At the time the translators were sitting, Francis Bacon was at the height of his fame.  By profession a lawyer—­time-serving and over-compliant to wealth and influence—­he gives singularly little evidence of it in the style of his books.  Lawyers, from the necessity they are under of exerting persuasion, of planting an unfamiliar argument in the minds of hearers of whose favour they are doubtful, but whose sympathy they must gain, are usually of purpose diffuse.  They cultivate the gift, possessed by Edmund Burke above all other English authors, of putting the same thing freshly and in different forms a great many times in succession.  They value copiousness and fertility of illustration.  Nothing could be more unlike this normal legal manner than the style of Bacon.  “No man,” says Ben Jonson, speaking in one of those vivid little notes of his, of his oratorical method, “no man ever coughed or turned aside from him without loss.”  He is a master of the aphoristic style.  He compresses his wisdom into the quintessential form of an epigram; so complete and concentrated is his form of statement, so shortly is everything put, that the mere transition from one thought to another gives his prose a curious air of disjointedness as if he flitted arbitrarily from one thing to another, and jotted down anything that came into his head.  His writing has clarity and lucidity, it abounds in terseness of expression and in exact and discriminating phraseology, and in the minor arts of composition—­in the use of quotations for instance—­it can be extraordinarily felicitous.  But it lacks spaciousness and ease and rhythm; it makes too inexorable a demand on the attention, and the harassed reader soon finds himself longing for those breathing spaces which consideration or perhaps looseness of thought has implanted in the prose of other writers.

His Essays, the work by which he is best known, were in their origin merely jottings gradually cohered and enlarged into the series we know.  In them he had the advantage of a subject which he had studied closely through life.  He counted himself a master in the art of managing men, and “Human Nature and how to manage it” would be a good title for his book.  Men are studied in the spirit of Machiavelli, whose philosophy of government appealed so powerfully to the Elizabethan mind.  Taken together the essays which deal with public matters are in effect a kind of manual for statesmen and princes, instructing them how to acquire power and how to keep it, deliberating how far they may go safely in the direction of self-interest, and to what degree the principle of self-interest must be subordinated to the wider interests of the people who are ruled.  Democracy, which in England was to make its splendid beginnings in the seventeenth century, finds little to foretell it in the works of Bacon.  Though he never advocates cruelty or oppression and is wise enough to see that no statesman can entirely set aside moral considerations, his ethical