The German Schlegel, in his History of Literature, calls him “this mighty genius,” and adds, “Stimulated by his capacious and stirring intellect ... intellectual culture, nay, the social organisation of modern Europe generally, assumed a new shape and complexion.” While again from Lord Macaulay we quote this: “With great minuteness of observation he had an amplitude of comprehension such as has never yet been vouchsafed to any human being.”
In the Encyclopoedia Britannica we read: “The thoughts are weighty, and, even when not original, have acquired a peculiar and unique tone or cast by passing through the crucible of Bacon’s mind. A sentence from the Essays can rarely be mistaken for the production of any other writer. The short, pithy sayings,
Jewels five words long
That on the stretched forefinger of all Time
Sparkle for ever,
have become popular mottoes and household words. The style is quaint, original, abounding in allusions and witticisms, and rich, even to gorgeousness, with piled-up analogies and metaphors.”
In the presence of these acknowledged masters in literary judgment, I may well be silent. These quotations might be extended indefinitely. Anything I could add of my own would be repetition. In the face of these well-considered opinions, the flippant adverse judgment of newspaper critics, in the Bacon-Shakespeare controversy, thrown off in the hurry of daily issues, may for the present be disregarded. The writers of such articles have never read Bacon well, if at all,—perhaps not Shakespeare thoroughly.
My work in the past eight years of constant study of the subject has led me, of necessity, through every line and word that Bacon wrote, both acknowledged and concealed, so far as the latter has been developed. The work I have done upon the word-cipher in reassembling his literature from the mosaic to its original form has given me a critical knowledge at least, and a basis perhaps possessed by few for forming, to the extent of my abilities, a critical judgment; but I would merely add, that he was, assuredly, master in many fields of which even they who knew him best were unaware.
Granting him these literary powers, was he at the same time a cipher writer? and did he particularly affect this bi-literal method of cipher writing?
For the first I refer, for brevity’s sake, to the article on cryptograms in the Encyclopoedia Britannica; and for the second to the original Latin De Augmentis Scientiarum (editions of 1623 and 1624), and its very excellent translation by Messrs. Spedding, Ellis, and Heath, where the bi-literal cipher precisely as I have used it is described and illustrated by Bacon in full, with the statement that he invented it while at the Court of France. This was between his sixteenth and eighteenth years. His first reference to it was in 1605. Its first publication was in 1623, after he had used it continuously forty-four years, confiding to it his wrongs and woes, and intending, in thus explaining and giving the key, that at some near or distant day his sorrows and his claims should be known by its decipherment.