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Francis Bacon and the Architect of Fortune

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  02 January 2019

Rexmond C. Cochrane
Rexmond C. Cochrane*
Affiliation:
University of Maryland
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Extract

The most frequently read book in the library that Samuel Pepys began to collect about 1660 was a volume he called ‘my dear “Faber Fortunae”, of my Lord Bacon's'. This book, which he apparently read through six times between 1661 and 1666, has been identified as an edition of Bacon's essays in Latin translation which was published and reprinted in duodecimo at Leyden in 1641, 1644, and 1659.

The question of the identity of this work by Bacon was first raised by correspondents of Notes & Queries in 1886, but it was not resolved. Despite the importance of this much read book to young Pepys and to our understanding of him, only three of his eight biographers have so much as mentioned the work. None has identified it sufficiently to discuss it.

Type
Research Article
Information
Studies in the Renaissance , Volume 5 , 1958 , pp. 176 - 195
Copyright
Copyright © Renaissance Society of America 1958

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References

1 Diary, 18 May 1661, 20 July 1663, 5 February 1664, 14 March 1666, 20 May 1666, 10 August 1666. See also entry on 29 October 1666 concerning his brother's translation of ‘my Lord Bacon's “Fiber Fortunae” ‘.

2 See my note, ‘Bacon, Pepys, and the Faber Fortunae', N&Q, N.S. III (1956), 511-514. These editions came from the well-known printing house of Francis Hackius in Leyden, but who there devised the format and under what circumstances I have not learned.

3 These fragments from the De augmentis will be found in The Philosophical Works Francis Bacon, ed. J. M. Robertson (London, 1905), pp. 575-577, 580-581, 582-593, 594-606, 613-630, 537-545. Unless otherwise noted, page references to Bacon's works in the text, including the matter of the Sermones fideles (i.e., Pepys’ ‘Faber fortunae’), will be to this edition.

4 Bacon's Works, ed. Spedding, Ellis, and Heath (London, 1862-1876), VII, 98-99.

5 A Harmony of the Essays, etc. of Francis Bacon,ed. E. Arber (London, 1871), pp. 374-380

6 Patch, Howard R., The Goddess Fortuna in Mediaeval Literature (Cambridge, 1927), pp. 23–24 CrossRefGoogle Scholar and n. 4.

7 Plautus, tr. Paul Nixon (Loeb Classical library), v, 132-133.

8 The Essays… of Francis Bacon, ed. S. H. Reynolds (Oxford, 1890), pp. 284-285; Sallust, tr. J. C. Rolfe (Loeb Library), pp. 444-445; Livy, tr. E. T. Sage (Loeb Library), XI, 348-349.

9 Crane, William G., Wit and Rhetoric in the Renaissance (New York, 1937), pp. 140–147 CrossRefGoogle Scholar, discusses Bacon's commonplace books and their relation to the Essays and the De augmentis.

10 ‘Letter to Pier Soderini, Jan. 1512-1513’, in The Prince and Other Works, ed. Allan H. Gilbert (Chicago, 1941), p. 227, and The Prince, p. 173. See also the essay on fortune, ch. 25 in The Prince, and the poem ‘Capitolo on Fortune', pp. 211-215.

11 Discourses, tr. N. H. Thomson (London, 1883), pp. 311, 376-377.

12 Arber Reprint No. 20 (London, 1870), p. 38; Reynolds, loc. cit.

13 Corneli Nepotis Vitae, ed. O. Winstedt (Oxford, 1904), no page. See Montaigne's Essays, tr. Charles Cotton (5th ed., 1738), 1, 303, 314, 325. Pepys’ only mention of Montaigne in the Diary (17 March 1668) is of his intention to buy the Essays.

14 Matzke, John E., ‘On the Source of the Italian and English Idioms Meaning “To take Time by the Forelock” …', PMLA VIII (1893), 303–334 CrossRefGoogle Scholar; Patch, , “The Tradition of the Goddess Fortuna in Roman Literature and in the Transition Period', Smith College Studies in Mod. Lang, XXII (1922), 131–177 Google Scholar; ‘The Tradition of the Goddess Fortuna in Medieval Philosophy and Literature‘, ibid, III (1922), 179-235; ‘Chaucer and Lady Fortune’, MLR XXII (1927), 377-388; Chapman, Raymond, ‘The Wheel of Fortune in Shakespeare's Historical Plays’, RES, N.S. I (1950), 1–7.Google Scholar; Shaw, John, ‘Fortune and Nature in As You Like It', SQ VI (1955), 45–50 Google Scholar.

15 Cicero, Tusculan Disputations, tr. J. E. King (Loeb Library), v, 9 (pp. 450-451). Quoted in Montaigne's ‘Of Vanity’, III, 241.

16 Patch, , The Goddess Fortuna in Mediaeval Literature, pp. 16–19 Google Scholar, 30

17 Page 604. But see p. 579 for Bacon's approximation: ‘moral philosophy propounds to itself to imbue and endow the mind with internal goodness; but civil knowledge requires only an external goodness, for that suffices for society’.

