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 revision. 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 vitæ 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

these originals. But if with attention we consider the matter, it will appear that they were delivered and related as things formerly believed and received, and not as newly invented and offered unto us. Besides, seeing they are diversely related by writers that lived near about one and the self-same time, we may easily perceive that they were common things, derived from precedent memorials, and that they became various by reason of the divers ornaments bestowed on them by particular relations. And the consideration of this must needs increase in us a great opinion of them as not to be accounted either the effects of the times or inventions of the poets, but as sacred reliques or abstracted airs of better times, which by tradition from more ancient nations fell into the trumpets and flutes of the Grecians.

...

If, however, any will obstinately deny all this, leaving them to enjoy the gravity of judgment which they affect, -"although indeed it be but lumpish and almost leaden "-he will present the matter to them in another way :

There is found among men (and it goes for current) a twofold use of parables. and those (which is more to be admired) referred to contrary ends, conducing as well to the folding up and keeping of things under a vail, as to the enlightening and laying open of obscurities. But omitting the former (rather than to undergo wrangling, and assuming ancient fables as things vagrant and composed only for delight), the latter must questionless still remain as not to be wrested from us by any violence of wit, neither can any (that is but meanly learned) hinder, but it must absolutely be received as a thing grave and sober, free from all vanity, and exceeding profitable and necessary to all sciences. This is it, I say, that leads the understanding of man by an easy and gentle passage through all novel and abstruse inventions which any way differ from common received opinions. Therefore in the first ages (when many human inventions and conclusions, which are now common and vulgar, were new and not generally known), all things were full of fables, enigmas, parables, and similes of all sorts, by which they sought to teach and lay open, not to hide and conceal knowledge, especially seeing the understandings of men were in those times rude and impatient, and almost incapable of any subtilties, such things only excepted as were the objects

of sense for as hieroglyphics preceded letters, so parables were more ancient than arguments. And in these days also, he that would illuminate men's minds anew in any old matter, and that not with disprofit and harshness, must absolutely take the same course and use the help of similes....

There is perhaps no work of Bacon's that impresses one so forcibly with admiration of the ingenuity, freshness, and vital energy of his intellect as this treatise on the Wisdom of the Ancients. Nothing in his interpretation of the old fables is borrowed or common-place; every thing is new and his own. Yet it seems all as natural as if no other explanation were possible, and in some instances as if the only wonder were that it should not have been all along perceived by every body. So exquisite is the art of the exposition. And very note-worthy, too, it is how these original views of Bacon's, with all this ready acceptance or accordance which they command, have never yet become vulgar or trite. They have been promulgated for more than two centuries, mixed up during all that time with the general mass of thought; yet there they still lie as bright and distinguishable as at first, like the crystals imbedded in common clay or gravel. Their originality has preserved them in their integrity, like a powerful salt. Or, they are of too marked a character to admit of their being taken up by any one who chooses, and becoming common property. The king's broad arrow is stamped too deep upon them; the master mind that first gave them forth has put too much of itself into them-has too livingly shaped, coloured, inspired them all over and through and through.

The fables, or mythological legends, interpreted amount to the number of thirty-one. We must, however, confine our review to a very few of the more remarkable expositions, which we shall give entire, or nearly entire; for none of them will bear abridg

ment.

We will begin with that of the story of Typhon, to which an allusion has already been made in the Preface:

Juno being vexed (say the poets) that Jupiter had begotten