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98 FRANCIS BACON'S CRYPTIC RHYMES
Table." For, he goes on to say, Bacon clothed
every saying of another " in better Vestments and
Apparel." Then follow the words :
Et quod tentabam scribere, Versus erat
(And what I
attempted to write, turned to verse) ;
which Bacon might have said of himself.
We shall soon see that these words were indeed
most suitably applied, for a number of the points to
the anecdotes, yea, at times the whole anecdote,
rhymed such rhymes were ;
droll, frequently burlesque,
but always
artistic. And so Bacon recounted them
in English and in French, to the delectation of his
guests. No wonder that, on leaving the table, many
of them were in a hurry to write down the rhymes,
lest they should forget them. Some of those rhymes
may have been made on the spur of the moment, but
others are thought out so carefully, and are of so
complicated a
construction, that they cannot possibly
have been the inspiration and result of a moment.
The anecdotes, then, had been prepared by the
recounter for the occasion, or were at least revised
in that sense as to their rhymes, before the printed
work was published.
Francis Bacon's table-talk must indeed have been
brilliant and unique. The preface to the first edition
of the
Latin work, " Francisci Baconi Opera Omnia,"
also testifies to this fact. The
published in Germany,
first sentence in that preface contains a passage ex
tracted from the letter of a German travelling in
England, written at the time when Bacon had risen
to the height of his glory. It says :
" Deum se testari, se in illo
Europae angulo nullos
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