case they will do it yet; and if it will further help
it, they will “presume” that all those
butchers were his father. And the week after,
they will say it. Why, it is just like being
the past tense of the compound reflexive adverbial
incandescent hypodermic irregular accusative Noun
of Multitude; which is father to the expression which
the grammarians call Verb. It is like a whole
ancestry, with only one posterity.
To resume. Next, the young Bacon took up the
study of law, and mastered that abstruse science.
From that day to the end of his life he was daily
in close contact with lawyers and judges; not as a
casual onlooker in intervals between holding horses
in front of a theater, but as a practicing lawyer—a
great and successful one, a renowned one, a Launcelot
of the bar, the most formidable lance in the high brotherhood
of the legal Table Round; he lived in the law’s
atmosphere thenceforth, all his years, and by sheer
ability forced his way up its difficult steeps to
its supremest summit, the Lord-Chancellorship, leaving
behind him no fellow-craftsman qualified to challenge
his divine right to that majestic place.
When we read the praises bestowed by Lord Penzance
and the other illustrious experts upon the legal condition
and legal aptnesses, brilliances, profundities, and
felicities so prodigally displayed in the Plays, and
try to fit them to the historyless Stratford stage-manager,
they sound wild, strange, incredible, ludicrous; but
when we put them in the mouth of Bacon they do not
sound strange, they seem in their natural and rightful
place, they seem at home there. Please turn back
and read them again. Attributed to Shakespeare
of Stratford they are meaningless, they are inebriate
extravagancies—intemperate admirations of
the dark side of the moon, so to speak; attributed
to Bacon, they are admirations of the golden glories
of the moon’s front side, the moon at the full—and
not intemperate, not overwrought, but sane and right,
and justified. “At ever turn and point
at which the author required a metaphor, simile, or
illustration, his mind ever turned first to the
law; he seems almost to have thought in legal
phrases; the commonest legal phrases, the commonest
of legal expressions, were ever at the end of his pen.”
That could happen to no one but a person whose trade
was the law; it could not happen to a dabbler in it.
Veteran mariners fill their conversation with sailor-phrases
and draw all their similes from the ship and the sea
and the storm, but no mere passenger ever does
it, be he of Stratford or elsewhere; or could do it
with anything resembling accuracy, if he were hardy
enough to try. Please read again what Lord Campbell
and the other great authorities have said about Bacon
when they thought they were saying it about Shakespeare
of Stratford.
X
The Rest of the Equipment
Copyrights
What Is Man? and Other Essays from Project Gutenberg. Public domain.
