works can this Essay "On Adversity" be read without emotion. Every word is written with the pen dipped deep in the ink of his own experience. Out of the fulness of knowledge born of suffering, and of the moderation that comes with age he spoke, so that the jewels of his wisdom seem like the crystallised residuum of mental anguish double distilled. Smarting under the sense of humiliation consequent on his disgrace, gnawed by remorse over his unworthy servility to the infamous minion of a scarcely less infamous monarch, Bacon turned with an eagerness almost passionate to resume the intellectual pursuits his official duties had interrupted. In profound study he found an anodyne for his spirit's pain, the delight he experienced in such labours being beautifully expressed in his Essay "Of Nature in Men": "In studies whatsoever a man commandeth upon himself let him set hours for it, but whatsoever is agreeable to his nature let him take no care for any set times, for his thoughts will fly to it of themselves."1

His activity was phenomenal. Five months after his fall he completed his History of Henry VII., which received the praise of Grotius and Locke as a model of philosophical history-writing; he began his History of Henry VIII., sketched the outline of his History of Great Britain, made notes

1 P. 168.

for his Digest of the Laws of England and Scotland, and prepared his Dialogue on the Sacred War. In 1623 appeared the "De Augmentis," the Latin translation with expansion of the Advancement of Learning, and his unfinished philosophical romance "New Atlantis," designed as a half practical, half poetical suggestion of a College of Thinkers, partially realised afterwards in the Royal Society. Not the least important work was the final revision of his famous Essays, with as many new papers added as raised the total number to fifty-eight. This was his last literary undertaking, and was published a few months before his death.

For some time he had been growing increasingly feeble; yet never for a moment did his gigantic intellect remit its labours. He literally laid down his life a martyr to science. On a bitterly cold day he descended from his carriage, purchased a fowl, killed it, and with his own hands stuffed it with snow, to see if cold would prove an agent in arresting putrefaction. Scarcely was the task complete, than he felt a chill striking through his system. Too ill to return home, he was carried to the house of Lord Arundel, where, exactly a week later, on

1 Not a prior "suggestion" for a work like Bunyan's "Holy War," as some writers rather amusingly have stated, but an endeavour to stimulate Europe into forming a League of Extermination against the Barbary pirates and the Turks.

April 9, 1626, he passed peacefully away. He was buried, as he desired, near his mother, in the Church of St. Michael, St. Albans.

Bacon was intellectually great, but morally weak. His marvellous versatility renders the task a difficult one, to present a critical estimate of the man, which will embrace all the varied aspects of his personality, as lawyer, politician, scientist, philosopher, historian, and essayist. In theology also and church politics he dabbled, while the ambiguous phrase, “be kind to concealed poets"—a phrase on which the BaconShakespeare theory has laid stress-has raised the suspicion that he wooed the Muses to a further extent than was covered by the two or three masques he wrote. In a word, he took all knowledge for his province. Nothing less appeared to satisfy him; the orb of his brain, to use his own phrase, being concentric with the universe.

Bacon's philosophical "system," which is to be studied in his Advancement of Learning, the De Augmentis, and the Novum Organum, may be said to aim primarily at a review, classification, and methodisation of all knowledge. To speak of him as formulating a “system, system," or as founding a 'school," is erroneous. He who only builds the porch cannot be said to have erected a mansion. Comprehensive though his intellect was, he had diffused his energies over so many fields that in his

own half-sad, half-humorous saying, "he had done nothing more than to ring the bell to call the wits together." Yet even this is a service neither trivial nor superficial. The very magnitude of his plans rendered their realisation practicable only in part. In physics, in politics, in morals, he sought to apply the same great organon for arriving at Truth, not a priori by deducing conclusions from first principles that too often were assumed, but a posteriori, so that through a wide induction from a sufficient number of particular examples he might attain a probability that was tantamount to certainty. To style Bacon the "inventor" or "discoverer" of Induction is a mistake. Induction, besides being referred to by Aristotle and others in Greece, was known to Gemistos Pletho, Pico della Mirandola, &c., at least a century and a half before Bacon. What he did was to insist on the process being conducted with scrupulous care. Rigorous Observation and careful Experiment, the accumulation and systematic analysis of numberless separate instances before probable truth could be affirmed-such was Bacon's great Organum or instrument, and such his achieve

ment.

Now about the "Essays." No one can study them with care without discovering that every paper is the fruit of his own experience, distilled through the alembic of his marvellous mind. There

is scarcely a single Essay which, in some sentence or another, does not point its affirmations and conclusions by some subtle reference expressed or understood, to his own life. It is one of the few volumes that may be designated "world-books books that are more cosmopolitan than patriotic, adapted not to an age but to all time. In it, supreme intellectual force is united to Protean variety of interests and sympathies. All types

and temperaments of humanity, may find some affinity to themselves therein. Easy would it have been for Bacon to make his volume merely a study of English traits, of local men and manners, like Hall's Characterismes, or Overbury's Characters, or Earle's Microcosmographie. In that case, however, none but Englishmen could have adequately entered into its spirit and sentiments. But now, its sphere of influence is well-nigh coterminous with the world's boundaries, since none can fail to enjoy where all are able to understand.

The Essays of Francis Bacon, in the form or text now presented to our readers, may be said to have passed through three distinct stages of evolution, represented by the editions of 1597, 1612, and 1625. Numbering at first only ten papers, as we have seen (the volume being eked out with "Religious Meditations "),' they were

1 Written in Latin, but translated into English in 1598.