Let the following passages attest, of which the first is taken from The Advancement of Learning and the remaining two from the Novum Organum: "For the contemplation of God's creatures and works produceth (having regard to the works and creatures themselves) knowledge; but having regard to God, no perfect knowledge, but wonder, which is broken knowledge." "Therefore let all men know how much difference there is between the idola of the human Mind and the Ideas of the Divine. For the former are nothing but arbitrary abstractions; the latter are the true stamps of the Creator upon his creatures. And so truth and utility in this case are the very same things; and results themselves are to be more esteemed, as being pledges of truth, than as supplying conveniences for life." "Let the human. race only recover the rights over Nature which by God's endowment belong to it; and let power be given it, right Reason and sound Religion will direct its application.'

THE ESSAYS

An essay, as the name implies, is in general an adventuring, an endeavour to do something. In literature this meaning holds good, though the beginnings of the literary essay are to be looked for in casual experiences, in the suggestions that come to thinkers in "undress" mood, in the "play" side of life. The essay as a type has very slowly taken on dignity and differentiated itself from other types.

It has been normally considered a by-product, few writers of fame having as yet restricted their production to this form. Dr. Johnson's definition of the essay as "a loose sally of the mind" is admirable, provided that by "loose" we understand "tentatively reaching out after," not "poorly organized,” for the essay's very artlessness and abandon are subject to law. The charm of the essay, particularly of the lyric order, lies in its flexibility, its prattle, so to speak, and is gone unless the principles of brevity, clearness, and ease, or winsomeness, be continuously observed. Even the apparent sacrifice of coherence should, if possible, be more apparent than real.

The term has long since become an elastic one, extending from a competent writer's casually related jottings on a chosen subject to the more formal and pretentious treatise. Montaigne appears to have given the word its place in literature. His Essais were published at Bordeaux in 1580, and soon became familiar to Shakespeare and to the Bacon brothers, Anthony, indeed, having been in Bordeaux about that time. Montaigne used the word in its primary meaning, and he and his readers stressed the second syllable in pronunciation. That such differing

1 This would seem also to have been the Elizabethan English pronunciation. Compare the following doggerel, attributed to Dr. Andrews, Bishop of Winchester:

"When learned Bacon wrote Essays

He did deserve and hath the praise;

writers as Bacon, Lamb, Emerson, Lowell, Pater,
have employed the form leads at once to the state-
ment that there are several orders of the essay, their
nature varying with their source. There is, first, the
portrait-essay, with its personal cameos and minia-
ture appraisements, found in many of Addison's
Spectator" papers, in some of Dickens's "Sketches
by Boz," and in a few of Agnes Repplier's essays of
our own time. This is followed by the deliberately
humorous essay, as others of Dickens's, not a few of
Thackeray's, and papers by Holmes, Clemens, Doug-
las Jerrold; the "wisdom" essay, as Bacon's and
Emerson's; the critical essay, as Pater's or Goldwin
Smith's, representing the personal sally of the cul-
tured mind into the field of literary criticism; the
historical essay, as many of Macaulay's and Car-
lyle's; the "nature" essay, as represented by the
work of Izaak Walton and of Henry D. Thoreau; the
professional essay, constituting a literary treatment
of legal, medical, or theological topics; and, last, the
"lyric'
essay, so called because it seeks to bring
the reader into close, personal, intimate touch with
the writer himself, his moods, whims, and vagaries,
to express or, rather, to suggest the writer's
emotion, to "make friends," a fashion delightfully
represented by Lamb, by Stevenson, and, in our day,
by Samuel M. Crothers.

To the third of these orders Bacon's essays belong. They are, as Bacon himself phrases it, "certain brief notes, set down rather significantly

wiedom

Ecsay.

than curiously, requiring both leisure in the writer and reader," and devoted to the direct and even proverbial exposition of topics for the most part weighty. "Though the word is late," he writes to the Prince of Wales, "the thing is ancient; for Seneca's Epistles to Lucilius, if you mark them well, are but essays; that is, dispersed meditations though conveyed in the form of epistles. These labours of mine, I know, cannot be worthy of your Highness, for what can be worthy of you? But my hope is, they may be as grains of salt, that will rather give you an appetite than offend you with satiety. And although they handle those things wherein both men's lives and their persons are most conversant; yet what I have attained I know not; but I have endeavoured to make them not vulgar, but of a nature whereof a man shall find much in experience and little in books; so as they are neither repetitions nor fancies." Their subject-matter ranges from the abstractions of Truth and Love, through the daily businesses of Travel, Expense, Studies, and empirical observations on Gardens and Building, to the half-concessive discussion of such "toys" as Masques and Triumphs. The contents of the third edition may be loosely classified as follows: I. Conditions of Personal Welfare. (a) Moral and Intellectual Numbers 4, 5, 12, 14, 27, 31, 34, 50, 53-55, 57. (b) Political and Prudential Numbers 6, 18, 21-23, 25, 26, 28, 32, 47-49. (c) Physical and Domestic Numbers 30, 43-46. II. World-Problems, common to Man

kind Numbers 1, 2, 9, 10, 13, 16, 17, 38, 40, 42, 58. III. Topics relating to Society as Such Numbers 3, 7, 8, 11, 15, 19, 20, 24, 29, 33, 35-37, 39, 41, 51, 52, 56.

The first edition of the Essays appeared in 1597, in a thin octavo volume, "Essayes, Religious Meditations, Places of Perswasion and Disswasion, Seene and Allowed," and included three distinct works, the Meditationes Sacrae in Latin, the Colours of Good and Evil, and the Essays proper, then numbering ten, and touching Study, Discourse, Ceremonies and Respects, Followers and Friends, Suitors, Expence, Regiment of Health, Honour and Reputation, Faction, and Negociating. All of these had been partially current for some years in manuscript. The little book was affectionately dedicated by Francis Bacon, then thirty-six years of age, to his brother Anthony, as follows:

"To MR. ANTHONY BACON, "His Dear Brother.

“Loving and beloved brother, I do now like some that have an orchard ill neighboured, that gather their fruit before it is ripe, to prevent stealing. These fragments of my conceit were going to print: to labour the stay of them had been troublesome, and subject to interpretation; to let them pass had been to adventure the wrong they might receive by untrue copies, or by some garnishment, which it might please any that should set them forth to bestow