[222] Lansdowne MSS. 888, in the former printed catalogue, art. 79.
[223] Coins are the most dangerous things which can be exhibited to a professed collector. One of the fraternity, who died but a few years since, absolutely kept a record of his pilferings; he succeeded in improving his collection by attending sales also, and changing his own coins for others in better preservation.
[224] It is probable that this story of Gough’s pocketing the fore-finger of Edward the First, was one of the malicious inventions of George Steevens, after he discovered that the antiquary was among the few admitted to the untombing of the royal corpse; Steevens himself was not there! Sylvanus Urban (the late respected John Nichols), who must know much more than he cares to record of “Puck,”—has, however, given the following “secret history” of what he calls “ungentlemanly and unwarrantable attacks” on Gough by Steevens. It seems that Steevens was a collector of the works of Hogarth, and while engaged in forming his collection, wrote an abrupt letter to Gough to obtain from him some early impressions, by purchase or exchange. Gough resented the manner of his address by a rough refusal, for it is admitted to have been “a peremptory one.” Thus arose the implacable vengeance of Steevens, who used to boast that all the mischievous tricks he played on the grave antiquary, who was rarely over-kind to any one, was but a pleasant kind of revenge.
OF LORD BACON AT HOME.
The history of Lord Bacon would be that of the intellectual faculties, and a theme so worthy of the philosophical biographer remains yet to be written. The personal narrative of this master-genius or inventor must for ever be separated from the scala intellectûs he was perpetually ascending: and the domestic history of this creative mind must be consigned to the most humiliating chapter in the volume of human life; a chapter already sufficiently enlarged, and which has irrefutably proved how the greatest minds are not freed from the infirmities of the most vulgar.
The parent of our philosophy is now to be considered in a new light, one which others do not appear to have observed. My researches into contemporary notices of Bacon have often convinced me that his philosophical works, in his own days and among his own countrymen, were not only not comprehended, but often ridiculed, and sometimes reprobated; that they were the occasion of many slights and mortifications which this depreciated man endured; but that from a very early period in his life, to that last record of his feelings which appears in his will, this “servant of posterity,” as he prophetically called himself, sustained his mighty spirit with the confidence of his own posthumous greatness. Bacon cast his views through the maturity of ages, and perhaps amidst the sceptics and the rejectors of his plans, may have felt at times all that idolatry of fame, which has now consecrated his philosophical works.
At college, Bacon discovered how “that scrap of Grecian knowledge, the peripatetic philosophy,” and the scholastic babble, could not serve the ends and purposes of knowledge; that syllogisms were not things, and that a new logic might teach us to invent and judge by induction. He found that theories were to be built upon experiments. When a young man, abroad, he began to make those observations on nature, which afterwards led on to the foundations of the new philosophy. At sixteen, he philosophised; at twenty-six, he had framed his system into some form; and after forty years of continued labours, unfinished to his last hour, he left behind him sufficient to found the great philosophical reformation.