Page:Notes and Queries - Series 9 - Volume 11.djvu/311

 9*8. XI. APRIL 18, 1903.] NOTES AND QUERIES.

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and this entry is closely related to No. 69, of uncertain authorship :

"Nemo virtuti invidiam reconciliaverit praeter mortem."

Indeed, the relation between the two entries is established by Horace himself, in the same Epistle, 11. 10-12, where he says that "he who crushed the direful hydra, and subdued well-known monsters with fated labour, found envy to be conquered only at his latter end."

Baconians apparently do not know that No. 69 forms part of the Antitheta of ' Envy,' that Bacon again refers to it in the ' De Aug.,' book viii. ch. viii, and that the sentiment itself is extremely common in all writers of the period and previously. And, of course, we may assume that the verse suggested to Bacon the masque which he wrote under Jonson's name, 'Pleasure reconciled to Virtue.' In the first ' Essay of Death ' No. 60 is brought in thus :

"Death hath this also, that it openeth the gate to good fame, and extinguisheth envy: Extinctus amabitur idem."

In Jonson's supposed work the two entries are closely paralleled several times ; and in one place we find a repetition of Bacon's own phrasing, which Gabriel Harvey would dub " as new as Newgate," but which is really much older :

Gen. It will open the gate to your fame.

' The Silent Woman,' IV. ii. No. 123 is an innocent-looking phrase from Psalm cxlvii. 16 :

Qui dat nivem sicut lanam. Yet it is a trap for the unwary Baconian who has forgotten to read Bacon. It reminds one of the musty proverb of trying to play quotes from Shakespeare as follows : His shroud as the mountain snow.
 * Hamlet ' without Hamlet. Judge. Mrs. Pott

' Hamlet,' IV. v., Song. When snow the pasture sheets.

'Ant. and Cleop.,' I. iv. 65. When one turns from a Baconian to Bacon one must be prepared to shed bitter tears : " Snow hath in it a secret warmth ; as the monk

like ashes."' Natural History, ' Century viii. No 788. The saying is again alluded to in Century vi. That " snow hath in it a secret warmth " is a notion that reminds one of two other 4 Promus ' notes :

No. 1366. Boreae penetrabile.

No. 1367. Frigus adurit.

These notes together form part of line 93 of the first book of Virgil's ' Georgics,' and they appear thus in the 'Novum Organum ':

"Even a severe and intense cold produces a sen- sation of burning : Nee Boreas penetrabile friqus ." Book ii. Aph. xi. 27.

Baconians are always able to illustrate Bacon by passages from Shakespeare; they are as ready with parallels as a borrower is with his cap ; hence four quotations appear from the plays, which give us to understand that the wind, from whatever quarter it comes, is apt to blow very cold. We do not now dispute the accuracy of the observation, yet nobody had recorded it previous to Bacon, who, as Mrs. Pott has told us in her book, is almost alone in noting that age causes even the Hyperion curl to change from gold to silver. Philosophy may not cure the tooth- ache, but it puts many things into one's head, bees amongst the number. And since Bacon's time small boys and others have taken to playing with snow, and to the congenial pastime of pelting Robert with snowballs and solely because of Bacon's discovery that " snow hath in it a secret warmth."

Bacon had some very curious notions re- specting the nature of heat and cold, to which he gives much prominence in the 'Novurn Organum' and in his 'Sylva Sylvarum' or them from the plays and poems of Shake- speare. He tells us that flame does not mingle with flame, as air does with air, or water with water, but remains contiguous ; that one flame within another queucheth not ; and much more that is curious, if not contrary to the teachings of modern science. And in the 'Promus,' No. 889, he notes down the antediluvian proverb that nail drives out nail. Now, in ' Coriolanus,' and again in ' The Two Gentlemen of Verona,' the proverb is quoted and bracketed with the kindred saying that fire drives out fire. The notion that fire drives out fire finds expression several times in Shakespeare, and it is a maxim in the Baconian philosophy. Ergo^ Bacon wrote Shakespeare.
 * Natural History ' ; but he rigidly excludes

It is true that Bacon does not anywhere in all his work couple the nail proverb with its perhaps more ancient brother - saying, but that does not matter. It is coupled so in Shakespeare, and that fact squares the circle, and proves the origin of the passages in the plays.

Here we may observe that the lines in ' The Two Gentlemen of Verona ' are imitated from 'Romeus and Juliet,' the foundation- stone of Shakespeare's ' Romeo and Juliet,' a poem written by one Arthur Brooke in or about 1562, when Bacon and Shakespeare were just out of their swaddling-clothes.

Chapman, in his * Monsieur D'Olive,'