SOURCE: "Preface to The New Atlantis," in The Works of Francis Bacon, Vol. V, James Spedding, Robert Leslie Ellis, and Douglas Denon Heath, eds., Brown and Taggard, 1862, pp. 349-53.

In the following excerpt, Spedding correllates Bacon's New Atlantis with several of his concurrent works, and describes how Bacon's desire to complete a natural history forestalled the work's completion.

The New Atlantis seems to have been written in 1624, and, though not finished, to have been intended for publication as it stands. It was published accordingly by Dr. Rawley in 1627, at the end of the volume containing the Sylva Sylvarum; for which place Bacon had himself designed it, the subjects of the two being so near akin; the one representing his idea of what should be the end of the work which in the other he supposed himself to be beginning. For the story of Solomon's House is nothing more...