The Fifth Counsellor, advising him Virtue and a gracious

Most excellent Prince,

Government.

I have heard sundry plats and propositions offered unto you severally; one to make you a great Prince, another to make you a strong Prince, and another to make you a memorable Prince, and a fourth to make you an absolute Prince. But I hear of no invention to make you a good and a virtuous Prince; which surely my Lords have left out in discretion, as to arise of your own motion and choice; and so I should have thought, had they not handled their own propositions so artificially and persuadingly, as doth assure me their speech was not formal. But, most worthy Prince, fame is too light, and profit and surety are too low, and power is either such as you have or ought not so to seek to have. It is the meriting of your subjects, the making of golden times, the becoming of a natural parent to your state; these are the only [fit] and worthy ends of your Grace's virtuous reign. My Lords have taught you to refer all things to yourself, your greatness, memory, and advantage; but whereunto shall yourself be referred? If you will be heavenly you must have influence. Will you be as a standing pool, that spendeth and choketh his spring within itself, and hath no streams nor current to bless and make fruitful whole tracts of countries whereby it runneth? Wherefore, first of all, most virtuous Prince, assure yourself of an inward peace, that the storms without do not disturb any of your repairers of state within. Therein use and practise all honourable diversions. That done, visit all the parts of your state, and let the balm distil everywhere from your sovereign hands, to the medicining of any part that complaineth. Beginning with your seat of state, take order that the faults of your great ones do not rebound upon yourself; have care that your intelligence, which is the light of your state, do not go out or burn dim or obscure; advance men of virtue and not of mercenary minds; repress all faction be it either malign or violent. Then look into the state of your laws and justice of your land; purge out multiplicity of laws, clear the incertainty of them, repeal those that are snaring, and press the execution of those that are wholesome and necessary; define the jurisdic

1 mention in original.

3

fault of your greatness in original.

4

2 reneweth in original. prize in original.

tion of your courts, repress1 all suits and vexations, all causeless delays and fraudulent shifts and devices, and reform all such abuses of right and justice; assist the ministers thereof, punish severely all extortions and exactions of officers, all corruptions in trials and sentences of judgment. Yet when you have done all this, think not that the bridle and spur will make the horse to go alone without time and custom. Trust not to your laws for correcting the times, but give all strength to good education; see to the government of your universities and all seminaries of youth, and to the private order of families, maintaining due obedience of children towards their parents, and reverence of the younger sort towards the ancient. Then when you have confirmed the noble and vital parts of your realm of state, proceed to take care of the blood and flesh and good habit of the body. Remedy all decays of population, make provision for the poor, remove all stops in traffic, and all cankers3 and causes of consumption in trades and mysteries; redress all-But whither do I run, exceeding the bounds of that perhaps I am now demanded? But pardon me, most excellent Prince, for as if I should commend unto your Excellency the beauty of some excellent Lady, I could not so well express it with relation as if I showed you her picture; so I esteem the best way to commend a virtuous government, to describe and make appear what it is; but my pencil perhaps disgraceth it; therefore I leave it to your Excellency to take the picture out of your wise observation, and then to double it and express it in your government.

The Sixth Counsellor, persuading Pastimes and Sports. When I heard, most excellent Prince, the three first of my Lords so careful to continue your fame and memory, methought it was as if a man should come to some young prince as yourself is, and immediately after his coronation be in hand with him to make himself a sumptuous and stately tomb. And, to speak out of my soul, I muse how any of your servants can once endure to think of you as of a prince past. And for my other Lords, who would engage you so deeply in matters of state, the one persuading you to a more absolute, the other to a more gracious government, I assure your Excellency their lessons were so cumbersome, as if they would make you a king in a play, who, when

1

1 reprize in original.

2

of in original.

3 cancers in original.

one would think he standeth in great majesty and felicity, he is troubled to say his part. What! nothing but tasks, nothing but working-days? No feasting, no music, no dancing, no triumphs, no comedies, no love, no ladies? Let other men's lives be as pilgrimages, because they are tied to divers necessities and duties; but princes' lives are as progresses, dedicated only to variety and solace. And [as] if your Excellency should take your barge in a summer evening, or your horse or chariot, to take the air; and if you should do any the favour to visit him ; yet your pleasure is the principal, and that is but as it falleth out; so if any of these matters which have been spoken of fall out in the way of your pleasure, it may be taken, but no otherwise. And therefore leave your wars to your lieutenants, and your works and buildings to your surveyors, and your books to your universities, and your state-matters to your counsellors, and attend you that in person which you cannot execute by deputy: use the advantage of your youth: be not sullen to your fortune; make your pleasure the distinction of your honours, the study of your favourites, the talk of your people, and the allurement of all foreign gallants to your Court. And in a word, sweet Sovereign, dismiss your five counsellors, and only take counsel of your five senses.1

The Prince's Answer and Conclusion to the Speeches of the Counsellors.

