[Footnote 3: There is a graphic little pen-picture of their method in
Selden's "Table Talk."]

Its influence is one of those things on which it is profitless to
comment or enlarge simply because they are an understood part of every
man's experience. In its own time it helped to weld England, for where
before one Bible was read at home and another in churches, all now read
the new version. Its supremacy was instantaneous and unchallenged, and
it quickly coloured speech and literature; it could produce a Bunyan in
the century of its birth. To it belongs the native dignity and eloquence
of peasant speech. It runs like a golden thread through all our writing
subsequent to its coming; men so diverse as Huxley and Carlyle have paid
their tribute to its power; Ruskin counted it the one essential part of
its education. It will be a bad day for the mere quality of our language
when it ceases to be read.

At the time the translators were sitting, Francis Bacon was at the
height of his fame. By profession a lawyer--time-serving and
over-compliant to wealth and influence--he gives singularly little
evidence of it in the style of his books. Lawyers, from the necessity
they are under of exerting persuasion, of planting an unfamiliar
argument in the minds of hearers of whose favour they are doubtful, but
whose sympathy they must gain, are usually of purpose diffuse. They
cultivate the gift, possessed by Edmund Burke above all other English
authors, of putting the same thing freshly and in different forms a
great many times in succession. They value copiousness and fertility of
illustration. Nothing could be more unlike this normal legal manner than
the style of Bacon. "No man," says Ben Jonson, speaking in one of those
vivid little notes of his, of his oratorical method, "no man ever
coughed or turned aside from him without loss." He is a master of the
aphoristic style. He compresses his wisdom into the quintessential form
of an epigram; so complete and concentrated is his form of statement, so
shortly is everything put, that the mere transition from one thought to
another gives his prose a curious air of disjointedness as if he flitted
arbitrarily from one thing to another, and jotted down anything that
came into his head. His writing has clarity and lucidity, it abounds in
terseness of expression and in exact and discriminating phraseology, and
in the minor arts of composition--in the use of quotations for
instance--it can be ext