The character of his idol is matter of faith; and the province of faith is not to be invaded by reason. He maintains his superstition with a credulity as boundless, and a zeal as unscrupulous, as can be found in the most ardent partisans of religious or political factions. The most overwhelming proofs are rejected; the plainest rules of morality are explained away; extensive and important portions of history are completely distorted; the enthusiast misrepresents facts with all the effrontery of an advocate, and confounds right and wrong with all the dexterity of a Jesuit and all this only in order that some man who has been in his grave for ages may have a fairer character than he deserves.
Middleton’s Life of Cicero is a striking instance of the influence of this sort of partiality. Never was there a character which it was easier to read than that of Cicero. Never was there a mind keener or more critical than that of Middleton. Had the doctor brought to the examination of his favourite statesman’s conduct but a very small part of the acuteness and severity which he displayed when he was engaged in investigating the high pretensions Epiphanius and Justin Martyr, he could not have failed to produce a most valuable history in most interesting portion of time. But this ingenious and learned man, though so wary held and wise said, he scarce received for gospel what the church believed, and a superstition of his own. The great conoclast was himself an idolater. The great Jivvocata, del Diavolo, while he disputed, with no small ability, the claims of Cyprian and Athanasius to a place in the Calendar, was himself composing a lying legend in honour of St. Tully! He was holding up as a model of every virtue a man whose talents and acquirements, indeed, can never be too highly extolled, and who was by no means destitute of amiable qualities, but whose whole soul was
under the dominion of a girlish vanity and a craven fear. Actions for which Cicero himself, the most eloquent and skilful of advocates, could contrive no excuse, actions which in his confidential correspondence he mentioned with remorse and shame, are represented by his biographer as wise, virtuous, heroic. The whole history of that great revolution which overthrew the Roman aristocracy, the whole state of parties, the character of every public man, is elaborately misrepresented, in order to make out something which may look like a defence of one most eloquent and accomplished Trimmer.
The volume before us reminds us now and then of the Life of Cicero. But there is this marked difference. Dr. Middleton evidently had an uneasy consciousness of the weakness of his cause, and therefore resorted to the most disingenuous shifts, to unpardonable distortions and suppressions of facts. Mr. Montagu’s faith is sincere and implicit. He practises no trickery. He conceals nothing. He puts the facts before us in the full confidence that they will produce on our minds the effect which
they have produced on his own. It is not till he comes to reason from facts to motives, that his partiality shows itself; and then he leaves Middleton himself far behind. His work proceeds on the assumption that Bacon was an eminently virtuous man. From the tree Mr. Montagu judges of the fruit. He is forced to relate many actions, which, if any man but Bacon had committed them, nobody would have dreamed of defending actions which are readily and completely explained by supposing Bacon to have been a man of principles were not strict, and whose spirit was not high actions which can be explained in no other way, without resorting to some grotesque hypothesis for which there is not a title of evidence. But any hypothesis is, in Mr. Montagu’s opinion, more probable than that his hero should ever have done any thing very wrong.
This mode of defending Bacon seems to us by no means Baconian. To take a man’s character for granted, and then from his character to infer the moral quality of all his actions, is surely a process the very reverse of that which is recommended in the Novum Organum. Nothing, we are sure, could have led Mr. Montagu to depart so far from his master’s precepts, except zeal for his master’s honour. We shall follow a different course. We shall attempt, with the valuable assistance which Mr. Montagu has afforded us, to frame such an account of Bacon’s life as may enable our readers correctly to estimate his character.
It is hardly necessary to say that Francis Bacon was the son of Sir Nicholas Bacon, who held the great seal of England during the first twenty years of the reign of Elizabeth. The fame of the father has been thrown into shade by that of the son. But Sir Nicholas was no ordinary man. He belonged to a set of men whom it is easier to describe collectively than separately; whose minds were formed by one system of discipline; who belonged to one rank in society, to one university, to one party, to one sect, to one administration; and who resembled each other so much in talents, in opinions, in habits, in fortunes, that one character, we had almost said one life, may, to a considerable extent, serve for them all.
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