When Robert Groome was with me a month ago, I was speaking to him of having found some Bacon in Montaigne: and R. G. told me that you had observed the same, and were indeed collecting some instances; I think, quotations from Seneca, so employed as to prove that Bacon had them from the Frenchman. It has been the fashion of late to scoff at Seneca; whom such men as Bacon and Montaigne quoted: perhaps not Seneca’s own, but cribbed from some Greek which would have been admired by those who scoff at the Latin.
I had not noticed this Seneca coincidence: but I had observed a few passages of Montaigne’s own, which seemed to me to have got into Bacon’s Essays. I dare say I couldn’t light upon all these now; but, having been turning over Essai 9, Lib. iii. De la Vanité, I find one sentence which comes to the point: ‘Car parfois c’est bien choisir de ne choisir pas.’ In the same Essay is a piece of King Lear, perhaps; ‘De ce mesme papier où il vient d’escrire l’arrest de condemnation contre un Adultere, le Juge en desrobe un lopin pour en faire un poulet à la femme de son compaignon.’ One doesn’t talk of such things as of plagiarisms, of course; as if Bacon and Shakespeare couldn’t have said much better things themselves; only for the pleasure of tracing where they read, and what they were struck by. I see that ‘L’Appetit vient en mangeant’ is in the same Essay.
If I light some other day on the other passages, I will take the liberty of telling you. You see I have already taken the liberty of writing to a man, not unknown to me in several ways, but with whom I have not the pleasure of being acquainted personally. Perhaps I may have that pleasure one of these days; we are both connected with the same town of Beccles, and may come together. I hope so.
But I have also another reason for writing to you. Your ‘Master’ wrote me word the other day, among other things, that you as well as he wished for my own noble works in your Library. I quite understand that this is on the ground of my being a
Trinity man. But then one should have done something worthy of ever so little a niche in Trinity Library; and that I do know is not my case. I have several times told the Master what I think, and know, of my small Escapades in print; nice little things, some of them, which may interest a few people (mostly friends, or through friends) for a few years. But I am always a little ashamed of having made my leisure and idleness the means of putting myself forward in print, when really so many much better people keep silent, having other work to do. This is, I know, my sincere feeling on the subject. However, as I think some of the Translations I have done are all I can dare to show, and as it would be making too much fuss to wait for any further asking on the subject, I will send them if you think good one of these days all done up together; the Spanish, at least, which are, I think, all of a size. Will you tell the Master so if you happen to see him and mention the subject? Allow me to end by writing myself yours sincerely,
Edward FitzGerald.
To E. B. Cowell.
12 Marine Terrace, Lowestoft.
Dec. 28 [1867].
My dear Cowell,
. . . I don’t think I told you about Garcin de Tassy. He sent me (as no doubt he sent you) his annual Oration. I wrote to thank him: and said I