Francis Bacon and his secret society - Grand Lodge of Colorado

AND HIS SECRET SOCIETY. 109
have been better with me. " This passage was cut out of the
fair copy of the letter; its original idea appeared next year in
the play of Henry VIII.
Ben Jonson describes, in well-known lines, the labour and
artistic skill necessary for the production of mighty verse so
richly spun and woven so fit as Shakespeare 1 s. To a profound
study of Nature, which is
exalted by, " made proud of his designs,
" must be added the art which arrays Nature in "lines
so richly spun and woven so fit:"
" For though the poet's matter Nature be,
His art must give the fashion ;
and that he
Who casts to write a living line must sweat
(Such as thine are) and strike the second heat
Upon the Muses' anvil ; turn the same
And himself with it, that he thinks to frame ,
Or for the laurel he may gain a scorn
For a good poet's made as well as born.
And such wertthou."
But, as a mere child, he seems to have written, not words
without matter, but matter without art, and we can well imagine
him saying to himself in after years :
There is
" Why did T write ? What sin to me unknown
Dipt me in ink, my parents', or my own ?
As yet a child, nor yet a fool to fame,
I lisped in numbers, and the numbers came."
not one, not even the poorest, amongst the Shakespeare
plays, which could possibly have been the first or nearly
the earliest of its author's efforts in that kind. A careless perusal
of some of the " mysteries " or play interludes which were
in favour previous to the year 1579 will enable any one to perceive
the wide chasm which lies between such pieces and— say
— Titus Andronicus and the plays of Henry VI. There are
passages in these plays which no tyro in the arts of poetry and of
playwriting could have penned, and for our own part we look,
not backward, but forward, to the crowd of " minor Elizabethan
dramatists" in order to find the crude, juvenile effusions which,