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164 FRANCIS BACON'S CRYPTIC RHYMES
where one person takes the place of another, where
the question
is of a substitute. Thus, for instance, it
was customary in Saxony, only fifty years ago, for the
son of a wealthy citizen to emancipate himself from
military duty by paying a certain sum (I
think a few
hundred thalers) to a poor peasant's son who stood in
need of money, to enlist in his stead. In other words,
a substitute, a dummy, was bought. And that is the
kind of turning of things and of persons which Bacon
so warmly recommends in his Essay. In doing so, he
"
uses the term : to bring in some Body upon the
Stage" adding that there are never wanting some
\
persons who " will take it at any Cost " !
May we
not be permitted to believe that in punning England
of the seventeenth century such a man as Bacon, in
stringing those words together, was aiming at a certain
" Witt" (William)
? At one Will who had under
taken to play the part of a simulating dummy for the
dramatist and playwright, Francis Bacon ?
In examining the Essays, we shall often find the
author insinuating that such a substitute must be of
an enterprising, a violent, somewhat eccentric, absurd
nature, and that such a one is better than too
scrupulous, too cunning a dummy. For the inter
posing of another person, and the disguising of one's
own name, are subjects to which the book is ever
reverting, while the opening lines of the next Essay,
beginning, as they do, with the words " : The Stage"
afford us the clearest proof that the theatre forms the
foremost and leading subject treated of in those
Essays.
Let us now briefly review the contents of those first
fifty pages of the book of Essays.