of the Levant. So again Persia, being a country imbarred with mountains, open to the sea, and in the middle of the world, we see hath had three memorable revolutions of great monarchies. The first in the time of Cyrus; the second in the time of the new Artaxerxes, who raised himself in the reign of Alexander Severus, Emperor of Rome; and now of late memory, in Ismael the Sophy, whose descendents continue in empire and competition with the Turks to this day. So again Constantinople, being one of the most excellentest seats of the world, in the confines of Europe. and Asia.1 1 Here the MS. stops again, at the bottom of the page; but without any mark of ending. The other side of the leaf is indeed left blank; but the rest of the original draught, if there was more, may have been in the hands of another transcriber. PREFACE. THE fragment entitled Of the Colours of Good and Evil (the beginning of a collection of colourable arguments on questions of good and evil, with answers to them,) appears in a more perfect shape, though still a fragment, in the sixth book of the De Augmentis Scientiarum, cap. iii. As it stands here, it formed part of Bacon's earliest publication; being printed in the same volume with the Essays and Meditationes Sacræ (1597), in the title of which it is called "Places of persuasion and dissuasion;" and was probably composed not long before. In a bundle of manuscripts in the British Museum (of which a more particular account will be found, under the title of Promus of Formularies and Elegancies, in the next volume), written in Bacon's hand and apparently about the years 1595 and 1596, there is a considerable collection of these "colours;" but being set down without the explanations, and with only here and there a note to suggest the answer, they are valuable only as an example of his manner of working and of the activity of his industry. There are seventy or eighty altogether. The following are on a separate sheet, and may serve as a specimen of the least naked of them. |