18 For Bacon on morigeration and fortune, see p. 53. Abbott, Edwin A., in his Francis Bacon, an Account of His Life and Works (London, 1885), pp. 157, 323-328Google Scholar, is the most detailed in his criticism of Baconian morigeration. In the many works deriving from Bacon's treatise on fortune, morigeration is perhaps best exemplified in Chesterfield's advice to his son on the necessity of cultivating ‘the art of pleasing [which] is, in truth, the art of rising … of making a figure and a fortune in the world’ (The Letters of Lord Chesterfield, ed. B. Dobree, London, 1932, v, 2025-2026).

19 Page xxviii: ‘These Essays in their method and form are simply the turning of his system of investigating Nature upon Humanity and Society’. This statement seems contradicted on the previous page by Arber's assertion that the Essays ‘formed no essential part of his work; they entered not into his conception of the proficiency and advancement of knowledge'.

20 The exceptions are the essays upon projects (‘Of Plantations’, ‘Of Usury’, ‘Of Building’, ‘Of Gardens’, ‘Of Judicature’), the advice to princes (‘Of Nobility’, ‘Of Seditions and Troubles’, ‘Of Empire’, ‘Of Counsel’, ‘Of the True Greatness of Kingdoms and Estates’, ‘Of Faction’), and the unclassifiable (‘Of Prophecies’, ‘Of Masques and Triumphs’, ‘Of Vicissitude of Things’).

21 ‘Of Simulation and Dissumulation’, ‘Of Envy’, ‘Of Great Place’, ‘Of Boldness’, ‘Of Goodness and Goodness of Nature’, ‘Of Delays’, ‘Of Cunning’, ‘Of Wisdom for a Man's Self’, ‘Of Innovations’, ‘Of Dispatch’, ‘Of Seeming Wise’, ‘Of Friendship’, ‘Of Expense’, ‘Of Regiment of Health’, ‘Of Suspicion’, ‘Of Discourse’, ‘Of Riches’, ‘Of Ambition’, ‘Of Nature in Men’, ‘Of Custom and Education’, ‘Of Fortune’, ‘Of Negotiating’, ‘Of Followers and Friends’, ‘Of Studies’, ‘Of Ceremonies and Respects’, ‘Of Praise’, ‘Of Vain-glory’, ‘Of Honour and Reputation’, ‘Of Anger’.

22 ‘Of Expense’, ‘Of Regiment of Health’, ‘Of Discourse’, ‘Of Negotiating’, ‘Of Followers and Friends’, ‘Of Studies’, ‘Of Ceremonies and Respects’, ‘Of Honour and Reputation’.

23 Arber, p. xl; Bacon's Novum organum, ed. T. Fowler (2d ed., Oxford, 1889), p. 3.

24 ‘Of Fortune’, ‘Of Great Place’, ‘Of Goodness and Goodness of Nature’, ‘Of Cunning’, ‘Of Wisdom for a Man's Self, ‘Of Dispatch’, ‘Of Seeming Wise’, ‘Of Friendship’, ‘Of Riches’, ‘Of Ambition’, ‘Of Nature in Men’, ‘Of Custom and Education’, ‘Of Praise’, ‘Of Vain-glory’.

25 Crane, Ronald S., “The Relation of Bacon's Essays to his Program for the Advancement of Learning’, Schelling Anniversary Papers (New York, 1923), p. 89 Google Scholar; see pp. 88-94.

26 Dedicatory letter to Henry, Prince of Wales, in Works, ed. Spedding et al., XI, 340. Cf. Works, ed. Robertson, pp. 150, 581.

27 ‘Of Simulation and Dissimulation’, ‘Of Envy’, ‘Of Boldness’, ‘Of Delays’, ‘Of Innovation’, ‘Of Suspicion’, ‘Of Anger’.

28 Rambler 106, 23 March 1751 (Johnsonian Miscellanies, ed. G. B. Hill, Oxford, 1897, II, 229).

29 In their editions of the Essays, neither Montagu (1836,1845), Taylor (1840, Knight's English Classics), Devey (1852, Bohn ed. of Bacon's Moral and Historical Works), Whately (1856), Wright (1862, Golden Treasury Ser.), Singer (1868), Arber (1871, English Reprints), Selby (1889), Reynolds (Oxford, 1890), Lee (1905, Methuen's Standard Library), Smeaton (1906, Everyman's Library), Northup (1908, Riverside College Classics), Gay (1921), nor Jones (1937) has remarked on the place of the Essays in Bacon's treatise on fortune and men.

30 ‘Francis Bacon in Early Eighteenth-Century English Literature', forthcoming in PQ.

31 Introd. to A Treatise of Human Nature (1738), in The Philosophical Works of David Hume (Edinburgh, 1826), I, 8-9. In a note, Hume listed the ‘late philosophers’ as Locke, Shaftesbury, Mandeville, Hutchinson, and Butler.

32 Bryant, Arthur, Samuel Pepys: the Man in the Making (Cambridge, 1933), pp. 24–25 Google Scholar.

33 Diary, 9 September 1662, 17 January 1663; Works, ed. Robertson, pp. 565, 572.