they are among the finest remains of Elizabethan prose. Critics often incautiously speak as if the whole work were written in the same strain. A grave melancholy runs through them, the natural mood of an ambitious spirit and a strong confident wit chastened but not broken by slander and imprisonment, writing in "the evening of a tempestuous life." Especially remarkable are the

passages on Death. In the preface he says:—

"But let every man value his own wisdom, as he pleaseth. Let the rich man think all fools, that cannot equal his abundance; the Revenger esteem all negligent that have not trodden down their opposites; the Politician, all gross that cannot merchandise their faith: Yet when we once come in sight of the Port of death, to which all winds drive us, and when by letting fall that fatal Anchor, which can never be weighed again, the navigation of this life takes end: Then it is, I say, that our own cogitations (those sad and severe cogitations, formerly beaten from us by our health and felicity) return again, and pay us to the uttermost for all the pleasing passages of our life past.

In the same strain he concludes his history:

"It is therefore death alone that can suddenly make man to know himself. He tells the proud and insolent that they are but Abjects, and humbles them at the instant; makes them cry, complain, and repent; yea, even to hate their forepassed happiness. He takes the account of the rich, and proves him a beggar; a naked beggar, which hath interest in nothing, but in the gravel that fills his mouth. He holds a Glass before the eyes of the most beautiful, and makes them see therein their deformity and rottenness; and they acknowledge it.

“ (

"O eloquent, just, and mighty Death! whom none could advise, thou hast persuaded; what none hath dared, thou hast done; and whom all the world hath flattered, thou only hast cast out of the world and despised; thou hast drawn together all the far-stretched greatness, all the pride, cruelty, and ambition of man, and covered it all over with these two narrow words, Hic jacet."

Raleigh's other works are a treatise on Ship-building, 'Maxims of State,' the 'Cabinet Council,' the 'Sceptic,' and 'Advice to his Son.' In worldly wisdom, this last is equal to Bacon's Essays, though the subjects of advice are more commonplace.

William Cecil, Lord Burleigh (1522-1598), like Raleigh, wrote advice for his son under the title 'Precepts or Directions for the Well-ordering and Carriage of a Man's Life,' a digest of commonplace advice on the choice of a wife, the management of a household, the danger of suretiship, and suchlike.

Thomas Dekker, the dramatist, an antagonist of Ben Jonson's, wrote 'Seven Deadly Sins of London' (1606), 'The Gull's Hornbook' (1609), and other ephemeral productions-burlesque satires of the extreme fashionable world, of the bucks and girls of the period.

King James I. had a literary turn: he wrote 'A Counterblast to Tobacco,' and a work on 'Demonology.' Neither of these

pedantic compositions would have survived had they been written by a less distinguished personage.

The unfortunate Sir Thomas Overbury (1581-1613),—who, after figuring brilliantly at the Court of James as the favourite of the King's favourite, Robert Carr, was mysteriously cut off by slow poison, in consequence of his opposing Carr's marriage with the Countess of Essex,-wrote 'Characters of Witty Descriptions of the Properties of Sundry Persons.' Fanciful word-play, we have seen, existed at Court before Lyly's 'Euphuism: the sermons of the King's admired preachers are one evidence that it continued when the temporary fashion of Euphuism was gone; Overbury's characters are another and a stronger. Take as a sample his description of a tinker :

"He seems to be very devout, for his life is a continual pilgrimage; and sometimes in humility goes barefoot, therein making necessity a virtue. His house is as ancient as Tubal-Cain's, and so is a renegade by antiquity; yet he proves himself a gallant, for he carries all his wealth upon his back; or a philosopher, for he bears all his substance about him. .. So marches he all over England with his bag and baggage; his conversation is irreprovable, for he is ever mending. He observes truly the statutes, and therefore had rather steal than beg, in which he is irremovably constant, in spite of whips or imprisonment. Some would take him to be a coward, but, believe it, he is a lad of mettle. He is very provident, for he will fight with but one at once, and then also he had rather submit than be counted obstinate."

WERE we to place authors strictly according to age, we should include Bacon in the same generation with Sidney and Hooker. But we have an eye rather to the dates of the composition of their works; and most of Bacon's works were written after 1610.

As the "founder of Inductive Philosophy," his great reputation is literary rather than scientific; he advanced Science as an advocate, not as a labourer in the field. He recalled men from speculation, and urged them to study facts. He was an eager and acute observer, whenever he found time; but only a fraction of his time was devoted to Science. His service lay not so much in what he did himself, as in the grand impulse he gave to others.

The merits of his style, as of every other style in that age, are variously estimated. Addison praises his grace, Hume calls him stiff and rigid, and many persons would be unable to see that either of these criticisms has any peculiar application. But all admit that he is one of the greatest writers of prose during the reigns of Elizabeth and James.

