direction of exact inductive method.

Bacon had so little faith in the enduring qualities of the English
language, that he wrote the most of his philosophical works in Latin.
He planned a Latin work in six parts, to cover the whole field of the
philosophy of natural science. The most famous of the parts completed
is the _Novum Organum_, which deals with certain methods for searching
after definite truth, and shows how to avoid some ever present
tendencies toward error.

Bacon wrote an excellent _History of the Reign of Henry VII_., which
is standard to this day. He is also the author of _The New Atlantis_,
which may be termed a Baconian Utopia, or study of an ideal
commonwealth.

General Characteristics.--In Bacon's sentences we may often find
remarkable condensation of thought in few words. A modern essayist has
taken seven pages to express, or rather to obscure, the ideas in these
three lines from Bacon:--

"Men of age object too much, consult too long, adventure too little,
repent too soon, and seldom drive business home to the full period,
but content themselves with a mediocrity of success."[3]

His works abound in illustrations, analogies, and striking imagery;
but unlike the great Elizabethan poets, he appeals more to cold
intellect than to the feelings. We are often pleased with his
intellectual ingenuity, for instance, in likening the Schoolmen to
spiders, spinning such stuff as webs are made of "out of no great
quantity of matter."

He resembles the Elizabethans in preferring magnificent to commonplace
images. It has been often noticed that if he essays to write of
buildings in general, he prefers to describe palaces. His knowledge of
the intellectual side of human nature is especially remarkable, but,
unlike Shakespeare, Bacon never drops his plummet into the emotional
depths of the soul.

THE NON-DRAMATIC POETRY--LYRICAL VERSE

A Medium of Artistic Expression.--No age has surpassed the
Elizabethan in lyrical poems, those "short swallow flights of song,"
as Tennyson defines them. The English Renaissance, unlike the Italian,
did not achieve great success in painting. The Englishman embodied in
poetry his artistic expression of the beautiful. Many lyrics are
merely examples of word painting. The Elizabethan poet often began his
career by trying to show his skill with the ingenious and musical
arrangement of words, where an Italian would have used color and
drawing on an actual canvas.

We hav