Page:The Dial (Volume 76).djvu/440

346 concentration and despite flawless logic and construction, one turns from it as from a handbook of anecdotes or consecutive pages of bons mots. Bacon's philosophical writings like an author's diary read in connexion with his novels, indeed seem the essence of the man and perhaps overshadow the "minor" works. The history of Henry Seventh, however, in its celerity and shrewdness as a tale and as a personal expression, is unique; The Wisdom of the Ancients seems to epitomize Bacon's nature of poet and logician, and one feels that in shapeliness, cumulative power, and intellectual attractiveness, in flavour of strangeness and power, The Advancement of Learning has no rival. "Even in divinity," its author says, "some writings have more of the eagle than others." There is in The Advancement of Learning conspicuously much of the eagle. One does not wonder that Bacon should have said of it, "If the first reading will make an objection, the second will make an answer."