Page:Biographical and critical studies by James Thomson ("B.V.").djvu/156

140 fancy himself occupied with Bacon's "Essays," until he misses the copiousness of illustration. Here are one or two of the shortest : " Consilia : " " No man is so foolish but may give another good counsel some- times ; and no man is so wise but may easily err if he will take no other's counsel than his own. But very few men are wise by their own counsel ; or learned by their own teaching. For he that was only taught by himself had a fool to his master." " Ap- plausus : " " We praise the things we hear with much more willingness than those we see, because we envy the present and reverence the past, thinking ourselves instructed by the one and overlaid by the other." " Comit. Suffragia:" "Suffrages in Parliament are numbered, not weighed : nor can it be otherwise in those public councils, where nothing is so unequal as the equality ; for there, how odd soever men's brains or wisdoms are, their power is always even and the same." Under the head of Memoria, he tells us : " I myself could, in my youth, have repeated all that ever I had made, and so continued till I was past forty ; since, it is much decayed in me. Yet I can repeat whole books that I have read, and poems of some selected friends, which I have liked to charge my memory with." Of Shakespeare, De Shakespeare Nostrat : " I remember the players have often men- tioned it as an honour to Shakespeare, that in his writing (whatsoever he penned) he never blotted out a line. My answer hath been. Would he had blotted a thousand. Which they thought a malevolent speech. I had not told posterity this, but for their ignorance, who choose that circumstance to commend their friend by, wherein he most faulted, and to justify mine own