Page:Essays of Francis Bacon 1908 Scott.djvu/78

Rh at bowls'] and yet he would lose no time, inasmuch as upon his first and immediate return he would fall to reading again, and so suffer no moment of time to slip from him without some present improvement. It may well be that the subject Of Studies was the one that revolved longest in Bacon 's mind, for it is the first essay of the edition of 1597, where it consists of eleven sentences only arranged in seven paragraphs, each formally isolated from the rest by the paragraph sign ¶. In the edition of 1625, Of Studies is number fifty. This original construction of detached sentences on a single theme accords with the first meaning of the word 'essay,' which Bacon in his 1597 title seems to have introduced into English, from Montaigne, though it was quite in character for him to cite a favorite Latin classic to support his use of the term. In the draft of the dedication of the second edition of the Essays, 1607—1612, to Prince Henry, not used on account of the death of the prince and never printed by Bacon, he says he had chosen "to write certaine breif notes, sett downe rather significantlye, then curiously, which I have called Essaies; The word is late, but the thing is auncient. For Senecaes Epistles to Lucilius; yf one marke them well, are but Essaies,—That is dispersed Meditacions." Dr. Johnson's definition of 'essay,' in 1755, is "an irregular undigested piece."

It is extremely interesting to observe the growth of the original ten essays through the second edition to the third. It will be seen that as Bacon's Rh