Page:Essays of Francis Bacon 1908 Scott.djvu/101

Rh their discourse. Perhaps of a summer evening a wandering bat darts in at the open window to disturb the vigil. Late, too late for sound health, he lies down on his couch, and when he wakes in the broad light of full day, his eyes open on the varnished wooden ceiling of a large, low bedroom. Bacon was no poet. His imagery is not that of a transcendent imagination playing over a subject and illuminating it here and there with brilliant flashes of light. But Bacon's mind was poetic, and he had the gift, which while it is not so rare as the transcendent imagination, is yet very rare, the gift of seeing analogies in common things. His similes and metaphors are the hardy flowers that grow by the wayside for any one to pluck. A whole body of them come from contemporary sports, cards, bowls, horsemanship. A cunning man may be able to "pack the cards" and yet not play well; so cunning men who understand persons rather than matters "are good but in their own alley," Of Cunning. Of a delicate constitution, he dabbled perforce in medicine, and another set of tropes reveal the curious materia medica of Tudor times, "You may take sarza to open the liver, steel to open the spleen, flower of sulphur for the lungs, castoreum for the brain; but no receipt openeth the heart but a true friend," Of Friendship. Finally, the freshness of much of Bacon's imagery is delightful, like "Charity will hardly water the ground where it must first fill a pool," Of Marriage and Single Life. Men who hold on to business with failing powers are "like old Rh