This looks like coming near to the name of the statuary; the more so as Stone made monuments to Edmund Spenser, the author of the “Faerie Queene,” and to Donne, the Dean of St. Paul’s; but the silence of the pocket-book is, we unwillingly repeat, fatal to his claim.
Who then made this far-famed Sic sedebat statue of the great Lord Chancellor Bacon? We have a fancy of our own, and it is this—the sculptor was no less a person than Sir Nathaniel Bacon of Culford in Suffolk. And who was Sir Nathaniel Bacon of Culford? We will answer the question.
Sir Nathaniel was a son of the Lord Keeper, Sir Nicholas Bacon, by his second wife, and was consequently half-brother to Lord Chancellor Bacon. At Gorhambury, the last hold in broad acres of the Bacon family, there is a fine life-size full length of him seated with his dog. He also wears a Sic sedebat look on canvas: sits ad vivum with the air of an ambassador. In his right hand he holds his hat and plume; in his left, a sheet of paper; his sword hangs on a cabinet by his side; he has before him his palette, his brushes, his compasses, and his square; and what Walpole calls (conjecturally, no doubt) a half-length portrait of his mother. At Culford, in Suffolk, where he is buried, is his bust, with his palette and pencils. Dallaway (the editor of Walpole), who has a right to be heard on such a point, thinks that the Culford monument was “probably after his own design.” Nor are we disinclined to agree with him. Sir Nathaniel died in 1627. His will is to be seen in the Prerogative Will Office of the Archbishop of Canterbury, but unhappily art is nowhere mentioned in it.
No one has informed us when the custom was introduced, and by whom it was introduced, of affixing the name and fecit of the sculptor above the hic jacet of the poor inhabitant below. We have seen some early tombs in Hertfordshire, carrying the names of sculptors unrecorded in Walpole. In Westminster Abbey, that historical gallery of our English school of sculpture, the earliest monument bearing the name of its artist belongs to the reign of Charles I. On the monument at Guildford, of Abbot, Archbishop of Canterbury, who died in 1633, the curious eye will find what local historians fail to tell us, the name of the sculptor—not an unknown name—Gerard, or Garrett Christmas, “citizen of London and carver:”—“an exquisite master in his art, and a performer above his promises.”[1]
The Guildford monument is an unusual instance of an early sculptor marking the marble with his name. Bird, and Scheemaker, and Roubiliac invariably placed their names conspicuously on their works; so did, nearer our own time, Wilton, Banks, Bacon, Nollekens, Flaxman, Westmacott, and Chantrey. The “Chantrey fecit,” on a monument in St. Paul’s, gave rise to a rather equivocal witticism from the lips of a learned Canon, the Reverend Sydney Smith.
It is an evening in autumn, and I am in the chancel of the church of St. Michael’s, alone, and lost in thought. A numbness and fear creep over me. I would fain be outside, but feel a fascination in trying to unsphere the soul of the great man who lies below. I cannot move. What fell? The wing of an angel from a stone corbel in the nave. I find relief in murmuring to myself Bacon’s own thoughts told in verse, by Bacon himself.
The world’s a bubble, and the life of man
Less than a span,
In his conception, wretched from the womb;—
So to the tomb;
Curst from his cradle, and brought up to years
With cares and fears.
Who, then, to frail mortality shall trust,
But limns on water, or but writes in dust?
Yet, whilst with sorrow here we live opprest,
What life is best?
Courts are but only superficial schools
To dandle fools:
The rural part is turned into a den
Of savage men:
And where’s a city from foul vice so free
But may be termed the worst of all the three?
Domestic cares afflict the husband’s bed,
Or pains his head;
Those that live single take it for a curse,
Or do things worse:
These would have children, those that have them moan,
Or wish them gone:
What is it, then, to have, or have no wife,
But single thraldom or a double strife?
Our own affections still at home to please
Is a disease:
To cross the seas to any foreign soil,
Peril and toil:
Wars with their noise affright us: when they cease
We’re worse in peace:
What then remains, but that we still should cry
For being born, and being born—to die?
This intensely thoughtful poem was found among the papers of the writer of Bacon’s epitaph, and is by him ascribed to the great Lord Chancellor. It is much in Cowley’s manner; aye, and in Cowley’s best manner. Nor is other evidence of its paternity wanting. It is given to Bacon in 1629 by Farnaby in his “Florilegium,” and referred to as his by Aubrey in his instructive and often-quoted “Anecdotes” compiled for the use of Anthony à Wood.
But see “dun night has veiled the solemn view;” farewell to mitred abbots; good night to monk Matthew Paris; good night, Duke Humphrey; good night, Lady Juliana; battle-fields and hawking-fields, farewell—farewell to Bacons, and Jermyns, and Grimstons; my Lord Lovat and Tom Jones, good night. Thanks to James Watt and George Stephenson, we are once more in London, and at Gray’s Inn, with a bottle of ’20 port before us, and with thoughts reverting to the fine old ale for which Gorhambury, under the Grimstons, is still famous, and (less pleasantly) to “the small beer of Grays Inn,” which Aubrey assures us was in no way to the “liking” of the palate of Francis Bacon.
- ↑ Thomas Heywood, the dramatist, describes him in the above terms.