His father, Sir Nicholas Bacon, was Elizabeth's Lord Keeper; his mother, Anne Cooke, a woman of Lady Jane Grey accomplishments, translated Bishop Jewel's 'Apology' in 1564. Born at his father's house in London, Francis was sent at the age of twelve to Trinity College, Cambridge, and remained there for two years and a half under the care of Whitgift, then Master of Trinity. Of these early days little is known, except that he was an exceedingly grave and precocious child, and was called by Elizabeth her

"young Lord Keeper;" it is said, also, that before he left Cambridge he had begun to dislike Aristotle as being barren of practical fruit. Previous to his father's death in 1579, he had spent more than two years in Paris with the English ambassador there. His ideal at this time seems to have been to make statecraft his profession, and reserve a considerable part of his time for study. But his father's death leaving him without adequate provision, and his uncle Burleigh refusing to find him a sinecure, he was compelled to take up the profession of law. He was admitted as an utter barrister in 1582; and thenceforth his time was distributed between the practice of law, public business, and his great literary projects. Under Elizabeth his promotion was not rapid : the Queen thought him "showy and not deep" in law; he had enemies at Court in his uncle and cousin; and his generous patron, Essex, did him more harm than good by indiscreet urgency. got nothing but the reversion of the Clerkship of the Star-Chamber, which did not fall in for twenty years; he applied in vain for the Attorney-Generalship, the Solicitor-Generalship, and the Mastership of the Rolls. Under James, he became Solicitor-General in 1607, Attorney-General in 1613, Lord Chancellor in 1617. In 1620 appeared the 'Novum Organum.' In 1621 he underwent the well-known censure of Parliament, being fined and deprived of the Great Seal. The remainder of his life was passed in studious retirement, during which he composed the greater part of his literary works. In the spring of 1626 he caught a chill when experimenting with snow, and died on Easter-day, April 9.

He

His chief English works are the 'Essays,' the Advancement of Learning,' the History of Henry VII.,' the New Atlantis,' and 'Sylva Sylvarum.' Of the Essays there were three different issues: ten essays in 1597, under the title Essays, Religious Meditations, Places of persuasion and dissuasion;' thirty-eight in 1612, entitled The Essays of Sir Francis Bacon, Knight, the King's SolicitorGeneral;' fifty-eight in 1625, entitled 'The Essays or Counsels, Civil and Moral, of,' &c. The Advancement of Learning' (which he translated into Latin, and enlarged during his retirement, calling it 'De Augmentis Scientiarum ') was published in 1605. The History of Henry VII.' was his first work after he was banished from Court. The New Atlantis' was written about the same time; it is a romance somewhat after the manner of More's 'Utopia,' the design being to describe a college fully equipped for the study of Nature on the inductive method. Sylva Sylvarum' or the Natural History,' - a collection of facts touching the qualities of bodies, made partly from observation, partly from books-was the last work of his life.

Bacon seems to have been in person a little, broad, square

shouldered, brown man, thin and nervous-looking. large head and small features.

He had a

It would be presumptuous to attempt anything like an exact valuation of Bacon's intellectual power. We state only what lies upon the surface when we say that the character and products of his intellect are very often as much over-estimated upon one side as they are under-estimated upon another. He is frequently praised as if he had originated and established the inductive method, as if he had laid down the canons appealed to in modern science as the ultimate conditions of sound induction. This is going too far. Bacon was an orator, not a worker; a Tyrtæus, not a Miltiades. He rendered a great service by urging recourse to observation and experiment rather than to speculation; but neither by precept nor by example did he show how to observe and experiment well, or so as to arrive at substantial conclusions. Not by precept; for if modern inductive method were no better than Bacon's inductive method, Macaulay's caricature of the process would not be so very unlike the reality. Nor by example; for the majority of his own generalisations are loose to a degree. To call Bacon the founder of scientific method is to mistake the character of his mind, and to do him an injustice by resting his fame upon a false foundation. Unwearied activity, inexhaustible constructiveness-that, and not scientific patience or accuracy, was his characteristic. He had what Peter Heylin calls a chymical brain;" every group of facts that entered his mind he restlessly threw into new combinations. We over-estimate the man upon one side when we give him credit for scientific rigour; his contemporary Gilbert, who wrote upon the magnet, probably had more scientific caution and accuracy than he. And we under-estimate him upon another side when we speak as if the Inductive Philosophy had been the only outcome of his ever-active brain. His projects of reform in Law were almost as vast as his projects of reform in Philosophy. In Politics he drew up opinions on every question of importance during the forty years of his public life, and was often employed by the Queen and Lord Burleigh to write papers of State. All this was done in addition to his practical work as a lawyer. And yet his multiplex labours do not seem to have used up his mental vigour ; his schemes always outran human powers of performance. His ambition was not to make one great finished effort and then rest; his intellectual appetite seemed almost insatiable.1

1 It is a curious problem to make out why an intellect so acute and active revolted from the subtleties of the schoolmen, and did not rather turn to them as its most congenial element. Part of the explanation is doubtless to be found in the high development of his senses, in the strong arrest of his mind upon the outer world. A meditative man will walk for miles through the country, and be unable to describe minutely any one object that he has seen.

Bacon's eye