Fear is a fruit of sin, which drove the first father of our flesh from the presence of God, and hath bred an imperfection in a number of the worse part of his posterity.  It is the disgrace of nature, the foil of reason, the maim of wit, and the slur of understanding.  It is the palsy of the spirit where the soul wanteth faith, and the badge of a coward that cannot abide the sight of a sword.  It is weakness in nature and a wound in patience, the death of hope and the entrance into despair.  It is children’s awe and fools’ amazement, a worm in conscience and a curse to wickedness.  In brief, it makes the coward stagger, the liar stammer, the thief stumble, and the traitor start.  It is a blot in arms, a blur in honour, the shame of a soldier, and the defeat of an army.

* * * * *

Breton’s next little prose book, published in the following year, 1616—­year of the death of Shakespeare—­was a set of Characters, “The Good and the Bad,” without suggestion that they were built upon the lines of Bacon’s Essays.  Bacon’s Essays first appeared as a set of ten in 1597, became a set of forty in the revised edition of 1612, and of fifty-eight in the edition of 1625, published a year before their author’s death.  In their sententious brevity Bacon’s Essays have, of course, a style more nearly allied to the English Character Writing of the Seventeenth Century than to the Sixteenth Century Essays of Montaigne, which were altogether different in style, matter, and aim.  This, for example, was Bacon’s first Essay in the 1597 edition:—­

OF STUDIES.

Studies serve for pastimes, for ornaments, for abilities; their chief use for pastimes is in privateness and retiring, for ornaments in discourse, and for ability in judgment; for expert men can execute, but learned men are more fit to judge and censure.  To spend too much time in them is sloth; to use them too much for ornament is affectation; to make judgment wholly by their rules is the humour of a scholar; they perfect nature, and are themselves perfected by experience; crafty men contemn them, wise men use them, simple men admire them; for they teach not their own use, but that there is a wisdom without them and above them won by observation.  Read not to contradict nor to believe, but to weigh and consider.  Some books are to be tasted, others to be swallowed, and some few to be chewed and digested; that is, some are to be read only in parts, others to be read but curiously, and some few to be read wholly with diligence and attention.  Reading maketh a full man, conference a ready, and writing an exact man; therefore, if a man write little, he had need of a great memory; if he confer little, he had need of a present wit; and if he read little, he had need have much cunning to seem to know that he doth not know.  Histories make men wise; poets witty; the mathematics subtile; natural philosophy deep; moral grave; logic and rhetoric able to contend.