Page:Grierson Herbert - First Half of the Seventeenth Century.djvu/226

206 to statesmen and sovereigns, his new instrument for unlocking the secrets of nature to scholars at home and abroad.

The earliest of Bacon's papers which have been preserved—An Advertisement touching the Controversies of the Church (1589)—has all the characteristics of his later work,—breadth and subtlety of thought, gravity, heightened by the tinge of archaism in the diction, the well-built sentences, now long, now short, as occasion demands, never getting out of hand, the perfectly chosen phrase, the felicitous illustrations and quotations. There is not an "empty" or "idle" word. "His hearers," Jonson tells us, "could not laugh or look aside from him without loss." His readers cannot afford to overlook a word if they would appreciate his argument or do justice to his art as a writer; though they will recognise in it an art that is always conscious of its end and in methods a little over-elaborate. Neither in rhetoric nor diplomacy did Bacon ever recognise, with Pascal, that there is an "esprit de finesse" which can achieve more than studied method, that "la vraie éloquence se moque de l'éloquence." Bacon excites our admiration: he never carries us away.

The Advancement of Learning (1605) is in the same closely reasoned persuasive style, but more elaborate in its rhetoric. The first book is a brilliant popular Apologia for learning. After a eulogy of the king, characteristic of the age, but which Bacon alone could have penned, he proceeds to meet the detractors of learning, whether