Sir Francis Bacon
Gray's Inn
Courtesy of sirbacon.org

Lord Bacon is the greatest genius that either England or perhaps any other country ever produced - - Pope

He stands as the mark and acme of our language. It is he that hath filled up all numbers - - Ben Jonson

All who were great and good loved him...a poet but concealed - - Tobie Matthew

He was retiring, nervous, sensitive, unconventional and very modest. A man most sweet in his conversation and ways - - James Spedding

One of the broad minds of the Secret Fraternity - in fact the moving spirit of the whole enterprise - was Francis Bacon. In the sixty-sixth year of his life, having completed his work which held him in England, Francis Bacon feigned death and passed over into Germany, there to guide the destines of his philosophical and political Fraternities for nearly twenty-five years after his death - - Manley P. Hall

The life of Shake-Speare is a fine mystery, and I tremble every day lest something should turn up - - Dickens

That Bacon wrote Shakespeare, I have no more doubt than that he wrote the Novum Organum - - M. Theobald

We are compelled to fall back upon Francis Bacon himself being really our only authority, and to hold him guilty to the extent of his own confession and no further - - James Spedding

Those who have true skill in the works of Lord Verulam, can tell whether he was the author of this or the other piece though his name be not to it - - Archbishop Tenison, 1679

Among the Elizabethans, Bacon stands second in intellectual power only to Shakespeare - - A.R. Skemp

No man was ever more generally in advance of his age than Bacon, or came nearer to "surveying all things as from a lofty cliff." - - John Nichol

To get at the being of a great author, to come into relationship with his absolute personality, is the highest result of the study of his works - - Prof. Hiram Corson

Bacon’s memory is stabbed, racked, hacked, twisted, tortured, scarified, scorched, charred and carbonised; and all in order that a literary rope-dancer may amuse himself and his readers at Bacon’s expense - - Journal of the Bacon Society, #1, June 1886.

The real significance of the Promus consists in the enormous proportion of notes which Bacon could not possibly have used in his acknowledged writings; the colloquialisms, dramatic repartees, turns of expression, proverbs, etc. Any biographer of Bacon, whatever his notions as to the Shakespearean Authorship, may be reasonably expected to offer some explanation of this queer assortment of oddments, and to find out, if possible, what use Bacon made of them; and then our case becomes urgent - - R. M. Theobald, Esq., Past Secretary of the Bacon Society of London

The question why Bacon, if he were the composer of the Shakespeare Plays, did not acknowledge the authorship, is not difficult to answer. His birth, his position and his ambition forbade him, the nephew of Lord Burleigh, the future Lord Chancellor of England, to put his name on a play-bill. In the interest of his family and of his political career, the secret must be so strictly preserved that mere anonymity would not be sufficient. A live man-of-straw, a responsible official representative known to every one, was required. No person could be better fitted for such a purpose than an actor, wise enough to understand and appreciate what was to his own advantage. Perhaps this "Johannes Factotum" of Greene's did not know the name of his benefactor. But even if he did know the name, it was obviously to his interest to keep from the world, and particularly from his gossiping companions, a secret which brought him money and fame - - Allgemeine Zeitung

It was Publilius Syrus, a Roman mimographer of the time of Julius Caesar, who said that “it is scarcely possible for a god to love and be wise.” Bacon and the author of the Plays both quote the saying approvingly, but both also change its application (as above) from gods to men. Bacon’s Promus bears two dates, namely: December 5, 1594, at which time, or thereabouts, it was begun, and January 27, 1595/96, when (probably after a brief interval) work upon it was resumed - - Edwin Reed, Bacon vs Shakspere, 1905.

Atlas was represented in Atlantis by a sacred central mountain, topped with a temple and surrounded by three concentric circles of water, like Mount Meru of Hindu tradition. Atlantis represented a previous condition of the world, or that part of the world called Atlantis, which began as a paradise with humanity enjoying a golden age, but which then fell into corruption and disintegration, to be finally destroyed by a flood. The New Atlantis signifies the restoration of the world to a new paradisiacal state and golden age, which is what the Baconian project, The Great Instauration, is all about - - Peter Dawkins

He could at once imagine like a poet and execute like a clerk of the works - - James Spedding

Most of all Sr Francis Bacon’s Writings which have the freshest, and most savoury form and aptest utterances, that (as I suppose) our Tongue can bear - - Edmund Bolton, 1822

Bacon belongs not to mathematical or natural science, but to literature and to moral science in its most extensive acceptation to the realm of imagination, of wit, of eloquence, of aesthetics, of history, of jurisprudence, of political philosophy, of logic, of metaphysics, and the investigation of the powers and operations of the human mind,” and (as he might have added) the order, operation, and Mind of Nature. - - George L. Craik, LL.D.: Hist, of Eng. Lit. and Language, New York, 1862

Bacon Vicount St Alban doth far better for my Capacity distinguish them into Causes, second or scatter’d, and into Causes confederate, and knit together. In this point consisteth the principle Difficulty and mystery of Historical Office, and not only Difficulty and Mystery, but Felicity also, according to that of the Poet: Felix qui potuit rerum cognoscere causas. - - Rawlinson’s MSS. First published by Anthony Hall, Oxford, 1822; Hypercritica. 239

'I have been induced to think that if there were a beam of knowledge derived from God upon any man in these modern times, it was upon him, for though he was a great reader of books, yet he had not his knowledge from books only, but from some grounds and notions within himself - - Dr. Rawley

Analogy and antithesis, antithesis and analogy, these are the secrets of the Baconian force - - E. A. Abbott

The great glory of literature in this island, during the reign of James, was my Lord Bacon - - Hume

He [Bacon] possessed at once all those extraordinary talents which were divided amongst the greatest authors of antiquity. He had the sound, distinct, comprehensive knowledge of Aristotle, with all the beautiful lights, graces, and embellishments of Cicero. One does not know which to admire most in his writings, the strength of reason, force of style, or brightness of imagination - - Addison

Any man who believes that William Shaksper of Stratford wrote Hamlet or Lear is a fool - - John Bright

In the light of his writings, he had one great aim the good of mankind; in the light of his career one little aim the good of Francis Bacon - - Lovejoy

Nature, and Nature’s laws lay hid in night: God said, let Bacon be! and all was light - - Newton

The Lord Chancellor Bacon, is a man of a most strong brain, and a chemical head; designing his endeavours to the perfecting of the works of nature; or rather improving nature to the best advantages of life, and the common benefit of mankind. Pity it is, he is not entertained with some liberal salary, abstracted from all affairs both of Court and Judicature, and furnished with sufficiency, both of means and helps for the going on his design: which had it been, he might have given us such a body of natural philosophy, and made it so subservient to the public good, that neither Aristotle, nor Theophrastus, or the rest of our latter chemists, would have been considerable - - Dr. Peter Heylin