f-realized
and imperfect creations of the prophetic soul of the wide world dreaming
of things to come.

The matters of interest in the volume before us are by no means
exhausted, but we can proceed no farther in the examination of them, and
must refer those readers who desire to know more of its contents to the
volume itself. We can assure them that they will find it full of vivid
illustrations of the character of Bacon's time,--of the thoughts of men
at an epoch of which less is commonly known than of periods more
distant, but less connected by intellectual sympathy and moral relations
with our own. But the chief interest of Bacon's works lies in their
exhibition to us of himself, a man foremost in his own time in all
knowledge, endowed by Nature with a genius of peculiar force and
clearness of intuition, with a resolute energy that yielded to no
obstacles, with a combination so remarkable of the speculative and the
practical intellect as to place him in the ranks of the chief
philosophers to whom the progress of the world in learning and in
thought is due. They show him exposed to the trials which the men who
are in advance of their contemporaries are in every age called to meet,
and bearing these trials with a noble confidence in the final prevalence
of the truth,--using all his powers for the advantage of the world, and
regarding all science and learning of value only as they led to
acquaintance with the wisdom of God and the establishment of Christian
virtue. He himself gives us a picture of a scholar of his times, which
we may receive as a not unworthy portrait of himself. "He does not care
for discourses and disputes of words, but he pursues the works of
wisdom, and in them he finds rest. And what others dim-sighted strive to
see, like bats in twilight, he beholds in its full splendor, because he
is the master of experiments; and thus he knows natural things, and the
truths of medicine and alchemy, and the things of heaven as well as
those below. Nay, he is ashamed, if any common man, or old wife, or
soldier, or rustic in the country knows anything of which he is
ignorant. Wherefore he has searched out all the effects of the fusing of
metals, and whatever is effected with gold and silver and other metals
and all minerals; and whatever pertains to warfare and arms and the
chase he knows; and he has examined all that pertains to agriculture,
and the measuring of lands, and the labors of husbandmen; and he has
even