“THE DISTILLATION OF A LIFETIME’S WISDOM”: SCARCE 1701 EDITION OF BACON’S ESSAYS

BACON, Francis. The Essays, or Councils, Civil and Moral… With a Table of the Colurs of Good and Evil. And a Discourse Of the Wisdom of the Ancients. To this Edition is added the Character of Queen Elizabeth. London: Printed by E. Holt for Timothy Childe, 1701. Octavo, contemporary mottled brown calf rebacked, raised bands, later red morocco spine label.

1701 edition of Bacon’s Essays, the influential writings of the man Jefferson ranked with Locke and Newton as “the three greatest men who have lived,” scarce in contemporary calf.

“I have taken all knowledge to be my province” Francis Bacon declared. In the ideas explored in his Essays and in his work “as a philosopher, Bacon’s influence on Locke and through him on subsequent English schools of psychology and ethics was profound” (PMM 119). With the original publication of the Essayes, “the word makes its first appearance on the title-page of an English book” (Grolier, 100 Books, 34), and it is through these works that “his name has won a degree of familiarity that sets Bacon’s among the great names of an epoch in which the standards of immortality were never so high… The essays were simply the distillation of a lifetime’s wisdom by the wisest man of his day… The first edition of the Essayes was by no means the book of that title which the world knows today. It contained only ten essays, and opened not with “Of Truth,” but with “Of Studie.’ The last edition to be published during Bacon’s lifetime appeared in 1625, the year before his death” (Winterich, 23 Books, 207-09). Jefferson ranked Bacon with Locke and Newton as the three greatest men who have lived, without exception” (1789 letter), and he followed Bacon’s organizational model for his library, which held an early edition of Bacon’s Essays. Containing 61 essays, along with “Of the Colours of Good and Evil; A Fragment,” “The Wisdom of the Ancients” (with separate title page) and “The Character of Queen Elizabeth.” Editions of Bacon’s collected essays first appeared in 1597, with an edition of 61 essays first published in 1625. Containing seven pages of publisher’s advertisements at rear. One of four editions “undoubtedly issued simultaneously” in 1701 (Gibson 28dn). Gibson 28d. See Pforzheimer 28-32; Sowerby 1339; STC 1137; Wing 283. Early owner signature dated 1716.

Text fresh with only light scattered foxing, slight edge-wear, rubbing to boards. An extremely good copy.