Francis Bacon and his secret society - Grand Lodge of Colorado

AND HIS SECRET SOCIETY. 369
" The fourth was a creature of incomparable abilities of mind,
of sharp and catching apprehension, large and faithful memory,
plentiful and sprouting invention, deep and solid judgment,
.
. .
a man so rare in knowledge of so many several kinds indeed
with the facility of expressing it in so elegant, significant, so
abundant, and yet so choice and ravishing a way of words, of
metaphors, and allusions, as perhaps the world has not seen
since it was a world."
So, of all intellectual monsters who had appeared until the
time' of Sir Tobie Matthew, incomparably the greatest was
Francis Bacon. Sir Tobie was well aware that detraction would
not suffer his eulogy to pass unchallenged, but he throws down
the gauntlet which no man has yet ventured to pick up:
" I know," he continues, " that this may seem a great hyperbole
and strange kind of riotous excess of speech ;
but the best
means of putting me to shame will be for you to place any man
of yours bv this of mine. And in the meantime even this little
makes a shift to shew that the genius of England is still not
onlv eminent, but predominant, for the assembling great variety
of those rare parts, in some single man, which may be incompatible
anyiohere else.
Bacon's works are sometimes described or alluded to as being
of so stupendous a kind that it is impossible to conceive his
having time, even had he the ability or inclination, for other
compositions. But, in fact, the whole of his written compositions,
excluding letters but including the law tracts and
charges, would fill only four of the fourteen volumes which appear
on our shelves as Spedding's Life, Letters, and Works of
Bacon. The rest consist of letters, transactions, variorum editions,
and comments by the editors.
Compare with this the voluminous productions of some of his
contemporaries. Coke " wrote thirty-one volumes with his own
hand" (yet he was a busy public man like Bacon). Richard
Baxter is " said to have produced " 145 distinct works, as he
himself says, " in the crowd of other employments." Thomas
Heywood, the actor, is " said to have written " 220 or 240 plays,
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