Page:The Works of Francis Bacon (1884) Volume 1.djvu/400

 272, EDITOR S PREFACE. poesy we see the use is authorized. In heathen poesy we see the exposition of fables doth fall out sometimes with great felicity ; as in the fable that the giants being overthrown in their war against the gods, the Earth their mother in revenge thereof brought forth Fame : &quot;Illam Terra parens, ir& irritata deoruni, Extreinam, ut perhibent, CCBO Enceludoque sororem Progenuit :&quot; expounded, that when princes and monarchs have suppressed actual and open rebels, then the malig nity of the people, which is the mother of rebellion, doth bring forth libels and slanders, and taxations of the state, which is of the same kind with rebellion, but more feminine. So in the fable, that the rest of the gods having conspired to bind Jupiter, Pallas called Briareus with his hundred hands to his aid : expounded, that monarchies need not fear any curbing of their absoluteness by mighty sub jects, as long as by wisdom they keep the hearts of the people, who will be sure to come in on their side. So in the fable, that Achilles was brought up under Chiron the Centaur, who was part a man and part a beast: expounded ingeniously, but corruptly by Machiavel, that it belongeth to the educa tion and discipline of princes to know as well how to play the part of the lion in violence, and the fox in guile, as of the man in virtue and justice. Nevertheless, in many the like encounters, I do rather think that the fable was first and the exposition then devised, than that the moral was first, and thereupon the fable framed. For I find it was an ancient vanity in Chrysippus, that troubled himself with great contention to fasten the assertions of the Stoics upon the fictions of the ancient poets; but vet that all the fables and fictions of the poets were but pleasure and not figure, I interpose no opi nion. Surely of those poets which are now extant, even Homer himself, (notwithstanding he was made a kind of Scripture by the latter schools of the Grecians,) yet I should without any difficulty pronounce that his fables had no such inwardness in his own meaning ; but what they might have upon a more original tradition, is not easy to affirm; for he was not the inventor of many of them.&quot; In the treatise &quot; De Augmentis,&quot; the same sentiments will be found with a slight alteration in the expressions. He says, &quot;There is another use of parabolical poesy, opposite to the former, which tendeth to the folding up of those things, the dignity whereof deserves to be retired and distinguish ed, as with a drawn curtain : that is, when the secrets and mysteries of religion, policy, and philo sophy are veiled and invested with fables, and parables. But whether there be any my sticaj. sense couched under the ancient fables of the poets, may admit some 4.ubt.: and indeed for our part we incline to this opinion, as to think, that there was an infused mystery in many of the ancient fables of the poets. Neither doth it move us that these matters are left commonly to school-boys, and grammarians, and are so embased, that we should therefore make a slight judgment upon them ; but contrariwise because it is clear, that the writings which recite those fables, of all the writ ings of men, next to sacred writ, are the most ancient ; and that the fables themselves are far more ancient than they (being they are alleged by those writers, not as excogitated by them, but as cre dited and recepted before) seem to be, like a thin rarified air, which from the traditions of more ancient nations, fell into the flutes of the Grecians.&quot; This tract seems in former times, to have been much valued, for the same reason, perhaps, which Bacon assigns for the currency of the Essays; &quot;because they are like the late new halfpence, which, though the silver is good, yet the pieces are small.&quot; Of this tract, Archbishop Tenison, in his Bacon- iana, says, &quot; In the seventh place, I may reckon his book De Sapientia Veterum, written by him in Latin, and set forth a second time, with enlargement; 1 and translated into English by Sir Arthur Georges : a book in which the sages of former times are rendered more wise than it may be they were, by so dexterous an interpreter of their fables. It is this book which Mr. Sandys means, in those words which he hath put before his notes, on the Metamorphosis of Ovid. Of modern writers, I have received the greatest light from Geraldus, Pontanus, Ficinus, Vives, Comes, Scaliger, Sabinus, Pierius, and the crown of the latter, the Viscount of St. Albans. It is true, the design of this book was instruction in natural and civil matters, either couched by the ancients under those fictions, or rather made to seem to be so by his lordship s wit, in the opening and applying of them. But because the first ground of it is poetical story, therefore let it have this place, till a fitter be found for it.&quot; The author of Bacon s Life, in the Biographia Britannica, says, &quot; that he might relieve himself a little from the severity of these studies, and as it were amuse himself with erecting a magnificent pa vilion, while his great palace of philosophy was building, he composed and sent abroad in 1610, his celebrated treatise Of the Wisdom of the Ancients, in which he showed that none had studied them more closely, was better acquainted with their beauties, or had pierced deeper into their meaning. There have been very few books published, either in this or in any other nation, which either deserved or met with more general applause than this, and scarce any that are like to retain it longer, for in this In the year 1617, in Latin. It was published in Italian in 1618 in French in 1619.