Francis Bacon, Baron Verulam, 1561–1626. Born, at York House, 22 Jan. 1561. At Trinity Coll., Cambridge, April 1573 to March 1575. Admitted at Gray’s Inn, 27 June 1575; called to Bar, 27 June 1582. With Sir Amias Paulet’s embassy to France, 1576. M.P. for Melcombe Regis, 1584. M.P. for Taunton, 1586. Bencher of Gray’s Inn, 1586. M.P. for Liverpool, 1589. Friendship with Earl of Essex begun, 1591. M.P. for Middlesex, 1593. Employed as Learned Counsel to Queen, 1594. M.A., Cambridge, 27 July 1594. “Essays” published, 1597. M.P. for Southampton, 1597. Arrested for debt, Sept. 1598. Took part in trials of Earl of Essex, 5 June 1600 and 19 Feb. 1601. Knighted, 23 July 1603. Appointed on Commission to discuss Union, 1604. Pension of £60 granted as Counsel to the King, Aug. 1604. Married Alice Barnham, 10 May 1606. Speech in Parliament in favour of Union proposals, 17 Feb. 1607. Solicitor-General, 25 June 1607. Attorney-General, 27 Oct. 1613. Prosecutor in Earl of Somerset’s trial, 25 May 1616. Privy Councillor, 9 June 1616. Lord Keeper, 7 March 1617. Lord Chancellor, 7 Jan. 1618. Created Baron Verulam, 12 July 1618. Prosecution of Sir Walter Raleigh, 1618; of Earl of Suffolk, 1619; of Sir Henry Yelverton, 1620. “Novum Organum” published, Oct. 1620. Created Viscount St. Alban, 27 Jan. 1621. Tried for bribery, and sentenced to deprivation of office, fine of £40,000 and imprisonment in Tower, 3 May 1621. Partial mitigation of sentence by King, Sept. 1621. Died, 9 April 1626. Buried at St. Michael’s Church, St. Albans. Works: “Essays,” 1597; “Declaration of the practises and treasons attempted … by Robert late Earle of Essex” (anon.), 1601; “Apologie of the Earle of Essex…. Penned by himself” (or rather, by Bacon), 1603; “Brief Discourse touching the happie Union of the Kingdomes of England and Scotland” (anon.), 1603; “Apologie in certaine imputations concerning the late Earle of Essex,” 1604; “Certaine considerations touching the better pacification … of the Church of England” (anon.), 1604; “Of the Proficience and Advancement of Learning,” 1605; “De Sapientia Veterum,” 1609; “Charge Concerning Duels,” 1614; “Instauratio Magna” (“Novum Organum”), 1620; “Historie of the Raigne of King Henry the Seventh,” 1622; “Historia Naturalis et Experimentalis ad condendam Philosophiam” (“Historia Yentorum”), 1622; “De Dignitate et Augmentis Scientiarum,” 1623; “Historia Vitæ et Mortis,” 1623; “Translation of Certaine Psalmes,” 1625; “Apophthegmes new and old,” 1625. Posthumous: “Sylva Sylvarum,” 1627; “Considerations touching a warre with Spaine,” 1629; “The Use of the Law” (anon.) in “The Lawyers’ Light…. By I. D.,” 1629; “Certaine Miscellany Works,” 1629; “Operum Moralium et Civilium tomus,” 1638; “The Elements of the Common Lawes of England,” 1640; “A Wise and Moderate Discourse concerning Church Affaires” (anon.), 1641; “Remaines,” 1648; “The Felicity of Queen Elizabeth,” 1651; “Scripta in Naturali et Universali Philosophia,” 1653; “The Mirrour of State and Eloquence,” 1656; “Resuscitatio,” 1657: “Opuscula varia posthuma,” 1658; “New Atlantis,” 1660; “Opera Omnia,” 1665; “Letters,” 1702; “A Conference of Pleasure,” 1870; “The Promus of Formularies and Elegancies,” 1833.

Personal

	FRANCISCUS BACON, BARO DE VERULAM, ST.
	ALBANI VICMES,
	Seu Notioribus Titulis
	Scientiarum Lumen, Facundiæ Lex
	Sic Sedebat:
	Qui Postquam Omnia Naturalis Sapientiæ
	Et Civilis Arcana Evolvisset,
	Naturæ Decretum Explevit.
	Composita Solvantur.
	AN. DNI. M. DC. XXVI.
	AETATIS LXVI.

  She did acknowledge you had a great wit and an excellent gift of speech, and much other good learning. But in the law she rather thought you could make show to the utmost of your knowledge than that you were deep.

  I have found an alderman’s daughter, a handsome maiden to my liking.

  Sir Francis Bacon was married yesterday to his young wench in Maribone Chapel. He was clad from top to toe in purple, and hath made himself and his wife such store of fine raiments of cloth of silver and gold that it draws deep into her portion. The dinner was kept at his father-in-law Sir John Packington’s lodging, over against the Savoy, where his chief guests were the three knights, Cope, Hicks, and Beeston; and upon this conceit (as he said himself), that since he could not have my Lord of Salisbury in person, which he wished, he would have him at least in his representative body.

	Haile, happie Genius of this antient pile!
	How comes it all things so about thee smile?
	The fire, the wine, the men, and in the midst
	Thou stand’st, as if some mystery thou did’st!
	Pardon, I read it in thy face, the day
	For whose returnes, and many, all these pray:
	And so doe I. This is the sixtieth year,
	Since Bacon, and thy Lord, was borne and here;
	Son to the grave, wise Keeper of the Seale,
	Fame and foundation of the English weale:
	What then his father was, that since is he,
	Now with a title more to the degree.
	England’s High Chancellor! the destined heire
	In his soft cradle to his father’s chair;
	Whose even thred the Fates spinne round and full,
	Out of their choycest and their whitest woole.
	’Tis a brave cause of joy; let it be knowne.—
	For ’twere a narrow gladnesse, kept thine owne.
	Give me a deep-crowned bowle, that I may sing,
	In raysing him, the wysdome of my King.

  You found me of the Learned Counsel Extraordinary, without patent or fee—a kind of individuum vagum. You established me, and brought me into Ordinary. Soon after, you placed me Solicitor, where I served seven years. Then your majesty made me your Attorney, or Procurator General. Then Privy Counsellor, while I was attorney—a kind of miracle of your favor that had not been in many ages. Thence Keeper of your Seal; and because that was a kind of planet and not fixed, Chancellor. And when your majesty could raise me no higher, it was your grace to illustrate me with beams of honor: first making me Baron Verulam, and now Viscount St. Albans. So this is the eighth rise or reach, a diapason in music, even a good number and accord for a close. And so I may without superstition be buried in St. Alban’s habit or vestment.

  The Chancellor being convicted of bribery, pretends, as if being weary of honour, he would resign his place, being much loaded with calumnies.

  There happened in my time one noble speaker, who was full of gravity in his speaking. His language (where he could spare or pass by a jest) was nobly censorious. No man ever spake more neatly, more pressly, more weightily, or suffered less emptiness, less idleness, in what he uttered. No member of his speech, but consisted of his own graces. His hearers could not cough, or look aside from him, without loss. He commanded where he spoke; and had his judges angry and pleased at his devotion. No man had their affections more in his power. The fear of every man that heard him was, lest he should make an end…. My conceit of his person was never increased toward him by his place, or honours: but I have and do reverence him, for the greatness that was only proper to himself, in that he seemed to me ever, by his work, one of the greatest men, and most worthy of admiration, that had been in many ages. In his adversity I ever prayed, that God would give him strength; for greatness he could not want. Neither could I condole in a word or syllable for him, as knowing no accident could do harm to virtue, but rather help to make it manifest.

  Pity it was he was not entertained with some liberal salary, abstracted from all affairs, both of court and judicature, and furnished with sufficiency both of means and helps for the going on of his design; which, had it been, he might have given us such a body of Natural Philosophy, and made it so subservient to the public good, that neither Aristotle nor Theophrastus amongst the Ancients nor Paracelsus, or the rest of our latest chymists, would have been considerable.

  His great spirit was brought low, and this humiliation might have raised him again, if his offences had not been so weighty as to keep him down…. He was a fit jewel to have beautified and adorned a flourishing kingdom, if his flaws had not disgraced the lustre that should have set him off.

  None can character him to the life, save himself. He was in parts more than a man; who in any liberal profession might be whatsoever he would himself: a great honourer of ancient authors, yet a great deviser and practiser of new ways in learning: privy counsellor, as to king James, so to nature itself, diving into many of her abstruse mysteries. New conclusions he would dig out with mattocks of gold and silver; not caring what his experience cost him, expending on the trials of nature all and more than he got by the trials at the bar; posterity being the better for his—though he the worse for his own—dear experiments. He and his servants had all in common; the men never wanting what their master had; and thus what came flowing in unto him was sent flying away from him, who, in giving of rewards, knew no bounds but the bottom of his own purse. Wherefore, when king James heard that he had given ten pounds to an under-keeper, by whom he had sent him a buck, the king said merrily, “I and he shall both die beggars;” which was condemnable prodigality in a subject. He lived many years after; and in his books will ever survive: in the reading whereof, modest men commend him in what they do—condemn themselves in what they do not—understand, as believing the fault in their own eyes, and not in the object.

  His meals were reflections of the ear as well as of the stomack: like the Noctes Atticæ or Convivia Deipno Sophistarum, wherein a man might be refreshed in his mind and understanding no less than in his body. And I have known some of no mean parts, that have professed to make use of their note-books, when they have risen from his table. In which conversations and otherwise, he was no dashing man, as some men are; but ever a countenancer and fosterer of another man’s parts. Neither was he one, that would appropriate the speech wholly to himself or delight to out-vie others, but leave a liberty to the co-assessors to take their turns. Wherein he would draw a man on, and allure him to speak upon such a subject as wherein he was peculiarly skilful and would delight to speak: and for himself he contemned no man’s observations, but would light his torch at every man’s candle…. Neither was he, in his time, less gracious with the subject than with his Sovereign…. He was free from malice, which (as he said himself) he never bred, nor fed. He was no revenger of injuries, which if he had minded he had both opportunity and place high enough, to have done it. He was no heaver of men out of their places, as delighting in their ruin and undoing. He was no defamer of any man to his Prince.

  His decrees were generally made with so much equity, that, though gifts rendered him suspected for injustice, yet never any decree made by him was reversed as unjust.

  He was so excellent, so agreeable a speaker, that all who heard him were uneasy if he was interrupted, and sorry when he concluded…. Now this general knowledge he had in all things, husbanded by his wit, and dignified by so majestical a carriage, he was known to own, struck such an awful reverence in those he questioned, that they durst not conceal the most intrinsic part of their mysteries from him, for fear of appearing ignorant or saucy: all of which rendered him no less necessary than admirable at the Council-table, where in reference to impositions, monopolies, &c., where the meanest manufactures were a usual argument; and, as I have heard, did in this baffle the Earl of Middlesex, that was born and bred a Citizen; yet without any great (if at all) interrupting his other studies, as is not hard to be imagined of a quick apprehension, in which he was admirable.

  Shortly after the king dissolved the Parliament, but never restored that matchless lord to his place, which made him then to wish the many years he had spent in state policy and law study had been solely devoted to true philosophy: for (said he) the one, at the best, doth but comprehend man’s frailty in its greatest splendour; but the other the mysterious knowledge of all things created in the six days’ work.

  Methinks in this one man I do at once find enough occasion to admire the strength of human wit, and to bewail the weakness of a mortal condition; for is it not wonderful, that he who had run through all the degrees of that profession which usually takes up men’s whole time, who had studied, and practised, and governed the Common Law, who had always lived in the crowd, and borne the greatest burden of civil business, should yet find leisure enough for these retired studies, to excel all those men who separate themselves for this very purpose? He was a man of strong, clear, powerful, imagination; his genius was searching and invincible, and of this I need give no other proof than his style itself; which, as, for the most part, it describes men’s minds as well as pictures do their bodies, so it did his above all men living; the course of it vigorous and majestic; the wit, bold and familiar; the comparisons, fetched out of the way, and yet the most easy; in all, expressing a soul equally skilled in men and nature.

