Page:Essays of Francis Bacon 1908 Scott.djvu/71

Rh When Emerson talks about Friendship and Love we are in another world than Bacon's. Emerson opens his essay on Domestic Life with impassioned tenderness for the child in the house. There are no children in Bacon's world and the few children in Shakspere's plays are all sharp of wit, precocious beyond their years. They are the children of his brain, not little people he had lived with. Some eight or ten of Bacon's essays have become obsolete in thought. They are those which grew out of his experience of life at the Courts of Elizabeth and James I, of the petty rivalries and intrigues which led him to believe and to say, "All rising to great place is by a winding stair." Bacon's "winding stair" to the Lord Chancellorship runs through the essays, Of Simulation and Dissimulation, Of Delays, Of Cunning, Of Wisdom for a Man's Self, Of Dispatch, Of Suspicion, Of Negociating, and Of Followers and Friends. Fancy Emerson writing an essay on cunning! It is not that dissimulation and cunning no longer exist in the world, but that the intellectual appeal of such subjects is now restricted to their kind. Like drunkenness, dissimulation has descended in the social scale.

When we recall that the composition of his Essays occupied Bacon's thought for the space of more than thirty years, it is curious that he nowhere alludes to any English contemporary by name, except Queen Elizabeth, and that after her death. But between the lines Bacon has left on record the characters of three men who crossed his path. Rh