:: Bacon's Dictionary Part 3C ::

Cæser’s assassination How to extinguish envy he knew excellently well, and thought it an object worth purchasing even at the sacrifice of dignity. He did not put off his mask, but so carried himself that he turned the envy upon the other party. At last, whether satiated with power or corrupted by flattery, he aspired likewise to the external emblems thereof, the name of King and the crown, which turned to his destruction. (Bacon, Imago Civilis Julii Cæsaris).
So we receive from him, as a Monument both of his power and learning, the then reformed computation of the year; well expressing that he took it to be as great a glory to himself to observe and know the law of the heavens as to give law to men upon the earth. (Bacon, Adv).

Capias Utlagatum A Jewish goldsmith and moneylender sues for his bond for £300 on Bacon’s departure from the Tower on business of the Learned Counsel, being the investigation of John Stanley and Valentine Thomas which allege to a conspiracy of the assassination of the Queen, by the Popish refuges in Spain. Bacon is arrested by the sheriff. In those days, every shire had a sheriff, which word, being of the Saxon English, is as much as to say shirereeve, or minister of the county. His function or office was twofold, namely; one Ministerial and two Judicial. Bacon’s anger is expressed to Robert Cecil in the following letter: 1

It May Please Your Honour.
I humbly pray you to understand how badly I have been used by the enclosed, being a copy of a letter of complaint thereof, which I have written to the Lord Keeper. How sensitive you are of wrongs offered to your blood in my particular, I have had not long since experience. But herein I think your Honour will be doubly sensitive, in tenderness also of the indignity to her Majesty’s service. For as for me, Mr. Sympson might have had me every day in London; and therefore to delay me, while he knew I came from the Tower about her Majesty’s special service, was to my understanding very bold. And two days before he brags he before me, because I dined with sheriff More. So as with Mr. Sympson, examinations at the Tower are not so great a privilege, eundo et redeundo, as sheriff More’s dinner. But this complaint I make duty; and to that and have also informed my Lord of Essex thereof; for otherwise his punishment will do me no good. So with signification of my humble duty, I commend your Honour to the divine preservation.
Fra. Bacon
From Coleman Street.

After Bacon’s release from Coleman Street comes within a few days after an arrangement is made regarding the debt. Upon this case, Coke and Bacon blow in an altercation at the Bar of the Court of the Exchequer. This being that Coke had taken great offence because without his consent, brief and fee, Bacon presumed to make a motion about re-seizing the lands of a relapsed recusant in which the crown was concerned. The altercation between Bacon and Coke is presumed by Spedding to be caused due to Bacon’s arrest for debts. Bacon gives the account:
“He accosteth me by saying, “Mr. Bacon, if you have any tooth against me, pluck it out, for it will do you more hurt than all the teeth in your head will do you good.” I answer in a cold manner. “Mr. Attorney, I respect you; I fear you not: and the less you speak of your own greatness, the more I will think of it.” “I think scorn to stand upon terms of greatness towards you, who are less than little, less than the least.” He replies, adding other such strange light terms, with that insolence which cannot be expressed. I am self-possessed. “Mr. Attorney, do not depress me so far; for I have been your better, and may be again when it please the Queen.” With this, he spake neither I nor him self could tell what, as if he had been born Attorney General, and in the end bade me not meddle with the Queen’s business but with mine own, and that I was unsworn. With this, I conclude on that “Sworn or not sworn is all one to an honest man; I have ever set my service first, and my self second; and I wish to God you would do the like.” “It were good to clap a capias utlagatum upon your back.” He fumes. “I thank God you cannot, but you are at fault and hunt upon an old scent.””

Carre’s wedding masque When the infamous Carre was about to be married to the equally infamous Lady Frances Howard, the divorced wife of the son Essex, Bacon had talked to Carre in order to obtain the Mastership of the Wards and had failed. He therefore tried before the wedding to curry favour by offering to provide a Masque similar to the gorgeous pageant produced by the Inner Temple and Gray’s Inn on the occasion of the marriage of the Elector Palatine and the Princess Elizabeth on February 14, 1613. These Masques were usual on such occasions. At the week’s festivities which took place at the marriage of the Prince of Orange with Charles I’s daughter (whose son was to dethrone the Stuarts), a great scaffolding for the show was erected outside Whitehall Banqueting House. During that whole week Strafford lay awaiting his doom, vainly imploring the King, for whose service he was about to die, and whose protection had previously been promised him, to refuse to sign the Attainder. The mills of God do not always grind slowly, for within eight years that same scaffold was re-erected on the same spot, and the King himself ascended it. Bacon absolutely tried to get the Masque performed by the four Inns of Court. But three of these bodies had an instinct that both bride and bridegroom would be in the Tower as convicted murderers within a very short period, and held aloof. So Bacon by a letter in his own hand, thus commits his own Inn.

