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 inventor or at least the re-inventor of the inductive method, and the father of all discovery since his time.  These notions have been held firmly, while more special ones concerning his system and himself have been, for the most part, vague or unformed.

In great part, this fact is the result of the condition in which Lord Bacon left his works, the manner of their composition, and their intrinsic defects.  He did not publish them in any systematic order, but printed one after another, as it was written, or as extraneous circumstances might induce.  Nor did he leave his system complete in any one treatise.  His mind discursive, his imagination easily fired, he seized subject after subject and discussed each in a separate treatise, all with more or less reference to a general plan, but not embodied in any consecutive and harmonious development.  The growth of his ideas, the changes of his views, as his life advanced, are manifest in the want of connection, as well as in the connection, of these various fragments.  Dr. Rawley, his chaplain, says,—­and it is a marvellous illustration of Bacon’s diligence and desire for perfection,—­“I myself have seen, at the least, twelve copies of the ‘Instauration,’ revised year by year, one after another, and every year altered and amended in the frame thereof.”

Such, then, being the state of Bacon’s works at his death, much was left to the judgment of his editors, and, unfortunately, the labor of editing his books has, up to the present time, fallen into hands wanting in competence and discretion.  It has consequently been a task of special difficulty to get from the ill-arranged mass of Bacon’s writings a satisfactory view of the essential elements of his philosophy and a just knowledge of his final opinions.

But the reproach of non-fulfilment of the trust committed to them will rest upon “the next ages” no longer; for the edition which is now in course of publication amply redeems the faults of those that have preceded it, and is such a one as Bacon himself might have approved.  In the second book of the “Advancement of Learning,” in recounting “the works or acts of merit toward learning,” he includes among them “new editions of authors, with more correct impressions, more faithful translations, more profitable glosses, more diligent annotations, and the like.”  In each of these respects the edition before us deserves the highest praise.  The editors have engaged in their task as in a labor of love.  It is the result of many years of study, and it exhibits the fruit of unwearied care, great