Perhaps we ought not
to wonder at his silence about Shakespeare. It was the fashion, except
among a set of clever but not always very reputable people, to think the
stage, as it was, below the notice of scholars and statesmen; and
Shakespeare took no trouble to save his works from neglect. Yet it is a
curious defect in Bacon that he should not have been more alive to the
powers and future of his own language. He early and all along was
profoundly impressed with the contrast, which the scholarship of the age
so abundantly presented, of words to things. He dwells in the
_Advancement_ on that "first distemper of learning, when men study words
and not matter." He illustrates it at large from the reaction of the new
learning and of the popular teaching of the Reformation against the
utilitarian and unclassical terminology of the schoolmen; a reaction
which soon grew to excess, and made men "hunt more after choiceness of
the phrase, and the round and clean composition of the sentence, and the
sweet falling of the clauses," than after worth of subject, soundness of
argument, "life of invention or depth of judgment.
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