Page:Essays of Francis Bacon 1908 Scott.djvu/19

Rh to advance into foreign territory, and forever compelling the sentinel prepositions to take up new outposts in order to hold the position gained.

To illustrate Bacon's use of language, I have made a point of drawing upon Shakspere and the Bible. The Authorized Version of the Bible was being translated between the years 1607 and 1610, and was published in 1611. Either The Tempest, composed about 1610 or 1611, or The Winter's Tale, acted May 15, 1611, is Shakspere's last complete play. Bacon brought out the second edition of his Essays, the bulk of them, in 1612. Illustrations from King James's Bible and from Shakspere are the best to be had to explain the English of Bacon's Essays, for the three great classics are almost as precisely contemporaneous as it is possible to be. Making the citations without forethought just as they occurred to me, I found on completing the notes that all the thirty-seven plays of Shakspere had been called into requisition to illustrate Bacon's fifty-eight essays.

"Thy creatures have been my books, but thy Scriptures much more," Bacon wrote in humiliation after his pitiful fall from power. Bacon's knowledge of the Bible, both the Vulgate and the Authorized Version, was thorough and familiar, and he uses it with fine effect, producing that mixture of simplicity and grandeur which marks his style. There is some suggestion of the Bible on almost every page of the Essays. Wherever the Bible is quoted, and wherever there is a reflection of its language or phraseology, I have given in my Rh