[367b] See Calendar of State Papers, Domestic, 1595-7, p. 310.
See Warners Catalogue of Dulwich MSS. pp. 24-6.
[368b] Cf. ibid. pp. 26-7.
[369a] See p. 235, note I.
[369b] Cf. Warner’s Dulwich MSS. pp.30-31.
[369c] See p. 254, note I.
[370] Most of those that are commonly quoted are phrases in ordinary use by all writers of the day. The only point of any interest raised in the argument from parallelisms of expression centres about a quotation from Aristotle which Bacon and Shakespeare not merely both make, but make in what looks at a first glance to be the same erroneous form. Aristotle wrote in his Nicomachean Ethics, i. 8, that young men were unfitted for the study of political philosophy. Bacon, in the Advancement of Learning (1605), wrote: ‘Is not the opinion of Aristotle worthy to be regarded wherein he saith that young men are not fit auditors of moral philosophy?’ (bk. ii. p. 255, ed. Kitchin). Shakespeare, about 1603, in Troilus and Cressida, II. ii. 166, wrote of ‘young men whom Aristotle thought unfit to hear moral philosophy.’ But the alleged error of substituting moral for political philosophy in Aristotle’s text is more apparent than real. By ‘political’ philosophy Aristotle, as his context amply shows, meant the ethics of civil society, which are hardly distinguishable from what is commonly called ‘morals.’ In the summary paraphrase of Aristotle’s Ethics which was translated into English from the Italian, and published in 1547, the passage to which both Shakespeare and Bacon refer is not rendered literally, but its general drift is given as a warning that moral philosophy is not a fit subject for study by youths who are naturally passionate and headstrong. Such an interpretation of Aristotle’s language is common among sixteenth and seventeenth century writers. Erasmus, in the epistle at the close of his popular Colloquia (Florence, 1530, sig. Q Q), wrote of his endeavour to insinuate serious precepts ‘into the minds of young men whom Aristotle rightly described as unfit auditors of moral philosophy’ (‘in animos adolescentium, quos recte scripsit Aristoteles inidoneos auditores ethicæ philosophiæ’). In a French translation of the Ethics by the Comte de Plessis, published at Paris in 1553, the passage is rendered ‘parquoy le ieune enfant n’est suffisant auditeur de la science civile;’ and an English commentator (in a manuscript note written about 1605 in a copy of the book in the British Museum) turned the sentence into English thus: ‘Whether a young man may bee a fitte scholler of morall philosophie.’ In 1622 an Italian essayist, Virgilio Malvezzi, in his preface to his Discorsi sopra Cornelio Tacito, has the remark, ‘E non è discordante da questa mia opinione Aristotele, it qual dice, che i giovani non sono buoni ascultatori delle morali’ (cf. Spedding, Works of Bacon, i. 739, iii. 440).
[371] Cf. Birch, Letters of Bacon, 1763, p. 392. A foolish suggestion has been made that Matthew was referring to Francis Bacon’s brother Anthony, who died in 1601; Matthew was writing of a man who was alive more than twenty years later.
[372] Cf. Life by Theodore Bacon, London, 1888.
[374a] See pp. 4, 77, 127.