Page:Grierson Herbert - First Half of the Seventeenth Century.djvu/230

210 as a mine of treasure of a strange kind of ore: iron at the top and gold and silver at the bottom."

Bacon's Essays are not the only literature of the kind which has come down to us from the seventeenth century. Ben Jonson's Discoveries, like Bacon's, are collections of notes and aphorisms on various subjects, cohering at times into regular short essays. In the earlier editions of the Essays, it must be remembered, the note or aphorism character was more obvious than in the later ones. Jonson's never received the final shaping and polishing which Bacon's passed through.

The essays of each are what might be expected from the character, tastes, and life of the two men. Bacon is the statesman, and inductive student of nature and human nature,—one who has mingled in great affairs, and moved in high circles. His Essays are a manual for princes and statesmen. Jonson is the poet and student, poor and a little embittered, looking out on life with a clear and manly gaze, but chiefly interested in letters, and the place assigned to the man of letters. Jonson's morality is robuster than Bacon's, but then he writes from the study, not from the court. His tendency is not towards compliancy, but rather to petulant arrogance. He inveighs against envy and calumny, and pours contempt on courtiers, critics, and bad poets. But it is on literature that he writes most at length,