characteristics of style in these two works are by no means the same;
but between them they represent fairly enough the characteristics of all
Bacon's English prose. It might indeed be desirable in studying it to add
to them the _Henry the Seventh_, which is a model of clear historical
narration, not exactly picturesque, but never dull; and though not exactly
erudite, yet by no means wanting in erudition, and exhibiting conclusions
which, after two centuries and a half of record-grubbing, have not been
seriously impugned or greatly altered by any modern historian. In this
book, which was written late, Bacon had, of course, the advantage of his
long previous training in the actual politics of a school not very greatly
altered since the time he was describing, but this does not diminish the
credit due to him for formal excellence.

The _Essays_--which Bacon issued for the first time, to the number of ten,
in 1597, when he was, comparatively speaking, a young man, which he
reissued largely augmented in 1612, and yet again just before his death, in
their final and fullest condition--are not so much in the modern sense
essays as collections of thoughts more or less connected. We have, indeed,
the genesis of them in the very interesting commonplace book called the
_Promus_ [butler or storekeeper] _of Elegancies_, the publication of which,
as a whole, was for some reason or other not undertaken by Mr. Spedding,
and is due to Mrs. Henry Pott. Here we have the quaint, but never merely
quaint, analogies, the apt quotations, the singular flashes of reflection
and illustration, which characterise Bacon, in their most unformed and
new-born condition. In the _Essays_ they are worked together, but still
sententiously, and evidently with no attempt at sustained and fluent
connection of style. That Montaigne must have had some influence on Bacon
is, of course, certain; though few things can be more unlike than the curt
severity of the scheme of the English essays and the interminable
diffuseness of the French. Yet here and there are passages in Montaigne
which might almost be the work of a French Bacon, and in Bacon passages
which might easily be the work of an English Montaigne. In both there is
the same odd mixture of dignity and familiarity--the familiarity
predominating in Montaigne, the dignity in Bacon--and in both there is the
union of a rich fancy and a profound interest in ethical questions, with a
curious absence of passion and