Page:Supplement to the fourth, fifth, and sixth editions of the Encyclopaedia Britannica - with preliminary dissertations on the history of the sciences - illustrated by engravings (IA gri 33125011196181).pdf/211

Rh of our censures. “” De Aug. Sc. L. viii. c. iii.

Even in Bacon’s professional line, it is now admitted, by the best judges, that he was greatly underrated by his contemporaries. “The Queen did acknowledge,” says the Earl of Essex, in a letter to Bacon himself, “you had a great wit, and an excellent gift of speech, and much other good learning. But in law, she rather thought you could make shew, to the utmost of your knowledge, than that you were deep.”

“If it be asked,” says Dr Hurd, “how the Queen came to form this conclusion, the answer is plain. It was from Mr Bacon’s having a great wit, an excellent gift of speech, and much other good learning.” Hurd’s Dialogues.

The following testimony to Bacon’s legal knowledge (pointed out to me by a learned friend) is of somewhat more weight than Queen Elizabeth’s judgment against it: “What might we not have expected,” says Mr Hargrave, after a high encomium on the powers displayed by Bacon in his ‘Reading on the Statute of Uses,’ “what might we not have expected from the hands of such a master, if his vast mind had not so embraced within its compass the whole field of science, as very much to detach him from professional studies!”

It was probably owing in part to his court-disgrace, that so little notice was taken of Bacon, for some time alter his death, by those English writers who availed themselves, without any scruple, of the lights struck out in his works. A very remarkable example of this occurs in a curious, though now almost forgotten book (published in 1627), entitled, An Apology or Declaration of the Power and Providence of God in the Government of the World, by George Hakewill, D. D. Archdeacon of Surrey. It is plainly the production of an uncommonly liberal and enlightened mind; well stored with various and choice learning, collected both from ancient and modern authors. Its general aim may be guessed at from the text of Scripture prefixed to it as a motto, “Say not thou, what is the cause that the former days are better than these, for thou dost not inquire wisely concerning this;” and from the words of Ovid, so happily applied by Hakewill to the “common error touching the golden age,”

That the general design of the book, as well as many incidental observations contained in it, was borrowed from Bacon, there cannot, I apprehend, be a doubt; and yet I do not recollect more than one or two references (and these very slight ones) to his writings, through the whole volume. One would naturally have expected, that, in the following passage of the epistle dedicatory, the name of the late unfortunate Chancellor of England, who had died in the course of the preceding year, might have found a place along with the other great clerks there enumerated: “I do not believe that all regions of the world, or all ages in the same region, afford wits always alike; but this I think (neither is it my opinion alone, but of Scaliger, Vives, Budæus, Bodin, and other great clerks), that the wits of these latter ages, being manured by industry, directed by precepts, and regulated by method, may be as capable of deep speculations, and produce as masculine and lasting births, as any of the ancienter times have done. But if we conceive them to be giants, and ourselves dwarfs; if we imagine all sciences already to have received their utmost perfection, so as we need not but translate and comment on what they have done, surely there is little hope that we should ever come near them, much less match them. The first step to enable a man to the achieving of great designs, is to be persuaded that he is able to achieve them; the next not to be persuaded, that whatsoever hath not yet been done, cannot therefore be done. Not any one man, or nation, or age, but rather mankind is it, which, in latitude of capacity, answers to the universality of things to be known.” In another passage, Hakewill