Page:Essays of Francis Bacon 1908 Scott.djvu/89

Rh every man is the architect of his own fortune. That is a truism. The experience of men in every land and at all times confirms it. The older democracy of the French Revolution and of the Signers cherished the idea as almost inspired doctrine. The difficulty is that moral ideas develop and change. Bacon, though a religious man, was essentially not a moralist. Like Machiavelli, but with the sea change from Italy to England, he accepted the moral and religious ideas of his time. His religious writings show that by preference he always took the middle course. In morals, Bacon's ideas combine curiously the enlightened thought of pagan Greece and Rome with the Christian ethics of the Bible. But this is theory with him; in practice he did not rise above the political morality of his time. He fell below it at the last. In that morality the distinction between right and wrong in conduct was neither so sharply nor so widely drawn as now. The development of moral ideas and the ethical point of view should be factors in any judgment of the actions of men and women of former times. The same justice which underlies James Spedding's eminently sane judgment of Bacon, John Morley extended to Machiavelli in his brilliant Romanes Lecture of 1897.

When we consider the great drama of the Elizabethan age, the bulk of it running to some fifteen hundred plays, its popularity, its reflection of contemporary life at all angles, its excellence and the high average of ability of the writers who were producing it, and Shakspere one of them, it is little Rh