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SECTION II.

THE WISDOM OF THE ANCIENTS.

IN the year 1601 occurred the trial, conviction, and execution of Bacon's friend Essex, and the publication soon after by the government of what was called "A Declaration of the Practices and Treasons" of the earl and his accomplices, which was drawn up by Bacon, who had also appeared on the part of the crown at the trial. It is accordingly included among his works, as well as an 66 Apology," or defence of his conduct, which he deemed it expedient to print, probably in the same year, in the form of a letter to the Earl of Devonshire. James I. became king of England by the death of Elizabeth, on the 24th of March, 1603; and Bacon was knighted on the 23rd of July, the day before the coronation, on which occasion above three hundred other gentlemen received the same honour. In a letter written a few days previous to his relation Robert Lord Cecil (afterwards Earl of Salisbury), the chief minister of the new king, he intimates that he would be glad to have "this divulged and almost prostituted honour," among other reasons, "because," he says, "I have found out an alderman's daughter, a handsome maiden, to my liking." This was Alice, one of the daughters and coheirs of Benedict Barnham, Esq., alderman of London, whom he afterwards married. He had also been continued in his rank (or rather office, as it was then considered) of king's counsel by a warrant signed by James at Worksop, on his way to London, on the 21st of April.*

* Published by Mr. Collier in the Egerton Papers, p. 367 Mr. Montagu's account, given under the year 1604 (Life, p. 108), is, that Bacon was made by patent king's counsel learned

According to Mr. Montagu, it was in the fall of the year 1604 that he prepared and addressed to the king his work (which is, however, only a fragment) upon The Greatness of the Kingdom of Britain." In 1605 he published his "Two Books of the Proficience and Advancement of Learning, Divine and Human," also addressed to James. On new year's day, 1606, he presented to the king his short paper entitled "Certain Considerations touching the Plantation in Ireland;" and in the course of the same year, according to Mr. Montagu (Life, pp. 140, 141), his "two publications" on "Church Controversies," and the "Pacification of the Church." But in the first place neither of these tracts appears to have been ever published till many years after both James and Bacon himself had left the world: and secondly, it is clear from the second, certainly written in the beginning of the reign of James, that the first must have been written long before the end of the preceding reign. On the 25th of June, 1607, Bacon was at last appointed solicitor-general, on Sir Edward Coke being made Chief Justice of the Common Pleas. This year he is supposed to have communicated to his friends Andrews, then Bishop of Ely, and Sir Thomas Bodley, his exposition in Latin of some of the principles of his philosophy, entitled Cogitata et Visa; the letters sent with it, which as there given, however, are both without date, are in the Resuscitatio. In 1609, or more probably in in the law, with a fee of forty pounds a-year, "which," it is added, " is said to have been a grace scarce known before."" For this last expression reference is made in a foot-note to the life by Rawley; but Rawley uses it in speaking of his having been made queen's counsel extraordinary in the reign of Elizabeth, as Mr. Montagu has himself noticed in a preceding page (p. 24). Mr. Montagu adds, but without giving his authority, that the same day on which he was made king's counsel, James granted Bacon "by another patent under the great seal a pension of sixty pounds a-year, for special services received from his brother Anthony Bacon and himself." The same facts are stated in the Biographia Britannica on the authority of documents in Rymer's Foedera, and with the additional information that the two patents are dated the 25th of August, 1604.

the beginning of what we should now call the year 1610 he published his Latin Treatise 'De Sapientia Veterum" (Concerning the Wisdom of the Ancients), of which we have a very good translation by his friend Sir Arthur Gorges (uniformly, as far as we have observed, called Georges by Mr. Montagu), already mentioned as the translator of the Essays into French. This translation was published in 1619, in Bacon's lifetime; and it is very probable that it may have had the advantage of his revi

sion.

The Wisdom of the Ancients is the next of what may be called the Moral Works which falls to be noticed; and we shall take our extracts from the English translation by Gorges, which is made from a second and enlarged edition of the Latin published in 1617. An Italian translation was also published in 1618, and a French translation in 1619.

