thy profession, and will prevent thee from ever rising to eminence, or acquiring a fortune." "Father, will they not bring me the wealth of the soul, which thou thyself valuest more than gold " Bernardo's anger kindled; and for almost the only time in his life, he addressed harsh and unworthy reproaches to his gifted son. The latter listened with patient respect; and when his parent angrily demanded, "What has your philosophy done for you?" he quietly answered, “It has taught me to bear with meekness the reproofs of a father." 267 The anger, however, was transient, and Bernardo consented to his son's forsaking his intendedrofession, and dedicating his life to the cultivation of poetry. A hard destiny it proved. As the nightingale ever sings most sweetly when her breast leans against a thorn, so many darts, and sharp ones too, pierced Torquato's gentle, loving heart, while he poured forth its deep-toned melody in that old crusading song. The The last years of Bernardo Tasso's life were passed in tranquillity at Astia, of which place the government had been conferred on him by the Duke of Mantua. Thither, in the year 1569, Torquato was summoned. His father was very ill, and would fain see him before he died. old man still continued to compose and publish poetry, but it was not destined to survive him. The name of Tasso, which he fondly hoped to perpetuate through his "Amadigi" and Floridante," will live, coupled not with them, but with his son's immortal lay, while ever the lips of Europe continue to utter its musical Italian. Carefully and fondly did the poet watch by his father's bed; and dark was his feeling of desolation when, the last pang over, he found himself alone. The Duke of Mantua, who had a sincere esteem for Bernardo, caused him to be interred with much pomp, in the church of St. Egidius, at Mantua, with this simple inscription on his tomb: "Ossa Bernardi Tassi." The most illustrious court in Italy was at this time held by a relative of Ippolito d'Este, the patron of Ariosto. Alfonso the Second, Duke of Ferrara, willing to be distinguished as a patron of genius, summoned Tasso to his palace, where he was speedily nominated personal attendant of the Cardinal d'Este, brother to the Duke. Here he lived for some time a solitary unit amid the splendor of the court, observing and treasuring up in his memory all that he saw and heard, as materials for celebration, in another form, of the same scenes of luxury and magnificence upon a grander scale, and, though in an ideal field, of more enduring exhibition. While moving among the gay throng, he was not of them; yet the dreaming quiet of his soul was soon destined to be disturbed by his hopeless affection for Leonora d'Este, his patron's youngest sister. Whether his passion was returned or not, has been a question much disputed; one thing seems certain, that his subsequent misfortunes, and the injustice which he suffered at the hands of the duke, were caused by a brother's haughty and jealous displeasure. During his halcyon days at Ferrara, Torquato was vigorously prosecuting |