most part it describes men's minds as well as pictures do
their bodies, so it did his above all men living."

And Ben Jonson, who knew him well, describes his eloquence in terms
which are confirmed by all we know of his Parliamentary career:--

"One, though he be excellent and the chief, is not to be
imitated alone; for no imitator ever grew up to his author:
likeness is always on this side truth. Yet there happened in
my time one noble speaker, who was full of gravity in his
speaking. His language (when he could spare or pass by a
jest) was nobly censorious. No man ever spake more neatly,
more rightly, more weightily, or suffered less emptiness,
less idleness in what he uttered. No member of his speech but
consisted of his own graces. His hearers could not cough or
look aside from him without loss. He commanded when he spoke,
and had his judges angry and pleased at his devotion. No man
had their affections more in his power. The fear of every man
that heard him was lest he should make an end."

The speeches of Bacon are almost wholly lost, his philosophy is an
undeciphered heap of fragments, the ambitions of his life lay in ruins
about his dishonored old age; yet his intellect is one of the great
moving and still vital forces of the modern world, and he remains, for
all ages to come, in the literature which is the final storehouse of the
chief treasures of mankind, one of

"The dead yet sceptered sovereigns who still rule
Our spirits from their urns."

OF TRUTH

From the 'Essays'

What is Truth? said jesting Pilate; and would not stay for an answer.
Certainly there be that delight in giddiness; and count it a bondage to
fix a belief; affecting free-will in thinking, as well as in acting. And
though the sects of philosophers of that kind be gone, yet there remain
certain discoursing wits, which are of the same veins, though there be
not so much blood in them as was in those of the ancients. But it is not
only the difficulty and labor which men take in finding out of truth,
nor again, that when it is found it imposeth upon men's thoughts, that
doth bring lies in favor: but a natural though corrupt love of the lie
itself. One of the later school of the Grecians examineth the matter,
and is at a stand to think what should be in it, that men should love
lies, where neither they make for pleasure as with poets, nor for
advantage