  All that were great and good loved and honoured him…. He was a ηαιδεραστης. His Ganimeds and favourites tooke bribes; but his lordship alwayes gave judgement secundum aequum et bonum. His decrees in Chancery stand firme, i.e. there are fewer of his decrees reverst then of any other Chancellor…. He had a delicate, lively hazel eie; Dr. Harvey told me it was like the eie of a viper…. Mr. Hobbs told me that the cause of his lordship’s death was trying an experiment: viz., as he was taking the aire in a coach with Dr. Witherbone (a Scotchman, Physitian to the King) towards High-gate, snow lay on the ground, and it came into my lord’s thoughts, why flesh might not be preserved in snow, as in salt. They were resolved they would try the experiment presently. They alighted out of the coach, and went into a poore woman’s howse at the bottome of Highgate hill, and bought a hen, and made the woman exenterate it, and then stuffed the bodie with snow, and my lord did help to doe it himselfe. The snow so chilled him, that he immediately fell so extremely ill, that he could not returne to his lodgings (I suppose then at Graye’s Inne), but went to the earle of Arundell’s house at Highgate, where they putt him into a good bed warmed with a panne, but it was a damp bed that had not been layn-in in about a yeare before, which gave him such a cold that in 2 or 3 dayes, as I remember he told me, he dyed of suffocation.

  Who can forbear to observe and lament the weakness and infirmity of human nature? To see a man so far exalted above the common level of his fellow-creatures, to sink so far below it; to see a man who, like Seneca, gave admirable rules for the conduct of life, and condemning the avaricious pursuit after riches, and, what is unlike Seneca, condemning them in his own person, and yet be defiled thereby.

  I was infinitely pleased to find among the works of this extraordinary man a prayer of his own composing, which, for the elevation of thought, and greatness of expression, seems rather the devotion of an angel than a man…. In this prayer, at the same time that we find him prostrating himself before the great mercy seat, and humbled under afflictions which at that time lay heavy upon him, we see him supported by the sense of his integrity, his zeal, his devotion, and his love to mankind; which give him a much higher figure in the minds of thinking men, than that greatness had done from which he was fallen.

	If Parts allure thee, think how Bacon shined,
	The wisest, brightest, meanest of mankind!

  A man universally admired for the greatness of his genius, and beloved for the courteousness and humanity of his behaviour. He was the great ornament of his age and nation; and nought was wanting to render him the ornament of human nature itself, but that strength of mind which might check his intemperate desire of preferment, that could add nothing to his dignity, and might restrain his profuse inclination to expense, that could be requisite neither for his honour nor entertainment. His want of economy, and his indulgence to servants, had involved him in necessities; and, in order to supply his prodigality, he had been tempted to take bribes, by the title of presents, and that in a very open manner, from suitors in chancery…. The Lords insisted on a particular confession of all his corruptions. He acknowledged twenty-eight articles; and was sentenced to pay a fine of forty thousand pounds, to be imprisoned in the Tower during the King’s pleasure, to be for ever incapable of any office, place, or employment, and never again to sit in Parliament, or come within the verge of the court. This dreadful sentence, dreadful to a man of nice sensibility to honour, he survived five years; and, being released in a little time from the Tower, his genius, yet unbroken, supported itself amidst involved circumstances and a depressed spirit, and shone out in literary productions, which have made his guilt or weaknesses be forgotten or overlooked by posterity.

  Nature had designed him to rule a master spirit in the world of letters; but ambition led him to crouch at court in search of wealth and preferment. Neither did he fail in his object: industry and perseverance enabled him to overcome the jealousy of Elizabeth, the favouritism of James, and the intrigues of his competitors. He was not only in possession of the great seal; in addition to the rank of baron, he had recently obtained, as a new proof of the royal favour, the title of viscount St. Alban’s. But, if he found the ascent to greatness slow and toilsome, his fall was sudden and instantaneous…. Of his guilt there was no doubt: but, had he submitted with patience to his fate, had he devoted to literary pursuits those intellectual powers which made him the prodigy of the age, he might have redeemed his character, and have conferred immortal benefits on mankind. He revised, indeed, his former works, he procured them to be translated into the Latin language, and he wrote a life of Henry VII.; but these were unwelcome tasks, suggested to him from authority, and performed with reluctance. He still looked back to the flesh pots of Egypt, the favours of the court; and in addition to the restoration to liberty, and the remission of his fine, boons which were granted, he solicited with unceasing importunity both a pension and employment. With this view he continued to harass the king, the prince, and the favourite, with letters; he pleaded his former services, he sought to move pity by prayers the most abject, and to win favour by flattery the most blasphemous. But his petitions were received with coldness, and treated with contempt; the repeated failure of his hopes soured his temper and impaired his health; and he died, the victim of mistaken and disappointed ambition, in the fifth year after his disgrace.

  This chancellor was peculiarly eminent as a patron of distinguished churchmen and men of letters; and few persons of his day received a larger share of learned incense.

  A more pious mind never existed. There is scarcely a line of his works in which a deep, awful, religious feeling is not manifested…. He was of a temperament of the most delicate sensibility: so excitable, as to be affected by the slightest alterations in the atmosphere. It is probable that the temperament of genius may much depend upon such pressibility, and that to this cause the excellencies and failures of Bacon may frequently be traced. His health was always delicate…. The extent of his views was immense. He stood on a cliff, and surveyed the whole of nature…. His powers were varied and in great perfection. His senses were exquisitely acute…. His imagination was fruitful and vivid; but he understood its laws, and governed it with absolute sway. He used it as a philosopher…. He so mastered and subdued his mind as to counteract disinclination to study; and he prevented fatigue by stopping in due time: by a judicious intermission of studies, and by never plodding upon books; for, although he read incessantly, he winnowed quickly…. As a lawyer he looked with microscopic eye into its subtleties, and soon made great proficience in the science. He was active in the discharge of his professional duties: and published various works upon different parts of the law…. As a Judge, it has never been pretended that any decree made by him was ever reversed as unjust…. As a Statesman he was indefatigable in his public exertions…. His love of reform, his master passion, manifested itself both as a statesman and as a lawyer.

  The moral qualities of Bacon were not of a high order. We do not say that he was a bad man. He was not inhuman or tyrannical. He bore with meekness his high civil honours, and the far higher honours gained by his intellect. He was very seldom, if ever, provoked into treating any person with malignity and insolence. No man more readily held up the left cheek to those who had smitten the right. No man was more expert at the soft answer which turneth away wrath. He was never accused of intemperance in his pleasures. His even temper, his flowing courtesy, the general respectability of his demeanour, made a favourable impression on those who saw him in situations which do not severally try the principles. His faults were—we write it with pain—coldness of heart and meanness of spirit. He seems to have been incapable of feeling strong affection, of facing great dangers, of making great sacrifices.

  Bacon, in all the misfortunes of his life, was the victim of his ignorance of the value of money. He brought himself to distress and degradation by wasteful negligence, and allowed himself to be robbed and ruined in his fortune and reputation by his servants. His life should be a moral lesson, and his genius is an intellectual guide, to all mankind.

  Though Bacon was quite as bad a public man as he represents, his vices were not the consequences of a weak and servile temperament, but of the same profound and subtle mind that he evinced in letters. He chose his means according as they could bring success to his ends. And it is remarkable … that his worst and meanest acts invariably succeeded in their object,—nay, that they were the only means by which his objects could have been gained. Thus his ingratitude to Essex was his great stepping-stone to his after distinctions, and his cowardly submission on the detection of his corruption, not only saved his head, but restored him to liberty, wealth, and rank. I could show, too, from Bacon’s letters that Macaulay is mistaken as to his religious sincerity. As Bacon himself says, he wrapped up his physic in sweets for the priests to swallow. In fact, he was not a weak, irresolute actor in politics, but a consummate and masterly hypocrite, trained in the rules of Italian statesmanship.

  He idolized state and magnificence in his own person; the brilliancy of his robes and the blaze of his equipage his imagination seemed to feed on; he loved to be gazed on in the streets, and to be wondered at in the cabinet: but, with this feminine weakness, this philosopher was still so philosophic as to scorn the least prudential care of his fortune; so that, while he was enamoured of wealth, he could not bring himself down to the love of money. Participating in the corruptions of the age, he was himself incorruptible: the Lord Chancellor never gave a partial or unjust sentence; and Rushworth has told us, that not one of his decrees was ever reversed. Such a man was not made to crouch and to fawn, to breathe the infection of a corrupted court, to make himself the scapegoat in the mysterious darkness of court-intrigues; but he was this man of wretchedness!

  Has the world’s meanness and cunning engrafted into his intellect, and remains smooth, serene, unenthusiastic, and in some degree base, even with all his sincere devotion and universal wisdom; bearing, to the end of life, the likeness of a marble palace in the street of a great city, fairly furnished within, and bright in wall and battlement, yet noisome in places about the foundations.

  There is in this Lord Keeper an appetite, not to say a ravenousness, for earthly promotion and the envy of surrounding flunkies, which seems to me excessive. Thou knowest him, O reader: he is that stupendous Bacon who discovered the new way of discovering truth,—as has been very copiously explained for the last half century,—and so made men of us all. Undoubtedly a most hot seething, fermenting piece of Life with liquorish viper eyes; made of the finest elements, a beautiful kind of man, if you will; but of the earth, earthy; a certain seething, ever-fermenting prurience which prodigally burns up things:—very beautiful, but very clayey and tereene every thing of them;—not a great soul, which he seemed so near being, ah no!

  Among his good qualities it ought to be mentioned, that he had no mean jealousy of others, and he was always disposed to patronise merit. Feeling how long he himself had been unjustly depressed from unworthy motives, he never would inflict similar injustice on others, and he repeatedly cautions statesmen to guard against this propensity. “He that plots to be a figure among ciphers is the decay of a whole age.” He retained through life his passion for planting and gardening, and, when Chancellor, he ornamented Lincoln’s Inn Fields with walks and groves, and gave the first example of an umbrageous square in a great metropolis…. He was of a middling stature,—his limbs well formed, though not robust,—his forehead high, spacious, and open,—his eye lively and penetrating; there were deep lines of thinking in his face;—his smile was both intellectual and benevolent;—the marks of age were prematurely impressed upon him;—in advanced life, his whole appearance was venerably pleasing, so that a stranger was insensibly drawn to love before knowing how much reason there was to admire him…. Notwithstanding all the money he had received, duly and unduly,—such was his love of expense, and his neglect of his affairs, that upon his death his estate appears to have been found insolvent. All the six executors whom he named in his will refused to act, and on the 13th of July, 1627, administration with the will annexed was granted to Sir Thomas Meautys, and Sir Robert Rich, a Master in Chancery, as two of his creditors.—No funds were forthcoming for the foundation of his lecture-ships.

  No one lapse is known to have blurred the beauty of his youth. No rush of mad young blood ever drives him into brawls. To men of less temper and generosity than his own—to Devereux and Montjoy, to Percy and Vere, to Sackville and Bruce—he leaves the glory of Calais sands and Marylebone Park. If he be weak on the score of dress and pomp; if he dote like a young girl on flowers, on scents, on gay colors, on the trappings of a horse, the ins and outs of a garden, the furniture of a room; he neither drinks nor games, nor runs wild and loose in love. Armed with the most winning ways, the most glozing lip at court, he hurts no husband’s peace, he drags no woman’s name into the mire. He seeks no victories like those of Essex; he burns no shame like Raleigh into the cheek of one he loves. No Lady Rich, as in Sydney’s immortal line, has cause

To blush when he is named.

When the passions fan out in most men, poetry flowers out in him. Old when a child, he seems to grow younger as he grows in years. Yet with all his wisdom he is not too wise to be a dreamer of dreams; for while busy with his books in Paris he gives ear to a ghostly intimation of his father’s death. All his pores lie open to external nature. Birds and flowers delight his eye; his pulse beats quick at the sight of a fine horse, a ship in full sail, a soft sweep of country; everything holy, innocent, and gay acts on his spirits like wine on a strong man’s blood. Joyous, helpful, swift to do good, slow to think evil, he leaves on every one who meets him a sense of friendliness, of peace and power.

  Even the peerage of Francis Bacon was conferred, not for his merits, but for his demerits, for acts of servile baseness to that hideous court that have left behind them a stain as immortal as his name.

  Francis Bacon was endowed by nature with the richest gifts and most extraordinary powers. His mother was a learned woman in those days when learning for either sex implied a knowledge of the Greek and Latin classics…. His father was not only Lord Keeper of the Great Seal, but an eminent scholar and a patron of learning and art, who had the reputation of uniting in himself “the opposite characters of a witty and a weighty speaker.”… An original thinker always; a curious explorer into every branch, and a master in nearly all parts, of human learning and knowledge; a brilliant essayist, an ingenious critic, a scientific inventor, a subtle, bold, and all-grasping philosopher; an accurate and profound legal writer, a leading orator and statesman, a counsellor of sovereigns and princes, a director in the affairs of nations, and, in spite of all faults, whether his own, or of his time, or of servants whose rise was his fall, “the justest Chancellor that had been in the five changes since Sir Nicholas Bacon’s time.”

