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.

Rawley’s Notebook

As the next anecdote in English writing begins with the words: “The same Mr. Bacon,” there can be no doubt, but that Bacon was also meant in the first apophthegm, by the words “My Lord,” contained therein. Rawley’s notebook had been begun in September 1626, i.e., not until after Bacon’s death. And yet, for all that, such precautions on the part of his secretary. Another entry of interest also emanated from Bacon’s lips, for the “He” referred to is none other than Bacon. The anecdote had evidently never been told outside the most intimate circle, and Rawley thought it better, even in this case, to enter it cautiously (curiously) in his notebook. Using the same key, the words read: “He thought Moses was the greatest sinner that was, for he never knew any break both tables at once but he.” To consider Moses a sinner who broke all the Ten Commandments at once, was a thought, which, in the year 1626, it was wise to express in a secret (veiled) language, by means of a cipher.

If we take up Bacon’s works themselves, we shall find, wherever we turn, that he was thoroughly versed in all occult arts. The cipher employed by Rawley, which we referred to above, was a very simple one for those times. Francis Bacon himself, in his work De Augmentis Scientiarum (1623), devotes whole pages to the subject of ciphers and secret or occult methods of instruction. He discusses the special method how one ought to bring forward, and speak upon, a subject or matter that were of too dangerous a nature for the general public, as being too new and too exciting. It may then be expressed by mouth, written, yea even printed, and yet only the initiated, only the filii will know what is really meant thereby. Bacon enumerates a whole series of such methods, and then goes on to mention briefly the various kinds of ciphers, dwelling longer upon one, which, as a young diplomatist in France, where he was attaché to the English Embassy, he had invented himself. By this method it is possible to express omnia per omnia. [all by all].

It is based upon the employment of two alphabets differing but slightly from each other, every five letters to which mean a secret letter. With its aid one might write, for instance, Tennyson’s Locksley Hall, and the initiated would decipher The May Queen from it. The disguising piece need only contain at least five times as many letters as the piece to be disguised. A favourite and frequently quoted saying of Bacon’s, is the line from Solomon’s Proverbs (xxv. 2): “It is the glory of God to conceal a thing; but the honour of Kings to search for matter.” But Bacon alters the wording and addresses the proverb in a passage directly to King James, when he says “The glory of God is to conceal a thing, but the glory of the King is to find it out.” Thus in The Advancement of Learning. In the Latin edition of that work, however, in De Augmentis Scientiarum, the proverb undergoes a still greater change in the same place, having assumed this form: Gloria Dei est celare verbum, et gloria Regis investigare sermonem, [The glory of God is to conceal a word (or a name, for verbum also means that) and the glory of the King is to investigate speech; King is to investigate speech.] In his work De Sapientia Veterum [The Wisdom of the Ancients] Bacon seeks to fathom the deepest meaning of the Greek primitive fables, to solve their mystery.

The old French edition of the seventeenth century shows right on the title of the book the version la Sagesse mysterieuse des Anciens. In order, however, to show clearly how much mystery attaches to Bacon’s works and to everything he did and said, let us briefly examine one of his books, the complete edition of the Essays (1625). There are few works of the kind, in which men of thought, poets and proverbs are so frequently quoted. Here we find quotations from Aristophanes, Virgil, Horace, Lucrece, Seneca, Rabelais, Montaigne, Machiavelli, from Solomon and other biblical authors, we are indeed afforded a rich selection from Grecian, Roman, French, Italian and Hebrew writings. But we do not find one single quotation from the whole of our English literature. In fact, the only English book mentioned in the Essays, is Bacon’s own History of King Henry the Seventh of England. It would seem as though for Bacon, the essayist, the man versed in the literature of every civilised nation, there had never existed such a man as Shakespeare, or Ben Jonson, and their great predecessors; and yet in those very years the first Shakespeare Folio edition had appeared, and Ben Jonson, the dramatist, had lived with Bacon for five years.

