“... was not all the knowledge Of the Egyptians writ in mystic symbols? Speak not the Scriptures oft in parables? Are not the choicest fables of the poets, That were the fountains and first springs of wisdom, Wrapp’d in perpetual allegories? * * * * * ... Sisyphus was damned To roll the ceaseless stone, only because He would have made Ours common.”[340] A man who boldly, even fiercely, avowed such opinions as Bacon’s, was bound in consistency to employ some cryptic method in recording his own secrets; and when we closely examine the course Bacon actually followed, we find that his practice was rigidly in accordance with his theory—in fact, too rigidly. Those steeped in the Cabbala of Alchemy in his own age may have grasped his meaning, but to those who came afterwards it was obscure, if not hidden. Even to the early copyists of his MSS. it was unintelligible. In one of the MSS. consulted by Professor Brewer, the scribe has written on the margin of Chap. IX. of the _De Secretis_:—_Hæc sunt œnigmata_; “these things are enigmas,” and enigmas they have remained for seven centuries. The presence of two anagrams in Chap. XI. is sufficient of itself to arouse a suspicion that some cryptic method (of a different kind) has been employed in Chaps. IX. and X., and this suspicion is strengthened by their whole manner and diction. Their style is involved, and their meaning (as they stand) unintelligible. Bacon passes from one subject to another in bewildering haste; from the unfinished description of one process to instructions about a second, which he leaves half told in order to plunge into a third. Among directions of _seemingly_ primitive simplicity he interpolates such phrases as “catch my meaning if you can” (_intellige si potes_); “you will see whether I am speaking riddles or the plain truth” (_videas utrum loquor œnigmata aut secundum veritatem_); and he warns us that the purport of Chap. IX. may wholly escape us, unless we distinguish the (real from the apparent) meaning of his statements (_in hoc capitulo decipieris, nisi dictionum significata, distinguas_). These special peculiarities of Chaps. IX. and X. can be only explained by the use of some cryptic method, to which Bacon points plainly in Chap. VIII. He there names two cryptographers, Ethicus and Artephius, in connection with the seven cryptic methods already given, and he broadly hints that he may make use of some of these methods (_forsan, propter secretorum magnitudinem, aliquibus his utar modis_). It is needless to pursue the matter further: Chaps. IX. and X. are not, as they appear to be, nonsense, but the cryptic exposition of some secret which Bacon believed to be of great value.