Page:Grierson Herbert - First Half of the Seventeenth Century.djvu/229

Rh important or trifling, worthy or ignoble, by which human nature is worked on, power acquired and maintained. There was, undoubtedly, in Bacon a certain degree of moral obliquity as well as weakness. But he was humane, and by no means without ideals. Behind all his worldly ambition and crooked policies lay an ideal enthusiasm for knowledge; and he was acutely sensitive to both moral and religious motives. The tone of the Essays is not throughout that of cold scientific analysis. Only one side of his nature is represented by such essays as those named. Those "Of Truth," "Of Death," "Of Unity in Religion," "Of Revenge," "Of Friendship," bear witness to another; while others, such as those "Of Regiment of Health," "Of Plantations," "Of Masks and Triumphs,["] "Of Gardens," are delightful results of that wide range of interest, of curious inquiry, which is the chief characteristic of Bacon's thought, as felicitous illustration is of his style.

The spirit of the Essays, the analytic, unsentimental, though not undignified, somewhat Machiavellian temper, is that in which he composed his History of Henry VII. (1622). It is a careful, sympathetic study of a king who played the game of ruling a state with both wisdom and subtlety. Bacon's style is, as befits the form of the work, plainer than in the essays; as pregnant as ever, but less rich in illustration. Yet here, too, he does not disdain a happy figure. "He did make that war rather with an olive-branch than a laurel-branch in his hand." "For his wars were always to him