learning, and excellent judgment.  So far as it has advanced, it does the highest honor to English scholarship, and takes its place as one of the most remarkable editions in existence of any author whose works stand in need of editorial care.  The plan upon which it is arranged is as follows.  Bacon’s works are divided into three broad classes:—­first, the Philosophical; secondly, the Professional; thirdly, the Literary and Occasional.  Each of these classes was undertaken by a separate editor.  Mr. Robert Leslie Ellis engaged upon the Philosophical Works, and had advanced far in his task when he was suddenly compelled to relinquish it some years since by illness which completely disabled him for labor.  What he had already accomplished is so well done as to excite sincere regret that he was unable to carry his work forward.  But this regret is diminished by the ability with which Mr. James Spedding, who had taken charge of the Literary and Occasional Works, has supplied Mr. Ellis’s place in the completion of the editing of the Philosophical.  The burden of the edition has fallen upon his shoulders, and the chief credit for its excellence is due to him.  Up to the present time, the publication of the Philosophical Works is complete in five volumes, and the first volume of the Literary Works has just appeared.  The separate treatises contained in the completed portion are distributed into three parts,—­“whereby,” says Mr. Spedding, “all those writings which were either published or intended for publication by Bacon himself as parts of the Great Instauration are (for the first time, I believe) exhibited separately, and distinguished as well from the independent and collateral pieces which did not form part of the main scheme, as from those which, though originally designed for it, were afterwards superseded and abandoned.”  Each piece is accompanied with a preface, both critical and historical, and with notes.  It is in these prefaces that a great part of the value of the new edition consists; for they are in themselves treatises of elucidation and illustration of Bacon’s opinions, and of investigation concerning the changes they underwent from time to time.  They are written with great clearness and ability, and, taken together, present such a view of Bacon’s philosophy as is to be found nowhere else, and amply answers the requirements of students, however exacting.

Far too much credit has been attributed to Bacon, in popular estimation, as the author of a system upon which the modern progress of science is based.[A] Whatever his system may have been, it is certain that it has had little direct influence upon the advance of knowledge.  But, perhaps, too little credit has been given to Bacon as a man whose breadth and power of thought and amplitude of soul enabled a spirit that has at once stimulated its progress and elevated its disciples.  That Bacon believed himself to have invented a system wholly new admits of no doubt; but it is doubtful whether he ever definitely arranged