Francis Bacon and his secret society - Grand Lodge of Colorado

240 FRANCIS BACON
poetry in that wonderful mind of which John Beaumont said
mat it was ahle " to lend a charm to the greatest as well as to
the meanest of matters.'' 1
To begin with Puck's well-known speech. Oberon desires him
to fetch a certain herb and to return " ere Leviathan can swim
a league. " Puck answers:
" I'll put a girdle round about the earth
In forty minutes."
Bacon, in studying the winds, made many inquiries as to the
parts of the globe in which the winds chiefly occur, and where
they blow with the greatest swiftness. He finds this to be the
case at the tropics. " In Peru, and divers parts of the West
Iudies, though under the liue, the heats are not so intolerable as
they are in Barbary aud the skirts of the torrid zone. The
causes are, first, the great breezes tvhich the motion of the air in
great circles, such as are under the girdle of the earth, producetli. v
Puck, then, is
the ministering wind, Oheron's familiar or aerial
•spirit, who will, at his bidding, sweep round the girdle of the
earth, where, according to Bacon's observatious, winds travel
with the greatest speed.
Puck is " one of the free winds which range over a wide
space." We know this, because he calls himself 2 "a merry
wanderer of the night, " and the free winds, Bacon tells us, " last,
generally, for twenty-four hours;" it is the " smaller and lighter
winds " which " generally rise in the morning and fall at
sunset." 3
The first scene in which the fairies enter suggests the airiness
of the elves, the " rare " and wind-like nature which
Bacon says resembles fame, " for the winds penetrate and
bluster everywhere." The fairies here seem to be "the free
winds blowing from every quarter," and the first speaker " an
attendant wind, " whose duty it is " to collect clouds, " and
which are, according to the " History," of a moist nature.
iThe following is reprinted from an article published in Shakespeariana,
April, 1884.
2 M. N. D. ii. 1.
3 History of Winds. Spedding, Works, v. 143.