It may please your good L.
I am sorry the joint masque from the four Inns of Court faileth. Nevertheless because it faileth out that at this time Gray’s Inn is well furnished of gallant young gentlemen, your L. may be pleased to know that rather than this occasion shall pass without some demonstration of affection from the Inns of Court, there are a dozen gentlemen of Gray’s Inn that out of the honour which they bear to your Lordship and my Lord Chamberlain (father of the bride) to whom at their last masque they were so much bounden, will be ready to furnish a masque, wishing it were in their power to perform it according to their minds.
Fr. Bacon

Gray’s Inn found only the composers and performers, the cost (some £2,000 then), being borne by Bacon personally. The expression, the Gentlemen of Gray’s Inn were “much bounden” to the Lord Chamberlain at their last masque seems to indicate some kind of sociality between that Inn and the Players. Indeed one of them, Ben Jonson, was Bacon’s guest at York House on the proudest day of his life: his sixtieth birthday.

Castle of Kenilworth Alfred Dodd’s 2 comment will set the reader to an interest on this historical topic that is found in the Appendices under the same title.

Canonbury House Is generally supposed to have been built in 1362, ten years after Edward III., had exempted the priory of St. Bartholomew from the payment of subsidies in consequence of their great outlay in charity. Stow says that William Bolton (prior from 1509 to 1532) rebuilt the house, and probably erected the well-known brick tower, as Nichols, in his History of Canonbury, mentions that his rebus, a bolt in a tun, was still to be seen cut in stone, in two places, on the outside facing the mansion was much altered by Sir John Spencer, who came to reside there, in splendour, about 1599, and it is now divided into several houses: Canonbury Place having absorbed the grand old residence, and portioned out its relics of bygone grandeur. A long range of tiled buildings, supposed to have been the stables of the old mansion, but which had become an appendage to the Canonbury Tavern, was pulled down in 1840. A tradition once prevailed at Islington that the monks of St. Bartholomew had a subterranean communication from Canonbury to the priory at Smithfield. This notion had arisen from the discovery of brick archways in Canonbury, which seem to have been only conduit heads, and had really served to lead water to the priory. After the Spencers, the Lord Keeper Coventry rented this house. In 1635 we find the Earl of Derby detained here, and prevented from reaching St. James’s by a deep snow.

Cecil’s death The following account was written by Sir Simonds D’Ewes * regarding Robert Cecil’s death: “And therefore, when I consider in what a general hate, almost of all sorts, he [Robert Cecil] died, and what infamous libels were made of him after his death, instead of funeral elegies, I cannot but conceive that the first ground of the people’s hatred to him arose from their love formerly borne to Robert de Ebroicis or D’Evereux, Earl of Essex, who was beheaded within the Tower of London, upon the 25th day of February, in the year 1601; of whose death and destruction no man doubted but that his subtle head, actuated by his father’s principles, had been the contriver and finisher, howsoever his cousin Francis Bacon, the then solicitor-general, much hated also for his ungrateful treachery to that Earl, did afterwards labour by a printed apology, ** colourably inscribed to Charles Lord Mountjoy, Earl of Devonshire, to purge both himself and the said Earl of Salisbury from that imputation.”

Several of these “infamous libels” that D’Ewes refers to have been preserved. The following epitaph may be given as a specimen of the spirit in which most of them were penned:

Here lies, thrown for the worms to eat,
Little bossive Robin, that was so great:
Not Robin Goodfellow, nor Robin Hood,
But Robin, the encloser of Hatfield Wood;
Who seem’d as sent from ugly fate,
To spoil the prince and rob the state:
Owning a mind for dismal ends,
As traps for foes, and tricks for friends.

