Francis Bacon and his secret society - Grand Lodge of Colorado

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AND HIS SECRET SOCIETY. 39
tile review of Basil Montagu's edition of Bacon's works ? For
many years those two lines of Pope, and that review of Macaulay,
together with Lord Campbell's odious little " Life of Bacon"
(based upon Macaulay's essay), were nearly all that the English
public read with regard to " Francis Bacon, the glory of his age
and nation, the adorner and ornament of learning, " " the most
prodigious wit" that the world has seen, " the benefactor of the
human race in all ages.
Let us forget the foolish and cruel things which modern ignorance
and prejudice have said of him, things which must be excused
and partly justified by our theory that he was, throughout
his life, a "concealed man"— not only a "concealed poet,"
but a concealed theologian and religious reformer or revivalist
and that, by the very rules of his own secret society, not only
was he bound, in these capacities, to efface himself, to allow himself
to be, to any extent, maligned and disgraced, rather than
declare his real vocation and aims, but, also (and this is very
important), his own friends must ignore him, as he must likewise
ignore them, in all relations excepting those which he " professed"—
as a public character and a philosopher.
In the following chapters we shall not attempt to give a
" life "of Bacon in his accepted characters of statesman, lawyer,
or scientist, all of which has been faithfully, and, perhaps, exhaustively,
treated of by Speddiug and others. Our efforts will
•
be directed to selecting, from the writings of his contemporaries
and later biographers and critics, some passages which seem to
throw light upon the obscure or private recesses of his life —
passages which are sometimes introduced in such a manner as
to favour the belief that they were intended to be passed over
by the general reader, whilst, to the initiated observer, they
were full of suggestion and information.