plete edition, the first is entitled 'Of Truth,' and is as follows:

"What is Truth?' said jesting Pilate, and would not stay for an answer. Certainly there be that delight in giddiness, and count it a bondage to fix a belief; affecting free-will in thinking, as well as in acting. And though the sects of philosophers of that kind be gone, yet there remain certain discoursing wits, which are of the same veins, though there be not so much blood in them as was in those of the ancients. But it is not only the difficulty and labour which men take in finding out of Truth; nor again, that when it is found, it imposeth upon men's thoughts, that doth bring lies in favour; but a natural, though corrupt, love of the lie itself. One of the later school of the Grecians examineth the matter, and is at a stand to think what should be in it that men should love lies; where neither they make for pleasure, as with poets, nor for advantage, as with the merchant, but for the lie's sake. But I cannot tell: this same Truth is a naked and open daylight, that doth not show the masques, and mummeries, and triumphs of the world, half so stately and daintily as candle-lights. Truth may perhaps come to the price of a pearl, that showeth best by day; but it will not rise to the price of a diamond or carbuncle, that showeth best in varied lights. A mixture of a lie doth ever add pleasure. Doth any man doubt, that if there were taken out of men's minds vain opinions, flattering hopes, false valuations, imaginations as one would, and the like; but it would leave the minds of a number of men, poor shrunken things, full of melancholy and indisposition, and unpleasing to themselves. One of the Fathers, in great severity, called poesy 'Vinum Dæmonum,'* because it filleth the imagination, and yet it is but with the shadow of a lie. But it is not the lie that passeth through the mind, but the lie that sinketh in and settleth in it, that doth the hurt, such as we spake of before. But howsoever these things are thus in men's depraved judgments and affections, yet truth, which only doth judge itself, teacheth that the inquiry of truth, which is the love-making or wooing of it; the knowledge of truth, which is the presence of it; and the belief of truth, which is the enjoying of it, is the sovereign

*The wine of devils. (The translations throughout our extracts from the Essays are the same as in the edition, with notes, by Dr. W. C. Taylor, 8vo., Lond. 1840.)

good of human nature. The first creature of God in the works of the days was the light of the sense; the last was the light of reason; and his sabbath-work ever since is the illumination of his spirit. First he breathed light upon the face of the matter or chaos, then he breathed light into the face of man, and still *he breatheth and inspireth light into the face of his chosen. The poet that beautified the sect that was otherwise inferior to the rest, saith yet excellently well: 'It is a pleasure to stand upon the shore, and to see ships tossed upon the sea; a pleasure to stand in the window of a castle and to see a battle, and the adventures thereof below; but no pleasure is comparable to the standing upon the vantage-ground of truth-(a hill not to be commanded, and where the air is always clear and serene)and to see the errors, and wanderings, and mists, and tempests in the vale below: so always that this prospect be with pity, and not with swelling or pride. Certainly it is heaven upon earth to have a man's mind move in charity, rest in providence, and turn upon the poles of truth.

To pass from theological and philosophical truth to the truth of civil business, it will be acknowledged, even by those that practise it not, that clear and round dealing is the honour of man's nature, and that mixture of falsehood is like alloy in coin of gold and silver, which may make the metal work the better, but it embaseth it. For these winding and crooked courses are the goings of the serpent, which goeth basely upon the belly, and not upon the feet. There is no vice that doth so cover a man with shame as to be found false and perfidious. And therefore Mountaigny saith prettily, when he inquired the reason, Why the word of the lie should be such a disgrace, and such an odious charge? Saith he, 'If it be well weighed, To say that a man lieth, is as much as to say that he is brave towards God, and a coward towards men." For a lie faces God, and shrinks from man. Surely the wickedness of falsehood, and breach of faith, cannot possibly be so highly expressed, as in that it shall be the last peal, to call the judgments of God upon the generations of men; it being foretold, that when Christ cometh, He shall not find faith upon the earth.'

As this is our first specimen, we may stop for a moment to notice the characteristics of Bacon's manner of thinking and writing by which it is marked.

