wledge
worthy to be known and the highest imagination presenting it. There is a
school calling itself that of pure art, to which substance is nothing
and form is everything. Its measure of merit is applied to the manner
only; and the meanest of subjects, the most trivial and even the most
degraded of ideas or facts, is welcomed to its high places if clothed in
a satisfying garb. But this school, though arrogant in the other arts of
expression, has not yet been welcomed to the judgment-seat in
literature, where indeed it is passing even now to contempt and
oblivion. Bacon's instinct was for substance. His strongest passion was
for utility. The artistic side of his nature was receptive rather than
creative. Splendid passages in the 'Advancement' and 'De Augmentis' show
his profound appreciation of all the arts of expression, but show
likewise his inability to glorify them above that which they express. In
his mind, language is subordinate to thought, and the painting to the
picture, just as the frame is to the painting or the binding to the
book. He writes always in the grand style. He reminds us of "the large
utterance of the early gods." His sentences are weighted with thought,
as suggestive as Plato, as condensed as Thucydides. Full of wit, keen in
discerning analogies, rich in intellectual ornament, he is yet too
concentrated in his attention to the idea to care for the melody of
language. He decorates with fruits, not with flowers. For metrical
movement, for rhythmic harmony, he has no ear nor sense. Inconceivable
as it is that Shakespeare could have written one aphorism of the 'Novum
Organum,' it would be far more absurd to imagine Bacon writing a line of
the Sonnets. With the loftiest imagination, the liveliest fancy, the
keenest sense of precision and appropriateness in words, he lacks the
special gift of poetic form, the faculty divine which finds new
inspiration in the very limitations of measured language, and whose
natural expression is music alike to the ear and to the mind. His powers
were cramped by the fetters of metre, and his attempts to versify even
rich thought and deep feeling were puerile. But his prose is by far the
weightiest, the most lucid, effective, and pleasing of his day. The poet
Sprat justly says:--

"He was a man of strong, clear, and powerful imaginations;
his genius was searching and inimitable; and of this I need
give no other proof than his style itself, which as for the