ts companions has arisen from
oversight of this eminently rhetorical character; and this character is the
chief property of his style. It may seem presumptuous to extend the charges
of want of depth which were formulated by good authorities in law and
physics against Bacon in his own day, yet he is everywhere "not deep." He
is stimulating beyond the recorded power of any other man except Socrates;
he is inexhaustible in analogy and illustration, full of wise saws, and of
instances as well ancient as modern. But he is by no means an accurate
expositor, still less a powerful reasoner, and his style is exactly suited
to his mental gifts; now luminously fluent, now pregnantly brief; here just
obscure enough to kindle the reader's desire of penetrating the obscurity,
there flashing with ornament which perhaps serves to conceal a flaw in the
reasoning, but which certainly serves to allure and retain the attention of
the student. All these characteristics are the characteristics rather of
the great orator than of the great philosopher. His constant practice in
every kind of literary composition, and in the meditative thought which
constant literary composition perhaps sometimes tempts its practitioners to
dispense with, enabled him to write on a vast variety of subjects, and in
many different styles. But of these it will always be found that two were
most familiar to him, the short sententious apothegm, parallel, or image,
which suggests and stimulates even when it does not instruct, and the
half-hortatory half-descriptive _discours d'ouverture_, where the writer is
the unwearied panegyrist of promised lands not perhaps to be identified
with great ease on any chart.[38]

[38] Of Bacon in prose, as of Spenser, Shakespere, and Milton in verse, it
does not seem necessary to give extracts, and for the same reason.

A parallel in the Plutarchian manner between Bacon and Raleigh would in
many ways be pleasant, but only one point of it concerns us here,--that
both had been happier and perhaps had done greater things had they been
simple men of letters. Unlike Bacon, who, though he wrote fair verse, shows
no poetical bent, Raleigh was _homo utriusque linguae_, and his works in
verse, unequal as they are, occasionally touch the loftiest summits of
poetry. It is very much the same in his prose. His minor books, mostly
written hurriedly, and for a purpose, have hardly any share of the graces
of style; and his masterpiece, the famous _Hist