Douglas Denon Heath,
Barrister-at-Law, late Fellow of Trinity College, Cambridge. Vols.
I.-VI. London: Longman & Co. 1858.

"For my name and memory," said Bacon in his will, "I leave it to men's
charitable speeches, and to foreign nations, and to the next ages."
Scarcely was he dead when the first portion of this legacy received some
part of its fulfilment in the touching and often quoted words of Ben
Jonson:--"My conceit of his person was never increased toward him by his
place or honors; but I have and do reverence him for the greatness that
was only proper to himself, in that he seemed to me ever, by his work,
one of the greatest men and most worthy of admiration that had been
in many ages. In his adversity, I ever prayed that God would give him
strength; for greatness he could not want. Neither could I condole in
a word or syllable for him, as knowing no accident could do harm to
virtue, but rather help to make it manifest." But it may fairly be
doubted whether "the next ages" have done fitly by his memory, spite of
the honor that has been indiscriminately lavished upon his name as a
philosopher, and the mass of praise, for the most part ignorant, beneath
which his works have been buried. The world of readers has been content
to take Bacon's greatness upon trust, or to form such imperfect idea of
it as was to be got from acquaintance with his "Essays," the only one
of his works which has ever attained popularity. Even more thorough
students have, for the most part, satisfied themselves with a general
view of Bacon's philosophy, dwelling on disconnected passages of ample
thought or aphoristic wisdom, and rarely attempting to gain an insight
into the real character of his system. Indeed, "the system of Lord
Bacon" became a sort of cabalistic phrase. It meant anything and
everything. It was like the English Constitution, venerable in authority
and prescription, interpreted in contradictory methods, and never
precisely defined. Few men undertook to study it with a zeal like that
of Homer and his friend Lord Webb Seymour, when, in days of enthusiasm,
they read and re-read the "De Augmentis" and the "Novum Organum," and
Homer planned to do what Dr. Whewell seems to suppose he has done, bring
Bacon up to the present time, by writing a work upon the basis of his,
which should furnish a complete review of modern knowledge. Still, it
has been part of an English birthright to hold Bacon as the restorer of
the sciences, the inv