Page:Essays of Francis Bacon 1908 Scott.djvu/20

Rh notes the exact reference, using the Authorized Version which Bacon knew, and the Vulgate, for the Latin allusions.

But while I have made large use of Shakspere and the Bible, my illustrative notes are by no means confined to the seventeenth century. The English language looks backwards as well as forwards, and I have put its literature to use over the centuries from Chaucer to Thomas Hardy. Some of the quotations from Scottish literature indicate the survival in Scots of forms used by Bacon, but now either lost or obsolescent in English.

I have ventured to hope that my notes may serve a double purpose, not only to make Bacon's thought clear, but to rouse interest and to stimulate to further reading. Occasionally they point a pretty moral and are meant to. Sydney Smith's "Maxims to make one get up" is the happiest of renderings for the Latin proverb in Of Parents and Children, while the quotation from The Faery Queene under the word 'indignity,' Of Great Place, gives Spenser's thought on corruption or 'graft.'

I think I took most pleasure in editing the essay, Of Gardens. It is not possible now to know just what iris Bacon meant by the 'chamaïris,' or whether 'flos Africanus' was the botanical name of the French marigold in his day, but as far as I could I have identified botanically all the plants and flowers Bacon mentions in his Elizabethan garden, except those so familiar as to need no comment. And wherever any of them is mentioned by Shakspere I have added a posy from his plays. But Rh