s of his life. His business may
merely be to write "a device" or panegyric for a pageant in the Queen's
honour, or for the revels of Gray's Inn. But even these trifles are the
result of real thought, and are full of ideas--ideas about the hopes of
knowledge or about the policy of the State; and though, of course, they
have plenty of the flourishes and quaint absurdities indispensable on
such occasions, yet the "rhetorical affectation" is in the thing itself,
and not in the way it is handled; he had an opportunity of saying some
of the things which were to him of deep and perpetual interest, and he
used it to say them, as forcibly, as strikingly, as attractively as he
could. His manner of writing depends, not on a style, or a studied or
acquired habit, but on the nature of the task which he has in hand.
Everywhere his matter is close to his words, and governs, animates,
informs his words. No one in England before had so much as he had the
power to say what he wanted to say, and exactly as he wanted to say it.
No one was so little at the mercy of conventional language or customary
rhetoric, except when he persuaded himself that he had to submit to
those necessities of flattery, which cost him at last so dear.

The book by which English readers, from his own time to ours, have known
him best, better than by the originality and the eloquence of the
_Advancement_, or than by the political weight and historical
imagination of the _History of Henry VII._, is the first book which he
published, the volume of _Essays_. It is an instance of his self-willed
but most skilful use of the freedom and ease which the "modern
language," which he despised, gave him. It is obvious that he might have
expanded these "Counsels, moral and political," to the size which such
essays used to swell to after his time. Many people would have thanked
him for doing so; and some have thought it a good book on which to hang
their own reflections and illustrations. But he saw how much could be
done by leaving the beaten track of set treatise and discourse, and
setting down unceremoniously the observations which he had made, and the
real rules which he had felt to be true, on various practical matters
which come home to men's "business and bosoms." He was very fond of
these moral and political generalisations, both of his own collecting
and as found in writers who, he thought, had the right to make them,
like the Latins of the Empire and the Italians and Spa