A Finding List: Part 3.

Elizabethan Facts and Historical References

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Pallas AthenA Was the goddess of wisdom, poetry, and the fine arts. Her statue stood on the Acropolis, wearing a helmet on which were figured the heads of two goats. On her breast was the celebrated aegis, made of goatskins. The goat was sacred to the drama, the word “goat” in Greek being trάgos, which, combined with adein (to sing), forms trago-dia, tragedy, or literally, goatsong. The name of Pallas was derived from Pallein, to shake, evidently in reference to the spear which she held in her right hand, and which was seventy feet in length. She was thus the Spear-shaker, or Shake-spear, of the Greek drama. The use of such a pseudonym was quite in Bacon’s manner. He thought at one time of publishing his great work on the Interpretation of Nature under a fictitious name. Indeed, he prepared to divide it into two parts, with a special pseudonym for each; one part in which he should appear as author, [Valerius Terminus] and the other in which he should appear as editor. [Hermes Stella]. His choice of names for these parts is significant; it shows that he gave no little attention to matters of this kind, and that he was fond of using classic models for his purpose. As author, in this instance, he selected the name of Valerius Terminus, evidently intending thereby to intimate that the work in question was destined (as Mr. Spedding expresses it) “to put an end to the wandering of mankind in search of truth.” As editor or annotator, he chose the name of Hermes Stella; Hermes being in Greek mythology the interpreter of the gods, and Stella signifying that the full meaning of the text could not at once be disclosed, but would be seen, as it were, by starlight. (Reed). 1
We are told that upon the death of his wife Metis, Jupiter, in order to relieve the pains in his head, ordered Vulcan to cleave it open 2 and Minerva leaped forth from her father’s brain: full grown and armed with her ægis. Hence some have explained her epithet,Tritogeneia, from a Cretan word, trito, the “head,” so that it would mean the Goddess born from the head. “When the blue-eyed Goddess sprang in shining armour from Jove’s immortal head, Olympus shook, earth and sea trembled, and the charioteer of the sun stopped his snorting steeds until she took off the divine weapons from her shoulder.” 3 Hence Minerva was always the favourite of Jupiter; she could hurl his thunders, and she defeated Mars when she met him in the conflict before Troy. She is the Goddess of wisdom; she can bestow the gift of prophecy; and her clearness of understanding is rivalled only by her firmness of resolution and her vigour in action. Some mythologists suppose Minerva to be identical with the Egyptian Goddess Neith, that she was born in Libya near the Lake Tritonis, and that her worship was introduced into Attica by Cecrops, from Sais in lower Egypt.
The worship of Minerva is diversified, like that of the other deities, according as she is viewed under different aspects. As the Goddess of high places, she was worshipped on the promontory of Sunium [modern: Sounio] in Attica; and hence Euripides, in his Cyclops, styles it the “rich rock of Sunium,” in allusion to the wealth of her temple. As the protecting Goddess of the city and the Acropolis (citadel), she was worshipped in the Thessalian Larissa, Sicyon, Epidaurus, Thebes, Argos, Trœzen. As the patron divinity of the state, she also maintained the authority of law, justice, and order in the courts and the assembly of the people; hence her epithets, the “avenger” as presiding over the senate and the forum. She is believed to have instituted the ancient court of the Areopagus; and, in cases where the votes of the judges were equal, she gave the “casting vote” in favour of the accused. The olive-tree was sacred to Minerva; the owl, as the bird of wisdom, was her symbol on Athenian coins; the cock, as the bird of courage, was sometimes perched upon her helmet; the dragon among reptiles was sacred to her, in reference probably to the head of Medusa. In some medals a chariot drawn by four horses appears at the top of her helm.
