Page:Essays of Francis Bacon 1908 Scott.djvu/99

Rh therefore purposely used the plain man's language, refining it only as language is naturally refined by education and good breeding.

The only conscious principle of style that Bacon followed is the same. "In the composing of his books," says Dr. Rawley, "he did rather drive at a masculine and clear expression than at any fineness or affectation of phrases, and would often ask if the meaning were expressed plainly enough, as being one that accounted words to be but subservient or ministerial to matter, and not the principal."

As in the Bible, English folk-lore is embedded in Bacon's style. Twice, in Of Friendship and Of Nature in Men, he illustrates a point by means of the rustic's advice to his fellow in anger, to "say over the four and twenty letters." The use of the curious old expression "to turn the cat in the pan," Of Cunning, (that is, to reverse the order of things dexterously, to change sides,) by Sir Walter Scott, in Old Mortality (XXXV), suggests the point that various words and expressions that have gone out of English since Bacon's time still survive in the picturesque Scottish vernacular. In this same essay on Cunning, Bacon speaks of the "falls of business," meaning its 'chances.' That is what Burns means when in the Address to the Deil, he cries out, "Black be your fa'!"

Simplicity, or homeliness, in its fine old sense, is a marked characteristic of Bacon's imagery. Notice the homely words, that is to say, the words of home, in the well-known figure,—"Some books are Rh