, after long researches, found that the stars
were so many flints which had been detached from the earth.

In a word, no one before the Lord Bacon was acquainted with experimental
philosophy, nor with the several physical experiments which have been
made since his time. Scarce one of them but is hinted at in his work,
and he himself had made several. He made a kind of pneumatic engine, by
which he guessed the elasticity of the air. He approached, on all sides
as it were, to the discovery of its weight, and had very near attained
it, but some time after Torricelli seized upon this truth. In a little
time experimental philosophy began to be cultivated on a sudden in most
parts of Europe. It was a hidden treasure which the Lord Bacon had some
notion of, and which all the philosophers, encouraged by his promises,
endeavoured to dig up.

But that which surprised me most was to read in his work, in express
terms, the new attraction, the invention of which is ascribed to Sir
Isaac Newton.

We must search, says Lord Bacon, whether there may not be a kind of
magnetic power which operates between the earth and heavy bodies, between
the moon and the ocean, between the planets, &c. In another place he
says either heavy bodies must be carried towards the centre of the earth,
or must be reciprocally attracted by it; and in the latter case it is
evident that the nearer bodies, in their falling, draw towards the earth,
the stronger they will attract one another. We must, says he, make an
experiment to see whether the same clock will go faster on the top of a
mountain or at the bottom of a mine; whether the strength of the weights
decreases on the mountain and increases in the mine. It is probable that
the earth has a true attractive power.

This forerunner in philosophy was also an elegant writer, an historian,
and a wit.

His moral essays are greatly esteemed, but they were drawn up in the view
of instructing rather than of pleasing; and, as they are not a satire
upon mankind, like Rochefoucauld's "Maxims," nor written upon a sceptical
plan, like Montaigne's "Essays," they are not so much read as those two
ingenious authors.

His History of Henry VII. was looked upon as a masterpiece, but how is it
possible that some persons can presume to compare so little a work with
the history of our illustrious Thuanus?

Speaking about the famous impostor Perkin, son to a converted Jew, who
assumed boldly the name and title of Ric