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Francis Bacon: An Unpublished Manuscript

A brief unpublished manuscript attributed in the text to Francis Bacon exists among the Sotheby Family papers in the Department of Special Collections, Spencer Research Library at the University of Kansas. This scribal copy offers directions "for the reading of histories with profit." One should distinguish three items: Bacon's original text (presumably lost), this copy of his text, and the manuscript collection in which the copy resides. I will discuss the probable date and provenance of the copy and then offer a transcription of it. The Sotheby Family papers, the name of the manuscript collection, were acquired by the Spencer Library in i960. The bulk of the materials concen trates on Sotheby family correspondence and personal papers, beginning in the late seventeenth century with letters of James Sotheby of Hatton Gardens (1656-1720). Herbert George Sotheby (1871-1954) inherited the family's Ecton Hall, from which this collection was dispersed in two sales in the latter part of 1955. Most of the collection centers on materials of 1688 to 1833. But tucked in this collection lies a book of Elizabethan letters and verses, composed between c. 1566 and c. 1616, designated MS 4A:i in the Spencer