Bacon's name is not upon the roll of those
who have enlarged by brilliant conjectures or discoveries the store of
human knowledge; his own investigations so far as they are recorded are
all of a trivial nature. The truth about him is that he was a
brilliantly clever populariser of the cause of science, a kind of
seventeenth century Huxley, concerned rather to lay down large general
principles for the guidance of the work of others, than to be a serious
worker himself. The superstition of later times, acting on and
refracting his amazing intellectual gifts, has raised him to a godlike
eminence which is by right none of his; it has even credited him with
the authorship of Shakespeare, and in its wilder moments with the
composition of all that is of supreme worth in Elizabethan literature.
It is not necessary to take these delusions seriously. The ignorance of
mediaevalism was in the habit of crediting Vergil with the construction
of the Roman aqueducts and temples whose ruins are scattered over
Europe. The modern Baconians reach much the same intellectual level.
A similar enthusiasm for knowledge and at any rate a pretence to science
belong to the author of the _Anatomy of Melancholy_, Robert Burton. His
one book is surely the most amazing in English prose.
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