The collecting together of these books originated with that distinguished Baconian scholar, Mr. W. M. Safford. For years past he has been steadily engaged in reconstituting Bacon's Library. The writer has had the privilege of being associated with him in this work during the past three years. A collection of nearly two thousand volumes has been gathered together. The annotations on the margins of these books are unquestionably the work of one man, and that man, or rather boy and man, was undoubtedly Francis Bacon. The books bear date from 1470 to 1620. It is impossible to enumerate them all here, but they include the works of Seneca, Aristotle, Plato, Horace, Alciat, Lucanus, Dionysius, Catullus, Lactinius, Plutarch, Pliny, Aristophanes, Plautus, Cornelius Agrippa, Cicero, Vitruvius, Euclid, Virgil, Ovid, Lucretius, Apuleius, Salust, Tibullus, Isocrates, and hundreds of other classical writers; St. Augustine, St. Jerome, Calvin, Beza, Beda, Erasmus, Martin Luther, J. Cammerarius, Sir Thomas Moore, Machiavelli, and other more modern writers.
The handwriting varies,[52] but there is a particular hand which is found accompanied by a boy's sketches. There are drawings of full-length figures, heads of men and women, animals, birds, reptiles, ships, castles, cathedrals, cities, battles, storms, etc. The writing is a strong, clerkly student's hand. There is a passage in "Hamlet," Act V., scene ii., which is noteworthy. Hamlet, speaking to Horatio, says:—
"I sat me down
Devised a new commission; wrote it fair;
I once did hold it, as our statists do,
A baseness to write fair, and labour'd much
How to forget that learning; but, Sir, now
It did me yeomans service."
The nature of this statement is so personal that it could only have been written as the result of experience. Hamlet had been taught, when young, to write a hand so fair that he was capable of producing a fresh commission which would pass muster as the work of a Court copyist. The annotation of these books possessed the same qualification. In the margins of these books are abundant references in handwriting to the whole range of classical authors.
A copy of the "Grammatice Compendium" of Lactus Pomponius, a very rare book printed by De Fortis in Venice in 1484, contains on the margins the boy's scribble and drawings, besides a number of manuscript notes. It bears traces of his reading probably at eight years of age. A large folio volume entitled "T. Livii Palvini Latinæ Historiæ Principis Decades Tres," published by Frobenius in 1535, is a treasure. It is most copiously annotated and embellished with sketches. The notes are usually in Latin, but interspersed with Greek and sometimes with English. Obviously the writer thought in Latin, and the character of the drawings justifies the assumption that, at the time, his age would be from ten to fourteen years.
The most remarkable reference to these annotations is to be found in the "Rape of Lucrece." The fifteenth stanza is as follows:—
"But she that never cop't with straunger eies,
Could picke no meaning from their parling lookes,
Nor read the subtle shining secrecies
Writ in the glassie margents of such bookes,
Shee toucht no unknown baits, nor feared no hooks,
Nor could shee moralize his wanton sight
More than his eies were opend to the light."
It would be difficult to conceive a more inappropriate simile for the lustful looks in Tarquin's eyes than "the subtle shining secrecies, writ in the glassie margents of such books." That this is lugged in for a purpose outside the object of the poem is manifest. How many readers of "Lucrece" would know of such a practice? Nay. If it did exist, was not its use very rare?
But the margin of the verse itself yields a subtle shining secret! The initial letters of the lines are B, C, N, W, Sh, N, M. It is only necessary to supply the vowels—BACoN, W. Sh., NaMe. Sh is on line 103, which is the numerical value of the word Shakespeare. The numerical value of Bacon is 33. In view of this the line 33 is significant:—"Why is Colatine the publisher?" The use of the word publisher here is quite inappropriate. It is introduced for some reason outside the purpose of the text.
The "Rape of Lucrece" commences with Bacon's monogram and, as the late Rev. Walter Begley pointed out, ends with his signature.