Atheist shoemaker displays a faculty which
has no scope in a sermon on Tennyson.

LORD BACON ON ATHEISM.

The pedants will be down upon us for speaking of Lord Bacon. It is true
there never was such a personage. Francis Bacon was Baron of Verulam,
Viscount St. Alban, and Lord High Chancellor of England. But this is a
case in which it is impossible to resist the popular usage. After all,
we write to be understood. The pedants, the heralds, and all the rest
of the tribe of technical fanatics, rejoice to mouth "Lord Verulam."
But the ordinary man of letters, like the common run of readers, will
continue to speak of Lord Bacon; for Bacon was his name, and the "Lord"
was but a pretty feather in his hat. And when his lordship took that
splendid pen of his, to jot down some of his profoundest thoughts for
posterity, did he not say in his grand style, "I, Francis Bacon, thought
on this wise"? You cannot get the "Bacon" out of it, and as the "Lord"
will slip in, we must let it stand as Lord Bacon.

Lord Bacon was was a very great man. Who does not remember Pope's
lines?--

If parts allure thee, think how Bacon shined,
The wisest, brightest, meanest of mankind.

But his hardship was fond of wielding the satiric lash, and that spirit
leads to exaggeration. Bacon was not the meanest of mankind, Pope
himself did things that Bacon would never have stooped to. Nor was Bacon
the wisest and brightest of mankind. A wiser and brighter spirit was
contemporary with him in the person of "a poor player." The dullards
who fancy that Lord Bacon wrote the plays of Shakespeare have no
discrimination. His lordship's mind might have been cut out of the
poet's without leaving an incurable wound. Some will dissent from this,
but be it as it may, the _styles_ of the two men are vastly different,
like their ways of thinking. Bacon's essay on Love is cynical. The man
of the world, the well-bred statesman, looked on Love as "the child of
folly," a necessary nuisance, a tragi-comical perturbation. Shakespeare
saw in Love the mainspring of life. Love speaks "in a perpetual
hyperbole," said Bacon. Shakespeare also said that the lover "sees
Helen's beauty in a brow of Egypt," The poet knew all the philosopher
knew, and more. What Bacon laughed or sneered at, Shakespeare recognised
as the magic of the great enchanter, who touches our imaginations and
kindles in us the power of the ideal. Exaggeration there must be in
passion and imaginat