Cecil vs Essex vs Bacon What will predispose the reader to believe the worst of Cecil, is a confidential letter written by him to his intimate friend Carew, in which he suggests to the latter an act of treachery that can be characterized by no other epithet than diabolical. It appears that a certain young Earl of Desmond, who had been sent over from England to Ireland, seemed likely to prove a costly and inconvenient encumbrance, instead of enabling the English to conciliate or suppress the Irish. Cecil therefore suggests to Carew that it may be possible to decoy the young nobleman into some act of treason, and then to make away with him:

Sir,
It shall be an easy matter for you to colour whatsoever you shall do in that kind by this course. You may either apostate (sic) some to seek to withdraw him who may betray him to you, or, rather than fail, there may be some found out there to accuse him. And that may be sufficient reason for you to remand him or to restrain him, under colour of which they [the Irish] shall be more greedy peradventure to labour for him but all that is here said is mine own and known to no soul living but the writer whose hand I use at this present, in regard of a fluxion in one of mine eyes.

If this is Cecil, it may be thought Essex might well have felt his life endangered by such an enemy always at the Queen’s ear. (Abbott). 3 Not to mention how much Bacon must have dreaded the crafty Cecil.

Central fire in the Earth The heaven, from its perfect and entire heat and the extreme extension of matter, is most hot, lucid, rarefied, and moveable; whereas the earth, on the contrary, from its entire and unrefracted cold, and the extreme contraction of matter, is most cold, dark, and dense, completely immoveable. The rigors of cold, which in winter time and in the coldest countries are exhaled into the air from the surface of the earth, are merely tepid airs and baths, compared with the nature of the primal cold shut up in the bowels thereof. (Bacon, De Principiis atque Originibus).

Chancellor of England On January 4, 1617–18 Francis Bacon, Lord Keeper of the Great Seal, was made Chancellor of England, the Seal being delivered again to him by the name of Chancellor.

Chillingham Castle The property of the Earl of Tankerville in the 1800’s, was re-built in Queen Elizabeth’s reign, and was a heavy square structure of four stories in the wings, and three in the centre. The apartments small, and the communications irregular. Here stood several good portraits, a full-length of Francis Bacon, when Lord Chancellor; another of Lord Treasurer Burleigh; a gaudy painting of Buckingham, in a white satin gilded vest, gold and white striped breeches, effeminate and fantastical; a good portrait of King Charles; and a good picture of James II., of the most unhappy countenance. 4

Ciphers “The virtues of them, whereby they are to be preferred, are three; that they be not laborious to write and read; that they be impossible to decipher; and, in some cases, that they be without suspicion.” (Bacon). 5 Science concerned with data 6communication and storage in secure and usually secret form. It encompasses both cryptography and cryptanalysis. The term cryptology is derived from the Greek kryptós (“hidden”) and lógos (“word”). Security obtains from legitimate users being able to transform 7 information by virtue of a secret key or keys. i.e., information known only to them. [Also see Part III: Reasons for Concealment; Part I: Cypher.] The earliest writer on ciphers, except Trithemius whom Bacon quotes, is John Baptist Porta, whose work De occultis literarum notis was reprinted in Strasburg in 1606. The first edition was published when Porta was a young man. The species of ciphers which Bacon mentions are described in this work. What he calls the ciphra simplex is doubtless that in which each letter is replaced by another in accordance with a secret alphabet. 8 The wheel cipher is described in chapters 7, 8, 9. It is that in which the ordinary alphabet and a secret one are written respectively on the rim of two concentric disks, so that each letter of the first corresponds in each position of the second (which is movable) to a letter of the secret alphabet. Thus in each position of the movable disk we have a distinct cipher, and in using the instrument this disk is made to turn through a given angle after each letter has been written. The ciphra clavis is described by Porta, 9 is a cipher of position; that is, one in which the difficulty is obtained not by replacing the ordinary alphabet by a new one, but by deranging the order in which the letters of a sentence or paragraph succeed each other. This is done according to a certain form of words or series of numbers which constitute the key. The cipher of words was given by Trithemius and in another form by Porta. 10 It is a cipher which is meant to escape suspicion. Each letter of the alphabet corresponds to a variety of words arranged in columns. Any word of the first column followed by any of the second, and that followed by any of the third, &c., will make, with the help of a non-significant word occasionally introduced, a perfectly complete sense; and by the time the last alphabet has been used, a letter on some indifferent subject has been written.
Only sixty alphabets are given by Porta, and therefore the secret communication can consist only of sixty letters. It is worth remarking that when Porta wrote, it was usual to put the sign of the cross at the head of an ordinary epistle. The first of his alphabets corresponds not to a series of words but to two and twenty different modifications of the figure of a cross, and his second alphabet similarly corresponds to two and twenty different modifications of the introductory flourish. His sixtieth alphabet is of the same kind. We see here perhaps whence Bacon derived his idea of giving significance to seemingly accidental modifications of the characters of ordinary writing. The Polygraphia of Trithemius (dedicated to Maximilian in 1508) consists of six books. The first four contain extensive tables constituting four different ciphre verborum; the first and second of which are significant, and relate, the former to the second person of the Trinity, and the latter to the Blessed Virgin. The fifth and sixth books are of less importance.

