Bacon's Essays, and Wisdom of the Ancients

10 The Solicitor-General is a law-officer inferior in rank to the Attorney-General, with whom he is associated in the management of the law business of the crown. He pleads also for private individuals, but not against government. He has a small salary, but very considerable fees. The salary in Bacon’s time was but seventy pounds.

11 Bacon was, like other courtiers, in the habit of presenting the Queen with a New Year’s gift. On one occasion, it was a white satin petticoat embroidered with snakes and fruitage, as emblems of wisdom and beauty. The donors varied in rank from the Lord Keeper down to the dust-man.

12 Essays.

13 The Attorney-General is the public prosecutor on behalf of the Crown, where the state is actually and not nominally the prosecutor. He pleads also as a barrister in private causes, provided they are not against the government. As he receives a fee for every case in which the government is concerned, his emoluments are considerable; but he has no salary. His official position secures to him the best practice at the bar. The salary was, in Bacon’s time, but 81l. 6s. 8d. per annum; but the situation yielded him six thousand pounds yearly.

14 Preliminary Discourse on the Study of Natural Philosophy.

15 Essay xvi.

16 Decisions being given against the parties is no proof of uncorruptness; it is always the party who loses his suit that complains; the gainer receives the price of his bribe, and is silent.

17 The exactions of his servants appear to have been very great; their indulgence in every kind of extravagance, and the lavish profuseness of his own expenses, were the principal causes of his ruin. Mallet relates that one day, during the investigation into his conduct, the Chancellor passed through a room where several of his servants were sitting; as they arose from their seats to greet him, “Sit down, my masters,” exclaimed he, “your rise hath been my fall.”

18 Essay xi.

19 Macaulay’s Essays.

20 He was not, as has been erroneously supposed, stripped of his titles of nobility; this was proposed; but it was negatived by the majority formed by means of the bishops.

21 The Prince of Wales, afterwards Charles the First, was before he ascended the throne the patron of Bacon, who said of him in his will, “my most gracious sovereign, who ever when he was prince was my patron.”

22 The Seasons.

23 Lives of the Lord Chancellors and Keepers of the Great Seal of England.

24 Bracton is one of the earliest writers of English law. He flourished in the thirteenth century. The title of his work is De Legibus et Consuetudinibus Angliæ, first printed in 1569.

25 The woods on his estate of Gorhambury.

26 Of the Interpretation of Nature.

27 Ibid.

28 New Atlantis.

29 Advancement of Learning.

30 Edinburgh Review.

31 Essays.

32 Advancement of Learning.

33 Preliminary Discourse on the Study of Natural Philosophy.

34 Tattler, No. 267.

35 Introduction to the Literature of Europe in the fifteenth, sixteenth, and seventeenth centuries.

36 Montaigne says, in his author’s address to the reader:—

“Ie veulx qu’on m’y veoye en ma façon simple, naturelle et ordinaire, sans estude et artifice; car c’est moi que je peinds.” He says again elsewhere: “Ie n’ay pas plus faict mon livre, que mon livre m’a faict; livre consubstantiel à son aucteur, d’une occupation propre, membre de ma vie, non d’une occupation et fin tierce et estrangiere, comme touts aultres livres.” (Livre ii. ch. xviii.)

37 Introduction to the Encyclopædia.

38 Introduction to the Literature of Europe in the fifteenth, sixteenth, and seventeenth centuries.

39 Introduction to the Literature of Europe in the 15th, 16th, and 17th centuries.

40 No. 267.

41 Essays.

42 He refers to the following passage in the Gospel of St. John, xviii. 38: “Pilate saith unto him, What is truth? And when he had said this, he went out again unto the Jews, and saith unto them, I find in him no fault at all.”

43 He probably refers to the “New Academy,” a sect of Greek philosophers, one of whose moot questions was, “What is truth?” Upon which they came to the unsatisfactory conclusion, that mankind has no criterion by which to form a judgment.

44 Perhaps he was thinking of St. Augustine.—See Aug. Confess. i. 25, 26.

45 “The wine of evil spirits.”

46 Genesis i. 3: “And God said, Let there be light, and there was light.”

47 At the moment when “The Lord God formed man out of the dust of the ground, and breathed into his nostrils the breath of life; and man became a living soul.”—Genesis ii. 7.

48 Lucretius, the Roman poet and Epicurean philosopher, is alluded to.—Lucret. ii. init. Comp. Adv. of Learning, i. 8, 5.