Francis Bacon and his secret society - Grand Lodge of Colorado

AND HIS SECRET SOCIETY. 191
voice and pronunciation, teaches a decent carriage of the countenance
and gesture, gives not a little assurance, and accustoms
young men to bear being looked at."
He then gives an example from Tacitus (not from Hamlet) of
a player who
" in a fiction, in a dream of passion,
Could force his soul so to his whole conceit
That, from her working;, all his visage wann'd
Tears in his eyes, distraction in 's aspect,
A broken voice, and his whole function suiting
To his conceit,
and who so moved and excited his fellow-soldier3 with a fictitious
account of the murder of his brother that, had it not shortly
afterward appeared that nothing of the sort had happened, or,
as Hamlet says, that it was " all for nothing " — " nay, that he
never had a brother, would hardly have kept their hands off the
prefect; but the fact was, that he played the whole thing as if it
had been a piece on the stage." l
Highly as Bacon extols Poetry in all its branches, but especially
in the narrative and dramatic forms, he yet gives to Parabolic
Poetry a still more distinguished place, and this would certainly
strike us as strange if it were not that this parabolic method is
found to be so intimately connected with the whole question
of secret societies, their symbols, ciphers, and hieroglyphics.
In the De Augmentis we cannot fail to see that he is everywhere
leading up to a secret description of his own system of
conveying covert or hidden information and of moralising two
meanings in one word.
" Parabolic Poesy is of a higher character than the others,
and appears to be something sacred and venerable, especially
as religion itself commonly uses its aid as a means of communication
between divinity and humanity. But this, too, is corrupted
by the levity and idleness of wits in dealing with allegory. It
is of double use, and serves for
contrary purposes, for it serves
for an infoldment, and it likewise serves for illustration. In the
latter case the object is a method of teaching, in the former an
1 De Aug. vi. 9.