  The meanness of Bacon, spoken of in the bitterest line of one of the bitterest poets, contrasts so strangely with the elevation of Bacon’s genius, that even they who cannot get rid of the impression left upon their minds by his conduct to Essex remain perplexed by the apparent enigma…. That much of Bacon’s advice seems, in itself, intrinsically mean, we do not for a moment deny; but what we feel very strongly is, that until we can place ourselves in the peculiar focus of his own familiar position, and of the personal relations of the great family of statesmen who then lived round the English throne, occupied by an able, crafty, and conceited—a vacillating and dangerous woman, whose word could and did decide the fate of any one or more of them, we cannot rightly judge the exact standard of Bacon’s worldly wisdom.

  His natural gifts were formed by the simple addition of those of his mother to those of his father. It is doubtful whether or no he was very precocious, but Queen Elizabeth certainly took delight in his boyish wit, gravity, and judgment.

  I am persuaded for my own part that, if he had died before Christmas 1620, his example and authority upon all questions of business, politics, administration, legislation, and morals, would have stood quite as high and been as much studied and quoted, and with quite as good reason, as it has upon questions purely intellectual. All his life he had been studying to know and to speak the truth; and I doubt whether there was ever any man whose evidence upon matters of fact may be more absolutely relied on, or who could more truly say with Kent, in Lear,—

	All my reports go with the modest truth;
	Nor more, nor clipp’d; but so.

… All the evidence shows that he was a very sensitive man, who felt acutely both kindness and unkindness, but that he was at the same time remarkably free from the ordinary defect of sensitive natures,—irritability and aptness to take offense…. Bacon’s record is unusully full, and as his life presented to himself many doubtful problems for action, it has left to us many questionable actions for criticism; and among them not a few which he would not himself have repeated or attempted to justify. One thing, however, must be admitted to his advantage. Of the contemporaries whose opinion of him is known to us, those who saw him nearest in his private life give him the best character.

  View him only as a thinker, and all the qualities that attract reverence for intellectual greatness—enthusiastic ardour in the pursuit of truth, penetrating and prophetic insight, grasp and comprehensiveness of mind, and a certain noble audacity of speculation and irrepressible confidence in human progress—meet the eye. View him only as an actor on the stage of public life, at one of the most corrupt periods of England’s political history, and it is possible to see in him only a clever, pliant man of the world, inspired with a somewhat vulgar ambition for the good things of life, yielding to the contaminating influences of the time, cold and somewhat faithless in his friendships, identifying himself with the measures of rulers conspicuous for their meanness, duplicity, and cruelty, and sacrificing his own self-respect, if not for worldly gain, at least to serve the ends of people who were not worthy, and whom he must have known not to be worthy, to untie his shoe-latchet. Such, or something like this, are the materials from which it has been possible to produce the picture, full of coarsely-drawn contrasts, of glaring lights and ink-black shadows, Hyperion and Satyr combined, which popular writers have offered to us as the faithful representation of the character of Bacon. Even were it nearer the truth than it is, it is difficult to understand the strange zest which these writers seems to feel in exposing the weaknesses and inconsistencies of a great nature, and in ferreting out every obscure and doubtful detail by which the proof of his supposed infamy can be strengthened. There are those, indeed, who can find consolation for their own littleness in the failings of an exalted mind, and whose delight in this sort of morbid anatomy is not to be wondered at; but surely for those who, by their own acknowledgment, find in Bacon “the most exquisitely constructed intellect that has ever been bestowed on any of the children of men,” the worthier attitude would be, instead of airing one’s wit and fancy and fine-writing over the inconsistencies of greatness, if possible, to ignore and forget them, if not, to speak of them with a regret too profound for flippancy.

  He was anything rather than “mean.” On the other hand, he was generous, open-hearted, affectionate, peculiarly sensitive to kindnesses, and equally forgetful of injuries. The epithet of “great,” which has been so ungrudgingly accorded to him as a writer, might, without any singular impropriety, be applied to him also as a man. The story of his life, it must be confessed, is not altogether what the reader of his works would have desired, but the contrast has been so exaggerated as to amount to a serious and injurious misrepresentation.

  The vast intellect of “high-browed Verulam” commands our respectful admiration, but it is icy and ungenial; we cannot bring ourselves to love the man, however much we may venerate the writer.

  If James had been capable of appreciating Bacon’s genius, the name of the prophet of natural science might have come down to us as great in politics as it is in philosophy. The defects in his character would hardly have been known, or, if they had been known, they would have been lost in the greatness of his achievements.

  The life of Francis Bacon is one which it is a pain to write or to read. It is the life of a man endowed with as rare a combination of noble gifts as ever was bestowed on a human intellect; the life of one with whom the whole purpose of living and of every day’s work was to do great things to enlighten and elevate his race, to enrich it with new powers, to lay up in store for all ages to come a source of blessings which should never fail or dry up; it was the life of a man who had high thoughts of the ends and methods of law and government, and with whom the general and public good was regarded as the standard by which the use of public power was to be measured; the life of a man who had struggled hard and successfully for the measure of prosperity and opulence which makes work easy and gives a man room and force for carrying out his purposes. All his life long his first and never-sleeping passion was the romantic and splendid ambition after knowledge, for the conquest of nature and for the service of man; gathering up in himself the spirit and longings and efforts of all discoverers and inventors of the arts, as they are symbolised in the mythical Prometheus. He rose to the highest place and honour; and yet that place and honour were but the fringe and adornment of all that made him great. It is difficult to imagine a grander and more magnificent career; and his name ranks among the few chosen examples of human achievement. And yet it was not only an unhappy life; it was a poor life…. When he is a lawyer, he seems only a lawyer. If he had not been the author of the “Instauratio,” his life would not have looked very different from that of any other of the shrewd and supple lawyers who hung on to the Tudor and Stuart Courts, and who unscrupulously pushed their way to preferment…. Both in his philosophical thinking, and in the feelings of his mind in the various accidents and occasions of life, Bacon was a religious man, with a serious and genuine religion…. It is not too much to say that in temper, in honesty, in labour, in humility, in reverence, he was the most perfect example that the world had yet seen of the student of nature, the enthusiast for knowledge. That such a man was tempted and fell, and suffered the Nemesis of his fall, is an instance of the awful truth embodied in the tragedy of “Faust.”

  What a great failure Bacon was, whenever he was tried! Poor Essex, hunted to death merely for “getting up a row,” and Bacon sacrificing him without compunction, and without seeing that he was probably made a tool of, merely to serve his personal advantage! Then the poetical justice, as they call it,—very prosaic justice,—of his own destruction, by a bolt out of a clear sky, which an enemy was adroit enough to direct to his ruin. And poor Bacon with conscience enough to feel that he deserved it, but not spirit enough to make a fight. No, if Pope’s fling was undeserved, as you say, it was because of the mean and ignoble set around him. Almost and pitiable and tragic in its way, pitiable in its true sense, was the upshot of Bacon’s higher and nobler life, conceiving vaguely and laboring all his days over that which he was unable and incompetent to bring to the birth. His memory reaping a great reward of fame for a century or so, and then the conclusion reluctantly reached that nothing tangible in the advancement of Natural Science can be attributed to him. Altogether, what a solemn sermon! It might be preached from the pulpit of St. Paul’s.

  Probably in consenting to contribute to the destruction of his friend, Bacon was acting under, what must have seemed to him, considerable pressure. If he had refused the task assigned to him by the Crown, he must have given up all chance of the Queen’s favour and with it all hope of promotion. Very inferior men have made as great, or greater, sacrifices; but Bacon was not the man to make such a sacrifice…. Bacon had a keen sense of the value of fortune, of the possibilities of a learned leisure, of the importance of his own colossal plans for the benefit of the human race; on the other hand he had a very dull sense of the claims of honour and friendship. Forced to choose between prosperity and friendship, he preferred to be prosperous even at the cost of facilitating the ruin of a friend for whom ruin, in any case, was ultimately inevitable…. One of the strongest helps that a man can have in the time of trouble seems to have been denied to Bacon. No record in any letter or document hitherto has attested that his wife sympathised with his pursuits, or shared any of his aspirations. Her name is scarcely mentioned in his voluminous correspondence, except in a letter indicating that her convenience, as well as his own, required that York House should be retained.

  The great Lord Bacon, who has come down to us in Pope’s epigrammatic judgment as “wisest, brightest, meanest of mankind,” finds in Mr. Dixon a brilliant advocate against the charges of treachery to his patron, Essex, and receiving bribes as a judge. The sum of this defence seems to be that in Bacon’s day all judges took bribes and all courtiers were ungrateful. This is equivalent to saying that Bacon was no worse than his contemporaries. The answer to this is that his contemporaries, at all events, seemed to think it wrong for a judge to take bribes, and punished Bacon for so doing. Therefore, Bacon was undeniably inferior in moral sense to his contemporaries. Indeed, he did not attempt to excuse the act except by saying that he never sold justice, that his judgments were always conscientious, although he might have received a present from one party to the suit. In respect to Essex, there can be no doubt that Bacon was disloyal to his benefactor. Bacon was a selfish man, a time-server, waiting on courts, and intent on his own fortunes. That posterity to whose judgment the great man committed his reputation has done his unparalleled genius full justice; but there are spots on the sun, and there are these distinct blemishes on Bacon’s character.

  Bacon was full of crotchets, so to speak. In spring, he would go out for a drive in an open coach while it rained, to receive “the benefit of irrigation,” which, he contended, was “most wholesome because of the nitre in the air, and the universal spirit of the world.” He had extraordinary notions and indulged them freely, such as dosing himself with chemicals, rhubarb, nitre, saffron, and many other medicines. At every meal his table was abundantly strewn with flowers and sweet herbs.

  Bacon’s conduct to Essex has been the subject of more vituperation than perhaps any other single act of any other single man. It has been denounced as mean and treacherous, dark, mournful, and shameful; it has been used to point half the morals and adorn half the tales against ingratitude for the last two centuries. Mr. Spedding has devoted a whole volume to this theme, and arranged the documents relating to the question in a manner which calls for a modification of the popular judgment similar if not equal to that achieved by Carlyle’s commentary on the letters of Cromwell. In an age when a good courtier has come to be considered as the reverse of a good citizen, men will continue to wish that Bacon had acted differently; but he must be acquitted of anything like treachery.

  Francis Bacon, Sir Francis Bacon, Baron Verulam, Viscount St. Albans,—these represent one individuality; but Lord Bacon is demonstrably a fictitious personage who never had any real existence on our planet. Lord Verulam, Lord St. Albans is somebody we can recognize; but Lord Bacon is an individual unknown to the British peerage. Hardwicke, Brougham, and Macaulay selected their family names when they were made nobles; but who would speak of Chesterfield as Lord Stanhope, or Chatham as Lord Pitt? Bacon deliberately chose to be Lord Verulam and Lord St. Albans rather than Lord Bacon. Why should everybody, including scores of men who know better, still persist in calling him “Lord” Bacon?… Whatever may be our opinion of him as a practical statesman, we all feel, in reading him, that we are in communion with an intellect which is essentially lordly. His “Method of Induction,” which some men of science ostentatiously celebrate but practically disregard, is demonstrably inadequate to explain the progress of modern invention and discovery. By his Method he never discovered anything himself; and certainly by his Method nothing has ever been discovered by those who rank themselves among his disciples. Still, he keeps his position as a kind of autocrat by the sheer force of a certain grandeur in his intelligence. It is useless to show that he misconceived the object of science, and was ignorant of its processes; he is still “Lord” Bacon even to such men as Whewell, Herschel, Comte, Mill, Huxley, Lewes, and Herbert Spencer. Every tyro in science can expose the errors of his Method; every eminent scientist persists in calling him “Lord,” and persists in calling him Bacon. Verulam is a grander title; but it has never forced itself either into popular or scientific speech.

  Here was a great mind—a wonderful intellect which everyone admired, and in which everyone of English birth, from Royalty down, took—and ever will take—a national pride; but, withal, few of those amiabilities ever crop out in this great character which make men loved. He can see a poor priest culprit come to the rack without qualms; and could look stolidly on, as Essex, his special benefactor in his youth, walked to the scaffold; yet the misstatement of a truth, with respect to physics, or any matter about which truth or untruth was clearly demonstrable, affected him like a galvanic shock. His biographers, Montagu and Spedding, have padded his angularities into roundness; while Pope and Macaulay have lashed him in the grave. I think we must find the real man somewhere between them; if we credit him with a great straight-thinking, truth-seeking brain, and little or no capacity for affection, the riddle of his strange life will be more easily solved…. Indeed his protestations of undying friendship to all of high station, whom he addresses unctuously, are French in their amplitude, and French, too, in their vanities. He presses sharply always toward the great end of self-advancement—whether by flatteries, or cajolement, or direct entreaty. He believed in the survival of the fittest; and that the fittest should struggle to make the survival good—no matter what weak ones, or timid ones, or confiding ones, or emotional ones should go to the wall, or the bottom, in the struggle.

