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FRANCIS BACON'S CRYPTIC RHYMES 93
Herbert. That dedication, printed in prose, opens
with the words :
To his Very Good Friend, Mr. George Herbert.
The pains, that it
pleased you to take, about some of my
Writings, I cannot forget : which did put me in minde, to
Dedicate to you this poor exercise of my Sickness.
Those words prove that George Herbert had
assisted in editing or publishing some printed works,
and that in token of gratitude Bacon had dedicated to
him the translations of the psalms. On closer exami
nation, however, we shall find that a colon, the sign
we have so often met with in other passages, placed
"
forget," divides the whole
here after the word
sentence into two equal parts. To be brief, we have
before us a rhythmical composition of four lines in
heroic verse: "Forget" rhymes with "Dedicate";
"
the last word of the sentence Sickness," which
should rhyme with "about," does not rhyme with it.
Now, what " Sickness " could Bacon have been
suffering from ? Evidently from none attended with
fever, nor scarcely from one that kept him in bed.
Indeed, he had inherited his father's and his brother's
chief ailment, one to which Francis Bacon himself had
long been a victim, and which is
very common among
Englishmen to this "
day gout."
We found a vexing rhyme in Hamlet here we
have just such another, and we feel inclined to call
out with Horatio " : You might have "
!
rhymed Let
us then substitute the word "gout"
for "Sickness"
and the four
(as in Hamlet "ass" for "pajock"), verses rhyme. The fact that in the first line a pre
position, " about," takes the rhyme, need not distress
us, for similar rhymes are of frequent occurrence in