niards of the
Renaissance. But a mere string of maxims and quotations would have been
a poor thing and not new; and he cast what he had to say into connected
wholes. But nothing can be more loose than the structure of the essays.
There is no art, no style, almost, except in a few--the political
ones--no order: thoughts are put down and left unsupported, unproved,
undeveloped. In the first form of the ten, which composed the first
edition of 1597, they are more like notes of analysis or tables of
contents; they are austere even to meagreness. But the general character
continues in the enlarged and expanded ones of Bacon's later years. They
are like chapters in Aristotle's Ethics and Rhetoric on virtues and
characters; only Bacon's takes Aristotle's broad marking lines as drawn,
and proceeds with the subtler and more refined observations of a much
longer and wider experience. But these short papers say what they have
to say without preface, and in literary undress, without a superfluous
word, without the joints and bands of structure; they say it in brief,
rapid sentences, which come down, sentence after sentence, like the
strokes of a great hammer. No wonder that in their disdainful brevity
they seem rugged and abrupt, "and do not seem to end, but fall." But
with their truth and piercingness and delicacy of observation, their
roughness gives a kind of flavour which no elaboration could give. It is
none the less that their wisdom is of a somewhat cynical kind, fully
alive to the slipperiness and self-deceits and faithlessness which are
in the world and rather inclined to be amused at them. In some we can
see distinct records of the writer's own experience: one contains the
substance of a charge delivered to Judge Hutton on his appointment;
another of them is a sketch drawn from life of a character which had
crossed Bacon's path, and in the essay on _Seeming Wise_ we can trace
from the impatient notes put down in his _Commentarius Solutus_, the
picture of the man who stood in his way, the Attorney-General Hobart.
Some of them are memorable oracular utterances not inadequate to the
subject, on _Truth_ or _Death_ or _Unity_. Others reveal an utter
incapacity to come near a subject, except as a strange external
phenomena, like the essay on _Love_. There is a distinct tendency in
them to the Italian school of political and moral wisdom, the wisdom of
distrust and of reliance on indirect and roundabout ways. There is a
group of