Pallas AthenA was tlie tutelar Divinity of the Greeks. The name Pallas was derived from Palléin, meaning to shake, evidently so called from the fact that she is represented in statuary art as armed with a spear. On the Acropolis in Athens where her statue by Phidias was long the wonder of the world, the spear rose far above her head; it is said to have been seventy feet in length. In Liddell and Scott’s Greek-English lexicon her name is given etymologically as “The Brandisher of the Spear.” The Romans, viewing her in the light of her intellectual qualities, called her Minerva, a word derived from mews, signifying mind. With them accordingly she was the personification of thought; thus under the two appellations combined she is presented to us by these great nations as the Divine symbol of wisdom and power. Her father, Zeus, was the greatest of the gods, and her mother, Metis, the wisest of them. Among the ancients, therefore, Pallas AthenA naturally became the patroness of learning. As such she was universally worshipped. The great temple of learning in Athens, where poets, philosophers and men of letters generally were accustomed to meet and to read their works for the instruction of others, was named for her, Athenaeum (Athene). In the second century of the Christian era, Hadrian founded a similar institution in Rome under the same sacred name. Indeed, this has been the custom in nearly all literary communities throughout the world (as in Paris, London, Berlin, Boston, Brunswick and elsewhere) to the present day, however unconscious modern generations may be that the brightest, most god-like image of the highest civilization which the world has ever known is still animating and inspiring them. Athens, the home of the noblest cult; Pallas AthenA, the recognized source of its intellectual and moral power. That is to say, the goddess with her spear stands for the strength that is always inherent in the cause of truth.
Another and deeper view of the subject remains to be considered. Pallas AthenA represents not only art in general but also in the highest sense precisely that branch of art to which the plays of Shakespeare belong. Richard de Bury, who was High Chancellor of England in the fifteenth century and one of the most learned men of that age, attributed to Minerva (or Pallas AthenA) a special function in literature, thus: “The wisdom of the ancients devised a way of inducing men to study truth by means of pious frauds, the delicate Minerva secretly lurking beneath the mask of pleasure.” This was published under the title, A vindication of Poetry, meaning, of course, epic or dramatic poetry, such as the Greek poets have given us, and such as Macbeth, King Lear and Anthony and Cleopatra are now recognized to be. These and all others of their kind, viewed historically, are what was meant by de Bury as “pious frauds.” It thus appears that in the highest cultivated circles of England, long before the time of Francis Bacon, Pallas AthenA was indentified with the Dramatic instinct, and became an exceedingly appropriate pseudonym for the author of plays to be known as Shakespeare’s, or as those of the goddess, so named. Reverend George Dawson of Birmingham, England, one of the most distinguished Shakespearean scholars of recent years, thus explained why the author of the Shakespeare plays, thought it necessary to conceal his true name and to write under a pseudonym: “There is heresy enough in Shakespeare to have carried him to endless stakes; political liberty enough to have made him a glorious jacobin. If he had appeared as a Divine, the authorities would have burned him; as a politician, they would have beheaded him.”
We must not forget that in one of Bacon’s Latin tracts (never translated into English by his biographer Spedding) he admits that he often wrote “behind a mask’, or under a pseudonym. Sir Philip Sidney uttered a similar sentiment in his Apology for Poetry in Bacon’s own time, thus: “The philosophers of Greece durst not for a long time appear to the world but under the mask of poets.” Bacon himself says: “In olden time metaphorical [or dramatic] writings were employed as a method of teaching, whereby what is new and abstruse may find an easier passage to the understanding. It was on this account that the world was then full of fables and parables of all sorts; and even now, if any one should wish to let new light on any subject into men’s minds, and without offense or harshness, one must still go the same way, and call in the aid of the imagination. Metaphorical writing has ever been a kind of ark in which the most precious things of life are preserved. It is in truth philosophy, and I hold it to be, in honor and importance, next to religion.” (Bacon, Wisdom of the Ancients). Furthermore, what has hitherto been inexplicable, the existence of a hyphen between the two syllables, Shake and speare, as printed in many of the original quartos and also in the First Folio of 1623. It occurs fifteen times in the early editions, and therefore cannot be, as claimed by our friends who advocate the cause of superstition in this controversy, a printer’s blunder, for it must have been made, if made in that way at all, at many different times and in many different places. No other similar name, pseudonymous or otherwise, has ever been found in the history of the world. It is  precisely the one, translated from the Greek word Pallas, without the change of a single letter, and including also the strange hyphen, under which the Shakespeare dramas were actually written.

