BACON AND J. R. GREEN.
[To VIM EDITOR or THE "SPECTATOR.")
Eint,—After reading your interesting article on J. R. Green (Spectator, June 12th), I contrasted its tone with that of a passage in Bacon's' Henry VII." :—" This year also the King
called his Parliament, where many laws were made of a more private and vulgar nature than ought to detain the reader of an history." Observe that Bacon, one of the very greatest of Englishmen, was writing about our statesman-Xing, whose title to fame wits the part which be played in smoothing the passage from feudal to commercial England. . Yet, pioneer though he was, Bacon seems here to have taken for his motto, Negligens tae qua populus taboret. Would that my friend II. D. Traill had been still alive to insert in an enlarged edition of "The New Lucian" a posthumous dialogue between Bacon and Green; the former might have been supported by Clarendon or Hume, and the latter by Macaulay, or perhaps by Buckle, who wrote contemptuously of soldiers and of narratives of wars, which "have no interest except for the military strident." The sensible and brilliant Charles Austin, who is now chiefly remembered as Mecanlay's initiator into Liberalism, spoke to me in the " sixties" of "that horrible genius of Napoleon"; yet even lie came to despise rather than to hate the military spirit, and to think that (to apply Clough's phrase) all such "old follies wore passing most tranquilly out of remembrance." But, alas! there are still wars and rumours of wars.—I am, Sir, &c.,
Previous page
