Page 48 - Amo Amass A-muse is some of the fruit of a lifetimes love of Freemasonry - the Lodge of Nine Muses No. 235

muSEiNGS

ROM TIME TO TIME I have made notes from books and papers in which
goodly references have been made to the name of our Lodge which are in
Fone way or another significant but not referring to it. Here are the three most
interesting ones.
Sir Thomas Bodley, being a supporter of the Reformation, escaped to Italy during
the reign of Queen Mary I, being fearful of loosing his head. Here, he joined a secret
society of three grades called “Fratelli Obscuri.” Their object was to preserve the love
of virtue and to propagate the Sciences. On the accession of Elizabeth I, he returned
to England and, having been greatly impressed with the value of this Italian Society, he
established a branch of it in London under the name of — “The Tavern of the Muses.”
Several well known personages appear to have joined it but all traces of the Society
had vanished by 1753. It was however revived fifty years later using the Tobacco Plant
as their Symbol representing Goodness and Healing. (A. Q. C. XXVIII. pt.2, page
181).
Now Lord Byron, the poet, became interested in the poetry of Brother Waller
Rodwell Wright, a famous freemason who joined our Lodge and signed our Signature
Book in 1806. In his “English Bards” he writes

“Blest is the man who dare approach the bower
Where dwells the Muses in their natal hour.
Wright, t’was thy happy lot at once to view
Those shores of glory and to ring them too.”

In 1768, there was a pamphlet, published in London, denouncing Masonry in the
most extravagent terms, entitled — “Freemasonry the Highway to Hell.” In the same
year, this attack, was met by a reply in another pamphlet, published in Dublin, entitled
— “Masonry, the Turnpike Road to Happiness in this life, and Eternal Happiness
hereafter.” Having claimed most of the great names of Antiquity, ending with St.
John, as teachers of the principles of Freemasonry, which are those of religion and
morality, charity and brotherly love, he concludes by invoking the aid of “the Muses,