The idea of “casting a spear” applied to a quotation from Virgil, which Bacon (as he was wont to do) alters to suit himself, thus effecting a most singular combination. In his Advancement of Learning (1605), he quotes a passage from Virgil, the original wording of which is: “My right hand and the spear which I shake, be my God (my guardian spirit); may they now assist me.” Librare is to shake; telum is the spear, the added word missile makes it more than ever the “hurled spear.” The arbitrary alteration of Virgil’s words, the wording of the original edition of the Advancement of Learning (1605) and also the edition of 1633 runs thus: “My right hand and the useless hurling-spear, which I shake, be my God (my guardian spirit); may they now assist me.” Spedding tries to put it down to, and explain it away as, a printer’s error; but he is not quite sure about it; he does not exactly know what to make of it. To be sure, a telum inutile [a useless spear], represented as God or a guardian spirit, is indeed contradictory to reason. The contradiction ceases, however, the moment we read the passage in the sense in which the author Bacon meant it to be read: “My right hand and the useless Shakespeare be my guardian spirit.” But when, immediately after his death, those thirty-two elegies were published in Latin, which bemoaned him as the foremost of the English poets, as the favourite of Melpomene, the comparison to the hurling-spear recurs repeatedly. [Also see Appendices: Manes Verulamiani.]

Ben Jonson’s significant poem, that contains the line: “Thou stand’st as if a mystery thou didst!” In that poem, Jonson sang the praises of Francis Bacon on the occasion of his sixtieth birthday. Jonson would sing the praises of the sixty-year-old Lord Chancellor, he would extol the man whose birthday was to be celebrated, and he begins with the words: “Hail, happy genius of this ancient pile.” And how antiquated, how far-fetched the word “pile” for house, building, palace, even in those days. Was Ben Jonson such a clumsy poet? He chose that ambiguous word as being the one with which to conclude the first line, rhyming with the following one, and which conveys at once the idea of “house” and “hurling-spear,” i.e., a word which (like his “Shake-lance”) again means Shakespeare.

Pilum in Latin, as “pile” in English, means “hurling-spear.” Muret’s carefully compiled dictionary will convince any one who might entertain a doubt. There we find the original meaning of “pile.” It is not the Genius of the house in which Bacon was born and in which he lived; it is above all his great fellow poet Shakespeare that Ben Jonson addresses in the opening line: “Hail, happy genius of the ancient Shakespeare.” Three lines further we read the words: “Thou stand’st as if a mystery thou didst!” And towards the end we find another play on words suited to the times and the occasion.

Bacon, the man whose sixtieth birthday is being celebrated, is to be extolled. Is it likely that such a poem should terminate with lines referring to another person? Does the word “King,” at the end, really refer to King James? If we listen attentively, we shall find that also that word refers rather to Bacon. The meaning of the two last lines is: “Give me a deep-bowl’d crown, that I may sing, in raising him (Bacon), the wisdom of my King.” No doubt, it was very nice of Ben Jonson to extol the wisdom of King James, who had appointed Bacon Lord Chancellor. But the idea which the witty author of those verses had in his mind surely was: I, the poet, Ben Jonson, in extolling the poet Bacon, sing the praises of my King, the King of England’s Poets, Shakespeare, the ancient Pile, who did a mystery. (Bormann). 1

In the Introduction to his Philosophers Satyrs, 1616, Robert Anton seems to point, in the following passage, at the hack-writers of his time, who made money out of the eccentricities or irregularities of celebrated persons by publishing their “jests” immediately after their death, as well as at those who made in a similar manner a commodity of their own frailties or adventures. “How poor a graduate is learning,” says he, “when it keeps acts in tenebris, and murders the Press with felonious pamphlets stolen from the imperfections of their dearest friends, nay, purloined from their own scabbed dispositions and ulcerous inclinations.” (Hazlitt). 2 [Also see Appendices: Condemned.]