My Lords,

We thank you for your good opinions; which have been so well set forth, as we should think ourselves not capable of good counsel if in so great variety of persuading reasons we should suddenly resolve. Meantime it shall not be amiss to make choice of the last, and upon more deliberation to determine of

1 There follows here, in the narrative from which this is taken, a reply from the Prince, which reads to me like an interpolation. It interrupts the action, and is inferior in style. It may have been spoken extempore by the Prince, but can hardly have been part of the composition. It runs thus:-"But if a man should follow your five senses" (said the Prince) "I perceive he might follow your Lordship now and then into an inconvenience. Your Lordship is a man of a very lively and pleasant advice; which though one should not be forward to follow, yet it fitteth the time, and what our own humour inclineth" oftentimes to, delight and merriment. For a prince should be of a cheerful and pleasant spirit, not austere, hard-fronted, and stoical, but, after serious affairs, admitting recreation, and using pleasures as sauces for meats of better nourishment."

a inclined in original.

the rest; and what time we spend in long consulting, in the end we will gain by prompt and speedy executing.

The Prince (proceeds the reporter) having ended his speech, arose from his seat and took that occasion of revelling. So he made choice of a Lady to dance withal; so likewise did the Lord Ambassador, the Pensioners, and Courtiers attending the Prince. The rest of that night was passed in those pastimes. The performance of which night's work being very carefully and orderly handled, did so delight and please the nobles and the other auditory, that thereby Gray's Inn did not only recover their lost credit and quite take away all the disgrace that the former Night of Errors had incurred; but got instead thereof so great honour and applause as either the good reports of our honourable friends that were present could yield, or we ourselves desire."

11.

Thus ended one of the most elegant Christmas entertainments, probably, that was ever presented to an audience of statesmen and courtiers. That Bacon had a hand in the general design is merely a conjecture; we know that he had a taste in such things and did sometimes take a part in arranging them; and the probability seemed strong enough to justify a more detailed account of the whole evening's work than I should otherwise have thought fit. But that the speeches of the six councillors were written by him, and by him alone, no one who is at all familiar with his style either of thought or expression will for a moment doubt. They carry his signature in every sentence. And they have a much deeper interest for us than could have been looked for in such a sportive exercise belonging to so forgotten a form of idleness. All these councillors speak with Bacon's tongue and out of Bacon's brain; but the second and fifth speak out of his heart and judgment also. The propositions of the latter contain an enumeration of those very reforms in state and government which throughout his life he was most anxious to see realized. In those of the former may be traced, faintly but unmistakably, a first hint of his great project for the restoration of the dominion of knowledge, a first draft of "Solomon's House,"-a rudiment of that history of universal nature, which was to have formed the third part of the Instauratio,' and is in my judgment (as I have elsewhere explained at large) the principal novelty and great characteristic feature of the Baconian philosophy. This composition is valuable therefore, not only as showing with what fidelity his mind when left to itself pointed always, in sport as in earnest, towards the great objects

which he had set before him, but also as giving us one of the very few certain dates by which we can measure the progress of his philosophical speculations in these early years.

It remains for me to give what account I can of the narrative in which it is preserved.

It is a quarto pamphlet of 68 pages; printed in 1685, for "W. Canning, at his shop in the Temple Cloisters;" with a dedication to Matthew Smyth, Esq., Comptroller of the Inner Temple; apparently from a manuscript written by some member of Gray's Inn who was an eye-witness of what he relates; and bearing the title "Gesta Grayorum, or the History of the high and mighty Prince, Henry, Prince of Purpoole, etc., who reigned and died A.D. 1594." Whom it was by, where and when it was found, how it came into the publisher's hands, we are not informed. We can only gather from the dedication that it was found by accident, and printed without alteration. The dedication is signed W. C., which stands, I presume, for W. Canning, the printer. But Nichols, who re-printed the pamphlet (without the dedication) in his 'Progresses of Queen Elizabeth' (III. 262), tells us that "the publisher was Mr. Henry Keepe, who published the Monuments of Westminster.'"

It is a pity that the publisher, whoever he was, did not tell us a little more about the manuscript, though it is probable enough that he had not much more to tell. Nothing is more natural than that such a narrative should have been written at the time for the amusement and satisfaction of the parties concerned; should have been laid by and forgotten; and found again lying by itself, without anybody to tell its story for it.

There is more of it; the historian proceeding to record other achievements of the Prince of Purpoole, whose reign was prolonged beyond the days of ordinary licence, and did not end before Shrove Tuesday. But I look in vain for any further traces of Bacon's hand. His Christmas holidays were over; Gray's Inn Hall was stripped of its scaffoldings and regal furniture; the business of real life commenced again; and the business which most concerned him was the appointment of a Solicitor-General, which still seemed as near, and was still as far off, as ever. But the suit takes a somewhat livelier aspect from the closer proximity into which it brings us with the Queen herself, as will be seen in the next chapter.