  The dispassionate mind that his philosophy required, Bacon applied somewhat too coldly to the philosophy of life. Without hatreds or warm affections, preferring always a kind course to an unkind one, but yielding easily to stubborn facts in his search for prosperity, Bacon, I have said, failed as a man, although he had no active evil in his character, for want of a few generous enthusiasms.

  Bacon, with his brilliant intellectual equipment and his consciousness of his great powers, is not to be set down as simply a bad man. But his heart was cold, and he had no greatness of soul. He was absorbed, to a quite unworthy degree, in the pursuit of worldly prosperity. Always deeply in debt, he coveted above everything fine houses and gardens, massive plate, great revenues, and, as essential preliminaries, high offices and employments, titles and distinctions, which he might well have left to men of meaner worth. He passed half his life in the character of an office-seeker, met with one humiliating refusal after another, and returned humble thanks for the gracious denial. Once and once only, in his early days in Parliament, did he display some independence and rectitude; but when he saw that it gave offence in the highest places, he repented as bitterly as though he had been guilty of a sin against all political morality, and besought her Majesty’s forgiveness in terms that might have befitted a detected thief.

Essays, 1597–1625

  Sir Francis Bacon hath set out new Essays, where, in a chapter of Deformity, the world takes notice that he paints out his little cousin [Robert Cecil, Earl of Salisbury] to the life.

  The virtue of these “Essays” is too well allowed to require any comment. Without the elegance of Addison, or the charming egotism of Montaigne, they have acquired the widest circulation: and if Bacon had written no more, they would have bequeathed his name undying to posterity. Burke preferred them to the rest of his writings, and Dr. Johnson observed that “their excellence and value consists in their being the observations of a strong mind operating upon life, and, in consequence, you will find there what you seldom find in other books.”

  No book contains a greater fund of useful knowledge, or displays a more intimate acquaintance with human life and manners. The style, however, is not pleasing; it is devoid of melody and simplicity, and the sentences are too short and antithetic.

  The small volume to which he has given the title of “Essays,” the best known and the most popular of all his works. It is one of those where the superiority of his genius appears to the greatest advantage; the novelty and depth of his reflections often receiving a strong relief from the triteness of the subject. It may be read from beginning to end in a few hours; and yet after the twentieth perusal one seldom fails to remark in it something overlooked before. This, indeed, is a characteristic of all Bacon’s writings, and is only to be accounted for by the inexhaustible ailment they furnish to our own thoughts, and the sympathetic activity they impart to our torpid faculties.

  For style, they are rich and venerable—for thinking, incorrect and fanciful.

  The Essays, which are ten in number, abound with condensed thought and practical wisdom, neatly, pressly, and weightily stated, and, like all his early works, are simple, without imagery. They are written in his favourite style of aphorisms, although each essay is apparently a continued work; and without that love of antithesis and false glitter to which truth and justness of thought is frequently sacrificed by the writers of maxims.

  It is by the “Essays” that Bacon is best known to the multitude. The “Novum Organum” and the “De Augmentis” are much talked of, but little read. They have produced indeed a vast effect on the opinions of mankind; but they have produced it through the operations of intermediate agents. They have moved the intellects which have moved the world. It is in the “Essays” alone that the mind of Bacon is brought into immediate contact with the minds of ordinary readers. There, he opens an exoteric school, and he talks to plain men in language which everybody understands, about things in I which everybody is interested. He has thus enabled those who must otherwise have taken his merits on trust to judge for themselves; and the great body of readers have, during several generations, acknowledged that the man who has treated with such consummate ability questions with which they are familiar, may well be supposed to deserve all the praise bestowed on him by those who have sat in his inner school.

  The transcendent strength of Bacon’s mind is visible in the whole tenor of these “Essays,” unequal as they must be from the very nature of such compositions. They are deeper and more discriminating than any earlier, or almost any later, work in the English language, full of recondite observation, long matured and carefully sifted…. Few books are more quoted; and, what is not always the case with such books, we may add, that few are more generally read. In this respect they lead the van of our prose literature: for no gentleman is ashamed of owning that he has not read the Elizabethan writers: but it would be somewhat derogatory to a man of the slightest claim to polite letters, were he unacquainted with the “Essays” of Bacon. It is, indeed, little worth while to read this or any other book for reputation’s sake; but very few in our language so well repay the pains, or afford more nourishment to the thoughts.

  Bacon’s “Essays” are the portrait of an ambitious and profound calculator,—a great man of the vulgar sort. Of the upper world of man’s being they speak few and faint words.

  His English Essays and Treatises will be read and admired by the Anglo-Saxon race all over the world, to the most distant generations; while since the age which immediately succeeded his own, only a few recondite scholars have penetrated and relished the admirable good sense enveloped in his crabbed Latinity.

  There is scarcely a volume in the whole prose literature of England, which is, more emphatically, at once a product of the English intellect, and an agency in the history of English practical ethics. The style of the “Essays” is very attractive, though never pedantically exact, and often even negligent, in its observance of the rules of grammatical concord and regimen; but though many Latinized words are introduced, even its solecisms are English, and it is, in all probability, a fair picture of the language used at that time by men of the highest culture, in the conversational discussion of questions of practical philosophy, or what the Germans call world-wisdom.

  Bacon’s sentence bends beneath the weight of his thought, like a branch beneath the weight of its fruit. Bacon seems to have written his essays with Shakespeare’s pen…. He writes like one on whom presses the weight of affairs, and he approaches a subject always on its serious side. He does not play with it fantastically. He lives amongst great ideas, as with great nobles, with whom he dare not be too familiar. In the tone of his mind there is ever something imperial. When he writes on building, he speaks of a palace with spacious entrances, and courts, and banqueting-halls; when he writes on gardens, he speaks of alleys and mounts, waste places and fountains, of a garden “which is indeed prince-like.”

  Stands confessedly at the head of all works of this class in English literature. It is in a sense properly taken as a model for all, and is one of the wisest and most thoughtful books for men of every condition and every age.

  The style of these brief essays, in which every sentence was compact with thought and polished in expression until it might run alone through the world as a maxim, had all the strength of euphuism and none of its weakness. The sentences were all such as it needed ingenuity to write; but this was the rare ingenuity of wisdom. Each essay, shrewdly discriminative, contained a succession of wise thoughts exactly worded.

  His “Essays” are not at all sceptical, like the French essays, from which he may have borrowed this appellation: they are thoroughly dogmatic…. They are extremely instructive for the internal relations of English society. They show wide observation and calm wisdom, and, like his philosophical works, are a treasure for the English nation, whose views of life have been built upon them.

  I venture to affirm that Bacon’s greatest and most characteristic work is not the “De Augmentis,” or the “Novum Orgnaum,” or any of his purely scientific writings, but the “Essays,” and that even of his more ambitious works the most valuable element is the many incidental remarks and suggestions which constitute a kind of practical worldly wisdom or philosophy of common life.

  The essays of Bacon contain the classicalism of the Renaissance combined with the practical moral sense of the Englishman.

  Nothing can be more loose than the structure of the essays. There is no art, no style, and, except in a few, the political ones, no order: thoughts are put down and left unsupported, unproved, undeveloped. In the first form of the ten, which composed the first edition of 1597, they are more like notes of analysis or tables of contents; they are austere even to meagreness. But the general character continues in the enlarged and expanded ones of Bacon’s later years…. But these short papers say what they have to say without preface, and in literary undress, without a superfluous word, without the joints and bands of structure: they say it in brief, rapid sentences, which come down, sentence after sentence like the strokes of a great hammer.

  In certain features they stand alone in this field of writing. There is nothing of the gay paradox of Montaigne, the sounding verbiage of Seneca, or the witty sophistry of Rochefoucauld. They express the “practical reason” of the English mind. Each sentence is beaten gold. One of his observations on men and manners is like a chalk outline by Michael Angelo. And as a model of English style, the “Essays” are unrivalled, although I think they have less of stately eloquence than the “Advancement of Learning.”

  The literature of aphorism contains one English name of magnificent and immortal lustre—the name of Francis Bacon. Bacon’s essays are the unique masterpiece in our literature of this oracular wisdom of life, applied to the scattered occasions of men’s existence.

  Of this book Hallam said, that it “leads the van of our prose literature.” In saying this, he did but formulate the impression of educated men in his day, but that was before the upper course of the stream had been adequately explored. As English prose it is indeed a very remarkable book, especially as it lets us see through the now prevailing and rampant Classicism to some select retreat where the true English tradition flourishes with its native vigour.

  Less than seventy years after the death of Bacon his “Essays” were so completely forgotten that when extracts from them were discovered in the common-place book of a deceased lady of quality, they were supposed to be her own, were published and praised by people as clever as Congreve, went through several editions, and were not detected until within the present century.

  This work secured for ever Bacon’s fame as a writer of rare wisdom, who expressed his vigorous and original thought in a style marked by compressed fulness of meaning, calm strength, and the utmost felicity of diction. The book is a triumph of literary skill, a combination of almost perfect excellence of matter and form.

  Their dignity, wealth of fancy, masculine grasp of ethical questions, language all compact, produce an effect, not of warmth and friendliness, but of intellectual activity. Bacon called himself “a bell-ringer who is up first to call others to church.”

  Certainly no other prose work of its size is so often used in quotation.

Advancement of Learning, 1605

  His character of the schoolmen is perhaps the finest philosophical sketch that ever was drawn.

  Neither the most liberal of the professions, nor even the wider field of politics and legislation, could supply to the genius of Bacon a sufficient sphere of activity; and turning aside for a short space from the career of worldly ambition, in which he had many competitors, to that in which he marched unrivalled and alone, he completed and gave to the world in 1605 his immortal work on the “Advancement of Learning.”… The experience of ages has shown, that he who assumes the character of a reformer in the art of reasoning, an expositor of the errors of the schools, soars above the region of popular applause only to excite the alarms, or encounter the hostility, of the learned; whose pride, whose prejudices and whose interests he offends or threatens. Thus, whilst a few inquisitive and enlightened spirits, such as Jonson and Wotton and Raleigh, hailed with delight and awe the discoveries of their great contemporary, born to establish an era in the progress of the human mind, the erudite disciples of ancient error busied themselves in depreciating and decrying what they would not or could not understand.

  The work is dedicated to King James the First, and its introduction inspires a mingled sentiment of admiration of the boldness and grandeur of the design which it announces, and of heart-ache at the depth of degradation to which it sinks in the servile adulation with which it besmears the king…. The stupendous magnitude of this undertaking, the courtly cunning, ingenuity, and meanness of suggesting it to the King as if it was an enterprise of his own, the lofty consciousness of its sublimity, and the sly implied disclaimer of it as anything more on the part of the author than a mere speculative whim to be moulded into form and substance, are all deserving of profound meditation—of more than I can give. He proceeds then to enumerate and to refute the objections against learning—of divines, of politicians, as arising from the fortunes, manners, or studies of learned men. He discusses the diseases of learning—the peccant humors which have not only given impediment to the proficiency of learning, but have given occasion to the traducement thereof. And he closes the book with a copious and cheering exhibition of the dignity of learning—a theme upon which I follow him with delight. The style is a continuous and perpetual citation of classical and scriptural quotations.

  Marked the first decisive appearance of the new philosophy…. He did not thoroughly understand the older philosophy which he attacked. His revolt from the waste of human intelligence which he conceived to be owing to the adoption of a false method of investigation blinded him to the real value of deduction as an instrument of discovery; and he was encouraged in his contempt for it as much by his own ignorance of mathematics as by the non-existence in his day of the great deductive sciences of physics and astronomy. Nor had he a more accurate prevision of the method of modern science.

  The two finest prose essays in the English language are Lord Bacon’s “Essay on the Advancement of Learning,” and Milton’s tract on “The Freedom of the Press.” And these are also interesting to that degree that, having once read them, you will never forget them.

  In the philosophical and historical works there is no want of attention to the flow and order and ornament of composition. When we come to the “Advancement of Learning,” we come to a book which is one of the landmarks of what high thought and rich imagination have made of the English language. It is the first great book in English prose of secular interest; the first book which can claim a place beside the “Laws of Ecclesiastical Polity.”… It contains some of his finest writings.