Palladis Tamia, Wits Treasury The obligation of Francis Meres, when compiling a comparative discourse of the English poets, with the Greek, Latin, and Italian poets, stated “I have had occasion to notice in another place J. Cambro-Vaughan, and also Henry Peacham, derived their information from the same unacknowledged authority.” 4 In 1599 appeared Granada’s Devotion teaching how a man may truly dedicate and devote himself unto God: and so become his acceptable votary. Written in Spanish by the learned and reverend Divine F. Lewes of Granada. Since this work has been translated into Latin, Italian and French, and now perused in English by Francis Meres, Master of Artes, and student in Divinity, London, 1698. This is dedicated “to the worshipful and virtuous Gentleman M. William Sammes of the Middle Temple, Esquire,” as one devout in religion and learned in knowledge, because “the wittiest Emblematists’ will that in presentation of gifts we should a collection of moral sentences from ancient writers collect” and which Wood considered “a noted school-book.” From the comparative discourse upon our English poets, the work obtained considerable repute. Heywood in his Apology for Actors, calls him an approved good scholar, and says his Account of Authors is learnedly done. Oldys speaks of him as of no small reputation at that time for his moral and poetical writings. Meres’ reading was general and extensive, and the connecting his numerous transcripts shows taste, research, and strong critical judgment. The reader will not consider it to depreciate the labour of the author, that many of his authorities were gathered from his first book of Puttenham’s Art of English Poesie, and in particular should fit the humour of the party, to whom they are presented, as to send “black to mourners, white to religious people, green to youth and them that lie in hope, yellow to the covetous and Jealous, tawny to the man refus’d, red to martial captains, blue to mariners, violet to prophets and diviners, medley, gray and russet to the poor and meaner sort.”

