Francis Bacon and his secret society - Grand Lodge of Colorado

,
evidently
AND HIS SECHET SOCIETY. 301
If it be worth while to collect, classify, and catalogue, in
handsomely bound volumes, the water-marked papers of foreign
countries before the middle of the sixteenth century, one would
think that it would be of at least equal interest and importance
to preserve a similar collection, such as could easily be made
from the papers manufactured in England circa 1588, the date of
the erection of the first great paper mill. If such matters are
interesting or important in
other respects, it would be natural
to suppose that literary experts would find pleasure and instruction
in connecting the paper with the matter printed upon
it, and that a collection of paper used by the printers of all the
greatest works published in the reigns of Elizabeth and James,
whether that paper was home-made or imported, would have
been formed by the careful observers who were so keen to
preserve the older foreign papers, which concern us much less.
But such a collection, we have been repeatedly assured, does
not exist at the British Museum, or indeed at any public library
or museum to which authorities on such subjects can — or may —
direct us. l
During this pursuit of knowledge under difficulties we have constantly
been told that the subject is one of deep interest. " Instructive,
" " wide," " complicated," " vast " are the terms by
turns applied to it by those to whom we have applied for help,
so that sometimes we have been oppressed and discouraged as
was perhaps occasionally intended) by the apparent hopelessness
of following up the quest, or of fathoming these mysterious
difficulties, which seemed to have no bottom.
But then came comfort. The mysteries, such as they are, are
evidently traditional, of no real use to living individuals; no one
can be personally interested in keeping them up, and where
and later, and they are numbered 1418, 1446, 1447, 1449, 1450. These numbers
refer to a collection such as we have anxiously sought, but which we
have been repeatedly assured is not known to exist. That it does exist, we have
not the slightest doubt ; but where is it, and why is it withheld 1
i Recently we have been told that the Trustees of the Bodleian Library
at Oxford have secured a private collection of the kind, concerning which,
however, no information is forthcoming to the present writer.