6

fore," he adds, "agreeable to my affection and obligation to your Grace to prefix your name before them both in English and in Latin; for I do conceive that the Latin volume of them, being in the universal language, may last as long as books last." He takes care to intimate that he has now also translated his Henry the Seventh' into Latin:* the Instauration and the Natural History were originally published and written in that language. But the Latin version of the Essays, of which he here speaks, was not printed till some years after his death; it and the translation of the History of Henry the Seventh, along with other pieces, were first published by Dr. Rawley, in a folio volume, at London, in 1638. The Latin title, which was given to the Essays by Bacon himself, is Sermones, Fideles, sive Interiora Rerum.'+ Mr. Montagu seems to consider the translation as being Bacon's own throughout-quoting, oddly enough, as the description of them given by Rawley, Sermones Fideles, ab ipso Honoratissimo Auctore, praeterquam in paucis, Latinitate donatus.' We need not say that the learned chaplain was incapable of writing anything like this. What his title-page (for it is from that that the words are extracted) describes as for the most part turned into Latin by Bacon himself is not the Sermones, but the entire volume, the general title of which is 'Moralium et Civilium Tomus.' As it contains the voluminous De Augmentis Scientiarum, and other long treatises, and the Sermones form a very small part of it, they may be among the few things of which the author himself was not the translator. In his Life of Bacon, it is true, both in the English and in the Latin, Rawley seems to enumerate the Latin translation of the Essays among Bacon's own performances. But, on the other hand, we find Bacon himself, in a letter to his friend Mr. Toby Matthew, without date, but apparently written in 1622

* The expression in the Latin is quite explicit :-"Quam etiam in Latinum verti."

This Bacon states in his Latin Letter to Father Fulgentio, written probably in 1624.

or 1623,* expressing himself in a way which implies at least that he did not then intend to be his own translator. "It is true," he says, "" my labours are now most set to have those works which I had formerly published, as that of Advancement of Learning, that of Henry Seventh, that of the Essays, being retractate and made more perfect, well translated into Latin by the help of some good pens, which forsake me not; for these modern languages will at one time or other play the bankrupts with books, and, since I have lost much time with this age, I would be glad, as God shall give me leave, to recover it with posterity." And Archbishop Tenison says expressly, speaking of the Essays, "The Latin translation of them was a work performed by divers hands; by those of Dr. Hacket (late Bishop of Lichfield), Mr. Benjamin Johnson (the learned and judicious poet), and some others, whose names I once heard from Dr. Rawley; but I cannot now recall them. To this Latin edition he gave the name of Sermones Fideles, after the manner of the Jews, who called the words, adagies, or observations of the wise, Faithful Sayings; that is, credible propositions, worthy of firm assent and ready acceptance. And, as I think, he alluded more particularly in this title to a passage in Ecclesiastes (xii. 10, 11), where the preacher saith that he sought to find out Verba Delectabilia (as Tremellius rendereth the Hebrew), pleasant words (that is, perhaps, his Book of Canticles), and Verba Fidelia (as the same Tremellius), faithful sayings (meaning, it may be, his collection of Proverbs). In the next verse he calls them Words of the Wise, and so many goads and nails given ab eodem pastore, from the same shepherd (of the flock of Israel)." Bacon himself, in his letter to Father Fulgentio, intimates that he preferred the title Sermones

.

*The letter is placed by Birch, in whose collection it was first published, under the year 1623; but, as it seems to speak of the Latin translation of the Advancement of Learning,' which was published in that year, as only in progress, perhaps it may have been written in 1622.

† Introduction to 'Baconiana,' 1679, p. 61.

Fideles, as weightier than that of Saggi Morali which had been given to the Essays in the Italian translations ;* "Verum illi libro nomen gravius impono."

It is a curious fact that at one time Bacon's Essays appear to have been generally known and read only in an English translation from the Latin. Thus, the writer of the Life of Bacon in the first edition of the Biographia Britannica, published about the middle of the last century, tells us that it is from the Latin translation we have the Essays in Bacon's Works, referring to what is called Mallet's edition, which appeared in 1753. Hume, it may be remarked, has described Bacon's prose as barbarous. And, what is still more surprising, Dugald Stewart, in his Preliminary Dissertation to the Encyclopædia Britannica, written and published within the last thirty years, expresses his astonishment that Bacon's English style should have been preferred by Bishop Burnet to that of Sprat! If, indeed, his wonder had been that so just a judgment should have proceeded from Burnet, it would be more intelligible; but, on the contrary, Burnet is strangely enough brought forward as no contemptible judge of style ;" and it is declared to be difficult to conceive on what grounds he proceeded “in hazarding so extraordinary an opinion." The passage occurs in a note at p. 40 (last edition); and is followed up by an exclamation about the inferiority, "in all the higher qualities and graces of style," of the prose compositions of Swift to those of Pope and Addison. We need not say that an editor of Bacon's Essays would now be thought out of his senses who should give them in any other English than Bacon's own.

