Francis Bacon and his secret society - Grand Lodge of Colorado

182 FRANCIS BACON
and had used it in all his works for thirty or forty years, and
with marvellous effect, we now know well from the internal
evidence of those works. In the Promus is a consecutive list
of one hundred and twenty-six short expressions of single
words, and farther on eighty more, which are all to be found in
the early Shakespeare plays, and more rarely elsewhere. Some of
these, such as " my L. S. '' (the " Lord, Sir, " of Love's Labour's
Lost and AWs Well), are dropped in later plays. But by far
the larger number, as "Believe me," "What else?" "Is it
possible ? " " For the rest," " You put me in mind," " Nothing
less," " Say that," etc., are met with throughout all the works
which will hereafter be claimed as Bacon's. Most of these
expressions are now such familiar and household terms that it
seems strange to imagine that three hundred years ago they
were not in everybody's mouth. What would be thought if it
were found that any great orator of our own time had written
down, intermixed with literary notes, which were carefully
preserved, such notes as these "
: Will you see? " " You take it
right," " All this while, " "As is," "I object," "I demand,"
" Well," " More or less," " Prima facie," " If that be so," " Is
it because? " " What else? " " And how now? " " Best of all,"
" I was thinking, " " Say, then, " " You put me in mind, " " Good
morning," " Good night "?
Yet these are amongst the private notes " for store of forms
and elegancies of speech. " They are of the kind which Bacon,
in his learned works, describes as deficient; which, even in his
last great work, the De Augmcntis, he still pronounces to be
deficient and mucli needed for the building-up of a noble model
of language. Can we doubt that in such collections as this we
see Bacon in labourer's clothes, digging the clay and gathering
the stubble from all over the desolate fields of learning, to burn
the bricks wherewith he would rebuild the temple of wisdom?
Careful study and examination of these questions will surely
prove that to Francis Bacon we owe, not only the grand speculative
philosophy and the experimental science which are associated
with his name, and a vast number of works unacknowledged
by him, though published during the sixteenth and seventeenth