ened, the _Visa et Cogitata_, on which he was long employed, and
which he brought to a finished shape, fit to be submitted to his friends
and critics, Sir Thomas Bodley and Bishop Andrewes. It is spoken of as
a book to be "imparted _sicut videbitur_," in the review which he made
of his life and objects soon after he was made Solicitor in 1608. A
number of fragments also bear witness to the fierce scorn and wrath
which possessed him against the older and the received philosophies. He
tried his hand at declamatory onslaughts on the leaders of human wisdom,
from the early Greeks and Aristotle down to the latest "novellists;" and
he certainly succeeded in being magnificently abusive. But he thought
wisely that this was not the best way of doing what in the _Commentarius
Solutus_ he calls on himself to do--"taking a greater confidence and
authority in discourses of this nature, _tanquam sui certus et de alto
despiciens_;" and the rhetorical _Redargutio Philosophiarum_ and
writings of kindred nature were laid aside by his more serious judgment.
But all these fragments witness to the immense and unwearied labour
bestowed in the midst of a busy life on his undertaking; they suggest,
too, the suspicion that there was much waste from interruption, and the
doubt whether his work would not have been better if it could have been
more steadily continuous. But if ever a man had a great object in life,
and pursued it through good and evil report, through ardent hope and
keen disappointment, to the end, with unwearied patience and unshaken
faith, it was Bacon, when he sought the improvement of human knowledge
"for the glory of God and the relief of man's estate." It is not the
least part of the pathetic fortune of his life that his own success was
so imperfect.

When a reader first comes from the vague, popular notions of Bacon's
work to his definite proposals the effect is startling. Every one has
heard that he contemplated a complete reform of the existing conceptions
of human knowledge, and of the methods by which knowledge was to be
sought; that rejecting them as vitiated, by the loose and untested way
in which they had been formed, he called men from verbal generalisations
and unproved assumptions to come down face to face with the realities of
experience; that he substituted for formal reasoning, from baseless
premises and unmeaning principles, a methodical system of cautious and
sifting inference from wide observation and experime