Page:Grierson Herbert - First Half of the Seventeenth Century.djvu/225

Rh interests could be found than the work of the great thinker and author who meets us on the threshold of the century. Francis Bacon (1561-1626), whose life and public career need hardly be detailed here, was as careful a student of the art of clear, dignified, and persuasive utterance as of any other of the many fields of inquiry his restless mind surveyed. The Colours of Good and Evil (1597)—which, with the first draft of the Essays, was his earliest literary publication,—and the Promus of Formalities and Elegancies, show, what is equally clear from everything he wrote, how consciously he studied to speak and to write effectively. But it was not for the sake of style that Bacon studied style. He recognised how frequently "the greatest orators, . . . by observing their well-graced forms of speech, lose the volubility of application." He condemned the Ciceronians of the Renaissance, who "began to hunt more after words than matter, and more after the choiceness of the phrase, and the round and clear composition of the sentence, and the sweet falling of the clauses, and the varying and illustration of their works with tropes and figures, than after the weight of matter, worth of subject, soundness of argument, life of invention, and depth of judgment." Style to Bacon is an instrument of power—a means by which to commend his policy