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 publi- 

 cation which has now ceased to exist, and Bacon was one 

 of those who availed himself of it. ' I do now/ he writes 

 in 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 



