“Mountaigny Saith Prettily”: Bacon's French and the Essay

Abstract

In the 1620s the disgraced Francis Bacon turned increasingly to France for an audience. Yet his 1625 volume of essays, which offers wry homage to Montaigne, seeks to undermine the authority of France and particularly of Montaigne. In the Novum Organum (1620) Bacon opposed the unlimited skepticism of “The Apology for Raymond Sebond” and rejected the Democritean tone of the rest of Montaigne's essays. In “Of Truth,” the first of the 1625 essays, he restates these views more forcefully, covertly depicting Montaigne as a “jesting Pilate.” In “Of Simulation and Dissimulation” he voices more vigorously his opposition to the unlimited openness of Montaigne, an opposition first expressed in the De Augmentis (1623). Furthermore, he ascribes the extremism of Montaigne to French society in general and, in “Of the True Greatnesse of Kingdomes and Estates,” acclaims England as a land paradoxically “great” in its “middle” people. Still the French remain, he believes, more likely to listen.