Even Sir Simonds D'Ewes wrote in cipher: “I joined with one of my schoolfellows, and invented a strange handwriting consisting of an alphabet of strange letters, which afterwards I altered also to mine own use, and penned several particulars of moment or secrecy in it, at all times to this present, upon any occasion that offered itself.” Some books written in the cipher here alluded to by D’Ewes, are still preserved in the British Museum.

The tragedy of Hamlet was written in or about 1586, but not printed until 1603. In this first draft of the play we find a letter, written by the prince to Ophelia, in which, she is told she may doubt any proposition whatever, no matter how certain it may be, but under no circumstances must she doubt the writer’s love. From this letter, which is partly in verse:

Doubt that in earth is fire,
Doubt that the stars do move,
Doubt truth to be a liar,
But do not doubt I love. 11

Among the certainties here specified, which Ophelia was at liberty to question before she could question the writer’s love, is the doctrine of a central fire in the earth, “Doubt that in earth is fire.” The belief in the existence of a mass of molten matter at the centre of the earth was then, as it is now, universal; but for some reason the author of the play changed his mind in regard to it within one year after the play was published.

The second edition of Hamlet came from the press in 1604, and then the first line of the stanza, quoted above, was made to read as follows: “Doubt that the stars are fire.” The doctrine of a central fire in the earth was thus taken out of the play some time between the appearance of the first edition in 1603 and that of the second in 1604.

How can this be accounted for? Was there another person known to fame in all the civilized world at that time, besides the author of Hamlet, who entertained a doubt as to the condition of the earth’s interior?

Yes, there was one, and perhaps one only. Francis Bacon wrote a tract, entitled Cogitationes de Natura Rerum, assigned to the latter part of 1603 or the early part of 1604. Mr. Spedding, the last and best editor of Bacon’s works, thinks it was written before September, 1604. In this tract, evidently a fresh study of the subject, Bacon boldly took the ground that the earth is a cold body, cold to the core, the only cold body, as he afterwards affirmed, in the entire universe, all others, sun, planets, and stars, being of fire.

It appears, then, that Bacon adopted this new view of the earth’s interior at precisely the same time that the author of Hamlet did; that is to say, according to the record, in the brief interval between the appearance of the first and that of the second editions of the drama, and, furthermore, against the otherwise unanimous opinion of physicists throughout the world. “The heaven, from its perfect and entire heat and the extreme extension of matter, is most hot, lucid, rarefied, and inoveable; whereas the earth, on the contrary, from its entire and unrefracted cold, and the extreme contraction of matter, is most cold, dark, and dense, completely immoveable. The rigours of cold, which in winter time and in the coldest countries are exhaled into the air from the surface of the earth, are merely tepid airs and baths, compared with the nature of the primal cold shut up in the bowels thereof.” (Bacon, De Principiis atque Originibus).

The second line of the stanza in this extraordinary loveletter is also significant. In the first edition (1603) it runs as follows: “Doubt that the stars do move.”

In the second edition (1604) the change is merely verbal: “Doubt that the sun doth move.”

The doctrine that the earth is the centre of the universe around which the sun and stars daily revolve is thus retained. It has been retained in every succeeding edition of the play to the present time. How can this, also, be accounted for?

Copernicus published his heliocentric theory of the solar system in 1543, eighteen years before Bacon was born. Bruno taught it in Geneva in 1580; in Paris, in 1582; in London and Oxford, in 1583; in Germany, in 1584; in Switzerland, in 1588; in Venice, in 1590; and he was burned at the stake as a martyr to it in Rome in 1600; Kepler announced two of his great laws, governing planetary motions, in 1609; Galileo established the truth of the Copernican system beyond the shadow of a doubt by his discoveries of the phases of Venus and the satellites of Jupiter in 1610; Harriot saw the sun spots and proved the rotation of that luminary on its axis in 1611; Kepler proclaimed his third law in 1619.

