And so that is what Bacon means by ** curiously
rhymed."

Wherever the adjective '* curious " or the adverb
" curiously " occurs in the Shakespeare works, it
is not intended to convey the idea or admixture of
anything funny or ridiculous, which the word does
nowadays, but is synonymous with careful, accurate,
scrupulous, elegant, nice (c/. Alexander Schmidt's
Shakespeare- Lexicon, and the old English- Latin
Dictionary by Adam Littleton, of the seventeenth
century) ; the Latin adverb ** curiose " being derived
from "cura," to which the English word **care" is
related, both as to sound and derivation. In Romeo
and Juliet {}. 4) the expression "curious eye" occurs

Digitized by VjOOQIC



FRANCIS BACON'S CRYPTIC RHYMES 7

close to the word " care " ; in Cymbeline (v. 5) we
find the expression ** curious mantle " ; in "A Lover^s
Complaint " we even read ** sealed to curious secrecy."
And now let us consider one of the very passages in
question, in the "prayer or psalm," preserved to us by
Rawley. As already stated, it is printed, like the rest,
in prose-form, and appears thus in the original :

O Lord, And ever as my worldly blessings were exalted,
so secret darts from thee have pierced me ; and when I have
ascended before men, I have descended in humiliation before
thee.
