PREFACE
About thirty years ago I read in the will of Lord Bacon—"For my burial, I desire it may be in St. Michael's Church, St. Albans: there was my mother buried, and it is the parish church of my mansion-house of Gorhambury, and it is the only Christian church within the walls of Old Verulam. For my name and memory, I leave it to men's charitable speeches, to foreign nations, and the next ages."
This passage, not to be seen till he was at rest from his labours, impressed me with a feeling of his consciousness of ill-usage, and a conviction that the time would arrive when justice would be done to his memory. Sir Philip Sydney says, "I never read the old song of Percy and Douglas, without feeling my heart stirred as by the sound of a trumpet;" and assuredly this voice from the grave was not heard by me with less emotion.
The words were cautiously selected, with the knowledge which he, above all men, possessed of their force and pregnant meaning, and of their certain influence, sooner or later, upon the community.[1] They spoke to me as loudly of a sense of injury, and of a reliance upon the justice of future ages, as the opening of the Novum Organum speaks with the consciousness of power:[2]
FRANCISCUS DE VERULAMIO
SIC COGITAVIT.
There was also something to me truly affecting in the disclosure of tender natural feeling in the short sentence referring to his mother, which, spanning a whole life between the cradle and the grave, seemed to record nothing else worthy of a tribute of affection.
Thus impressed, I resolved to discover the real merits of the case I found that the subject had always been involved in some mystery. Archbishop Tennison, the admirer of Lord Bacon, and the friend of Dr. Rawley, his domestic chaplain, thus mentions it in the Baconiana: "His lordship owned it under his hand,[3] that he was frail, and did partake of the abuses of the times; and
- ↑ In a former will (see Baconiana, p. 203) there is the same wish expressed, not in such polished terms. The sentence is, "For my name and memory, I leave it to foreign nations and to mine own countrymen, after some time be passed over."
- ↑ Francis of Verulam thought thus
- ↑ In his letter to King James, March 25, 1620, in the Cabala.
