speech. These collections it was his way to sift and
transcribe again and again, adding as well as omitting. From one of
these, belonging to 1594 and the following years, the _Promus of
Formularies and Elegancies_, Mr. Spedding has given curious extracts;
and the whole collection has been recently edited by Mrs. Henry Pott.
Thus it was that he prepared himself for what, as we read it, or as his
audience heard it, seems the suggestion or recollection of the moment.
Bacon was always much more careful of the value or aptness of a thought
than of its appearing new and original. Of all great writers he least
minds repeating himself, perhaps in the very same words; so that a
simile, an illustration, a quotation pleases him, he returns to it--he
is never tired of it; it obviously gives him satisfaction to introduce
it again and again. These collections of odds and ends illustrate
another point in his literary habits. His was a mind keenly sensitive to
all analogies and affinities, impatient of a strict and rigid logical
groove, but spreading as it were tentacles on all sides in quest of
chance prey, and quickened into a whole system of imagination by the
electric quiver imparted by a single word, at once the key and symbol of
the thinking it had led to. And so he puts down word or phrase, so
enigmatical to us who see it by itself, which to him would wake up a
whole train of ideas, as he remembered the occasion of it--how at a
certain time and place this word set the whole moving, seemed to
breathe new life and shed new light, and has remained the token,
meaningless in itself, which reminds him of so much.

When we come to read his letters, his speeches, his works, we come
continually on the results and proofs of this early labour. Some of the
most memorable and familiar passages of his writings are to be traced
from the storehouses which he filled in these years of preparation. An
example of this correspondence between the note-book and the composition
is to be seen in a paper belonging to this period, written apparently to
form part of a masque, or as he himself calls it, a "Conference of
Pleasure," and entitled the _Praise of Knowledge_. It is interesting
because it is the first draught which we have from him of some of the
leading ideas and most characteristic language about the defects and the
improvement of knowledge, which were afterwards embodied in the
_Advancement_ and the _Novum Organum_. The whole spirit and aim of h