There is no art, no style, almost, except in a few—­the political ones—­no order:  thoughts are put down and left unsupported, unproved, undeveloped.  In the first form of the ten, which composed the first edition of 1597, they are more like notes of analysis or tables of contents; they are austere even to meagreness.  But the general character continues in the enlarged and expanded ones of Bacon’s later years.  They are like chapters in Aristotle’s Ethics and Rhetoric on virtues and characters; only Bacon’s takes Aristotle’s broad marking lines as drawn, and proceeds with the subtler and more refined observations of a much longer and wider experience.  But these short papers say what they have to say without preface, and in literary undress, without a superfluous word, without the joints and bands of structure; they say it in brief, rapid sentences, which come down, sentence after sentence, like the strokes of a great hammer.  No wonder that in their disdainful brevity they seem rugged and abrupt, “and do not seem to end, but fall.”  But with their truth and piercingness and delicacy of observation, their roughness gives a kind of flavour which no elaboration could give.  It is none the less that their wisdom is of a somewhat cynical kind, fully alive to the slipperiness and self-deceits and faithlessness which are in the world and rather inclined to be amused at them.  In some we can see distinct records of the writer’s own experience:  one contains the substance of a charge delivered to Judge Hutton on his appointment; another of them is a sketch drawn from life of a character which had crossed Bacon’s path, and in the essay on Seeming Wise we can trace from the impatient notes put down in his Commentarius Solutus, the picture of the man who stood in his way, the Attorney-General Hobart.  Some of them are memorable oracular utterances not inadequate to the subject, on Truth or Death or Unity.  Others reveal an utter incapacity to come near a subject, except as a strange external phenomena, like the essay on Love.  There is a distinct tendency in them to the Italian school of political and moral wisdom, the wisdom of distrust and of reliance on indirect and roundabout ways.  There is a group of them, “of Delays,” “of Cunning,” “of Wisdom for a Man’s Self,” “of Despatch,” which show how vigilantly and to what purpose he had watched the treasurers and secretaries and intriguers of Elizabeth’s and James’s Courts; and there are curious self-revelations, as in the essay on Friendship.  But there are also currents of better and larger feeling, such as those which show his own ideal of “Great Place,” and what he felt of its dangers and duties.  And mixed with the fantastic taste and conceits of the time, there is evidence in them of Bacon’s keen delight in nature, in the beauty and scents of flowers, in the charm of open-air life, as in the essay on Gardens, “The purest of human pleasures, the greatest refreshment to the spirits of man.”