'To Become Our Best Selves'

Only Shakespeare, Dryden and Milton are cited more often than Francis Bacon (1561-1626) in Dr. Johnson’s Dictionary of the English Language (1755). We learn from W. Jackson Bate’s biography the importance of Bacon to Johnson and his great book:

“Longinus speaks of the influence of great models in enabling us to become our best selves. The formative influence here was the greatest master of compression in English style, Francis Bacon, whose works Johnson had been reading for the first times while gathering quotations for the Dictionary, and ‘from whose writings alone,’ he said, ‘a Dictionary of the English Language might be compiled. . . . The extent to which he assimilated Bacon has not been recognized. Yet one of his primary themes, from The Vanity of Human Wishes (1748) to Rasselas (1759), is a development of Bacon’s treatment of the whole psychology of wishing and of hope, and in particular of boredom and satiety.”

 

Consider the opening sentence of Bacon’s essay “Of Empire,” which both stylistically and in terms of thought might have been written more than a century later by Johnson:

 

“It is a miserable state of mind, to have few things to desire, and many things to fear; and yet that commonly is the case of kings; who, being at the highest, want matter of desire, which makes their minds more languishing; and have many representations of perils and shadows, which makes their minds the less clear.”

 

Bates says Bacon provided Johnson with “an ideal of style involving a union of compression and metaphor, of practical wisdom and imagination.” In his Adventurer essay published on this date, August 28, in 1753 --  two years before his Dictionary came out – Johnson begins by citing what is probably Bacon’s best-known phrase, from “On Studies”:

 

“It is observed by Bacon, that ‘reading makes a full man, conference [conversation] a ready man, and writing an exact man.’

 

“As Bacon attained to degrees of knowledge scarcely ever reached by any other man, the directions which he gives for study have certainly a just claim to our regard; for who can teach an art with so great authority, as he that has practised it with undisputed success?”