And yet, notwithstanding all these repeated and wonderful demonstrations and in opposition to the general current of contemporary thought, Bacon persistently and with ever increasing vehemence adhered to the old theory to the day of his death. The author of the Plays did the same. The two were agreed in holding to the cycles and epicycles of Ptolemy after all the rest of the scientific world had rejected them; and they were also agreed in rejecting the Copernican theory after all the rest of the scientific world had accepted it.

In the second edition of Hamlet 1604, we find the tides of the ocean attributed, in accordance with popular opinion, to the influence of the moon:
The moist star,
Upon whose influence Neptune’s empire stands,
Was sick almost to doomsday with eclipse. 12

This was repeated in the third quarto 1605; in the fourth 1611; in the fifth or undated quarto; but in the First Folio 1623, the lines were omitted.

During the Christmas revels at Gray’s Inn in 1594, Bacon contributed to the entertainment, among other things, a poem in blank verse, known as the Gray’s Inn Masque. It is full of those references to natural philosophy in which the author took so much delight, and especially on this occasion when Queen Elizabeth was the subject, to the various forms of attraction exerted by one body upon another in the world. Of the influence of the moon, he says: “Your rock claims kindred of the polar star, because it draws the needle to the north; yet even that star gives place to Cynthia’s rays, whose drawing virtues govern and direct the flots and re-flots of the Ocean.” At this time, then, Bacon held to the common opinion that the moon controls the tides; but later in life, in or about 1616, he made an elaborate investigation into these phenomena, and in a treatise entitled De Fluxu et Refluxu Maris, definitely rejected the lunar theory: “We dare not proceed so far as to assert that the motions of the sun or moon are the causes of the motions below, which correspond thereto; or that the sun and moon have a dominion or influence over these motions of the sea, though such kind of thoughts find an easy entrance into the minds of men by reason of the veneration they pay to the celestial bodies. Whether the moon be in her increase or wane; whether she be above or under the earth; whether she be elevated higher or lower above the horizon; whether she be in the meridian or elsewhere; the ebb and flow of the sea have no correspondence with any of these phenomena.”

In every edition of Hamlet published previously to 1616, the theory is stated and approved; in every edition published after 1616, it is omitted.

In Hamlet (1604) we have a singular doctrine in the sphere of moral philosophy, advanced by the author in his early years but subsequently withdrawn. The prince, expostulating with his mother in the celebrated chamber-scene where Polonius was hidden behind the arras, says to her, “Sense, sure, you have, else could you not have motion.” 13

The commentators can make nothing of these words. One of them suggests that for “motion” we substitute notion; another, emotion. Others still contend that the misprint is in the first part of the sentence; that “sense” must be understood to mean sensation or sensibility. Dr. Ingleby is certain that Hamlet refers to the Queen’s wanton impulse. The difficulty is complicated, too, by the fact that the lines were omitted from the revised version of the play in the First Folio of 1623, concerning which, however, the most daring commentator has not ventured to offer a remark.

In Bacon’s prose works we find not only an explanation of the passage in the quarto, but also the reason why it was excluded from the First Folio. The Advancement of Learning was published in 1605, one year after the quarto of Hamlet containing the sentence in question appeared; but no repudiation of the old doctrine, that everything that has motion must have sense, is found in it. Indeed, Bacon seems to have had at that time a lingering opinion that the doctrine is true, even as applied to the planets, in the influence which these wanderers were then supposed to exert over the affairs of men. But in 1623 he published a new edition of the Advancement in Latin, under the title of De Augmentis Scientiarum, and therein expressly declared that the doctrine is untrue; that there can be motion in inanimate bodies without sense, but with what he called a kind of perception. He said: “Ignorance on this point drove some of the ancient philosophers to suppose that a soul is infused into all bodies without distinction; for they could not conceive how there can be motion without sense, or sense without a soul.”

The Shakespeare First Folio with its revised version of Hamlet came out in the same year (1623) as the De Aug., and the passage in question, having run through all previous editions of the play, i.e., in 1604, in 1605, in 1611, and in the undated quarto, but now no longer harmonizing with the author’s views, dropped out.

