The New Atlantis of Francis Bacon

such as that the people of Bensalem were also descended from Abraham by another son, yet he recognizes him for a man ‘wise, learned, of great policy, and excellently seen in the laws and customs of that nation’. In short Joabin is the one man with whom he finds it possible to become familiar in a strange city.

But, of course, here as everywhere, Bacon’s choice of detail is intended to be significant. Bensalem is to be held up to Europe as a model of moral excellence as well as of scientific living, and who so fit to pronounce with authority on moral questions as a member of that race which had contributed to Bensalem not only the title of its chief institution, Solomon’s House, but also the very name of the kingdom itself ? The role assigned to Joabin is an indication of that preference for the Hebrew over the Greek tradition on which all Bacon’s thinking rests. Bensalem could not deserve its title of Son of Peace unless it were also a model of righteousness. It is not surprising, then, that Joabin’s speech should turn upon the contrast between the purity of life in Bensalem and the wickedness of Europe. “You shall understand,’ he says, ‘that there is not under the heavens so chaste a nation as this of Bensalem, nor so free from all pollution and foulness. It is the virgin of the world. . . . There is nothing amongst mortal men more fair and admirable than the chaste minds of this people. ... Know therefore that with them there are no stews, no dissolute houses, no courtesans, nor anything of that kind.’

This motive explains also the emphasis laid on the institution of the Feast of the family. This was a public honour granted to any man who should live to see ‘thirty persons descended of his body alive together’. The description of the institution reminds one of the Calvin of Geneva in the stiffness of its public regulation of private life, Particularly distasteful is the place assigned to the mother in this feast in honour of the father. ‘If there be a mother, from whose body the whole lineage is descended’—a likelihood which Bacon seems to regard as not very great—she has no part in the celebrations, but is to sit aloft in a little alcove by herself behind glass, from which she can look down at all the ceremonies without herself being seen.

While Joabin and his newly-acquired English friend were still

in conference, a messenger arrived to tell Joabin that a rare event

Io