Hail, happy genius of this ancient pile!
How comes it all things so about thee smile?
The fire, the wine, the men; and in the midst
Thou stand'st as if some mystery thou didst!
Pardon! I read it in thy face; the day
For whose returns, and many, all these pray :
And so do I. This is the sixtieth year
Since Bacon, and thy lord, was born, and here
Son to the grave wise Keeper of the Seal,
Fame and foundation of the English weal.
What then his father was, that since is he,
Now with a title more to the degree;
England's High Chancellor; the destined heir
In his soft cradle to his father's chair;

Whose even thread the Fates spin round and full
Out of their choicest and their whitest wool."*

He had shortly before this published, in a folio volume, the most highly finished and the most celebrated of all his works, his Novum Organum Scientiarum,* in two Books, forming the second part of his Instauratio Magna.' We have in the Resuscitatio a letter from King James to the author thanking him for a copy of his book as just received, which is dated the 16th of October, 1620.

On the 27th of January, 1621 (five days after his birthday), not 1620, as Mr. Montagu has it-Bacon was created Viscount St. Alban. On the 30th of the same mouth the new parliament met, and on the 15th of March a committee of the House of Commons, which had been appointed to inquire into abuses in the courts of justice, reported that two charges of corruption had been brought against the lord chancellor. On the 17th Bacon presided in the House of Lords for the last time. Mr. Montagu continues to lag a year behind throughout all this. The charges of corruption having in the mean time accumulated to twenty-three, Bacon on the 24th of

*Jonson's 70th Underwood; in Works, by Gifford, viii. 440, 441. The Biographia Britannica,' indeed, here quotes these very lines to prove that the celebration must have taken place in January, 1620. But " This is the sixtieth year since" must surely mean the same thing with," It is sixty years since."

April (Mr. Montagu says the 22nd) sent in his first submission and confession to the Lords by the hands of the Prince of Wales, and a second and more particular confession on the 30th of the same month. On the same or the next day the seals were sequestered; and on Thursday the 3rd of May, the Commons and their Speaker having appeared at the bar of the Lords and prayed judgment, the Lord Chief Justice, Sir James Ley, who had been commissioned to exercise for the present the office of Speaker in the House of Lords, pronounced sentence, to the effect that the Viscount St. Alban, having been by his own confession found guilty, should be fined forty thousand pounds, and imprisoned in the Tower during the King's pleasure; that he should be for ever incapable of any office, place, or employment in the state or commonwealth; and that he should never again sit in parliament, nor come within the verge of the court. Bacon was ill at this time, and he was not committed to the Tower till the 31st, nor was he detained in confinement more than two days. The king also forgave him his fine; and he was soon after allowed to return to court. At last, he received a full pardon in the beginning of the year 1624. The common account, however, that he was again summoned to parliament in the first year of the next reign appears to be erroneous.

Writing to the king on the 21st of April, 1621, in the very height of the storm which threw him down, we find Bacon thus concluding his letter-with more of strength of heart, it will perhaps be thought, than of moral sensibility:- -"Because he that hath taken bribes is apt to give bribes, I will go farther, and present your majesty with a bribe. For if your majesty give me peace and leisure, and God give me life, I will present your majesty with a good History of England, and a better digest of your laws. And so, concluding with my prayers, I rest your majesty's afflicted but ever devoted servant." certainly did not allow his fall either long to affect his spirits or to interrupt his studies. Before the end of the year he was ready with his History of Henry VII. :' it appears from a letter of Sir Thomas Meautys, dated

He

the 7th of January, 1622, that it had already been perused in manuscript by the king; and it was published probably a few weeks or months after. On the 20th of March, also, we find him sending the king, not indeed his promised digest of the laws, but" an offer," or detailed proposition of such a work. In this same year, too, he composed his unfinished dialogue entitled 'An Advertisement touching an Holy War,' which he inscribed to Bishop Andrews; and he published the portion of his "Historia Naturalis et Experimentalis' entitled' De Ventis' (Of Winds), which is arranged as a portion of the Third Part of the Instauratio Magna. The next year, 1623, he published in Latin his work entitled De Dignitate et Augmentis Scientiarum' (on the Dignity and Advancement of the Sciences), in nine Books, regarded as forming the First Part of the Instauratio Magna; and also his 'Historia Vitae et Mortis' (History of Life and Death), arranged as another portion of the Third Part of that work. Various other writings, both in English and Latin, which he composed in his retirement, were not given to the world till after his death. But in 1625, besides the new and greatly enlarged edition of his Essays, a very small 8vo. volume of 307 pages, widely and handsomely printed, entitled 'Apophthegms, new and old, collected by the Right Honourable Francis Lord Verulam, Viscount St. Alban,' once more gave public note, while he still lived, of the unabated activity of his mind and pen.