In the first draft of Hamlet, published in 1603, but produced on the stage in 1586, the Prince, referring to the clown in the grave-digger’s scene, says to Horatio,

An excellent fellow, by the Lord, Horatio;
These seven years have I noticed it; the toe of the peasant
Comes so near the heel of the courtier
That he galls his kibe. 14

In the second quarto (1604) this speech appears as follows: “By the Lord, Horatio; this three years have I taken note of it; the age is grown so picked that the toe of the peasant comes so near the heel of the courtier, he galls his kibe.” The period of seven years in the first edition gives place to that of three years in the second.

Bacon returned from the continent, where he had been living from boyhood, in 1579; consequently, in 1586, he had been an observer of manners and customs in and around the court of Elizabeth, to which he had had easy access, for a period of seven years. In 1603, we find Bacon full of alarm over the progress of democratic sentiment in the country. He then wrote to his cousin, Secretary Cecil, that he thought of abandoning politics and putting himself wholly “upon his pen;” he even predicted the revolution that followed fourty years later. This fear had its chief origin in the last parliament of Queen Elizabeth, when he saw the House of Commons converted into a pandemonium over public grievances.

The play of Hamlet was re-written and re-published in 1604; the last parliament under Elizabeth sat three years earlier, in 1601. Hence the substitution of this last-named period for the first.

King Lear was published in quarto in 1608, two editions having been issued in that year. It contains the following on the disorders of the time spoke by Edmund: “O! these eclipses do portend these divisions.” 15

The next appearance of the play, in print, was in the First Folio of 1623, where the closing part of Edmund’s soliloquy, suggested by what Gloucester had said before leaving the stage: “Edmund: “O! these eclipses do portend these divisions.! these eclipses do portend these divisions. Fa, sol, la, mi.” Here is a musical phrase added to the text fifteen years after the play was first printed; probably seventeen or eighteen years after the play was written. It consists of syllables for solmization (including a tritonus or sharp fourth), which in Shakespeare’s time implied a series of sounds exceedingly disagreeable to the ear. It was called the “devil in music.” 16

As an illustration of the state of moral, political, and physical discord described by Gloucester, nothing could have been more felicitous; but how shall we explain its late introduction into the play?

Evidently the figure was suggested to the author for use in this connection sometime between 1608 and 1623, and then only after the careful study of a science the technique of which is exceptionally difficult and abstruse. Shaksper, the reputed dramatist, was then living in Stratford, in an environment wholly unfitted for such a study. He died in 1616. Francis Bacon, on the other hand, began the composition of his Sylva Sylvarum in October 1622, and in that work investigated not only the general laws of harmony, but also this particular tritonus or sharp fourth, given one year later in the revised version of the play.

Bacon spent the years of his childhood partly in London, and partly at his father’s country seat at Gorhambury, near St. Albans; in 1573 he was matriculated at Cambridge University; from 1576 to 1579 he was in France; on his return to London he took up his residence as a law student at Gray’s Inn; in 1584 he entered Parliament. The first in order of composition of the historical dramas of Shakespeare was King Henry VI. It bears unmistakable marks of the immaturity of a great genius. It bears, also, marks of the author’s personal acquaintance with those localities where, previously to the date of the play, Bacon had lived. Of the seventy-eight scenes into which its three parts are divided, thirty are laid in London, where Bacon was born; three in St. Albans, where he was brought up; twenty in France, and in those provinces of France which he had visited; one is laid in the Temple, an institution for lawyers closely associated with Gray’s Inn; and one in the Houses of Parliament. “A young author’s first work almost always bespeaks his recent pursuits.” (Coleridge).

1 Birch. Letters of Francis Bacon, 1763

2 Alfred Dodd. Francis Bacon’s Personal Life Story, p. 76–77

3 Abbott. Bacon and Essex, p. 245

4 Hutchinson’s History of Northumberland, p. 237

5 Advancement of Learning, Bk. II

6 Porta. Bk. II. Ch. 5

7 Bk. II. pp. 15–16

8 Bk. II. Ch. 19. And in a different shape, Bk. V. Ch. 16

9 Act II., Sc. 2

10 Act I., Sc. 1

11 Act. III., Sc. 4

12 Act. V., Sc. 1

13 Act. I., Sc. 2

14 Naylor: Shakespeare and Music, p. 36.: “Edmund alludes to the unnatural division of parent and child, etc., in this musical phrase which contains the augmented fourth, or mi contra fa, of which the old theorists used to say, diabolus est.”

