ancement_. It was but a sketch; but it was a sketch so truly and
forcibly drawn, that it made an impression which has never been
weakened. To us its use and almost its interest is passed. But it is a
book which we can never open without coming on some noble interpretation
of the realities of nature or the mind; some unexpected discovery of
that quick and keen eye which arrests us by its truth; some felicitous
and unthought-of illustration, yet so natural as almost to be doomed to
become a commonplace; some bright touch of his incorrigible
imaginativeness, ever ready to force itself in amid the driest details
of his argument.

The _Advancement_ was only one shape out of many into which he cast his
thoughts. Bacon was not easily satisfied with his work; even when he
published he did so, not because he had brought his work to the desired
point, but lest anything should happen to him and it should "perish."
Easy and unstudied as his writing seems, it was, as we have seen, the
result of unintermitted trouble and varied modes of working. He was
quite as much a talker as a writer, and beat out his thoughts into shape
in talking. In the essay on _Friendship_ he describes the process with a
vividness which tells of his own experience--

"But before you come to that [the faithful counsel that a man
receiveth from his friend], certain it is that whosoever hath his
mind fraught with many thoughts, his wits and understanding do
clarify and break up in the communicating and discoursing with
another. He tosseth his thoughts more easily; he marshalleth them
more orderly; he seeth how they look when they are turned into
words; finally, he waxeth wiser than himself, and that more by an
hour's discourse than by a day's meditation. It was well said by
Themistocles to the King of Persia, 'That speech was like cloth of
arras opened and put abroad, whereby the imagery doth appear in
figure; whereas in thought they lie in packs.' Neither is this
second fruit of friendship, in opening the understanding,
restrained only to such friends as are able to give a man counsel.
(They are, indeed, best.) But even without that, a man learneth of
himself, and bringeth his own thoughts to light, and whetteth his
wits against a stone which itself cuts not. In a word, a man were
better relate himself to a _statua_ or a picture, than to suffer
his thoughts to pass in smo