Bacon's DictionaryAppendices

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The exhibits and miniatures of which are found in this section, are designed to assist the serious student and reader in following the path of the Authorship Controvesy that has been so laboriously persued by many authors and researchers during its commence.

These exhibits have been placed here as not to interrupt the flow of reading in the Baconian Dictionary sections, being a finding list of Bacon’s works, his history, his thoughts and his aims, which are a subject of study and discussion.

Condemned

Thomas Babington Macaulay was an epigrammatist, even more determined than Pope. Not once or twice, not in dealing with Bacon only, but repeatedly, he hoisted some smart antithesis as the mainsail of his literary bark, and throwing away ballast and rudder, drifted away right merrily wherever the antithesis might carry him. Never did he light upon a more appetising antithesis than Pope’s lines, “Wisest, brightest, meanest;” here was an unexampled opportunity for epigrammatic effect. The contrast between the magnificent qualities, which made Bacon the wisest and brightest of the souls of men, and the base qualities which made him the meanest and most sordid, was for Macaulay an irresistible temptation. Here was a brilliant picture, full of startling contrasts, dazzling lights and deepest shadows, a picture of an intellect quite without parallel in the world’s history, associated with the most grovelling and contemptible moral character. And with this as a starting point no calumny is too gross, no misrepresentation too glaring to heighten the contrast. If Bacon, as a young man, writes to his venerated uncle Lord Burleigh a letter of modest yet dignified self-justification, Macaulay says he abases himself in the dust and “bemoans himself in language suitable to a convicted thief.” If Bacon is present, unavoidably, in a subordinate capacity, when a prisoner is tortured, the whole responsibility is attributed to him; he is pictured as taking a fiendish delight in the cruel spectacle: he goes to the Tower to “listen to the yells of Peacham.” If Buckingham writes half a dozen brief and perfunctory lines about some case pending before Bacon as Chancellor, Buckingham “dictates his decisions.” Macaulay could only have derived this information from the letters of the time, which was inserted by Abbott in 1885, when he published two books entitled Francis Bacon An Account of his Life and his Works. Within Abbott’s preliminary introduction, he goes into Bacon’s weakness as Lord Chancellor, and how Buckingham manipulated many cases. Nathaniel Holmes confers that “only some three years before the attack on Bacon, we find Buckingham and Coke fomenting charges of the like nature, and with the same corrupt and wicked purpose of creating a vacancy to be filled by some new minion, and putting up the same pretence of corruption in taking bribes, of money, a ring, a cabinet, a piece of plate, and the like, against the Lord Chancellor Egerton (Ellesmere), nearly breaking the old man’s heart; and it might have been as successful with him as it was with Bacon afterwards, had not the King himself come to his relief, and defeated the scheme by giving an Earldom to Egerton and the Seals to Bacon.” The real truth of the matter was that the age began to discover that an ancient custom needed to be reformed, because it began to be felt as a grievance and an abuse. Old black letter laws fallen obsolete, practically superseded by custom almost equally ancient, and now lying more dead than asleep, were suddenly revived and put in force, and all at once what had been a lantern to the feet became a net in the path. (Holmes). 1

Macaulay’s concern if Bacon accepts gifts from suitors; his servants are jackals and decoys hunting up garbage and prey for their insatiable and unscrupulous master. And so the reviewer piles up the agony of detraction by absolute invention of charges never dreamed of before; calumnious accusations are tossed off in reckless profusion from this nimble pen, and 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. It is, indeed, provoking that such a life as Bacon’s should be made the occasion not for calm judicial criticism, with that strong bias in his favour which so great a benefactor and so transcendent a genius has an inalienable right to expect, but an occasion simply for literary pyrotechnics.