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FRANCIS BACON'S CRYPTIC RHYMES 99
invenisse homines, nullos inquam sed profect6 meras
GRATIAS" ("God be his witness, that in that corner
of Europe he had found no men, none I
say,
but real
GRACES"). The word "angulo"
is a play upon the
word "Anglia" (England).
But now to the anecdotes themselves, to test the
truth of Rawley's
German reporter.
The two speeches written in
words and the statement of the
Greek letters, and the
one we are about to quote, belong to the sentences
which secretary Rawley had himself noted down, after
assisting at one of the entertainments brightened by
Bacon's wit. We begin with the following one, as it
reveals to us the spirit that prevailed in Bacon, which
spirit
we shall consequently find prevalent
in the
apophthegms, Those taken down in Greek letters
were of too precarious a kind, for Rawley to have ever
risked having them printed
(they were not published
until the complete edition of the nineteenth century
appeared). But the speech of which we are about to
treat, Rawley caused to be added in the seventeenth
century to a new edition of the " Bacon Anecdotes,"
Here it is :
He said he had feeding swans and breeding swans ;
but for
malice, he thanked God, he neither fed it nor bred it.
The whole is cast in pleasing rhymes, and might be
written in the following form of verses :
He said
he had
feeding swans
and breeding swans ;
but for malice, he thanked God, he neither/^//
nor bred it.