Literature has a twofold aspect:  its ideal is pure truth, which is the noblest thought embodied in perfect beauty of form.  It is the union of science and art, the final wedding in which are merged the knowledge worthy to be known and the highest imagination presenting it.  There is a school calling itself that of pure art, to which substance is nothing and form is everything.  Its measure of merit is applied to the manner only; and the meanest of subjects, the most trivial and even the most degraded of ideas or facts, is welcomed to its high places if clothed in a satisfying garb.  But this school, though arrogant in the other arts of expression, has not yet been welcomed to the judgment-seat in literature, where indeed it is passing even now to contempt and oblivion.  Bacon’s instinct was for substance.  His strongest passion was for utility.  The artistic side of his nature was receptive rather than creative.  Splendid passages in the ‘Advancement’ and ‘De Augmentis’ show his profound appreciation of all the arts of expression, but show likewise his inability to glorify them above that which they express.  In his mind, language is subordinate to thought, and the painting to the picture, just as the frame is to the painting or the binding to the book.  He writes always in the grand style.  He reminds us of “the large utterance of the early gods.”  His sentences are weighted with thought, as suggestive as Plato, as condensed as Thucydides.  Full of wit, keen in discerning analogies, rich in intellectual ornament, he is yet too concentrated in his attention to the idea to care for the melody of language.  He decorates with fruits, not with flowers.  For metrical movement, for rhythmic harmony, he has no ear nor sense.  Inconceivable as it is that Shakespeare could have written one aphorism of the ’Novum Organum,’ it would be far more absurd to imagine Bacon writing a line of the Sonnets.  With the loftiest imagination, the liveliest fancy, the keenest sense of precision and appropriateness in words, he lacks the special gift of poetic form, the faculty divine which finds new inspiration in the very limitations of measured language, and whose natural expression is music alike to the ear and to the mind.  His powers were cramped by the fetters of metre, and his attempts to versify even rich thought and deep feeling were puerile.  But his prose is by far the weightiest, the most lucid, effective, and pleasing of his day.  The poet Sprat justly says:—­

“He was a man of strong, clear, and powerful imaginations; his genius was searching and inimitable; and of this I need give no other proof than his style itself, which as for the most part it describes men’s minds as well as pictures do their bodies, so it did his above all men living.”

And Ben Jonson, who knew him well, describes his eloquence in terms which are confirmed by all we know of his Parliamentary career:—­