the least value.

These are questions which any one might properly ask, who had only
glanced at the most superficial or easily accessible facts in this
case, and without any evidence from any other source to stimulate the
inquiry. These are facts which lie on the surface of this history,
which obtrude themselves on our notice, and demand inquiry.

That which lies immediately below this surface, accessible to any
research worthy of the name is, that these two so new extraordinary
developments of the modern philosophy which come to us without any
_superficially_ avowed connexion, which come to us as _branches_ of
learning merely, do in fact meet and unite in one stem, 'which has a
quality of entireness and continuance throughout,' even to the most
delicate fibre of them both, even to the 'roots' of their trunk, 'and
the strings of those roots,' which trunk lies below the surface of
that age, buried, carefully buried, for reasons assigned; and that it
is the sap of this concealed trunk, this new trunk of sciences, which
makes both these branches so vigorous, which makes the flowers and the
fruit both so fine, and so unlike anything that we have had from any
other source in the way of literature or art.

The question of the authorship of the great philosophic poems which
are the legacy of the Elizabethan Age to us, is an incidental question
in this inquiry, and is incidentally treated here. The discovery of
the authorship of these works was the necessary incident to that more
thorough inquiry into their nature and design, of which the views
contained in this volume are the result. At a certain stage of this
inquiry,--in the later stages of it,--that discovery became
inevitable. The primary question here is one of universal immediate