The first thing that will strike every reader is its Fulness of matter. Jonson, as we have seen, has said of Bacon's speaking, that his hearers could not cough or

look aside from him without loss; neither can his readers remit their attention for a sentence, or for a clause of a sentence, without missing a portion of the thought. We do not speak merely of the vividness and pregnancy of the expression; that is another thing. What we mean is, that the flow of the reasoning or reflection never pauses, never diminishes. True or false, one new thought, one new view succeeds another as fast as it is possible to exhibit them. Nor is this true only of the Essays, where the style is more formally aphoristic and economical. His other writings are less pointed and epigrammatic; but the packing of the thoughts is nearly as close everywhere. Every word indicates a working, teeming mind. Much of what is said, indeed, may be merely ingenious; some portion of the abundance may be even incumbering, and would, we may think, be better away; but there, at any rate, it is, never-failing and seemingly inexhaustible, at the least the richest intermixture of wisdom, fancy, and ingenuity in succession, often a combination and interfusion of all the three.

Then there is the uncommonness and characteristic air of nearly all the thoughts. It might be supposed that after any true thing has once been said, and generally felt and accepted, it would pass into common property, and cease to be recognisable as the thought of an individual. But it does not so happen. Án original thought never loses its stamp of originality. If it has been struck out in an illiterate and unrecording age, it spreads indeed everywhere among the people, but it retains its distinctive shape of a peculiar utterance, a proverb, and, after having been repeated for a thousand years, it shows like a flash of fire among other words every time it is used. It is the same with an original thought in a book. It always remains new, fresh, and striking A mere scientific truth may become a com monplace; it is something entirely separate from the mind of the discoverer but a happily expressed thought lis a fragment of the mind which first gave it such expression, and will always continue to be something unlike what any other mind would have produced. Take any

discovery in astronomy: we could not say from anything that is known of the minds of Copernicus, or Galileo, or Tycho Brahe, or Kepler, from which of them it proceeded, nor does the mention of it in ordinary circumstances recal its author; no part of its importance, no part of its beauty or its life lies in its connection with him: it has no flavour or character of any kind which it has taken from him, or which makes any likeness between him and it. He has thrown it forth as the tissue is thrown forth by the loom; a moral saying is more like the grape, that is ever racy of the soil where it grew. Thus, a characteristic thought of Bacon's cannot be taken possession of by any one else and made his own; in the change of the Baconian form or expression, the thought itself would be changed; it must therefore always retain that peculiarity of aspect which marks it as his, and which will keep it for ever as distinguishable and as striking as it was at first. A discovery made by Kepler might easily, if we were to judge only by the intellectual characters of the two, be attributed to Copernicus; but a verse of Homer's or a sentence of Bacon's will usually, like a picture by Raphael, attest their own paternity.

Bacon's manner of writing has been described by his chaplain and first biographer in the following terms:"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." What is here said of his avoidance of all mere verbal conceits is true, and the fact merits especial attention as notably discriminating the wit of Bacon from that of every other English writer eminent for that quality in his age. Pro

VOL. I.

C

bably nothing resembling a pun, or any quibble of that class, is to be found in all that he has written. Nor does he torture thoughts more than words; having once given the thought full and fitting expression, he lets it alone, and passes on to the next. Yet the characteristic of his writing is pre-eminently wit, understood in the largest and highest sense, as the perception and exhibition of things in their less obvious relations. Upon no topic is he ever trite, or a repeater of what has been said by others; he cannot quote a verse of Scripture without giving it an interpretation of his own. And yet the peculiar view that he takes of everything never, or very rarely, appears forced or unnatural; if it be the last that would occur to an ordinary thinker, it looks as if it were the first that had occurred to him.

Much of this comes of the real originality of Bacon's manner of thinking; but the effect is also in part owing to his great oratorical skill or art of expression. The manner of his writing is as striking and uncommon as the matter. Or rather, we should say, the arraying and apparelling of his thoughts is as brilliant as the thoughts themselves. He has no passion; but no man had ever more of the mere ingenuity and fancy that belong to eloquence. His style is all over colour and imagery; so much so, indeed, that this sort of enrichment may be said frequently to enter into its substance, and to constitute his thoughts rather than to clothe and decorate them. Metaphors, similitudes, and analogies make up a great part of his reasoning, are constantly brought in for proof and argument as well as for illustration. Not that this forms any objection to the force or soundness of the reasoning. In moral exposition, which is totally different in its nature from mathematical demonstration-as different as a piece of music is from the multiplication table-what is at all times principally wanted, almost the one thing needful, is the spirit and pulse of life; if that be present in sufficient strength, the manner in which it shows itself, or the source whence it is obtained, is of little consequence. Consider what all such exposition is. It rarely or never takes the form of pure syllogism