of creatures was still
left to him--the power of subduing and managing them by true and
solid arts--yet this too through our insolence, and because we
desire to be like God and to follow the dictates of our own reason,
we in great part lose. If, therefore, there be any humility towards
the Creator, any reverence for or disposition to magnify His works,
any charity for man and anxiety to relieve his sorrows and
necessities, any love of truth in nature, any hatred of darkness,
any desire for the purification of the understanding, we must
entreat men again and again to discard, or at least set apart for a
while, these volatile and preposterous philosophies which have
preferred theses to hypotheses, led experience captive, and
triumphed over the works of God; and to approach with humility and
veneration to unroll the volume of Creation, to linger and meditate
therein, and with minds washed clean from opinions to study it in
purity and integrity. For this is that sound and language which
"went forth into all lands," and did not incur the confusion of
Babel; this should men study to be perfect in, and becoming again
as little children condescend to take the alphabet of it into their
hands, and spare no pains to search and unravel the interpretation
thereof, but pursue it strenuously and persevere even unto
death."--Preface to _Historia Naturalis_: translated, _Works_, v.
132-3.

CHAPTER IX.

BACON AS A WRITER.

Bacon's name belongs to letters as well as to philosophy. In his own
day, whatever his contemporaries thought of his _Instauration of
Knowledge_, he was in the first rank as a speaker and a writer. Sir
Walter Raleigh, contrasting him with Salisbury, who could speak but not
write, and Northampton, who could write but not speak, thought Bacon
eminent both as a speaker and a writer. Ben Jonson, passing in review
the more famous names of his own and the preceding age, from Sir Thomas
More to Sir Philip Sidney, Hooker, Essex, and Raleigh, places Bacon
without a rival at the head of the company as the man who had "fulfilled
all numbers," and "stood as the mark and [Greek: akme] of our language."
And he also records Bacon's power as a speaker. "No man," he says, "ever
spoke more neatly, more pressly, or suffered less emptiness, less
idleness, in what he uttered."..."His hearers could not cough or look
asi