[5] In the case of something which apparently “grew from” himself, dealt with the Deposing of Richard II, and “went about in other men’s names,” pseudonymity seems to have failed to screen Bacon from cross-examination and censure by Queen Elizabeth. (Bacon’s Apologie in certaine imputations concerning the late Earl of Essex. 1604.)
[6] Browning and others less eminent than he have questioned the autobiographical value of the Sonnets. Even so they would be serious impedimenta to a Solicitor-General on his way to the Attorney-Generalship, Privy Councillorship, and other conspicuous offices.
[7] It is obviously borrowed, mutatis mutandis, from Ovid’s Metamorphoses. “Deeper than did ever plummet sound,” however, is not from Ovid’s Medea, but it seems to me from Act III, Sc. 3, of The Tempest itself. Golding’s English version of the Metamorphoses may well have been in the writer’s mind along with the Latin original.
[8] Advancement of Learning. “Art of Arts” was a favourite phrase of his. Of “rational knowledges” he says in the same book: “These be truly said to be the art of arts.”
[9] The idée mère of the Sapientia Veterum—allegorisation—is one which I think no notable man of science among his contemporaries would have attempted to press into the service of science as Bacon pressed it. With contemporary men of letters, poets especially, it was in high favour, partly I suppose as an exercise of ingenuity, partly as a “talking point” wherewith to capture the vulgar, and partly of course for higher reasons. Sir John Harington’s application of it to Orlando Furioso (1591), is a reductio ad absurdum of the fashion.
[10] Poetry for example!
[11] The second book of the Advancement—where “rational knowledges” or “arts intellectual” are being discussed—promises, “if God give me leave, a disquisition, digested into two parts; whereof the one I term experientia literata, and the other interpretatio naturæ, the former being but a degree or rudiment of the latter.” What the latter was in 1605 is matter of conjecture. Possibly Valerius Terminus, Of the Interpretation of Nature, with the Annotations of Hermes Stella, a curious essay, seemingly meant to be anonymous, or pseudonymous, may enable us to measure its value. Concerning the former, experientia literata, we may learn from the De Augmentis Scientiarum, the authorised Latin version of the Advancement of Learning, quite as much as any of us need wish to know.
It may be well to bear in mind that in addition to the above double promise, the Advancement of Learning contains other promises including one, “if God give me leave,” of a legal work—prudentia activa—digested into aphorisms.
[12] The nebulous Temporis Partus Maximus, of very uncertain date, was scarcely more serious, I suppose, than the eloquent eulogies of “knowledge” or “philosophy” in Bacon’s “apparently unacknowledged” Conference of Pleasure, 1592, and Gesta Graiorum, 1594, though towards the close of his life he seems to have claimed for it a somewhat higher value.
[13] According to Professor Fowler (Francis Bacon, Macmillan) the foundation of the Royal Society was due to the impulse given by Bacon to experimental science. Dr. Abbott (Francis Bacon, Macmillan) is struck by a different aspect of Bacon: “By a strange irony the great depreciator of words seems destined to derive an immortal memory from the rich variety of his style and the vastness of his too sanguine expectations.” I cannot help doubting whether, if Bacon had died before 1620 or thereabouts, he would have been held to have placed experimental science under any obligation at all.