iet still, but mild and earnest. The features had attained that
refinement which is often attributed to race, but comes, in truth, from
elegance of idea, whether caught from our parents or learned from books.
In his rich brown hair, thrown carelessly from his temples, and curling
almost to the shoulders; in his large blue eye, which was deepened to
the hue of the violet by the long dark lash; in that firmness of lip,
which comes from the grapple with difficulties, there was considerable
beauty, but no longer the beauty of the mere peasant. And yet there was
still about the whole countenance that expression of goodness and purity
which a painter would give to his ideal of the peasant lover,--such as
Tasso would have placed in the "Aminta," or Fletcher have admitted to
the side of the Faithful Shepherdess.

"You must draw a chair here, and sit down between us, Leonard," said the
parson.

"If any one," said Riccabocca, "has a right to sit, it is the one who is
to hear the sermon; and if any one ought to stand, it is the one who is
about to preach it."

"Don't be frightened, Leonard," said the parson, graciously; "it is only
a criticism, not a sermon;" and he pulled out Leonard's Prize Essay.

CHAPTER XIX.

PARSON.--"You take for your motto this aphorism, 'Knowledge is
Power.'--BACON."

RICCABOCCA.--"Bacon make such an aphorism! The last man in the world to
have said anything so pert and so shallow!"

LEONARD (astonished).--"Do you mean to say, sir, that that aphorism is
not in Lord Bacon? Why, I have seen it quoted as his in almost every
newspaper, and in almost every speech in favour of popular education."

RICCABOCCA.--"Then that should be a warning to you never again to fall
into the error of the would-be scholar,--

[This aphorism has been probably assigned to Lord Bacon upon the
mere authority of the index to his works. It is the aphorism of the
index-maker, certainly not of the great master of inductive
philosophy. Bacon has, it is true, repeatedly dwelt on the power of
knowledge, but with so many explanations and distinctions that
nothing could be more unjust to his general meaning than the attempt
to cramp into a sentence what it costs him a volume to define.
Thus, if on one page he appears to confound knowledge with power, in
another he sets them in the strongest antithesis to each other; as
follows "Adeo signanter Deus opera potentix et sapientive
discriminavit."