BIBLIOGRAPHICAL NOTE IN the absence of any law of copyright, literary pirates were active in the days of Elizabeth, lying in wait to secure for the printer manuscripts which were circulating among the authors' friends. Perhaps because about this time publishers were beginning to pay small sums for literary work, writers of any rank felt, or affected, some reluctance to appear in print, and to be printed against their will, and printed, moreover, from some imperfect transcript of a friend's copy, was a danger ever before their eyes. Its existence supplied them with a reason or excuse for publication which has now ceased to exist, and Bacon was one of those who availed himself of it. 'I do now,' he writes n the dedication to his brother Antony, 'like some that have an orchard ill neighboured, that gather their fruit before it is ripe, to prevent stealing. These fragments of my conceits were going to print: to labour the stay of them had been troublesome, and subject to interpretation ; to let them pass had been to adventure the wrong they mought receive by untrue copies therefore I held it best discretion to publish them myself, as they passed long ago from my pen, without any further disgrace than the weakness of the author.' Despite the metaphor of unripe fruit, the Essays, we note from this last sentence, had been written some time before, and it was rather their fewness than any distrust of their quality that Bacon had in his mind. There were, in fact, only ten of them, treating severally of Study, Discourse, Ceremonies and Respects, Followers and Friends, Suitors, Expense, Regiment of Health, Honour and Reputation, Faction, and Negociating. These occupy but twenty-five small octavo pages, and the rest of the little book, which contains in all only six-andthirty leaves, is made up with the Latin Meditationes Sacrae and the 'Places of Persuasion and Dissuasion,' or as they are called on their half-title, The Colours of Good and Evil.' The dates connected with the book's appearance lend some probability to the fear of piracy which Bacon expressed in his preface. Although this is dated 'From my Chamber at Graie's Inne this 30 of Januarie, 1597 (Bacon, as we should expect, reckoning his year from January), the copy now in the British Museum was bought on the seventh of the following month, as attested by the inscription on the title-page, Septimo die Februarii, 39 Elizabethae] R[eginae], pretium xxd. The high price paid shows, moreover, that the dainty vellum jacket, encircled with a gold fillet and with a flower in the centre, was already on the book, so that the printing off of the preliminary sheet and the casing of the book in its trade binding' must have been accomplished within a week, quick work, which suggests a fear of anticipation. A second edition of the Essays was issued by the same publisher, Humphrey Hooper, in 1598, and in 1606 Isaac Jaggard pirated them. He did more, for when six years later Bacon entrusted John Beale with copy for an enlarged edition, Jaggard, who was then bringing out a re-issue on his own behalf, impudently added the new matter to it as 'the second part.' Beale's new edition contains thirty-eight essays, i.e. nine of the original ten (the exception is that of BIBLIOGRAPHICAL NOTE vii Honour and Reputation) in a revised form, with twentynine new ones, and the increase of dignity which their author had attained since 1597 is duly recognized on the title-page, where he is called 'Sir Francis Bacon, Knight, the King's Solicitor-General.' Besides his hasty reprint of the same year, Jaggard published two other editions of the Essays in this stage, in 1613 and 1624, but the next authorized edition did not appear till 1625, that printed by J. Haviland for H. Barret, in which nineteen new essays were added, and that Of Honour and Reputation replaced. The title-page to this edition reads, The Essayes or Counsels, Ciuill and Morall, of Francis Lo. Verulam, Viscount St. Alban. Newly written," and as representing the author's last revision, it has been taken as the text of all succeeding editions. It is here reprinted, with the spelling modernized, and with the addition of the fragment On Fame,' first printed, with other of Bacon's sleeping' or unpublished works, by W. Rawley, in 1657. At least eight other editions of the 'Essays' appeared during the seventeenth century, and although the British Museum possesses no separate edition issued between 1720 and 1787, from the latter date their popularity has been steadily increasing. Of The Advancement of Learning there is a shorter tale to tell. It was printed for Henry Tomes in 1605, reprinted in 1629 and 1633, and then as far as separate English editions are concerned, suffered neglect for nearly two centuries, its place being taken by the enlarged Latin version, made by Rawley under Bacon's supervision in 1623, with the title, De Dignitate et Augmentis Scientiarum, which was even retranslated into English. In this edition, it is needless to say, the book in its native language, as ! |