Bacon's Apophthegms, in this his own edition, are 280 in number; but a good many more have been added in subsequent impressions. Tenison, in the Introduction to the Baconiana, says: "His lordship hath received much injury by late editions, of which some have much enlarged, but not at all enriched, the collection; stuffing it with tales and sayings too infacetious for a ploughman's chimney corner.' And he particularizes an octavo volume published in 1669 with the title of "The Apophthegms of King James, King Charles, the Marquis of Worcester, the Lord Bacon, and Sir Thomas More." This is described by Mr. Montagu as a reprint of a duodecimo volume printed in 1658, in which there are 184

Apophthegms attributed to Bacon. In the second edition of the Resuscitatio, published by Rawley in 1661, 249 Apophthegms are inserted, a few being new, but a good many of those published by Bacon himself being omitted; and in the third edition of the same work, pubfished in 1671, four years after Rawley's death, the number of the Apophthegms is increased to 307 (of which, however, twelve are repetitions). But Tenison expressly notes that this latter is one of the editions in which Bacon has been unfairly dealt with, and he declares that the additions were not made by Rawley. It is curious, by the by, that the publisher of the third edition of the Resuscitatio should affirm in an address to the reader that that edition in the First Part (in which the Apophthegms are included) is an exact reprint of the preceding edition; as he also affirms, in another address, that all the pieces in the Second Part were collected and left ready for the press by Rawley. Twenty-seven additional Apophthegms, which may be received as genuine, are in the Baconiana published in 1679; and Mr. Montagu observes that there are a few in Aubrey," by which we suppose is meant Aubrey's 'Lives,' published along with 'Letters written by eminent persons in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries,' 8vo. 1813. We do not perceive, however, that he has given any of these last in his edition of Bacon's Works. He has only reprinted in his first volume the 280 Apophthegms originally published by Bacon, together with the twenty-seven in the Baconiana, and in an appendix, twenty-eight more under the title of Spurious Apophthegms, making altogether 335. The common editions, copying that of Blackburn (4 vols. fol. 1730), give 362 in all; namely, the 296 (after omitting the repetitions) published in the third edition of the Resuscitatio; thirty-nine described as "contained in the original edition in octavo, but omitted in later copies ;" and the twenty-seven published in the Baconiana (of which last, however, three are sometimes omitted, as occurring in the same or nearly the same words in the Essays).

66

The apophthegms are introduced in the original edition by the following short preface:

"Julius Cæsar did write a collection of apophthegms, as appears in an epistle of Cicero: I need say no more for the worth of a writing of that nature. It is pity his work is lost, for I imagine they were collected with judgment and choice; whereas that of Plutarch and Stobæus, and much more the modern ones, draw much of the dregs. Certainly they are of excellent use. They are mucrones verborum, pointed speeches. Cicero prettily calls them salinas, salt pits, that you may extract salt out of and sprinkle it where you will. They serve to be interlaced in continued speech. They serve to be recited, upon occasions, of themselves. They serve, if you take out the kernel of them and make them your own. I have, for my recreation in my sickness, fanned the old, not omitting any because they are vulgar,* for many vulgar ones are excellent good; nor for the meanness of the person, but because they are dull and flat, and adding many new, that otherwise would have died."

The Apophthegms, or pointed sayings, thus collected by Bacon, are almost all good; very few at least of those published by himself can be pronounced unworthy of preservation. Many of them had been previously made use of by him in his Essays and other writings, and are repeated here for the most part nearly in the same words. Even with the aid he would thus have, however, we may take the liberty of doubting Tenison's assertion that the 280 short stories, filling above 300 printed pages in the original small volume, and above 60 in one of Mr. Montagu's octavos, were all dictated by him in one morning out of his memory. It is true that there are historical mistakes in some of them; but Bacon, as we have seen, does not himself plead the apology of haste, or talk of having written without resorting to books. Many of them, it is evident, he had merely transcribed from his own previous writings.

The following are selected from the original 280:

*Generally current.