161
s," he says,--how is all this passage on Ben's visits to Bacon concerned with the subject in hand?
Between the passage on some "efficient cause" "at the back of Ben's mind," {261a} and the passage on Ben's visits to Bacon in 1621-3, {261b} six pages intervene, and blur the supposed connection between the "efficient cause" of Ben's verses of 1623, and his visits to Bacon in 1621-3. These intercalary pages are concerned with Ben's laudations of Bacon, by name, in his Discoveries. The first is entirely confined to praise of Bacon as an orator. Bacon is next mentioned in a Catalogue of Writers as "HE WHO HATH FILLED UP ALL NUMBERS, and performed that in our tongue which may be preferred or compared either to INSOLENT GREECE OR HAUGHTY ROME," words used of Shakespeare by Jonson in the Folio verses.
Mr. Greenwood remarks that Jonson's Catalogue, to judge by the names he cites (More, Chaloner, Smith, Sir Nicholas Bacon, Sidney, Hooker, Essex, Raleigh, Savile, Sandys, and so on), suggests that "he is thinking mainly of wits and orators of his own and the preceding generation," not of poets specially. This is obvious; why should Ben name Shakespeare with More, Smith, Chaloner, Eliot, Bishop Gardiner, Egerton, Sandys, and Savile? Yet "it is remarkable that no mention should be made of the great dramatist." Where is Spenser named, or Beaumont, or Chaucer, with whom Ben ranked Shakespeare? Ben quoted of Bacon the line he wrote long before of Shakespeare as a poet, about "insolent Greece," and all this is "remarkable," and Mr. Greenwood finds it "not surprising" {262a} that the Baconians dwell on the "extraordinary coincidence of expression," as if Ben were incapable of repeating a happy phrase from himself, and as if we should wonder at anything the Baconians may say or do.
Another startling coincidence is that, in Discoveries, Ben said of Shakespeare "his wit was in his own power," and wished that "the rule of it had been so too." Of Bacon, Ben wrote, "his language, where he could spare or pass by a jes