Gorges, however, has omitted two short Dedications prefixed to the Latin work; the one (which is placed second) to the author's Alma Mater, the University of Cambridge, the other to the Lord Treasurer the Earl of Salisbury, Chancellor of the University. The address to Salisbury is chiefly remarkable for the elegant turning of the compliments and the general felicity of the expression, qualities not to be adequately represented in a translation. One phrase may be noticed as reflecting a favourite idea of Bacon's; he speaks of philosophy as then through old age falling as it were into a second childhood-philosophia seculo nostro veluti per senium repuerascens, as he does, both in the Advancement of Learning, and more at length in the Novum Organum, of ancient times being the youth, and modern times the old age of the world. For the rest, he professes his design in the present treatise to have been to pass over whatever was manifest, obsolete, or common-place, and to produce something which should have a respect to the steeps and high places of life and the more remote recesses of science-ad vita ardua et scientiarum arcana. In the Dedication to the University, he intimates his hope and belief that some addition to the stores of learning and knowledge may be found to have been made by what he has here written

from the circumstance that contemplation cannot but gain something of new grace and vigour by being transferred, as it has been in his case, to active life-that the richer supply of matter for nourishment must enable it to strike its roots deeper, or at the least to put forth more spreading boughs and a greater show of foliage. You yourselves, he adds, as I apprehend, are scarcely aware over how wide a sphere the dominion of those studies of yours extends, nor to what a multiplicity and variety of matters they apply.

The work is introduced by a Preface, which commences thus :

The antiquities of the first age (except those we find in sacred writ) were buried in oblivion and silence: silence was succeeded by poetical fables; and fables again were followed by the records we now enjoy. So that the mysteries and secrets of antiquity were distinguished and separated from the records and evidences of succeeding times by the vail of fiction, which interposed itself and came between those things which perished and those which are extant...

It is not his intention, Bacon goes on to state, to treat these ancient parables as mere exercises for ingenuity in the application of them; but with serious endeavour to labour to extract from them what they may contain of real mystery or hidden knowledge and wisdom. “And,” he continues,

I am persuaded (whether ravished with the reverence of antiquity, or because in some fables I find such singular proportion between the similitude and the thing signified, and such apt and clear coherence in the very structure of them, and propriety of names wherewith the persons or actors in them are inscribed and intituled) that no man can constantly deny but this sense was in the author's intent and meaning when they first invented them, and that they purposely shadowed it in this sort: for who can be so stupid and blind in the open light, as (when he hears how Fame, after the Giants were destroyed, sprang up as their youngest sister) not to refer it to the murmurs and seditious reports of both sides, which are wont to fly abroad for a time after the suppressing of insurrections? Or when he hears how the giant Typhon having cut out and

brought away Jupiter's nerves, which Mercury stole from him and restored again to Jupiter, doth not presently perceive how fitly it may be applied to powerful rebellions, which take from princes their sinews of money and authority, but so, that by affability of speech and wise edicts (the minds of their subjects being in time privily and as it were by stealth reconciled) they recover their strength again? Or when he hears how (in that memorable expedition of the gods against the giants) the braying of Silenus his ass conduced much to the profligation of the giants, doth not confidently imagine that it was invented to show how the greatest enterprises of rebels are oftentimes dispersed with vain rumours and fears.

Moreover, to what judgment can the conformity and signification of names seem obscure? Seeing Metis, the wife of Jupiter, doth plainly signify counsel; Typhon, insurrection; Pan, universality; Nemesis, revenge, and the like. Neither let it trouble any man, if sometimes he meet with historical narrations, or additions for ornament's sake, or confusion of times, or something transferred from one fable to another to bring in a new allegory; for it could be no otherwise, seeing they were the inventions of men which lived in divers ages and had also divers ends; some being ancient, others neoterical; some having an eye to things natural, others to moral.

There is another argument, and that no small one neither, to prove that these fables contain certain hidden and involved meanings, seeing some of them are observed to be so absurd and foolish in the very relation that they show, and as it were, proclaim a parable afar off; for such tales as are probable they may seem to be invented for delight, and in imitation of history. And as for such as no man would so much as imagine or relate, they seem to be sought out for other ends. For what kind of fiction is that wherein Jupiter is said to have taken Metis to wife, and, perceiving that she was with child, to have devoured her, whence himself conceiving brought forth Pallas armed out of his head. Truly I think there was never dream (so different to the course of cogitation, and so full of montrosity) ever hatched in the brain of man. Above all things this prevails most with me and is of singular moment, many of these fables seem not to be invented of those by whom they are related and celebrated, as by Homer, Hesiod, and others; for if it were so, that they took beginning in that age, and from those authors by whom they are delivered and brought to our hands, my mind gives me there could be no great or high matter expected or supposed to proceed from them in respect of