  The “Advancement” is written, or finished at least, obviously in too great haste; the Second Book is sometimes almost slovenly, and the close of it leaves us nowhere. But the opening part, in which Bacon sums up first the discredits and then the dignity of learning, defending wisdom, and justifying it to its sons, remains one of the great performances of the seventeenth century. The matter of it is obsolete, human knowledge having progressed so far forwards and backwards since 1605; and something dry and unripe in Bacon’s manner—which mellowed in later life—diminishes our pleasure in reading what is none the less a very noble work, and one intended to be the prologue to the author’s vast edifice of philosophical inquiry. At this point, however, he unluckily determined to abandon English brick for Latin stone.

Novum Organum, 1620

  I have received, from many parts beyond the seas, testimonies touching that work, much beyond what I could have expected at the first in so abstruse an argument.

  I have received three copies of that work, wherewith your Lordship hath done a great and everlasting benefit to all the children of Nature, and to Nature herself in her utmost extent and latitude, who never before had so true an Interpreter, or so inward a Secretary of her Cabinet.

  The most singular, and the least of all his pieces, is that which, at this time, is most useless and least read, I mean his “Novum Scientiarum Organum.” This is the scaffold with which the new philosophy was raised; and when the edifice was built, part of it at least, the scaffold was no longer of service. The lord Bacon was not yet acquainted with nature, but then he knew, and pointed out, the several paths that led to it.

  He saw and taught his contemporaries and future ages, that reasoning is nothing worth, except as it is founded on facts…. Most valuable of all his works, and by him most highly valued. It is written in a plain unadorned style in aphorisms, invariably stated by him to be the proper style for philosophy, which, conscious of its own power, ought to go forth “naked and unarmed;” but, from the want of symmetry and ornament, from its abstruseness, from the novelty of its terms, and from the imperfect state in which it was published, it has, although the most valuable, hitherto been too much neglected; but it will not so continue. The time has arrived, or is fast approaching, when the pleasures of intellectual pursuit will have so deeply pervaded society, that they will, to a considerable extent, form the pleasures of our youth; and the lamentation in the “Advancement of Learning” will be diminished or pass away.

  If Bacon constructed a method to which modern science owes its existence, we shall find its cultivators grateful for the gift, and offering the richest incense at the shrine of a benefactor whose generous labours conducted them to immortality. No such testimonies, however, are to be found. Nearly two hundred years have gone by, teeming with the richest fruits of human genius, and no grateful disciple has appeared to vindicate the rights of the alleged legislator of science. Even Newton, who was born and educated after the publication of the “Novum Organon,” never mentions the name of Bacon or his system; and the amiable and indefatigable Boyle treated him with the same disrespectful silence. When we are told, therefore, that Newton owed all his discoveries to the method of Bacon, nothing more can be meant than that he proceeded in that path of observation and experiment which had been so warmly recommended in the “Novum Organon;” but it ought to have been added, that the same method was practised by his predecessors; that Newton possessed no secret that was not used by Galileo and Copernicus; and that he would have enriched science with the same splendid discoveries if the name and the writings of Bacon had never been heard of.

  There is no book which gives me such a sense of greatness; because the sayings are like keys which turn every way and fit whichever chamber of truth you want to turn into,—physical, mental, and moral science alike.

  The Lord Chancellor, with his titles of honour, is almost forgotten when the author of the “Novum Organum” rises in our view…. The pains which Bacon took to make it worthy of his fame may be judged from the fact, that he copied and corrected it twelve times before he gave it to the world.

  Bacon the magnificent might be fit to lay down the chart of all knowledge; Bacon the despised seems fitter to guide patient and foot-sore pilgrims through tangled roads, amidst dangers arising from their own presumption, into a region of light. And this is, at last, the true glory of the “Novum Organum.”

  His acquaintance with Bacon was probably slight, and what he knew of his Latin works was, we suspect, what he had picked up in conversation from Bolingbroke and Clarke. No man who had read the “Novum Organum” would speak of it as Voltaire speaks of it in his Twelfth Letter.

  When we take in hand the “Novum Organum,” it is not wholly out of place to remember that Bacon took a bribe. So much we should expect an editor of that treatise to remind us of. But we should hardly wish to have him detail, in his introduction to it, the history of Bacon’s corruption, his black behaviour to Essex, the murder of Raleigh, the torture of Peacham.

  In spite however of his inadequate appreciation either of the old philosophy or the new, the almost unanimous voice of later ages has attributed, and justly attributed, to the “Novum Organum” a decisive influence on the development of modern science.

  And now at last the “Novum Organum,” the fragmentary relic of that grand scheme for the restoration of the sciences which had floated before his youthful imagination in the days when he boasted that he had “taken all knowledge for his province,” had passed through the press. For the reception with which it met, he cared but little: Coke might recommend him with a snarl to restore the justice and the laws of England before he meddled with the doctrines of the old philosophers; James might meet him with the silly jest that the book was like the peace of God, because it passed all understanding. It was for posterity that he worked, and for the judgment of posterity he was content to wait…. As a practical book, addressed to practical men, it was as complete a failure as was the commercial policy of its writer…. That which gives to the author of the “Novum Organum” a place apart amongst “those who know,” is, that being, as he was, far behind some of his contemporaries in scientific knowledge, and possessing scarcely any of the qualifications needed for scientific investigation, he was yet able, by a singular and intuitive prescience, to make the vision of the coming age his own, and not only to point out the course which would be taken by the stream even then springing into life, but to make his very errors and shortcomings replete with the highest spirit of that patient and toilsome progress from which he himself turned aside.

History of Henry VII., 1622

  But this good Work was the most effectually undertaken and compleated by the Incomparable Sir Francis Bacon, who has bravely surmounted all those difficulties, and pass’d over those Rocks and Shallows, against which he took such Pains to caution other less experienc’d Historians. He has perfectly put himself into King Henry’s own Garb and Livery, giving as sprightly a Mew of the Secrets of his Council, as if himself had been President in it. Not trivial Passages, such as are below the Notice of a Statesman, are mix’d with his Sage Remarks: Nor is any thing of Weight or Moment slubber’d over with that careless Hast and Indifferency which is too common in other Writers. No Allowances are given to the Author’s own Conjecture or Invention; where a little Pains and Consideration will serve to set the Matter in its proper and true Light. No Impertinent Digressions, nor fanciful Comments, distract his Readers: But the whole is written in such a Grave and Uniform Style, as becomes both the Subject and the Artificer.

  Thus ignominious was the fall of the famous Bacon! despicable in all the active parts of life, and only glorious in the contemplative. Him the rays of knowledge served but to embellish, not enlighten; and philosophy itself was degraded by a conjunction with his mean soul: we are told that he often lamented that ambition and vain glory had diverted him from spending his whole time in the manner worthy of his extensive genius; but there is too much reason to believe, from his conduct, that these sentiments arose from the weight of his mortifications, and not from the conviction of his judgment. He preferred mean applications to James, and continued to flatter him so far, as to paint his grandfather, Henry the Seventh, in an amiable light.

  The only two pieces of history we have, in any respect to be compared with the ancient, are, the reign of Henry the Seventh by my lord Bacon, and the history of our civil wars in the last century by your noble ancestor my lord chancellor Clarendon.

  Bacon’s “Henry the VIIth” betrays too much of the apologist for arbitrary power, but it is otherwise of great value; it is written from original, and now lost, materials, with vigour and philosophical acuteness.

  Of all his works, this gave the least satisfaction to the public; and after recently again perusing it, I must confess that it is hardly equal to Sir Thomas More’s “History of Richard III.,” or to Camden’s of Queen Elizabeth,—leaving the reproach upon our literature of being lamentably deficient in historical composition, till the days of Hume, Robertson, and Gibbon. Some have accounted for Bacon’s failure by supposing a decline in his faculties; but he afterwards showed that they remained in their pristine vigour to the very close of his career.

  Is in many ways a masterly work. With the true philosophic temper, he seeks, not content with a superficial narrative of events, to trace out and exhibit their causes and connections; and hence he approaches to the modern conception of history, as the record of the development of peoples, rather than of the actions of princes and other showy personages.

  In one respect Bacon’s History is in strong contrast to Macaulay’s. In relating the schemes and actions of such a king as Henry, Macaulay would have overlaid the narrative with strong expressions of approval or disapproval. Bacon writes calmly, narrating facts and motives without any comment of a moral nature. Sometimes, indeed, he criticises, but it is from the point of view of a politician, not of a moralist; a piece of cruelty or perfidy is either censured only as being injudicious, or not commented upon at all. On this ground he is visited with a sonorous declamation by Sir James Mackintosh—as if his not improving the occasion were a sign that he approved of what had been done. Bacon wrote upon a principle that is beginning to be pretty widely accepted as regards personal histories claiming to be impartial—namely, that “it is the true office of history to represent the events themselves together with the counsels, and to leave the observations and conclusions thereupon to the liberty and faculty of every man’s judgment.” He does not seek to seal up historical facts from the useful office of “pointing a moral;” he only held that the moralising should not interfere with the narrative.

  A work which, done under every advantage, would have been a rare specimen of skill, diligence, and spirit in the workman; but for which, begun as it was immediately after so tremendous an overthrow, and carried on in the middle of so many difficulties in the present and anxieties for the future, it would be hard to find a parallel. Though not one of his works which stand highest either in reputation or popularity with later times,—being neither generally read (an accident which it shares with most of the others) nor generally supposed to be of great value (in which it is more singular),—it has done its work more effectually perhaps than any of them. None of the histories which had been written before conveyed any idea either of the distinctive character of the man or the real business of his reign. Every history which has been written since has derived all its light from this, and followed its guidance in every question of importance; and the additional materials which come to light from time to time, and enable us to make many corrections in the history of the events, only serve to confirm and illustrate the truth of its interpretation of them.

  The government of the first Tudor, though by no means one of the worst, was a government of usurpation. Its most efficient means of accomplishing its ends was the secret court of Star Chamber. This court kept no records, and was not responsible for its acts. Whatever was necessary for the firmer establishment of the new line was done probably without question and without scruple. Very little documentary evidence was left. But even what little existed in Bacon’s time seems not to have been used by the historian. From the beginning to the end of his work, Bacon has given only one reference to an authority, and even that reference is so indefinite as almost to justify the suspicion that it was meant to mislead. The value of the history as a record of truth, therefore, rests solely upon the nature of the habits then prevailing in the investigation of knowledge, and on the character of the historian for veracity. Unfortunately, neither of these foundations is trustworthy. Bacon was not born till more than fifty years after the death of the king whose history he undertook to write. Three important and turbulent reigns had intervened. Bacon had every interest in giving to the facts, as he narrated them, a certain color. Unfortunately, we are debarred from believing that he would be overscrupulous in his searches after exact knowledge, even if exact knowledge were accessible. But it was not. It is therefore but simple truth to say that no court in any civilized community would accept of Bacon’s testimony as a basis on which to build up any judicial decision whatever. Historical evidence, in order to be conclusive, must be of the same general nature as all other evidence. The conclusion to which we are brought is obvious. The book teaches us something of Bacon; it teaches us possibly something of the way in which Bacon regarded Henry VII.; it teaches us still more of the way in which Bacon desired his readers to regard his opinions of Henry VII.; but of Henry VII. himself, or of his reign, it teaches us very little indeed.

  Stands confessedly amongst the choicest first-fruits of the long harvest of English historical literature.

  Is a model of clear historical narration, not exactly picturesque, but never dull; and though not exactly erudite, yet by no means wanting in erudition and exhibiting conclusions which, after two centuries and a half of record-grubbing, have not been seriously impugned or greatly altered by any modern historian. In this book, which was written late, Bacon had, of course, the advantage of his long previous training in the actual politics of a school not very greatly altered since the time he was describing, but this does not diminish the credit due to him for formal excellence.

Philosophy

  No man made more observations, or caused more to be made, to the end, that at last some notions of natural things, more sound and pure than those commonly received, might be collected; for which reason he admired the genius, and approved the design of that great Chancellor of England, Sir Francis Bacon.

  You formerly wrote me, that you knew persons who were willing to labour for the advancement of the sciences, at the cost of all sorts of observations and experiments: now, if any one who is inclined this way, could be prevailed upon to undertake a history of the appearances of the heavenly bodies, to be drawn up according to the Verulamian method, without the admixture of hypothesis; such a work as this would prove of great utility, and would save me a great deal of trouble in the prosecution of my inquiries.

  The Patriarch of experimental philosophy.

  It is certain that Lord Bacon’s way of experiment, as now prosecuted by sundry English gentlemen, affords more probabilities of glorious and profitable fruits, than the attempts of any other age or nation whatsoever.

  The Royal Society was a work well becoming the largeness of Bacon’s wit to devise, and the greatness of Clarendon’s prudence to establish.

