enthusiasm--a touch, as it may almost be
called, of Philistinism, which in Bacon's case contrasts most strangely
with his frequently gorgeous language, and the evident richness of his
imagination, or at least his fancy.

The scheme and manner of these essays naturally induced a sententious and
almost undeveloped manner of writing. An extraordinary number of separate
phrases and sentences, which have become the common property of all who use
the language, and are probably most often used without any clear idea of
their author, may be disinterred from them, as well as many striking images
and pregnant thoughts, which have had less general currency. But the
compression of them (which is often so great that they might be printed
sentence by sentence like verses of the Bible) prevents the author from
displaying his command of a consecutive, elaborated, and harmonised style.
What command he had of that style may be found, without looking far, in the
_Henry the Seventh_, in the _Atlantis_, and in various minor works, some
originally written in Latin and translated, such as the magnificent passage
which Dean Church has selected as describing the purpose and crown of the
Baconian system. In such passages the purely oratorical faculty which he
undoubtedly had (though like all the earlier oratory of England, with rare
exceptions, its examples remain a mere tradition, and hardly even that)
displays itself; and one cannot help regretting that, instead of going into
the law, where he never attained to much technical excellence, and where
his mere promotion was at first slow, and was no sooner quickened than it
brought him into difficulties and dangers, he had not sought the safer and
calmer haven of the Church, where he would have been more at leisure to
"take all knowledge to be his province;" would have been less tempted to
engage in the treacherous, and to him always but half-congenial, business
of politics, and would have forestalled, and perhaps excelled, Jeremy
Taylor as a sacred orator. If Bacon be Jeremy's inferior in exuberant
gorgeousness, he is very much his superior in order and proportion, and
quite his equal in sudden flashes of a quaint but illuminative rhetoric.
For after all that has been said of Bacon and his philosophy, he was a
rhetorician rather than a philosopher. Half the puzzlement which has arisen
in the efforts to get something exact out of the stately periods and
splendid promises of the _Novum Organum_ and i