VI.]

BACON'S INACCURACY.

597

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APPENDIX VI.

BACON'S APOPHTHEGMS.

(See p. 153, note 3, and p. 154, note 2.)

On the last line of stanza cxlvii. of Canto V. of Don Juan, Byron has the following note: "It may not be unworthy of "remark, that Bacon, in his essay on Empire,' hints that Solyman was the last of his line; on what authority, I "know not. These are his words: "The destruction of "Mustapha was so fatal to Solyman's line, as the succession "of the Turks from Solyman, until this day, is suspected to "be untrue, and of strange blood; for that Solyman the Second was thought to be supposititious.' But Bacon, in "his historical authorities, is often inaccurate. I could give "half-a-dozen instances from his apophthegms only," etc., etc. The instances are those which follow.

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BACON'S APOPHTHEGMS.

91.

"Michael Angelo, the famous painter, painting in the pope's chapel the portraiture of hell and damned souls, made one of the damned souls so like a cardinal that was his enemy, as everybody at first sight knew it; whereupon the cardinal complained to Pope Clement, humbly praying it might be defaced. The pope said to him, Why, you know very well I have power to deliver a soul out of purgatory, but not out of hell.

OBSERVATIONS.

"This was not the portrait of a cardinal, but of the pope's master of the ceremonies.

"Having stated that Bacon was frequently incorrect in his citations from history, I have thought it necessary in what regards

so great a name (however trifling,) to support the assertion by such facts as more immediately occur to me. They are but trifles, and yet for such trifles a schoolboy would be whipped (if still in the fourth form);-and Voltaire for half a dozen similar errors has been treated as a superficial writer, notwithstanding the testimony of the learned Warton :-' Voltaire, a writer of much deeper research than is imagined, and the first who has displayed the literature and customs of the dark ages with any degree of penetration and com. prehension.' For another distinguished testimony to Voltaire's merits in literary research, see also Lord Holland's excellent Account of the Life and Writings of Lope de Vega, vol. i. p. 215, edition of 1817.

"Voltaire has even been termed 'a shallow fellow,' by some of the same school who called Dryden's Ode 'a drunken song ;'-a school (as it is called, I presume, from their education being still incomplete) the whole of whose filthy trash of Epics, Excursions, etc., etc., etc., is not worth the two words in Zaïre, Vous pleures,' or a single speech of Tancred :-a school, the apostate lives of whose renegadoes, with their tea-drinking neutrality of morals, and their convenient treachery in politics-in the record of their accumulated pretences to virtue can produce no actions (were all their good deeds drawn up in array) to equal or approach the sole defence of the family of Calas, by that great and unequalled genius-the universal Voltaire.

"I have ventured to remark on these little inaccuracies of the greatest genius that England or perhaps any other country ever produced,'' merely to show our national injustice in condemning generally, the greatest genius of France for such inadvertencies as these, of which the highest of England has been no less guilty. Query, was Bacon a greater intellect than Newton?"

1. Pope, in Spence's Anecdotes, p. 158, Malone's edition.

6

"EIGHT months after the publication of my Tour in the Levant,' there appeared in the London Magazine, and subsequently in most of the newspapers, a letter from the late Lord Byron to Mr. Murray.

"I naturally felt anxious at the time to meet a charge of error brought against me in so direct a manner: but I thought, and friends whom I consulted at the time thought with me, that I had better wait for a more favourable opportunity than that afforded by the newspapers of vindicating my opinion, which even so distinguished an authority as the letter of Lord Byron left unshaken, and which, I will venture to add, remains unshaken still.

"I must ever deplore that I resisted my first impulse to reply immediately. The hand of Death has snatched Lord Byron from his kingdom of literature and poetry, and I can only guard myself from the illiberal imputation of attacking the mighty dead, whose living talent I should have trembled to encounter, by scrupulously confining myself to such facts and illustrations as are strictly necessary to save me from the charges of error, misrepresentation, and presumptuousness, of which every writer must wish to prove himself undeserving.

"Lord Byron began by stating, 'The tide was not in our favour;' and added, neither I nor any person on board the frigate had any notion of a difference of the current on the Asiatic side; I never heard of it till this moment.' His Lordship had probably forgotten that Strabo distinctly describes the difference in the following words :

666

· Διὸ καὶ εὐπετέστερον ἐκ τῆς Σηστοῦ διαίρουσι παραλλαξάμενοι μικρὸν ἐπὶ τὸν τῆς Ἡρους πύργον, κἀκεῖθεν ἀφιέντες τὰ πλοία συμπράττοντος τοῦ ῥοῦ πρὸς τὴν περαίωσιν. Τοῖς δ ̓ ἐξ ̓Αβύδου περαιουμένοις παραλλακτέον ἐστὶν εἰς τἀναντία, ὀκτώ που σταδίους ἐπὶ πύργον τινὰ κατ ̓ ἀντικρὺ τῆς Σηστοῦ, ἔπειτα διαίρειν πλάγιον, καὶ μὴ τελέως ἔχουσιν ἐναντίον τὸν ῥοῦν.— Ideoque facilius a Sesto, trajiciunt paululum deflexâ navigatione ad Herus turrim, atque inde navigia dimittentes adjuvante etiam fluxu trajectum. Qui ab Abydo trajiciunt, in contrariam flectunt partem