IV. 1,233.

f " It was told me I should be rich by the fairies." W. T. III. 3.
% " Fairies and gods prosper it with thee." Lear IV. 6.
§ " Dance our ringlets to the whistling winds." M. N. D. II. 2.
|| " You demi-puppets, that by moonshine do the sour-green ringlets make, whereof the sheep bites." Temp. V. 1.
^[ See of Ariel, who makes music in the air. Twanging instruments, voices humming, or howling and thunder.
** See how this is illustrated in M. N. D. II. 1. Puck takes the form of a stool.
tf " In likeness of a filly foal." M. N. D. II. 1.
" Sometime a horse I'll be, sometimes a hound, A hog, a headless bear, sometime a fire ;
AND HIS SECRET SOCIETY. 227
of which read Pit. Thyraeus the Jesuit, in his tract, de olcis infestis, I. 4, who will have them to be devils, or the souls of damned men that seek revenge, or else souls out of purgatory that seek ease. . . . These spirits often foretell men's deaths by several signs, as knockings, groanings,* etc. Near Rupes Nova, in Finland, in the Kingdom of Sweden, there is a lake in which, before the Governor of the Castle dies, a spectrum, in the habit of Arion with his harp, appears and makes excellent music. . . . Many families in Europe are so put in mind of their last by such predictions, and many men are forewarned (if we may believe Paracelsus) by familiar spirits in divers shapes, as cocks, crows, owls,^ which often hover about sick men's chambers, ... for that (as Bernadinus de Bustis thinketh) God permits the devil to appear in the form of crows, and such-like creatures, to scare such as live wickedly here on earth."
Farther on, when discoursing of idleness as a cause of melan- choly, the Anatomist describes the men who allow themselves to become a prey to vain and fantastical contemplation, as unable "to go about their necessary business, or to stave off and extri- cate themselves," but as " ever musing, melancholising, and carried along as he that is led round about a heath with Puck in the night, they run earnestly on in this labyrinth of anxious and solicitous meditation."
Such notes and studies as these appear most conspicuously in the Shakespeare and other plays of Bacon. It is hard to believe that he could have created the fairy world of the Midsummer Night' 8 Dream without some such preparation as is recorded in the scientific notes. Let us give a few minutes' consideration to this play, with the view of showing how dry facts, business- like notes, and commonplace observation were distilled into poetry in that wonderful mind of which John Beaumont said that it was able " to lend a charm to the greatest as well as to the meanest of matters." J
And neigh, and bark, and grunt, and roar, and burn, Like horse, hound, hog, bear, and lire, at every turn."