	Bacon at last, a mighty man, arose,…
	And boldly undertook the injur’d pupil’s cause.
	Bacon, like Moses, led us forth at last,
	The barren wilderness he pas’d;
	Did on the very border stand
	Of the bles’d promised land;
	And, from the mountain’s top of his exalted wit,
	Saw it himself, and shew’d us it.

  When our renowned Lord Bacon had demonstrated the methods for a perfect restoration of all parts of real knowledge, the success became on a sudden stupendous, and effective philosophy began to sparkle, and even to flow into beams of bright shining light all over the world.

  Though there was bred in Mr. Bacon so early a dislike of the Physiology of Aristotle, yet he did not despise him with that pride and haughtiness with which youth is wont to be puffed up. He has a just esteem of that great master of learning, greater than that which Aristotle expressed himself towards the philosophers that went before him; for he endeavoured (some say) to stifle all their labours, designing to himself an universal monarchy over opinions, as his patron Alexander did over men. Our hero owned what was excellent in him, but in his inquiries into nature he proceeded not upon his principles. He began the work anew, and laid the foundation of philosophic theory in numerous experiments.

  It was owing to the sagacity and freedom of Lord Bacon that men were then pretty well enabled both to make discoveries and to remove the impediments that had hitherto kept physics from being useful.

  The late most wise Chancellor of England was the chief writer of our age, and carried as it were the standard that we might press forward, and make greater discoveries in Philosophic matters, than any of which hitherto our schools had rung. So that if in our time any great improvements have been made in Philosophy, there has been not a little owing to that great man.

  By standing up against the Dogmatists, he emancipated and set free philosophy, which had long been a miserable captive, and which hath ever since made conquest in the territories of Nature.

  Though I give on this occasion, a preference to Bacon and to Locke over Des Cartes and the author of the logic of Port-royal, it is not from so mean and contemptible a motive as this would be, that they were Englishmen. The advancement of knowledge, and the improvement of reason are of common concern to all rational creatures. We are all of the same country in these respects: and he who thinks and acts otherwise is a promoter of faction in the great commonwealth of learning. As much as I admire these two philosophers, I am not blind to their errors; for even I, who have no telescopical eyes, can discern spots in these suns. I can discern a tincture, and sometimes more than a tincture, in Bacon, of those false notions which we are apt to imbibe as men, as individuals, as members of society, and as scholars, and against which he himself is very solicitous to put us on our guard.

  Never did two men, gifted with such genius, recommend paths of inquiry so widely different. Descartes aspired to deduce an explanation of the whole system of things by reasoning a priori upon assumed principles: Bacon, on the contrary, held that it was necessary to observe Nature thoroughly before attempting to explain her ways; that we must ascend to principles through the medium of facts; and that our conclusions must be warrented by what we observe. Descartes reasoned about the World, as if the laws which govern it had not yet been established, as if every thing were still to create. Bacon considered it as a vast edifice, which it was necessary to view in all directions, to explore through all its recesses and windings, before any conjecture even could be safely formed as to the principles of its construction, or the foundations on which it rests. Thus, the philosophy of Bacon, by recommending the careful observation of Nature, still continues to be followed, whilst that of Descartes, whose essence lay in hypothesis, has wholly disappeared.

  The influence of Bacon’s genius on the subsequent progress of physical discovery, has been seldom duly appreciated; by some writers almost entirely overlooked, and by others considered as the sole cause of the reformation in science which has since taken place. Of these two extremes, the latter certainly is the least wide of the truth; for, in the whole history of letters, no other individual can be mentioned, whose exertions have had so indisputable an effect in forwarding the intellectual progress of mankind. On the other hand, it must be acknowledged, that before the era when Bacon appeared, various philosophers in different parts of Europe had struck into the right path; and it may perhaps be doubted, whether any one important rule with respect to the true method of investigation be contained in his works, of which no hint can be traced in those of his predecessors. His great merit lay in concentrating their feeble and scattered lights; fixing the attention of philosophers on the distinguishing characteristics of true and of false science, by a felicity of illustration peculiar to himself, seconded by the commanding powers of a bold and figurative eloquence.

  This mighty genius ranks as the father of modern physics, inasmuch as he brought back the spirit of investigation from the barren verbal subtleties of the schools to nature and experience: he made and completed many important discoveries himself, and seems to have had a dim and imperfect foresight of many others. Stimulated by his capacious and stirring intellect, experimental science extended her boundaries in every direction: intellectual culture, nay, the social organization of modern Europe generally, assumed a new shape and complexion.

  Bacon’s grand distinction, considered as an improver of physics, lies in this, that he was the first who clearly and fully pointed out the rules and safeguards of right reasoning in physical inquiries. Many other philosophers, both ancient and modern, had referred to observation and experiment in a cursory way, as furnishing the materials of physical knowledge; but no one, before him, had attempted to systematize the true method of discovery; or to prove that the inductive, is the only method by which the genuine office of philosophy can be exercised, and its genuine ends accomplished. It has sometimes been stated, that Galileo was, at least in an equal degree with Bacon, the father of the Inductive Logic; but it would be more correct to say, that his discoveries furnished some fortunate illustrations of its principles. To explain these principles was no object of his; nor does he manifest any great anxiety to recommend their adoption, with a view to the general improvement of science.

  The opinion so prevalent during the last thirty years, that Lord Bacon introduced the art of experimental inquiry on physical subjects, and that he devised and published a method of discovering scientific truth, called the method of induction, appears to me to be without foundation, and perfectly inconsistent with the history of science. This heresy, which I consider as most injurious to the progress of scientific inquiry, seems to have been first propagated by D’Alembert, and afterwards fostered in our University by Mr. Stewart and Mr. Playfair, three men of great talent, but not one of whom ever made a single discovery in physics…. It has been said, however, by the admirers of Bacon, that though a few philosophers knew the secret of making advances in science, yet the great body were ignorant of it, and that Paracelsus, Van Helmont, and many others, were guided in their inquiries by very inferior methods…. It seems quite clear that Bacon, who knew nothing either of Mathematics or Physics, conceived the ambitious design of establishing a general method of scientific inquiry. This method, which he has explained at great length, is neither more nor less than a crusade against Aristotle, with the words experiment and observation emblazoned on his banner…. The method given by Bacon is, independent of all this, quite useless, and in point of fact has never been used in any successful inquiry. A collection of facts, however skilfully they may be conjured with, can never yield general laws unless they contain that master-fact in which the discovery resides, or upon which the law mainly depends.

  It is no proof of a solid acquaintance with Lord Bacon’s philosophy, to deify his name as the ancient schools did those of their founders, or even to exaggerate the powers of his genius. Powers they were surprisingly great, yet limited in their range, and not in all respects equal; nor could they overcome every impediment of circumstance. Even of Bacon it may be said, that he attempted more than he has achieved, and perhaps more than he clearly apprehended. His objects appear sometimes indistinct, and I am not sure that they are always consistent. In the “Advancement of Learning,” he aspired to fill up, or at least to indicate, the deficiencies in every department of knowledge: he gradually confined himself to philosophy, and at length to physics. But few of his works can be deemed complete, not even the treatise “De Augmentis,” which comes nearer to this than most of the rest. Hence the study of Lord Bacon is difficult, and not, as I conceive, very well adapted to those who have made no progress whatever in the exact sciences, nor accustomed themselves to independent thinking.

  He is one of the men to whom I owe most, though I have never followed him into the domain of physical science, where his method is most strikingly exhibited. What little physics I know, is almost purely theoretical. But the least knowledge of the history of science, coupled with a knowledge of the state of philosophy in Bacon’s day, is sufficient to enable me to appreciate the wonderful depth and comprehensiveness of his views, and to see how, to use Macaulay’s language, “he dug deep, that after ages might pile high.”

  It was as a philosopher that Bacon conquered immortality, and here he stands superior to all who went before and to all who have followed him. If he be not entitled to a place in the interior of the splendid temple which he imagined for those who, by inventing arts, have embellished life, his statue ought to appear in the more honourable position of the portico, as the great master who has taught how arts are to be invented…. He accomplished more for the real advancement of knowledge than any of those who spent their lives in calm meditation under sequestered porticos or amidst academic groves.

  Lord Bacon has the English duality. His centuries of observations on useful science, and his experiments, I suppose, were worth nothing. One hint of Franklin, or Watt, or Dalton, or Davy, or any one who had a talent for experiment, was worth all his lifetime of exquisite trifles. But he drinks of a diviner stream, and marks the influx of idealism into England. Where that goes, is poetry, health and progress.

  Bacon has been likened to the prophet who from Mount Pisgah surveyed the Promised Land, but left it for others to take possession of. Of this happy image perhaps part of the felicity was not perceived by its author. For though Pisgah was a place of large prospect, yet still the Promised Land was a land of definite extent and known boundaries, and moreover it was certain that after no long time the chosen people would be in possession of it all. And this agrees with what Bacon promised to himself and to mankind from the instauration of the sciences…. In this respect, then, as in others, the hopes of Francis Bacon were not destined to be fulfilled. It is neither to the technical part of his method nor to the details of his view of the nature and progress of science that his great fame is justly owing. His merits are of another kind. They belong to the spirit rather than to the positive precepts of his philosophy.

  With the audacity of ignorance, he presumed to criticise what he did not understand, and, with a superb conceit, disparaged the great Copernicus…. The more closely we examine the writings of Lord Bacon, the more unworthy does he seem to have been of the great reputation which has been awarded to him. The popular delusion to which he owes so much originated at a time when the history of science was unknown. They who first brought him into notice knew nothing of the old school of Alexandria. This boasted founder of a new philosophy could not comprehend, and would not accept, the greatest of all scientific doctrines when it was plainly set before his eyes. It has been represented that the invention of the true method of physical science was an amusement of Bacon’s hours of relaxation from the more laborious studies of law and duties of a court. His chief admirers have been persons of a literary turn, who have an idea that scientific discoveries are accomplished by a mechanico-mental operation. Bacon never produced any great practical results himself, no great physicist has ever made any use of his method. He has had the same to do with the development of modern science that the inventor of the orrery has had to do with the discovery of the mechanism of the world…. No man can invent an organon for writing tragedies and epic poems…. Few scientific pretenders have made more mistakes than Lord Bacon. He rejected the Copernican system, and spoke insolently of its great author; he undertook to criticise adversely Gilbert’s treatise “De Magnete;” he was occupied in the condemnation of any investigation of final causes, while Harvey was deducing the circulation of the blood from Aquapendente’s discovery of the valves in the veins; he was doubtful whether instruments were of any advantage, while Galileo was investigating the heavens with the telescope. Ignorant himself of every branch of mathematics, he presumed that they were useless in science, but a few years before Newton achieved by their aid his immortal discoveries. It is time that the sacred name of philosophy should be severed from its long connexion with that of one who was a pretender in science, a time-serving politician, an insidious lawyer, a corrupt judge, a treacherous friend, a bad man.

  The actual and undeniable facts that when compared with the writings of the Italian natural philosophers those of Bacon breathe more of the modern spirit, and yet that he ignores the discoveries which have proved themselves to be most fruitful for subsequent times, and even their originators (Copernicus, Galileo, Gilbert, Harvey, and others), or at least is less able to appreciate them than the former,—that, further, in spite of his praise of natural science he has exerted on its development no influence worthy of the name—(facts which in recent times have led to such different verdicts on Bacon), can only be harmonised (but then easily harmonised) when we do not attribute to Bacon the position of the initiator of modern philosophy, but see in him the close of the philosophy of the Middle Ages. He has left behind him the standpoint from which natural science subjected itself to dogma and in which she contended against it. Therefore he stands higher and nearer to modern times. But this advance refers only to the relation of the doctrines of natural science to religion and the Church…. Measured by the standard of the Middle Ages Bacon appears modern, by that of modern times he appears mediæval. But to say this implies that his merit is no small one.

  The first practical effect of Bacon’s writing was produced in this country in the department of physics. Meetings were held in the rooms of Dr. Wilkins, at Oxford, for the purpose of cultivating natural science and making experiments. Out of these meetings sprang the Royal Society (1638, chartered 1662); and the more important members, Wallis, Wilkins, Childrey, Boyle, Sprat, Digby, all recognised Bacon as practically their founder.

  He certainly never made utility the sole object of science, or at least never restricted utility to material advantages. He asserted in the noblest language the superiority of abstract truth to all the fruits of invention, and would never have called those speculations useless which form the intellectual character of an age. Yet, on the other hand, it must be acknowledged that the general tone of his writings, the extraordinary emphasis which he laid upon the value of experiments, and above all upon the bearing of his philosophy on material comforts, represents a tendency which was very naturally developed into the narrowest utilitarianism.

