was well said by Themistocles to the King of Persia, ’That speech was like cloth of arras opened and put abroad, whereby the imagery doth appear in figure; whereas in thought they lie in packs.’  Neither is this second fruit of friendship, in opening the understanding, restrained only to such friends as are able to give a man counsel.  (They are, indeed, best.) But even without that, a man learneth of himself, and bringeth his own thoughts to light, and whetteth his wits against a stone which itself cuts not.  In a word, a man were better relate himself to a statua or a picture, than to suffer his thoughts to pass in smother.”

Bacon, as has been said, was a great maker of notes and note-books:  he was careful not of the thought only, but of the very words in which it presented itself; everything was collected that might turn out useful in his writing or speaking, down to alternative modes of beginning or connecting or ending a sentence.  He watched over his intellectual appliances and resources much more strictly than over his money concerns.  He never threw away and never forgot what could be turned to account.  He was never afraid of repeating himself, if he thought he had something apt to say.  He was never tired of recasting and rewriting, from a mere fragment or preface to a finished paper.  He has favourite images, favourite maxims, favourite texts, which he cannot do without. “Da Fidei quae sunt Fidei” comes in from his first book to his last.  The illustrations which he gets from the myth of Scylla, from Atalanta’s ball, from Borgia’s saying about the French marking their lodgings with chalk, the saying that God takes delight, like the “innocent play of children,” “to hide his works in order to have them found out,” and to have kings as “his playfellows in that game,” these, with many others, reappear, however varied the context, from the first to the last of his compositions.  An edition of Bacon, with marginal references and parallel passages, would show a more persistent recurrence of characteristic illustrations and sentences than perhaps any other writer.

The Advancement was followed by attempts to give serious effect to its lesson.  This was nearly all done in Latin.  He did so, because in these works he spoke to a larger and, as he thought, more interested audience; the use of Latin marked the gravity of his subject as one that touched all mankind; and the majesty of Latin suited his taste and his thoughts.  Bacon spoke, indeed, impressively on the necessity of entering into the realm of knowledge in the spirit of a little child.  He dwelt on the paramount importance of beginning from the very bottom of the scale of fact, of understanding the commonplace things at our feet, so full of wonder and mystery and instruction, before venturing on theories.  The sun is not polluted by shining on a dunghill, and no facts were too ignoble to be beneath the notice of the true student of nature.  But his own genius was for the grandeur