are scowling, and the
whole expression calculated to inspire terror. It is remarkable for the
pertinacity with which it maintains its hold of any animal it may have
seized, and is, therefore, much used in the barbarous practice of
bull-baiting, so common in some countries, and but lately abolished in
England.

[Illustration: HEAD OF THE BULL-DOG.]

[Illustration]

* * * * *

LORD BACON.

[Illustration: Letter I.]

In those prescient views by which the genius of Lord Bacon has often
anticipated the institutions and the discoveries of succeeding times,
there was one important object which even his foresight does not appear
to have contemplated. Lord Bacon did not foresee that the English
language would one day be capable of embalming all that philosophy can
discover, or poetry can invent; that his country would at length possess
a national literature of its own, and that it would exult in classical
compositions, which might be appreciated with the finest models of
antiquity. His taste was far unequal to his invention. So little did he
esteem the language of his country, that his favourite works were
composed in Latin; and he was anxious to have what he had written in
English preserved in that "universal language which may last as long as
books last."

It would have surprised Bacon to have been told that the most learned
men in Europe have studied English authors to learn to think and to
write. Our philosopher was surely somewhat mortified, when, in his
dedication of the Essays, he observed, that, "Of all my other works, my
Essays have been most current; for that, as it seems, they come home to
men's business and bosoms." It is too much to hope to find in a vast and
profound inventor, a writer also who bestows immortality on his
language. The English language is the only object, in his great survey
of art and of nature, which owes nothing of its excellence to the genius
of Bacon.

He had reason, indeed, to be mortified at the reception of his
philosophical works; and Dr. Rowley, even, some years after the death of
his illustrious master, had occasion to observe, "His fame is greater,
and sounds louder in foreign parts abroad than at home in his own
nation; thereby verifying that Divine sentence, 'A Prophet is not
without honour, save in his own country and in his own house,'" Even the
men of genius, who ought to have comprehended this new source of
knowledge thus opened t