And little boies, whom shamfastnes did grace,
The Romans deck’d in scarlet like their face. 5

In 1598 was published Palladis Tamia, Wits Treasury. Being the second part of Wits Commonwealth, 1598. p. 340. Again 1634 to which an engraved title was added as Witts Academy, a Treasury of Golden Sentences, &c. 1636. In 1637 appeared Politeuphia, or Wits Commonwealth, which was compiled by John Bodenham, and probably being well received suggested the attempt for making the Palladis Tamia a second part. They are never found together. About 1602, Meres became rector of Wing in the county of Rutland, and continued to hold it for the remainder of his life. Wood notes the Sinner’s Guide of the whole Regiment of Christian Life (1614). 6 [See Appendices Palladis Tamia Wit’s Treasury].

Paper Making of the Age “Paper,” observed Fuller 7 “is entered as a manufacture of Cambridgeshire because there are mills nigh Sturbridge fair, where paper was made in the memory of our fathers. Pity the making thereof is disused, considering the vast sums yearly expended in our land for paper out of Italy, France, and Germany, which might be lessened were it made in our nation.” The first successful attempt to manufacture an article resembling modern paper, so far as we know, was made in Egypt at a very remote time. An aquatic plant, known to us as papyrus, having a soft cellular flower-stem, afforded the material. The stem of the plant grew from ten to twenty feet high, of a triangular shape, from the thin coats or pellicles of which the paper was made. These were separated by means of a pin, or pointed muscle-shells, and spread on a table sprinkled with Nile water, in such a form as the size of the sheets required, and washed over with the same. On the first layer of these slips, a second was placed cross-wise, so as to form a sheet of convenient thickness, which, after being pressed and dried in the sun, was polished with a shell or other hard and smooth substance. Twenty sheets was the utmost that could be separated from one stalk, and those nearest the pith made the finest paper. The Romans at a later day improved upon the papyrus made by the Egyptians; they sized it in a similar manner to that pursued with rag-paper, making their size of the finest flour. The paper of the Romans was very white; that of the Egyptians of a yellowish or brown tinge. The Egyptian paper was manufactured in Alexandria and other cities of Egypt in such large quantities that one individual boasted of the possession of so much paper that its revenue would maintain a numerous army. Alexandria was for a long time solely in the enjoyment of this manufacture, and acquired immense riches by it. Europe and Asia were supplied there from during several centuries. The art of making paper from fibrous matter reduced to a pulp in water, appears to have been first discovered by the Chinese about a thousand years ago.
The Chinese paper is commonly supposed to be made of silk; but silk alone cannot be reduced to a pulp suitable for making paper. Refuse silk is said to be occasionally used with other ingredients, but the greater part of the Chinese paper is made from the inner bark of the bamboo and mulberry tree, hempen rags, &c. The latter are prepared for paper by being cut and well washed in tanks. They are then bleached and dried; in twelve days they are converted into a pulp, which is then made into balls of about four pounds weight. These are afterwards saturated with water and made into paper on a frame of fine reeds; and are dried by being pressed under large stones. A second drying operation is performed by fastening the sheets on the walls of a room. The sheets are then coated with gum size, and polished with stones. They also make paper from cotton and linen rags, and a coarse yellow sort from rice straw, which is used for wrapping. They are enabled to make sheets of a large size, the mould on which the pulp is made into paper being sometimes ten or twelve feet long, and very wide, and managed by means of pulleys. The article popularly known as Chinese rice paper, is prepared from the pith of a plant, which is cut spirally into a thin slice, and when spread out and compressed, forms a light and fragile sheet, sometimes a foot in length, and five or six inches in breadth.
The Japanese prepare paper from the mulberry as follows: in the month of December the twigs are cut into lengths, not exceeding thirty inches, and put together in bundles. These fagots are then placed upright in a large vessel containing an alkaline ley, and boiled till the bark shrinks so as to allow about a half an inch of the wood to appear free at the top. After they are thus boiled, they are exposed to a cool atmosphere, when the bark is stripped from the wood and dried, and laid away for future use. When a sufficient quantity has been thus collected, it is soaked in water three or four days, when a blackish skin which covered it is scraped off. At the same time also the stronger bark, which is of a full year’s growth, is separated from the thinner, which covered the younger branches, and which yields the best and whitest paper.
The ancient Mexicans also, were found to have a kind of paper prepared from the maguey plant, or American aloe, the product of which resembled the papyrus of the Egyptians, and took ink and colour well.
The Arabians, in the seventh century, appear to have either discovered, or to have learned from the Chinese or Hindoos, quite likely from the latter, the art of making paper from cotton; for it is known that a manufactory of such paper was established at Samarcand about the year 706 A.D. The Arabians seem to have carried the art to Spain, and to have there made paper from linen and hemp as well as from cotton. The art of manufacturing paper from cotton is supposed to have found its way into Europe in the eleventh century.
The Greeks, it is said, made use of cotton paper before the Latins. It came into Germany through Venice, and was called Greek parchment.
The Moors, who were the paper-makers of Spain, having been expelled by the Spaniards, the latter, acquainted with water mills improved the manufacture so as to produce a paper from cotton nearly equal to that made of linen rags. It is not known when cotton paper was introduced into England, but it appears that its use continued until the latter part of the fourteenth century, when it was gradually supplanted by linen paper, which began to be used in 1342.
Paper manufactures early became a very flourishing product in France, and the paper-makers in that country soon excelled their neighbours in the art, and were therefore enabled to export considerable quantities, which increased so much yearly, that in 1658 two million francs in value was exported to Holland alone; and it provided Spain, England, Switzerland, Denmark, Sweden, Russia, but chiefly Holland, and the Levant, with paper for printing and waiting; and as to the 1800’s twenty-five thousand reams were annually exported to Switzerland and Germany. But at this time the art of paper-making had arrived at a great degree of perfection in England and Holland, whereby the export from France was so much reduced, that, of four hundred paper-mills in two provinces, three hundred were discontinued.
The chronology of paper-making from 1558 to 1635 one year before Francis Bacon died: 8

• 1558. Churchyard’s Spark of Friendship was first printed this year, and mentions the paper mill of Spilman, which is often quoted as the first paper mill in England under the date of 1588, q.v.
• 1562. A work printed in this year mentions a paper mill at Fen Ditton, near Cambridge, England.
• 1564. Charles IX., of France having put an impost upon paper, the University brought the subject before the Parliament, when Montholon and De Thou advocated the abolition of the tax, and the University gained its cause.
• 1565. Charles IX., of France, at the remonstrance of the University and the decision of the Parliament, abolished the duty which he had laid upon paper.
• 1588. Nicholas, in his Progresses of Queen Elizabeth., gives a poem with the following title A Description and Playne Discourse of Paper, and the whole Benefits that Paper brings, with Rehearsall, and setting foorth in Verse a Paper-myll built near Darthforth, by a high Germaine, called Master Spilman, Jeweller to the Queene’s Majestie. This is supposed to have been the second paper mill in England, and is often mentioned as the first. It was erected by a German named Spielman, or Spilman, in reward of which he received from Elizabeth the honour of Knighthood in 1591. A document in the Land Revenue Records of England, reads: “Fenclifton, Co. Cambridge; lease of a water mill called paper mills, late of the bishopric of Ely, to John George, dated 14th July, 34th Eliz.” This is evidence of a third paper mill in England at this time.