As the Essays stand in Bacon's last and most com

* Two Italian translations bearing this title had already appeared, one in 1618 (by Mr. Toby Matthew), the other in 1621. A French translation had also been published at London in 1619, under the title of Essays Moraux.' This was the work of Sir Arthur Gorges, the common friend of Bacon and Spenser, and also the English translator of Bacon's treatise 'De Sapientia Veterum.' Mr. Montagu everywhere gives the name Georges, we do not know upon what authority.

plete edition, the first is entitled' Of Truth,' and is as follows:

"What is Truth?' said jesting Pilate, and would not stay for an answer. Certainly there be that delight in giddiness, and count it a bondage to fix a belief; affecting free-will in thinking, as well as in acting. And though the sects of philosophers of that kind be gone, yet there remain certain discoursing wits, which are of the same veins, though there be not so much blood in them as was in those of the ancients. But it is not only the difficulty and labour which men take in finding out of Truth; nor again, that when it is found, it imposeth upon men's thoughts, that doth bring lies in favour; but a natural, though corrupt, love of the lie itself. One of the later school of the Grecians examineth the matter, and is at a stand to think what should be in it that men should love lies; where neither they make for pleasure, as with poets, nor for advantage, as with the merchant, but for the lie's sake. But I cannot tell: this same Truth is a naked and open daylight, that doth not show the masques, and mummeries, and triumphs of the world, half so stately and daintily as candle-lights. Truth may perhaps come to the price of a pearl, that showeth best by day; but it will not rise to the price of a diamond or carbuncle, that showeth best in varied lights. A mixture of a lie doth ever add pleasure. Doth any man doubt, that if there were taken out of men's minds vain opinions, flattering hopes, false valuations, imaginations as one would, and the like; but it would leave the minds of a number of men, poor shrunken things, full of melancholy and indisposition, and unpleasing to themselves. One of the Fathers, in great severity, called poesy "Vinum Dæmonum,'* because it filleth the imagination, and yet it is but with the shadow of a lie. But it is not the lie that passeth through the mind, but the lie that sinketh in and settleth in it, that doth the hurt, such as we spake of before. But howsoever these things are thus in men's depraved judgments and affections, yet truth, which only doth judge itself, teacheth that the inquiry of truth, which is the love-making or wooing of it; the knowledge of truth, which is the presence of it; and the belief of truth, which is the enjoying of it, is the sovereign

*The wine of devils. (The translations throughout our extracts from the Essays are the same as in the edition, with notes, by Dr. W. C. Taylor, 8vo., Lond. 1840.)

good of human nature. The first creature of God in the works of the days was the light of the sense; the last was the light of reason; and his sabbath-work ever since is the illumination of his spirit. First he breathed light upon the face of the matter or chaos, then he breathed light into the face of man, and still he breatheth and inspireth light into the face of his chosen. The poet that beautified the sect that was otherwise inferior to the rest, saith yet excellently well: 'It is a pleasure to stand upon the shore, and to see ships tossed upon the sea; a pleasure to stand in the window of a castle and to see a battle, and the adventures thereof below; but no pleasure is comparable to the standing upon the vantage-ground of truth-(a hill not to be commanded, and where the air is always clear and serene)and to see the errors, and wanderings, and mists, and tempests in the vale below: so always that this prospect be with pity, and not with swelling or pride. Certainly it is heaven upon earth to have a man's mind move in charity, rest in providence, and turn upon the poles of truth.

To pass from theological and philosophical truth to the truth of civil business, it will be acknowledged, even by those that practise it not, that clear and round dealing is the honour of man's nature, and that mixture of falsehood is like alloy in coin of gold and silver, which may make the metal work the better, but it embaseth it. For these winding and crooked courses are the goings of the serpent, which goeth basely upon the belly, and not upon the feet. There is no vice that doth so cover a man with shame as to be found false and perfidious. And therefore Mountaigny saith prettily, when he inquired the reason, Why the word of the lie should be such a disgrace, and such an odious charge? Saith he, "If it be well weighed, To say that a man lieth, is as much as to say that he is brave towards God, and a coward towards men.' For a lie faces God, and shrinks from man. Surely the wickedness of falsehood, and breach of faith, cannot possibly be so highly expressed, as in that it shall be the last peal, to call the judgments of God upon the generations of men; it being foretold, that when Christ cometh, 'He shall not find faith upon the earth.'

As this is our first specimen, we may stop for a moment to notice the characteristics of Bacon's manner of thinking and writing by which it is marked.

The first thing that will strike every reader is its fulness of matter. Jonson, as we have seen, has said of Bacon's speaking, that his hearers could not cough or