Topic Two ~ The Speare

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, the editor of the complete edition of Bacon’s Works, 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.” So far Bacon himself. 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.