Master Spilman, 9 Jeweller to the Queen’s Majesty 10
By Thomas Churchyard
(Then) he that made for us a paper-mill,
Is worthy well of love and world’s good will,
And though his name be Spill-man, by degree,
Yet Help-man now, he shall be called by me.
Six hundred men are set at work by him,
That else might starve, or seek abroad their bread;
Who now live well, and go full brave and trim,
And who may boast they are with paper fed.
A high Germaine he is, as may be proved,
In Lyndoam Bodenze, borne and bred,
And for this mill, may here be truly loved,
And praised, too, for deep device of head.

• 1635. Under the reign of Louis XIII., of France, an impost upon paper was established, but with the condition that the fermier should pay each year the sum often thousand livres to the royal printing office and the University of Paris.

Paradoxes not written by Bacon Grosart’s little book 11 probably was of the main interest and value to prove that the memorials were extrinsic, as enabling finally to determine the non-Baconian authorship of The Paradoxes, which for upwards of three centuries have been ascribed to Francis Bacon. The facts are of importance and worthy a space in this Dictionary. Among the Thomason Tracts in the British Museum, there is an edition of The Paradoxes, printed for Richard Wodenothe, at the Star, under Peter’s Church in Cornhill (1645). It is a small 8vo, and, including title page, makes 12 pages. On the title, with his usual exactness, Thomason has written July 24, which denotes the day of publication. It does not appear who prepared and published this anonymous version. In the Epistle, there is claim that it was unauthorised to be printed by the author: “I meant thee somewhat more: but whilst (in the midst of many employments) I was getting it ready, a strange hand was like to have robbed me of the greatest part of this, by putting to the Press (unknown to me) an imperfect copy of The Paradoxes. This made me hasten to tender a true one, and to content myself for the present with the addition of the other lesser pieces which here accompany them.” This Epistle is signed “Thine and the Churches servant together, Herbert Palmer,” and is prefixed to Part II., of the Memorials this second part being added to a new edition of Part I., which had been originally published in 1644, on December 13. The “true copy” mentioned in the Epistle is arranged with the aphorisms under eighty-five heads. All the editions of the completed Memorials, from first to last, bore the name of Herbert Palmer on the title page, as well as the above separate note of The Paradoxes, as forming a portion of the volume. Spedding noted that there had been an edition published in 1643, and bearing Bacon’s name on the title page: 12 “The Character of a Believing Christian in Paradoxes and Seeming Contradictions, is said to have appeared first in 1643 as a separate pamphlet, under Bacon’s name.” Spedding’s authority is Rémusat. But on turning to Rémusat 13 it is found that Spedding has misread the date, overlooked a statement about the “three years” that elapsed between the pamphlet of 1645 and The Remains of 1648, and erred in supposing that Rémusat described the tractate of 1645 as bearing Bacon’s name. The “imperfect copy” of July 24, 1645 therefore, was the first edition of The Paradoxes, and it is anonymous. The first “true copy” is Palmer’s own in Part II., of his Memorials, published on July 25, 1645. No edition whatever bore the name of Bacon, until in 1648 The Paradoxes were included in his Remains.
How The Paradoxes came to be thus included in The Remains of Bacon a volume “to which,” observes Spedding, “nobody stands sponsor,” 14 is impossible to say. Whatever the explanation, it is plain that The Paradoxes were not Bacon’s; and that the author, Herbert Palmer, did not claim his own when they appeared in Bacon’s Remains is accounted for by Palmer’s death in the previous year, 1647. Spedding remarks, “Rawley says nothing of it: and as he can hardly be supposed to have overlooked it in the collection, his silence must be understood as equivalent to a statement that it was one of the many “pamphlets put forth under his Lordship’s name, which are not to be owned for his.” This is put at the end of the 1657 Resuscitatio. Tenison says nothing about it. No traces of it, or of any part of it, or of anything at all resembling it, are to be found among the innumerable Baconian manuscripts, fair and foul, fragments, rough notes, discarded beginnings, loose leaves, which may still be seen at Lambeth, in the British Museum, and other repositories.” 15 After Bacon’s Remains of 1648 the first edition of the Works of Bacon which included The Paradoxes was Blackburn’s (1730); from a note in which it would appear that Archbishop Sancroft revised, or, as Blackburn puts it, gave them a careful review; the meaning of which is explained to be, that he had compared it with the other copy, printed in London (1645); and by which again must be understood the anonymous edition described earlier. Ever since Blackburn’s edition, The Paradoxes have been included therein, with less or more of suspicion. [Also see Part IV: Bacon’s Works.]