But he had another manner of writing for what he held to be his more serious work.  In the philosophical and historical works there is no want of attention to the flow and order and ornament of composition.  When we come to the Advancement of Learning, we come to a book which is one of the landmarks of what high thought and rich imagination have made of the English language.  It is the first great book in English prose of secular interest; the first book which can claim a place beside the Laws of Ecclesiastical Polity.  As regards its subject-matter, it has been partly thrown into the shade by the greatly enlarged and elaborate form in which it ultimately appeared, in a Latin dress, as the first portion of the scheme of the Instauratio, the De Augmentis Scientiarum.  Bacon looked on it as a first effort, a kind of call-bell to awaken and attract the interest of others in the thoughts and hopes which so interested himself.  But it contains some of his finest writing.  In the Essays he writes as a looker-on at the game of human affairs, who, according to his frequent illustration, sees more of it than the gamesters themselves, and is able to give wiser and faithful counsel, not without a touch of kindly irony at the mistakes which he observes.  In the Advancement he is the enthusiast for a great cause and a great hope, and all that he has of passion and power is enlisted in the effort to advance it.  The Advancement is far from being a perfect book.  As a survey of the actual state of knowledge in his day, of its deficiencies, and what was wanted to supply them, it is not even up to the materials of the time.  Even the improved De Augmentis is inadequate; and there is reason to think the Advancement was a hurried book, at least in the later part, and it is defective in arrangement and proportion of parts.  Two of the great divisions of knowledge—­history and poetry—­are despatched in comparatively short chapters; while in the division on “Civil Knowledge,” human knowledge as it respects society, he inserts a long essay, obviously complete in itself and clumsily thrust in here, on the ways of getting on in the world, the means by which a man may be “Faber fortunae suae”—­the architect of his own success; too lively a picture to be pleasant of the arts with which he had become acquainted in the process of rising.  The book, too, has the blemishes of its own time; its want of simplicity, its inevitable though very often amusing and curious pedantries.  But the Advancement was the first of a long line of books which have attempted to teach English readers how to think of knowledge; to make it really and intelligently the interest, not of the school or the study or the laboratory only, but of society at large.  It was a book with a purpose, new then, but of which we have seen the fulfilment.  He wanted to impress on his generation, as a very practical matter, all that knowledge might do in wise hands,