Herbert. That dedication, printed in prose, opens with the words: To his Very Good Friend, Mr. George Herbert. The pains, that it pleased you to take, about some of my Writings, I cannot forget: which did put me in minde, to Dedicate to you this poor exercise of my Sickness. Those words prove that George Herbert had assisted in editing or publishing some printed works, and that in token of gratitude Bacon had dedicated to him the translations of the psalms. On closer examination, however, we shall find that a colon, the sign we have so often met with in other passages, placed here after the word "forget," divides the whole sentence into two equal parts. To be brief, we have before us a rhythmical composition of four lines in heroic verse: "Forget" rhymes with "Dedicate "; the last word of the sentence Sickness," which should rhyme with "about," does not rhyme with it. Now, what "Sickness could Bacon have been suffering from? Evidently from none attended with fever, nor scarcely from one that kept him in bed. Indeed, he had inherited his father's and his brother's chief ailment, one to which Francis Bacon himself had long been a victim, and which is very common among Englishmen to this day-" gout." We found a vexing rhyme in Hamlet-here we have just such another, and we feel inclined to call out with Horatio: "You might have rhymed!" Let us then substitute the word "gout" for "Sickness" (as in Hamlet "ass" for "pajock"), and the four verses rhyme. The fact that in the first line a preposition, "about," takes the rhyme, need not distress us, for similar rhymes are of frequent occurrence in the Shakespeare plays. With the suggested alteration, the opening sentence of the dedicatory words to the volume of psalms would run thus: The pains, that it pleased you to take, about some of my Writings, I cannot forget: which did put me in minde, to Dedicate to you, this poor Exercise of my-Gout (Bacon's Sickness). So that not only in the psalms dedicated to Marquis Fiatt (lost to us), but right here in the psalms openly written in verse-form, in the very first place that offered itself, concealed in the preface written in proseform, we discover a verselet "curiously rhymed" in the very first sentence of the book. Besides the psalms, two short poems discovered later are said to have been written by Bacon, and have lately been added to the complete edition of his works. One is cast in Alexandrines, the other in a mellifluous form of iambic verse, the lines varying from five to two feet. The first stanza of the secondnamed poem runs thus : The world's a bubble, and the life of man less than a span ; In his conception wretched, from the womb Curst from his cradle, and brought up to years Who then to frail mortality shall trust, But limns the water, or but writes in dust. "The world's a bubble "-whom does that not remind of certain passages in the Plays? "Frail" the very word conjures up Hamlet. "But writes in dust"-who can help recalling the line in Henry the Eighth: "Their virtues we write in water?" I am not aware of any passage in literature in which the nothingness of human life is expressed in terms of profounder sadness and in a sweeter tone. The following, though in parts a somewhat free translation, retains the rhyme and metre of the original : Die Welt ist Tand, des Menschenlebens Traum Vom Mutterschoss durch Elend rings umdroht Mit Sorgen wächst es auf von Kindesbein, Wer drum der schwachen Sterblichkeit vertraut, VIII FRANCIS BACON, THE ANECDOTIST Et quod tentabat Dicere, Versus erat. Ovidii Tristia. As the psalms afforded us convincing evidence of the poet in Bacon and of his mastery over poetic form, so must his " Apophthegmes," published at the same time, prove him to have been a man of bright humour and ready wit. And while the former testify to his ability to write serious rhyme, the latter, as we shall soon see, will prove him an adept at comic rhyme. Francis Bacon published his "Apophthegmes New and Old," together with his psalms, shortly before Christmas 1624, with the year 1625 on the title-page; neither had ever heen printed before, and both bore his name in the title. Bacon never for a moment thought it below his dignity to collect, edit and publish such things as apophthegmes and anecdotes, for, as we learn from the first sentence of the preface to the book: "JULIUS CÆSAR did write a Collection of Apophthegms, as appears in an epistle of Cicero." And, surely, what Julius Cæsar, his avowed favourite, had done, whose praises he sings over and over again, that our Francis Bacon might also do. For, as the preface goes on to say: They are mucrones verborum, pointed speeches. They serve to be interlaced in continued speech. They serve to be recited upon occasion of themselves. They serve if you take out the kernel of them, and make them your own. Weighty importance, however, attaches to the marginal note added to said preface by his secretary Rawley, as the editor of the later editions: This collection his Lp. made out of his Memory, without turning any Book. In other words, Bacon was so familiar with those anecdotes, as to be able to dictate them one after the other to his clerk-a proof not only of the extraordinary memory of the man, but, above all, of the vein of humour he possessed. For, we must remember: the collection contains no fewer than 280 anecdotes ! And Bacon relates them all, without the aid of a book! How often, before he had them written down, must Bacon have recounted these miniature stories with their humorous points, to the delight of his friends. This argument is fully borne out by his secretary Rawley, a regular guest when Bacon had his friends around him, who says in the short essay: "The Life of Francis Bacon," 1657: "His Meals were Refections of the Ear as well as of the Stomach, like the Noctes Attica" (that is the title of a book by Gellius, the great Roman essayist and recounter of anecdotes). "And I have known some," Rawley continues, "of no mean Parts, that have professed to make use of their Note-Books, when they have risen from his G |