  Bacon of Verulam stripped off from natural philosophy the theosophical character which it bore during the Transitional Period, and limited it in its method to experiment and induction. The fundamental traits of this method he made apart of the philosophic consciousness of mankind, as emancipated in its investigations from the restriction to any particular department of natural science. He thus became the founder—not, indeed, of the empirical method of natural investigation, but—of the empirical line of modern philosophers.

  As a philosophical author, Bacon shows that he possessed a thorough knowledge of all the learning of his time…. The powerful and lasting influence which this philosophical realism exercised on the civilization of England may be traced down to the present day.

  The whole endeavor of Bacon in science is to attain the fact, and to ascend from particular facts to general. He turned away with utter dissatisfaction from the speculating in vacuo of the Middle Ages. His intellect demanded positive knowledge; he could not feed upon the wind. From the tradition of philosophy and from authority he reverted to nature. Between faith and reason Bacon set a great and impassable gulf. Theology is something too high for human intellect to discuss. Bacon is profoundly deferential to theology, because, as one cannot help suspecting, he was profoundly indifferent about it. The schoolmen for the service of faith had summoned human reason to their aid, and Reason, the ally, had in time proved a dangerous antagonist. Bacon, in the interest of science, dismissed faith to the unexceptionable province of supernatural truths. To him a dogma of theology was equally credible whether it possessed an appearance of reasonableness or appeared absurd. The total force of intellect he reserved for subjugating to the understanding the world of positive fact.

  Had Locke not yet made acquaintance with the writings of Bacon, which could hardly have been beyond the understanding of such a student? or did he regard Bacon rather as the great herald and pioneer of the new philosophy than as himself a great philosopher? There would be some warrant for that view, and though Locke’s philosophical debt to Bacon was a great one, Descartes was evidently a more attractive teacher for one situated and constituted as Locke was.

  Certainly, more than any man of his time, Bacon seems to have realized that he was standing at the vestibule of a new age, and was charged with the mission of showing the insufficiency of the past and the bright hopes of the future.

  I get driven out of all patience by Spedding’s special pleading for him. He seems to me to have done no work, to have shown no example of what he calls his method. But his imagination was his great faculty, and all that is most valuable in him is due to the prescient instinctive insight with which he looked on the possibilities of knowledge; the enthusiasm of a seer, not of a philosopher who had measured, and weighed, and compared, and done what Mozley calls the underground work of solid thinking. Galileo, as you say, and Pascal did what Bacon talked about without knowing how to do it, and they talked after they had touch of the realities of a hunt after physical truth.

  Was this not the very time when Bacon stood out before Europe the herald, if not the leader, of the great scientific movement of modern days, and to his own land set an example of sober practical thinking which the English mind has never since forgotten? If Hobbes, in the last years of Bacon’s life, was gradually working his way through scholarly studies to the position of a philosophical thinker, under whose influence but Bacon’s could the development proceed? From whom but the first of English modern philosophers should the second, being in actual contact with him, learn to think with the freedom of a modern, and the practical purpose of an Englishman?

  No delusion is greater than the notion that method and industry can make up for lack of mother-wit, either in science or in practical life; and it is strange that, with his knowledge of mankind, Bacon should have dreamed that his, or any other, “via inveniendi scientias” would “level men’s wits” and leave little scope for that inborn capacity which is called genius. As a matter of fact, Bacon’s “via” has proved hopelessly impracticable; while the “anticipation of nature” by the invention of hypotheses based on incomplete inductions, which he specially condemns, has proved itself to be a most efficient, indeed an indispensable, instrument of scientific progress. Finally, that transcendental alchemy—the superinducement of new forms on matter—which Bacon declares to be the supreme aim of science, has been wholly ignored by those who have created the physical knowledge of the present day. Even the eloquent advocacy of the Chancellor brought no unmixed good to physical science. It was natural enough that the man who, in his better moments, took “all knowledge for his patrimony,” but, in his worse, sold that birthright for the mess of pottage of Court favour and professional success, for pomp and show, should be led to attach an undue value to the practical advantages which he foresaw, as Roger Bacon and, indeed, Seneca had foreseen, long before his time, must follow in the train of the advancement of natural knowledge.

  Bacon is the bête noire and butt of Specialists, the modern Schoolmen, who resent his insufficient view of their little worlds. Mere politicians complain that he was neither a Whig nor a Tory: Mere theologians see that, with all his orthodox protestations, Religion was on the fringe of his system: Mere physicists, led by Harvey, who begins the attack in his dictum that he “wrote like a Lord Chancellor,” dislike or distrust his metaphysics, and dwell, as Baron Liebig does, with acrimonious exclusiveness on his defects. Their comments are narrowly correct; but, like those of mere dryasdust philologists on the classics of literature, so one-sided as to be impertinent. The inaccuracies inevitable to universal views, must be conceded to the ingratitude of those prone to bite the hand that feeds them.

  It is an exaggeration of Bacon’s merit to regard him as the creator of the experimental method and of modern science. On the contrary, Bacon was the product of the scientific revival of the sixteenth century, and his manifesto is but the conclusion, or as we might say the moral, which English common-sense draws from the scientific movement. But though he cannot be said to have originated the experimental method, we must at least concede to him the honor of having raised it from the low condition to which scholastic prejudice had consigned it, and of having insured it a legal existence, so to say, by the most eloquent plea ever made in its favor. It is no small matter to speak out what many think, and no one dares to confess even to himself. Nay, more. Though experimental science and its methods originated long before the time of the great chancellor, Bacon is none the less the founder of experimental philosophy, the father of modern positivistic philosophy, in so far as he was the first to affirm, in clear and eloquent words that true philosophy and science have common interests, and that a separate metaphysics is futile.

  The stately tropes and metaphors; the magnificent promises and heraldings of what the new science is to give us; the cunningly adjusted scraps of classical or biblical phrase; the pithy apophthegms; the shrewd commonsense; the suggestion that seems even more pregnant than it is; the masterful employment of a learning which is perhaps more thoroughly at command than extensive or profound—all these notes of “topmost Verulam” are well known. Unjust to his predecessors, hasty and even superficial in his grasp of sciences and philosophies, rhetorical, casuistical, almost shallow, delusive in his mighty promises, hollow in his cunning schemes and methods—all these unfavorable labels have been at different times attached to Bacon, and for some at least of them the Devil’s Advocate may make out a strong case. But the magnificence of his literature, and his imagination in the directions where he was imaginative, is undeniable; and he was perhaps, to those who look at literature as it affects and is affected by the social history of England, the best mouthpiece and embodiment of that side of the late Renaissance which retained the hopes of an all-embracing philosophia prima, supporting them on the treacherous struts and props that seemed to be lent by the new learning in physics as well as by the study of the ancients.

  Bacon was neither a retired and patient nor an accurate thinker—the desire to apply and make his learning useful led him away from the “sapientum templa serena” into the forum of life: in his own experience, as well as in his writings, he anticipated many of the dangers which beset modern culture—the love of premature application, and the haste for practical results and achievements.

  Diderot’s is a scientific mind, notably predisposed to experimental sciences. He is a mathematician, and particularly a naturalist; his master, however, is not the geometrician, Descartes, but the physician, Bacon, to whom he has more than once rendered abundant homage.

General

  Crown of all modern authors.

  Lewis Elzevir wrote me lately from Amsterdam, that he was designed to begin shortly an edition in quarto, of all the works of Lord Bacon; and he desired my advice and any assistance I could give him; to the end that, as far as possible, these works might come abroad with advantage, which have been long received with the kindest eulogies, and with the most attested applause of the learned world.

  If there were a beam of knowledge derived from God upon any man, in these modern times, it was upon him. For though he was a great reader of books, yet he had not his knowledge from books, but from some grounds or notions from within himself; which notwithstanding, he vented with great caution and circumspection. His book of “Instauratio Magna” (which, in his own account, was the chiefest of his works) was no slight imagination or fancy of his brain; but a settled and concocted notion: the production of many years’ labour and travail. I myself have seen at the least twelve copies of the “Instauration” revised, year by year, one after another; and every year altered and amended in the frame thereof; till, at the last, it came to that model, in which it was committed to the press: as many living creatures do lick their young ones till they bring them to their strength of limbs. In the composing of his books he did rather drive at a masculine and clear expression than at any fineness or affectation of phrases; and would often ask if the meaning were expressed plainly enough. As being one that accounted words to be but subservient or ministerial to matter, and not the principal: and if his style were polite, it was because he could do no otherwise. Neither was he given to any light conceits, or descanting upon words: but did ever, purposely and industriously, avoid them. For he held such things to be but digressions or diversions from the scope intended, and to derogate from the weight and dignity of the style.

  Fell into a dislike of Aristotle’s Philosophy, as barren and jejune, inabling some to dispute, more to wrangle, few to find out trueth, and none, if confining themselves to his principles. Hence it was that afterwards he traded so largely in Experiments; so that, as Socrates is said to be the first who stooped towering Speculations into practical Morality, Sir Francis was one of the first, who reduced notional to real and scientifical Philosophy…. His abilities were a clear confutation of two vulgar errors, (libells on learned men); First, that Judgement, Wit, Fancy, and Memory, cannot eminently be in conjunction in the same person; whereas our Knight was a rich Cabinet, fill’d with all four, besides a golden key to open it, Elocution. Secondly, “That he who is something in all, is nothing in any one Art;” whereas he was singular in singulis, and, being in-at-all, came off with credit. Such as condemn him for pride, if in his place, with the fifth part of his parts, had been ten times prouder themselves…. He may be said to have left nothing to his Executors, and all to his Heirs, under which notion the Learned of all ages may be beheld.

  Who knows not how Herbary had been improved by Theophrastus, Dioscorides, the Arabians, and other Peripatetics? who can deny that Physic, in every part of it, was improved by Galen and others, before the Lord Bacon ever sucked? and what accessionals had not Chemistry received by the cultivation of the Aristotlians, before his House of Solomon was dreamed of? Let us, therefore, not be concluded by the aphorisms of this Lord. Let his insulse adherents buy some salt, and make use of more than one grain when they read him; and let us believe better of the ancients, than that their methods of science were so unfruitful.

  A man who, for the greatness of genius, and compass of knowledge, did honour to his age and country; I could almost say to human nature itself. He possessed at once all these extraordinary talents which were divided amongst the greatest authors of antiquity. He had the sound, distinct, comprehensive knowledge of Aristotle, with all the beautiful lights, graces, and embellishments of Cicero. One does not know which to admire most in his writings, the strength of reason, force of style, or brightness of imagination.

  Lord Bacon was the greatest genius that England (or perhaps any country) ever produced.

  Lord Bacon is the first author who has attempted any style that can be relishable to the present age.

  Allowing as much sense to Sir Philip as his warmest admirers can demand for him, surely this country has produced many men of far greater abilities, who have by no means met with a proportionate share of applause. It were a vain parade to name them—take Lord Bacon alone, who I believe of all our writers, except Newton, is most known to foreigners, and to who Sir Philip was a puny child in genius.

  The great glory of literature in this island, during the reign of James, was Lord Bacon…. If we consider the variety of talents displayed by this man; as a public speaker, a man of business, a wit, a courtier, a companion, an author, a philosopher; he is justly the object of great admiration. If we consider him merely as an author and philosopher, the light in which we view him at present, though very estimable, he was yet inferior to his contemporary Galileo, perhaps even to Kepler. Bacon pointed out at a distance the road to true philosophy: Galileo both pointed it out to others, and made himself considerable advances in it. The Englishman was ignorant of geometry: the Florentine revived that science, excelled in it, and was the first that applied it, together with experiment, to natural philosophy. The former rejected, with the most positive disdain, the system of Copernicus; the latter fortified it with new proofs, derived both from reason and the senses. Bacon’s style is stiff and rigid; his wit, though often brilliant, is also often unnatural and far-fetched; and he seems to be the original of those pointed smiles and long-spun allegories which so much distinguish the English authors; Galileo is a lively and agreeable, though somewhat a prolix writer. But Italy, not united in any single government, and perhaps satiated with that literary glory which it has possessed both in ancient and modern times, has too much neglected the renown which it has acquired by giving birth to so great a man. That national spirit which prevails among the English, and which forms their great happiness, is the cause why they bestow on all their eminent writers, and on Bacon among the rest, such praises and acclamations as may often appear partial and excessive.

  The English language is the only object in his great survey of art and of nature, which owes nothing of its excellence to the genius of Bacon.

  Who is there, that, upon hearing this name does not instantly recognise everything of genius the most profound, everything of literature the most extensive, everything of discovery the most penetrating, everything of observation on human life the most distinguishing and refined? All these must be instantly recognised, for they are all inseparably associated with the name of Lord Veralum.

