Page:Bacons Essays 1908 West.djvu/17

 subject, is sometimes rich and ornate, sometimes solemn and majestic, sometimes penetrating and concise, the quality of superb self-confidence is seldom absent. What he conceives as a poet, he utters as a prophet, and as a prophet who delivers his message and disdains controversy. He speaks as one having authority: 'Franciscus Baconus sic cogitavit. These are thoughts which have occurred to me; weigh them well, and take them or leave them .'

His expressions are often obscure. Perhaps the obscurity was sometimes intentional. At any rate the fault was of old standing. His mother forwards to her son Anthony one of his brother's letters. 'Construe the interpretation,' she says: 'I do not understand his enigmatical folded writing .' Usually however the want of clearness is due to the terseness of his utterance. Thoughts which a writer of our own day would distil over a page, Bacon condenses into a sentence. What he writes is meant, not 'to be swallowed' in a hurry, but to be chewed and digested with deliberation. No man ever packed so much matter into smaller compass.

Dean Church says of Bacon's Essays that 'they are like chapters in Aristotle's Ethics and Rhetoric on virtues and characters; only Bacon takes Aristotle's broad marking lines as drawn, and proceeds with the subtler and more refined observations of a much longer and wider experience. But these short papers say what they have to say without preface, and in literary undress, without a superfluous word, without the joints and bands of structure: they say it in brief, rapid sentences, which come down, sentence after sentence, like the strokes of a great hammer. Bacon's fertility of imagination was immense. 'In wit, if by wit be meant the power of perceiving analogies between things which appear to have nothing in common, he never had an