Page:1909. Is Shakespeare Dead? From My Autobiography.djvu/132

IS SHAKESPEARE DEAD? Again:

While actively engaged in the House of Commons and in the courts of law, he still found leisure for letters and philosophy. The noble treatise on the Advancement of Learning, which at a later period was expanded into the De Augmentis, appeared in 1605.

The Wisdom of the Ancients, a work which if it had proceeded from any other writer would have been considered as a masterpiece of wit and learning, was printed in 1609.

In the meantime the Novum Organum was slowly proceeding. Several distinguished men of learning had been permitted to see portions of that extraordinary book, and they spoke with the greatest admiration of his genius.

Even Sir Thomas Bodley, after perusing the Cogitata et Visa, one of the most precious of those scattered leaves out of which the great oracular volume was afterward made up, acknowledged that "in all proposals and 118