  If it be true that the compositions of Bacon are scarcely at all read in his native country, I could not devise a more effectual charm to revive a taste which ought never to have declined, than a just translation of the “Cogitata et Visa.” When Hume denied this author the praise of eloquence, he must either have forgot that such a work issued from his pen; or that profound observations, clothed with enlarged sentiments and the images of a copious and exquisite fancy, will fully compensate the want of idiomatic purity, or a rhetorical structure of periods.

  That the composition of Lord Bacon, especially in his scientific works, was in general perspicuous, will not be denied; but that he reached the acme of our language, and exhibited the graces of Cicero, is surely hyperbolical praise.

  The vigour of his mind did not sink with his fall from power. For a while, indeed, it was broken and disturbed by the rock on which he had dashed; but soon his thoughts, bursting into a new channel, flowed onward with their accustomed, full, and majestic course.

  He has in general inspired a fervour of admiration which vents itself in indiscriminate praise, and is very adverse to a calm examination of the character of his understanding, which was very peculiar, and on that account described with more than ordinary imperfection, by that unfortunately vague and weak part of language which attempts to distinguish the varieties of mental superiority…. It is easy to describe his transcendent merit in general terms of commendation; for some of his great qualities lie on the surface of his writings. But that in which he most excelled all other men, was the range and compass of his intellectual view and the power of contemplating many and distant objects together without indistinctness or confusion, which he himself has called “discursive” or “comprehensive” understanding. This wide ranging intellect was illuminated by the brightest Fancy that ever contented itself with the office of only ministering to Reason: and from this singular relation of the two grand faculties of man, it has resulted, that his philosophy, though illustrated still more than adorned by the utmost splendour of imagery, continues still subject to the undivided supremacy of Intellect…. No man ever united a more poetical style to a less poetical philosophy. One great end of his discipline is to prevent mysticism and fanaticism from obstructing the pursuit of truth.

  His character was then an amazing insight into the limits of human knowledge and acquaintance with the landmarks of human intellect, so as to trace its past history or point out the path to future inquiries, but when he quits the ground of contemplation of what others have done or left undone to project himself into future discoveries, he becomes quaint and fantastic, instead of original. His strength was in reflection, not in production; he was the surveyor, not the builder, of the fabric of science. He had not strictly the constructive faculty. He was the principal pioneer in the march of modern philosophy, and has completed the education and discipline of the mind for the acquisition of truth, by explaining all the impediments or furtherances that can be applied to it or cleared out of its way. In a word, he was one of the greatest men this country has to boast, and his name deserves to stand, where it is generally placed, by the side of those of our greatest writers, whether we consider the variety, the strength, or splendour of his faculties, for ornament or use.

  In his historical authorities, is often inaccurate. I could give half a dozen instances from his Apophthegms only.

  It is scarcely possible to read a page of his works without seeing that the love of knowledge was his ruling passion; that his real happiness consisted in intellectual delight. How beautifully does he state this when enumerating the blessings attendant upon the pursuit and possession of knowledge.

  His eloquence, though not untainted with the vicious taste of his age, would alone have entitled him to a high rank in literature. He had a wonderful talent for packing thought close and rendering it portable. In wit, if by wit he meant the power of perceiving analogies between things which appear to have been nothing in common, he never had an equal—not even Cowley—not even the author of “Hudibras.” Indeed, he possessed this faculty, or rather this faculty possessed him, to a morbid degree.

  That Shakespeare’s appearance upon a soil so admirably prepared was neither marvellous nor accidental is evidenced even by the corresponding appearance of such a contemporary as Bacon. Scarcely can anything be said of Shakespeare’s position generally with regard to mediæval poetry which does not also bear upon the position of the renovator Bacon with regard to mediæval philosophy. Neither knew nor mentioned the other, although Bacon was almost called upon to have done so in his remarks upon the theatre of his day. It may be presumed that Shakespeare liked Bacon but little, if he knew his writings and life, that he liked not his ostentation, which, without on the whole interfering with his modesty, recurred too often in many instances; that he liked not the fault-finding which his ill-health might have caused, nor the narrow-mindedness with which he pronounced the histrionic art to be infamous, although he allowed that the ancients regarded the drama as a school for virtue; nor the theoretic precepts of worldly wisdom which he gave forth; nor, lastly, the practical career which he lived. Before his mind, however, if he had fathomed it, he must have bent in reverence. For just as Shakespeare was an interpreter of the secrets of history and of human nature, Bacon was an interpreter of lifeless nature.

  No English writer has surpassed him in fervor and brilliancy of style, in force of expression, or in richness of magnificence of imagery. Keen in discovering analogies where no resemblance is apparent to common eyes, he has sometimes indulged, to excess, in the exercise of this talent. But in general his comparisons are not less clear and apposite than full of imagination and meaning. He has treated of philosophy with all the splendor, yet none of the vagueness, of poetry. Sometimes, too, his style possesses a degree of conciseness very rarely to be found in the compositions of the Elizabethan age.

  If I were asked to describe Bacon as briefly as I could, I should say that he was the liberator of the hands of knowledge.

  I refer to him, because I fancy that many have a notion of his books on the Interpretation of Nature as very valuable for scientific men, and his books on Morals and Politics as very wise for statesmen and men of the world, but not as friends. They form this notion because they suppose, that the more we know of Bacon himself, the less sympathy we should have with him. I should be sorry to hold this opinion, because I owe him immense gratitude; and I could not cherish it if I thought of him, even as the sagest of book-makers and not as a human being. I should be sorry to hold it, because if I did not find in him a man who deserved reverence and love, I should not feel either the indignation or the sorrow which I desire to feel for his misdoings.

  Many thanks for the Bacon which you found in the Barrow. It all amounts to wondrous little, if, as you say, Bacon was known to the Cambridge men generally. How could Bacon be so little quoted? The conceits of which that age was fond were taken out of puerility by him, and made into wit and covered with taste. And yet they knew nothing of him to speak of. Newton’s silence is emphatic. When I have time and opportunity I intend to work out the thesis, “That Newton was more indebted to the Schoolmen than to Bacon, and probably better acquainted with them.”

  Newton was anything but illiterate. He knew Bacon. His silence is most marked. How could he avoid every possible amount of mention of Bacon on every possible subject? I never said he did not know Bacon; I only said he could not be proved to have known of his existence. Nor can he. I think he has taken such pains not to be known to know him as cannot be attributed to accident.

  What is true of Shakespeare is true of Bacon. Bacon thought in parables. Of the astounding versatility of his thought, of the universality of its reach, the subtlety of its discrimination, the practical Machiavellian omniscience of motive good and evil, it is difficult by words to convey any adequate idea. But the plasticity of his thought is always the humble servant of his omnipresent imagination. His intellect is always at the mercy of his fancy for a clothing. All his intellectual facts are wrapt in visions of beautiful illustration.

  Except it be Milton’s, there is not any prose fuller of grand poetic embodiments than Lord Bacon’s.

  Of Bacon, more than of any other writer, it may be said that “in the very dust of his writings there is gold.”

  There is nothing in English prose superior to his diction.

  Read a page of Macaulay, and you exhaust the thought at a single perusal. Read a page of Bacon twenty times, and at each reading you will discover new meanings, unobserved before. That haze which the naked eye could not penetrate is found by the telescope to be a nebula, composed of innumerable distinct stars. The one writer informs, the other stimulates, the mind. The one enlightens, the other inspires. The first communicates facts and opinions; the second floods and surcharges you with mental life.

  Bacon’s range of subjects was wide, and his command of words within that range as great as any man could have acquired. He took pains to keep his vocabulary rich. From some private notes that have been preserved, we see that he had a habit of jotting down and refreshing his memory with varieties of expression on all subjects that were likely to occur for discussion. He uses a great many more obsolete words than either Hooker or Sidney. To be sure, the language of the feelings and the language of theology have changed less than the language of science. But in his narrative and in his “Essays,” as well as in his scientific writings, Bacon shows a decided preference now and then for “inkhorn terms.”

  His utterances are not infrequently marked with a grandeur and solemnity of tone, a majesty of diction, which renders it impossible to forget, and difficult even to criticise them…. There is no author, unless it be Shakespeare, who is so easily remembered or so frequently quoted…. The terse and burning words, issuing, as it were, from the lips of an irresistible commander.

  In the matter of diction he uses more obsolete words than either Hooker or Sidney, but he is immeasurably superior to them both in the perspicuity of his sentences which, though occasionally involved, as a rule allow us to see into his thoughts with great distinctness. The aphoristic style of his essays is worthy of all praise, and he may be considered the first English master of antithesis: it was perhaps his work in this direction which gave his peculiar bent to the literature of the early part of the 17th century.

  Bacon was always much more careful of the value of aptness of a thought than of its appearing new and original. Of all great writers he least minds repeating himself, perhaps in the very same words; so that a simile, an illustration, a quotation pleases him, he returns to it—he is never tired of it; it obviously gives him satisfaction to introduce it again and again.

  Imagination is a compound of intellectual power and feeling. The intellectual power may be great, but if it is not accompanied with feeling, it will not minister to feeling; or it will minister to many feelings by turns, and to none in particular. As far as the intellectual power of a poet goes, few men have excelled Bacon. He had a mind stored with imagery, able to produce various and vivid illustrations of whatever thought came before him; but these illustrations touched no deep feeling; they were fresh, original, racy, fanciful, picturesque, a play of the head that never touched the heart. The man was by nature cold; he had not the emotional depth or compass of an average Englishman. Perhaps his strongest feeling of an enlarged or generous description was for human progress, but it did not rise to passion; there was no fervour, no fury in it. Compare him with Shelley on the same subject, and you will see the difference between meagreness and intensity of feeling. What intellect can be, without strong feeling, we have in Bacon; what intellect is, with strong feeling, we have in Shelley. The feeling gives the tone to the thoughts; sets the intellect at work to find language having its own intensity, to pile up lofty and impressive circumstances; and then we have the poet, the orator, the thoughts that breathe, and the words that burn. Bacon wrote on many impressive themes—on Truth, on Love, on Religion, on Death, and on the Virtues in detail; he was always original, illustrative, fanciful; if intellectual means and resources could make a man feel in these things, he would have felt deeply; yet he never did.

  Bacon’s style varied almost as much as his handwriting; but it was influenced more by the subject-matter than by youth or old age. Few men have shown equal versatility in adapting their language to the slightest shade of circumstance and purpose. His style depended upon whether he was addressing a king, or a great nobleman, or a philosopher, or a friend; whether he was composing a State paper, pleading in a State trial, magnifying the Prerogative, extolling Truth, discussing studies, exhorting a judge, sending a New Year’s present, or sounding a trumpet to prepare the way for the Kingdom of Man over Nature. It is a mistake to suppose that Bacon was never florid till he grew old. On the contrary, in the early “Devices,” written during his connection with Essex, he uses a rich exuberant style and poetic rhythm; but he prefers the rhetorical question of appeal to the complex period. On the other hand, in all his formal philosophical works, even in the “Advancement of Learning,” published as early as 1605, he uses the graver periodic structure, though often illustrated with rich metaphor…. In his estimation, literary style was a snare quite as often as a help.

  Illustrious beyond all others except Shakespeare in his intellect, and, with whatever infirmities, still not less than noble in his moral mind.

  In Bacon, as far as was possible in one man, the learning of the age met and mingled. All the Romance—i.e., at that date all the literary—languages of Europe, were part of his province. In his pages all the classics—save Homer and the Greek dramatists—are rifled to enrich the “Globus Intellectualis.” All the philosophies of the West and most of the little then known of science, come within his ken. His criticisms of history are generally sound, as are his references to the dicta and methods of previous authors, and his quotations, though somewhat overlaid, are always illuminating. He had no pretension to the minute scholarship of a Casaubon or a Scaliger; but his grasp of the Latin tongue was firm, and his use of it facile.

  The highest literary merit of Bacon’s “Essays” is their combination of charm and of poetic prose with conciseness of expression and fulness of thought. But the oratorical and ideal manner in which, with his variety, he sometimes wrote, is best seen in his “New Atlantis,” that imaginary land in the unreachable seas.

  In his English works, considered alone, we have to confess a certain poverty. He who thought it the first distemper of learning, that men should study words and not matter, is now in the singular condition of having outlived his matter, or, at least, a great part of it, while his words are as vivid as ever. We could now wish that he could have been persuaded to “hunt more after choiceness of the phrase, and the round and clear composition of the sentence, and the sweet falling of the clauses,” qualities which he had the temerity to profess to despise.

  In Bacon’s sentences we may often find remarkable condensation of thought in few words. One does not have to search for two grains of wheat hid in two bushels of chaff…. His work abounds in illustrations, analogies, and striking imagery.