To these Essays I have attached a carefully collated reprint of Francis Bacon's "Promus of Formularies and Elegancies," a work which is to be found in Manuscript at the British Museum in the Harleian Collection (No. 7,017.)
The folios at present known are numbered from 83 to 132, and are supposed to have been written about A.D. 1594-6, because folio 85 is dated December 5th 1594, and folio 114, January 27 1595.
The pagination of the MS. is modern, and was inserted for reference purposes when the Promus was bound up in one volume together with certain other miscellaneous manuscripts which are numbered from 1 to 82, and from 133 onwards.
A facsimile of a portion of a leaf of the Promus MS., folio 85, is given on pages 190-91, in order to illustrate Bacon's handwriting, and also to shew his method of marking the entries. It will be perceived that some entries have lines //// drawn across the writing, while upon others marks similar to the capital letters T, F, and A are placed at the end of the lines. But as the Promus is here printed page for page as in the manuscript, I am not raising the question of the signification of these marks, excepting only to say they indicate that Bacon made considerable use of these memoranda.
"Promus" means larder or storehouse, and these "Fourmes, Formularies and Elegancyes" appear to have been intended as a storehouse of words and phrases to be employed in the production of subsequent literary works.
Mrs. Pott was the first to print the "Promus," which, with translations and references, she published in 1883. In her great work, which really may be described as monumental, Mrs. Pott points out, by means of some thousands of quotations, how great a use appears to have been made of the "Promus" notes, both in the acknowledged works of Bacon and in the plays which are known as Shakespeare's.
Mrs. Pott's reading of the manuscript was extremely good, considering the great difficulty experienced in deciphering the writing. But I thought it advisable when preparing a reprint to secure the services of the late Mr. F. B. Bickley, of the British Museum, to carefully revise the whole of Bacon's "Promus." This task he completed and I received twenty-four proofs, which I caused to be bound with a title page in 1898. There were no other copies, the whole of the type having unfortunately been broken up. The proof has again been carefully collated with the original manuscript and corrected by Mr. F. A. Herbert, of the British Museum, and I have now reprinted it here, as I am satisfied that the more Bacon's Promus—the Storehouse—is examined, the more it will be recognised how large a portion of the material collected therein has been made use of in the Immortal Plays, and I therefore now issue the Promus with the present essay as an additional proof of the identity of Bacon and Shakespeare.
EDWIN DURNING-LAWRENCE.
[Illustration: Plate XLII. Facsimile of portion of Folio 85 of the Original MS of Bacon's "Promus." see page 199]
[Illustration: Plate XLIII. Portrait of Francis Bacon, from a Painting by Van Somers. Formerly in the Collection of the Duke of Fife]