it is the matter, the real thing that he wanted to say, which was uppermost.  He cared how it was said, not for the sake of form or ornament, but because the force and clearness of what was said depended so much on how it was said.  Of course, what he wanted to say varied indefinitely with the various occasions of his life.  His business may merely be to write “a device” or panegyric for a pageant in the Queen’s honour, or for the revels of Gray’s Inn.  But even these trifles are the result of real thought, and are full of ideas—­ideas about the hopes of knowledge or about the policy of the State; and though, of course, they have plenty of the flourishes and quaint absurdities indispensable on such occasions, yet the “rhetorical affectation” is in the thing itself, and not in the way it is handled; he had an opportunity of saying some of the things which were to him of deep and perpetual interest, and he used it to say them, as forcibly, as strikingly, as attractively as he could.  His manner of writing depends, not on a style, or a studied or acquired habit, but on the nature of the task which he has in hand.  Everywhere his matter is close to his words, and governs, animates, informs his words.  No one in England before had so much as he had the power to say what he wanted to say, and exactly as he wanted to say it.  No one was so little at the mercy of conventional language or customary rhetoric, except when he persuaded himself that he had to submit to those necessities of flattery, which cost him at last so dear.

The book by which English readers, from his own time to ours, have known him best, better than by the originality and the eloquence of the Advancement, or than by the political weight and historical imagination of the History of Henry VII., is the first book which he published, the volume of Essays.  It is an instance of his self-willed but most skilful use of the freedom and ease which the “modern language,” which he despised, gave him.  It is obvious that he might have expanded these “Counsels, moral and political,” to the size which such essays used to swell to after his time.  Many people would have thanked him for doing so; and some have thought it a good book on which to hang their own reflections and illustrations.  But he saw how much could be done by leaving the beaten track of set treatise and discourse, and setting down unceremoniously the observations which he had made, and the real rules which he had felt to be true, on various practical matters which come home to men’s “business and bosoms.”  He was very fond of these moral and political generalisations, both of his own collecting and as found in writers who, he thought, had the right to make them, like the Latins of the Empire and the Italians and Spaniards of the Renaissance.  But a mere string of maxims and quotations would have been a poor thing and not new; and he cast what he had to say into connected wholes.  But nothing can be more loose than the structure of the essays.