raordinarily felicitous. But it lacks
spaciousness and ease and rhythm; it makes too inexorable a demand on
the attention, and the harassed reader soon finds himself longing for
those breathing spaces which consideration or perhaps looseness of
thought has implanted in the prose of other writers.

His _Essays_, the work by which he is best known, were in their origin
merely jottings gradually cohered and enlarged into the series we know.
In them he had the advantage of a subject which he had studied closely
through life. He counted himself a master in the art of managing men,
and "Human Nature and how to manage it" would be a good title for his
book. Men are studied in the spirit of Machiavelli, whose philosophy of
government appealed so powerfully to the Elizabethan mind. Taken
together the essays which deal with public matters are in effect a kind
of manual for statesmen and princes, instructing them how to acquire
power and how to keep it, deliberating how far they may go safely in
the direction of self-interest, and to what degree the principle of
self-interest must be subordinated to the wider interests of the people
who are ruled. Democracy, which in England was to make its splendid
beginnings in the seventeenth century, finds little to foretell it in
the works of Bacon. Though he never advocates cruelty or oppression and
is wise enough to see that no statesman can entirely set aside moral
considerations, his ethical tone is hardly elevating; the moral
obliquity of his public life is to a certain extent explained, in all
but its grosser elements, in his published writings. The essays, of
course, contain much more than this; the spirit of curious and restless
enquiry which animated Bacon finds expression in those on "Health," or
"Gardens" and "Plantations" and others of the kind; and a deeper vein of
earnestness runs through some of them--those for instance on
"Friendship," or "Truth" and on "Death."

The _Essays_ sum up in a condensed form the intellectual interests which
find larger treatment in his other works. His _Henry VII._, the first
piece of scientific history in the English language (indeed in the
modern world) is concerned with a king whose practice was the outcome of
a political theory identical with Bacon's own. The _Advancement of
Learning_ is a brilliant popular exposition of the cause of scientific
enquiry and of the inductive or investigatory method of research. The
_New Atlantis_ is the picture o