‘For of the gretè clerk Grostest
I rede how busy that he was
Upon the clergie an head of brass
To forgè; and make it fortelle
Of suchè thingès as befelle.
And seven yerès besinesse
He laidè, but for the lachèsse[3]
Of half a minute of an hour ...
He lostè all that he hadde do.’
Stow tells a story of a Head of Clay, made at Oxford in the reign of Edward II., which, at an appointed time, spoke the mysterious words, ‘Caput decidetur—caput elevabitur. Pedes elevabuntur supra caput.’ Returning to Roger Bacon’s supposed invention, we find an ingenious though improbable explanation suggested by Sir Thomas Browne, in his ‘Vulgar Errors’:
‘Every one,’ he says, ‘is filled with the story of Friar Bacon, that made a Brazen Head to speak these words, “Time is.” Which, though there went not the like relations, is surely too literally received, and was but a mystical fable concerning the philosopher’s great work, wherein he eminently laboured: implying no more by the copper head, than the vessel wherein it was wrought; and by the words it spake, than the opportunity to be watched, about the tempus ortus, or birth of the magical child, or “philosophical King” of Lullius, the rising of the “terra foliata” of Arnoldus; when the earth, sufficiently impregnated with the water, ascendeth white and splendent. Which not observed, the work is irrecoverably lost.... Now letting slip the critical opportunity, he missed the intended treasure: which had he obtained, he might have made out the tradition of making a brazen wall about England: that is, the most powerful defence or strongest fortification which gold could have effected.’
An interpretation of the popular myth which is about as ingenious and far-fetched as Lord Bacon’s expositions of the ‘Fables of the Ancients,’ of which it may be said that they possess every merit but that of probability!
Bacon’s Brazen Head, however, took hold of the popular fancy. It survived for centuries, and the allusions to it in our literature are sufficiently numerous. Cob, in Ben Jonson’s comedy of ‘Every Man in his Humour,’ exclaims: ‘Oh, an my house were the Brazen Head now! ’Faith, it would e’en speak Mo’ fools yet!’ And we read in Greene’s ‘Tu Quoque’:
‘Look to yourself, sir;
The brazen head has spoke, and I must have you.’
Lord Bacon used it happily in his ‘Apology to the Queen,’ when Elizabeth would have punished the Earl of Essex for his misconduct in Ireland:—‘Whereunto I said (to the end utterly to divert her), “Madam, if you will have me speak to you in this argument, I must speak to you as Friar Bacon’s head spake, that said first, ‘Time is,’ and then, ‘Time was,’ and ‘Time would never be,’ for certainly” (said I) “it is now far too late; the matter is cold, and hath taken too much wind.”’ Butler introduces it in his ‘Hudibras’:—‘Quoth he, “My head’s not made of brass, as Friar Bacon’s noddle was.”’ And Pope, in ‘The Dunciad,’ writes:—‘Bacon trembled for his brazen head.’ A William Terite, in 1604, gave to the world some verse, entitled ‘A Piece of Friar Bacon’s Brazen-head’s Prophecie.’ And, in our own time, William Blackworth Praed has written ‘The Chaunt of the Brazen Head,’ which, in his prose motto, he (in the person of Friar Bacon) addresses as ‘the brazen companion of his solitary hours.’
FOOTNOTES
[2] Epistola Fratris Rogerii Baconis de Secretis Operibus Artis et Naturæ et de Nullitate Magiæ.
[3] Laches, oversight.