When learned Bacon wrote Essays,
He did deserve and hath the praise;
But now he writes his _Apophthegms_,
Surely he dozes or he dreams;
One said, _St. Albans_ now is grown unable,
And is in the high-road way--_to Dunstable_ [i.e., _Dunce-table_.]
To the close of his days were Lord Bacon's philosophical pursuits still
disregarded and depreciated by ignorance and envy, in the forms of
friendship or rivality. I shall now give a remarkable example. Sir
Edward Coke was a mere great lawyer, and, like all such, had a mind so
walled in by law-knowledge, that in its bounded views it shut out the
horizon of the intellectual faculties, and the whole of his philosophy
lay in the statutes. In the library at Holkham there will be found a
presentation copy of Lord Bacon's _Novum Organum_, the _Instauratio
Magna_, 1620. It was given to Coke, for it bears the following note on
the title-page, in the writing of Coke:--
Edw. Coke, _Ex dono authoris,
Auctori consilium
Instaurare paras veterum documenta sophorum
Instaura leges, justitiamque prius_.
The verses not only reprove Bacon for going out of his profession, but
must have alluded to his character as a prerogative lawyer, and his
corrupt administration of the chancery. The book was published in
October, 1620, a few months before his impeachment. And so far one may
easily excuse the causticity of Coke; but how he really valued the
philosophy of Bacon appears by this: in this first edition there is a
device of a ship passing between Hercules's pillars; the _plus ultra_,
the proud exultation of our philosopher. Over this device Coke has
written a miserable distich in English, which marks his utter contempt
of the philosophical pursuits of his illustrious rival. This ship
passing beyond the columns of Hercules he sarcastically conceits as "The
Ship of Fools," the famous satire of the German Sebastian Brandt,
translated by Alexander Barclay.
_It deserveth not to be read in schools,
But to be freighted in the Ship of Fools._
Such then was the fate of Lord Bacon; a history not written by his
biographers, but which may serve as a comment on that obscure passage
dropped from the pen of his chaplain, and already quoted, that he was
more valued abroad than at home.