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Spedding's industry and profound interest in the subject has brought together throws but an uncertain light on Bacon's long disappointment. Was it the rooted misgiving of a man of affairs like Burghley at that passionate contempt of all existing knowledge, and that undoubting confidence in his own power to make men know, as they never had known, which Bacon was even now professing?
Spedding's theory it can hardly be possible to do as much for King Henry VIII. The lines of demarcation, however visible or plausible, are fainter by far than these.
Spedding's work with especial interest, for in it will unquestionably be afforded, for the first time, the means of forming a correct judgment of Bacon's character, and just conclusions concerning those public actions of his which have hitherto stood in perplexing contradiction to his avowed principles, to the nobility of his views, to his religious professions, to the reverential love with which he was regarded by those who knew him best.
A good critic has said that it was a labour of love, like Spedding's Bacon; but that the correspondence, lavishly reproduced in both works, has "some of the defects of lovers' letters for those to whom they are not addressed."
In a note to page 208 of his second volume he tells how Spedding's arguments have caused him to modify some of his statements, although the two regard the history of the seventeenth century differently.
When James Spedding introduced Froude to Carlyle he made unconsciously an epoch in English literature. For though Froude was incapable of merging himself in another man, as Spedding merged himself in Bacon, he did more for the author of Sartor Resartus than Spedding did for the author of the Novum Organum. Spedding's Bacon is an impossible hero of unhistorical perfection.
Malachi, iv. 2. St. Luke, ii 32. 'Healing in his wings,'Malachi, iv. 2. 'He that believeth and is baptised shall be saved; but he that believeth not shall be damned. St. Mark, xvi. 16. Mr. Langton. See ante, ii. 254, 265. Spedding's Bacon, vii. 271. The poem is also given in The Golden Treasury, p. 37; where, however, 'limns the water' is changed into 'limns on water.
Had Johnson been furnished with the materials which the industry of that gentleman has procured, and with others which, it it is believed, are yet preserved in manuscript, he would, without doubt, have produced a most valuable and curious history of Cromwell's life. BOSWELL. See ante, ii.358, note 3. Spedding's Bacon, vii.109. 'When I took up his Life of Cowley, he made me put it away to talk.
Hallam, of the Middle Ages, 'a broad, old, positive man, with laughing eyes, was chairman and brought the lecturer face to face with his first audience, the two hundred holders of guinea tickets. It was made up of the elements referred to in Spedding's letter.
Spedding's translation is no unworthy representation of the words of the great Prophet of Knowledge: "Believing that I was born for the service of mankind, and regarding the care of the Commonwealth as a kind of common property which, like the air and water, belongs to everybody, I set myself to consider in what way mankind might be best served, and what service I was myself best fitted by nature to perform.
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