and seated in a contemplative attitude. It was set up by a loving disciple, Sir Thomas Meautys. A Latin inscription, which was penned by another admirer, Sir Henry Wotton, may be rendered in English thus:

His

"Thus was wont to sit FRANCIS BACON, LORD VERULAM, VICOUNT ST. ALBANS, (or to call him by his more illustrious titles) the light of the sciences, the standard of eloquence, who, after he had discovered all the secrets of natural and moral philosophy, fulfilled nature's law of dissolution, A.d. 1626, aged 66.-To the memory of so eminent a man THOMAS MEAUTYS, a disciple in life, an admirer in death, set up this monument.'

'For my name and memory,' Bacon wrote in his will, 'I leave it to men's charitable speeches, and to foreign nations and the next ages.' These legatees have character. not proved themselves negligent of the trust that Bacon reposed in them; yet, when his personal career is surveyed, it is impossible for man's charitable speeches or foreign nations or the next ages to apply to it the language of eulogy. An unparalleled faith in himself, a blind selfconfidence, is the most striking feature of his personal character. It justified in his mind acts on his part which defied every law of morality. That characteristic may have been partly due to his early training. The self-righteous creed which his narrowly Puritan mother implanted in him was responsible for much. The Calvinistic doctrine of predestination and election gave him, unconsciously, at the outset, confidence in his eternal salvation, whatever his personal conduct in life. But, if this were the result of his mother's teaching, his father, who was immersed in the politics of the day, made him familiar as a boy with all the Machiavellian devices, the crooked tricks of policy and intrigue which infected the political society of Queen Elizabeth's court. While these two influences-his mother's superstition and his father's

His neglect

of moral

functions.

crafty worldliness-were playing on his receptive mind, a third came from his own individuality. He grew convinced of the possession of exceptional intellectual power which, if properly applied, would revolutionise man's relations with nature and reveal to him her hidden secrets. As years advanced, he realised that material wealth and position were needful to him if he were to attain the goal of his intellectual ambition. With a moral sense weakened by his early associations with Calvinism on the one hand and with utilitarianism on the other, he was unable to recognise any justice in moral obstacles intervening between him and that material prosperity which was essential, in his belief, to the fulfilment of his intellectual designs. The higher he advanced in the material world, the more independent he became of the conventional distinctions between right and wrong. His mighty fall teaches the useful lesson that intellectual genius, however commanding, never justifies breaches of those eternal moral laws which are binding on men of great mental endowments equally with men of moderate or small intellectual capacities.

His want of savoir faire.

Nor in the practical affairs of life did Bacon have at command that ordinary faculty, that savoir faire, which is often to be met with in men of smaller capacity, and can alone ensure success or prosperity. In money matters his carelessness was abnormal, even among men of genius. Whether his resources were small or great, his expenditure was always in excess of them. He was through life in bondage to money-lenders, yet he never hesitated to increase his outlay and his indebtedness. He saw his servants robbing him, but never raised a word in protest. By a will which he drew up in the year before he died, he was munificent in gifts, not merely to friends, retainers, and the poor, but to public institutions, which he hoped to render

more efficient in public service. Yet when all his assets were realised, the amount was only sufficient to defray two-thirds of his debts, and none of his magnanimous bequests took effect. With his thoughts concentrated on his intellectual ambitions, he neglected, too, the study of the men with whom he worked. Although human nature had revealed to him many of its secrets, and he could disclose them in literature with rare incisiveness, he failed to read character in the individual men with whom chance brought him into everyday association. He misunderstood Essex; he misunderstood James 1.; he misunderstood Buckingham; his wife and his servants deceived him.

X

In the conduct of his affairs, as in the management of men, Bacon stands forth as a pitiable failure. It is only in his scientific and his literary achievements that he is greatness. great, but there few have been greater.

His true

Bacon's mind was a typical product of the European Renaissance. His intellectual interests embraced every His literary topic; his writings touched almost every subject versatility. of intellectual study. To each he brought the same eager curiosity and efficient insight. He is the despair of the modern specialist. He is historian, essayist, logician, legal writer, philosophical speculator, writer on science in every branch.

His reverence for

At heart Bacon was a scholar scorning the applause which the popular writer covets. It is curious to note that he set a higher value on his skill as a writer of Latin than on his skill as a writer of English. Latin he regarded as the language of the learned of every nationality, and consequently books written in Latin were addressed to his only fit audience, the learned society of

the Latin tongue.

the whole civilised globe. English writings, on the other hand, could alone appeal to the (in his day) comparatively few persons of intelligence who understood that tongue. Latin was for him the universal language. English books could never, he said, be citizens of the world.

His con

tempt for English.

So convinced was he of the insularity of his own tongue that at the end of his life he deplored that he had wasted time in writing books in English. He hoped all his works might be translated into Latin, so that they might live for posterity. Miscalculation of his powers governed a large part of Bacon's life, and find signal illustration in this regret that he should have written in English rather than in Latin. For it is not to his Latin works, nor to the Latin translations of his English works, that he owes the main part of his immortality. He lives as a speculator in philosophy, as one who sought a great intellectual goal; but he lives equally as a great master of the English tongue which he despised.

The style

of his Essays.

For terseness and pithiness of expression there is nothing in English to match Bacon's style in the Essays. His reflections on human life which he embodied there, his comments on human nature, especially on human infirmities, owe most of their force to the stimulating vigour which he breathed into English words. has proved himself a greater master of the pregnant apophthegm in any language, not even in the French language, which far more readily lends itself to aphorism.

No man

Phrases

Weighty wisdom, phrased with that point and brevity which only a master of style could command, is scattered through all the essays, and many sentences have become proverbial. It is the essay 'Of Marriage and Single Life' that begins: He that hath wife and children hath given hostages to fortune; for

P

from the Essays.

they are impediments to great enterprises either of virtue or mischief.' That of Parents and Children' has 'Children sweeten labours, but they make misfortunes more bitter; they increase the cares of life, but they mitigate the remembrance of death.' Of 'Building' he made the prudent and witty remark: Houses are built to live in and not to look on; therefore let use be preferred before uniformity, except where both may be had. Leave goodly fabrics of houses for beauty only to the enchanted palaces of the poets who build them with small cost.' Equally notable are such sentences as these: A crowd is not company, and faces are but a gallery of pictures, and talk but a tinkling cymbal where there is no love.' On the scriptural proverb about riches making themselves wings, Bacon grafted the practical wisdom: Riches have wings and sometimes they fly away of themselves, sometimes they must be set flying to bring in more.' Equally penetrating are these aphoristic deliverances:- Some books are to be tasted, others to be swallowed, and some few to be chewed and digested' (Essay 1., of 'Studies '). A little philosophy inclineth a man's mind to atheism, but depth in philosophy bringeth man's mind about to religion' (Essay XVI., of Atheism '). Sometimes he uses very homely language with singular effect. Money is like muck-not good except it be spread' (Essay xv., of 'Seditions and Troubles'). Thus he summarised a warning which he elsewhere elaborately phrased, that it is an evil hour for a State when its treasure and money are gathered into a few hands.

But Bacon's style is varied. The pithy terseness of his essays is not present in all his works. In addition to his terse His majesmode of English expression, he had at command a tic style. rich exuberance and floridity abounding in rhetorical ornament and illustration. He professed indifference to mere questions of form in composition. But whatever his