Condemned On May 3, 1621 Bacon was condemned upon a charge of corruption to which he pleaded guilty; to pay a fine of £40.000; to be imprisoned in the Tower during the King’s pleasure; to be forever incapable of sitting in Parliament or holding office in the State; and to be banished for life from the verge of the Court. [Also see Part III: Bacon’s Pedigree.] When Montague’s Life appeared, the reaction against Pope’s extra-judicial verdict had set in, and what was then required was a complete restatement of all the facts, without undue bias or favouritism. This Montague’s Life was not; it was sketchy and imperfect, and the advocacy of Bacon, although earnest and sincere, was so feeble and incomplete, that it became an easy prey for any critical terrier who might take a sportive delight in tearing it to pieces. Macaulay’s Essay on Bacon is a review of Basil Montague’s Life, and this same sportive delight is only too manifest. [See Appendices Condemned].

Conference of Pleasure On the Queen’s birthday, in 1592, at a Conference of Pleasure (so called) in Gray’s Inn, Bacon delivered a speech on Love. He was then nearly thirty-two years of age. He then expressed the true sentiments of his heart. This speech, somewhat condensed from an imperfect copy of it that has come down to us from the Northumberland MSS:

My praise shall be dedicated to the happiest state of the mind, to the noblest affection. I shall teach lovers to love, that have all this while loved by rote. I shall give them the Alphabet of Love. Let no man fear the yoke of fortune that’s in the yoke of love. What fortune can be such a Hercules as shall be able to overcome two? Assuredly no person ever saw at any time the mind of another but in love. Love is the only passion that opens the heart. If not the highest, it is the sweetest affection of all others. When one foreseeth withal that to his many griefs cannot be added solitude, but that he shall have a partner to bear them, this quieteth the mind.
Consider again the delight of concurrence in desire without emulation. If two be but set at a game they love, or labour together in some one work or invention, mark how well pleased, how well disposed, how contented they be. So then, if minds are sharpened against minds, as iron is against iron, in every action, what shall we think of that union and conjunction of minds which love worketh? What vigour, what alacrity must it give! It is noted that absolute idleness and leisure, when the mind is altogether without object, is but languishing and weariness. How precious then is love, which is the sweetest repose from travails and affairs, and the sweetest employment in leisure and idleness!
The virtues are moderators, they are the laws of the mind; they retain the mind, they limit it; they are as the mill when it is set upon a rich stone; here it grindeth out a race and there a grain, to make it wear more fair; but in the meantime the stone loseth carats. So with the virtues; they polish the mind; they make it without blemish; they give it excellent form, but commonly they diminish its natural vigour. Love contrariwise is a pure gain and advancement in nature; not a good by comparison, but a true good; not an ease of pain, but a true purchase of pleasures; and therefore, when our minds are soundest, when they are not, as it were, in sickness and out of taste, but when we be in prosperity, when we want nothing, then is the season, and the opportunity, and the spring of love.
Therefore, if all delight of sense affect love; if the understanding be tributary to love; if love offereth the sweetest contentment to him that desireth to rule, the comfortablest promise to him that looketh into his fortune, the surest hope to him that seekest to survive himself, the most flattering glass to him that loveth to view himself with advantage, the greatest union of mind to him that desireth the most refreshing repose from action, the most acceptable entertainment to him that would offer the most pleasing object to the most imprinting sense, let us make our suit to love, that gathereth the beams of so many pleasures into a flame in the soul of man. [Also see Part I: Love; Part III: Northumberland Manuscript; Part IV: Bacon’s Works].

Curiously binded rare treasure The Athenæum Library, Bury St. Edmund’s, there is a book which is bound in the skin of the man whose biography its pages contain. The story is familiar to many, especially in the Eastern Counties, where a melo-drama is founded on the incidents. A man named Corder murdered his sweetheart, Maria Martin, in the Red Barn near Bury St. Edmund’s, and Mrs. Martin some time after dreamt three successive nights that her daughter was buried under the Red Barn. She persuaded her husband to go and dig for the body, with the result that he found the corpse. By this time Corder was married, and while taking breakfast with his wife the detectives arrested him. A great excitement was manifested during the trial. Eventually, as every one expected, the prisoner was found guilty and sentenced to death. The doctor who dissected the body after execution, hearing that a life of Corder was being prepared, sent of the murderer’s skin properly cured to the author. When ready, a copy of the book was bound up in this covering and presented to the above library. This novel work is esteemed a rare treasure, especially by relic-hunters.

A Finding List: Part 3.

Elizabethan Facts and Historical References

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