“One, though he be excellent and the chief, is not to be imitated alone; for no imitator ever grew up to his author:  likeness is always on this side truth.  Yet there happened in my time one noble speaker, who was full of gravity in his speaking.  His language (when he could spare or pass by a jest) was nobly censorious.  No man ever spake more neatly, more rightly, more weightily, or suffered less emptiness, less idleness in what he uttered.  No member of his speech but consisted of his own graces.  His hearers could not cough or look aside from him without loss.  He commanded when he spoke, and had his judges angry and pleased at his devotion.  No man had their affections more in his power.  The fear of every man that heard him was lest he should make an end.”

The speeches of Bacon are almost wholly lost, his philosophy is an undeciphered heap of fragments, the ambitions of his life lay in ruins about his dishonored old age; yet his intellect is one of the great moving and still vital forces of the modern world, and he remains, for all ages to come, in the literature which is the final storehouse of the chief treasures of mankind, one of

     “The dead yet sceptered sovereigns who still rule
     Our spirits from their urns.”

OF TRUTH

From the ‘Essays’

What is Truth? said jesting Pilate; and would not stay for an answer.  Certainly there be that delight in giddiness; and count it a bondage to fix a belief; affecting free-will in thinking, as well as in acting.  And though the sects of philosophers of that kind be gone, yet there remain certain discoursing wits, which are of the same veins, though there be not so much blood in them as was in those of the ancients.  But it is not only the difficulty and labor which men take in finding out of truth, nor again, that when it is found it imposeth upon men’s thoughts, that doth bring lies in favor:  but a natural though corrupt love of the lie itself.  One of the later school of the Grecians examineth the matter, and is at a stand to think what should be in it, that men should love lies, where neither they make for pleasure as with poets, nor for advantage as with the merchant; but for the lie’s sake.  But I cannot tell:  this same truth is a naked and open daylight, that doth not show the masks and mummeries and triumphs of the world half so stately and daintily as candle-lights.  Truth may perhaps come to the price of a pearl, that showeth best by day; but it will not rise to the price of a diamond or carbuncle, that showeth best in varied lights.  A mixture of a lie doth ever add pleasure.  Doth any man doubt, that if there were taken out of men’s minds vain opinions, flattering hopes, false valuations, imaginations as one would, and the like, but it would leave the minds of a number of men poor shrunken things, full of melancholy and indisposition, and unpleasing to themselves?  One of the fathers, in great severity,