Page:Essays of Francis Bacon 1908 Scott.djvu/90

Rh short of astounding that nowhere throughout the fifty-eight essays does Bacon either quote a thought from the drama or mention a single dramatist. His silence is all the more extraordinary from the fact that he was himself concerned in the representation of six masques, the first as a Gray's Inn man of twenty-five and the last so late in life as his Attorney-Generalship, when he was fifty-two years old. Various explanations may be offered. Bacon was born in Court circles and was a lifelong courtier. Players were held in such contempt as to be classed legally with vagabonds. We know that Shakspere was sensitive to the degradation of his calling in public opinion,

Francis Beaumont was born a gentleman, and his name does not appear on the title-page of any play of his published during his lifetime. Further, Bacon was a busy man, probably occupied all day and every day with law and politics, and by night with his studies and authorship. He worked too hard to be much of a play-goer, even if he had been inclined to spend his afternoons at the theatres. Curious as the phenomenon is, nothing conceivable can better express the vitality and power of English literature than that it added to the thought of the world two such productions as the Essays of Bacon and the plays of Shakspere, the work of two men who walked the streets of London together for the span of some thirty years, so far as we know, each Rh