The new Essays added are: 1. Of Religion; 2. Of Death; 3. Of Goodnesse, and Goodnesse of Nature; 4. Of Cunning; 5. Of Marriage and Single Life; 6. Of Parents and Children; 7. Of Nobility; 8. Of Great Place; 9. Of Empire; 10. Of Counsell; 11. Of Dispatch; 12. Of Love; 13. Of Friendship; 14. Of Atheism; 15. Of Superstition; 16. Of Wisedome for a Man’s selfe; 20. Of seeming wise; 21. Of Riches; 22. Of Ambition; 23. Of Young Men and Age; 24. Of Beauty; 25. Of Deformity; 26. Of Nature in Men; 27. Of Custom and Education; 28. Of Fortune; 35. Of Praise; 36. Of Judicature; 37. of Vaine-Glory; 38. Of Greatnesse of Kingdomes; 39. Of the Publique; 40. Of Warre and Peace.
These forty-one Essays were afterwards again augmented to fifty-eight, with the new title of The Essaies or Covnsels, Civill and Morall; they were likewise improved by corrections, additions, and illustrations. By the peculiarity of Bacon, already noticed, the later Essays rise in beauty and interest.
Bacon considered his Essays but as “the recreations of his other studies.” He has entitled them, in the Latin translation, Sermones fideles, sive Interiora rerum. The idea of them, as has been already mentioned, was suggested by those of Montaigne; but there is but little resemblance between the two productions. Montaigne is natural, ingenuous, sportive. Bacon’s “Essays or Counsels, civil and moral,” “the fragments of his conceits,” as he styles them, are all study, art, and gravity; but the reflections in them are true and profound. Montaigne confessedly painted himself, declared that he was the matter of his own book,[36] while with Bacon the man was merged in the author and the philosopher, who propounded like Seneca, and somewhat in Seneca’s style, the maxims of practical wisdom, that, to use Bacon’s own language, “come home to men’s business and bosoms,” and clothed them in a garb, new, elegant, and rich, hitherto unknown in England. But our author, if we may judge by the matter and even manner of his Essays, may have had in view, not so much Montaigne’s Essais as Seneca’s Letters to Lucilius. The Essay of Death is obviously founded on Seneca’s Epistles on this subject. That he was well acquainted with Seneca’s Letters, is incontrovertible. He alludes to them thus in the dedication to Prince Henry, in 1612: “The word (Essays),” says he, “is late, but the thing is ancient; for Seneca’s Epistles to Lucilius, if you mark them well, are but Essays, that is, dispersed meditations, though conveyed in the form of epistles.” Bacon justly foretold of his Essays that they “would live as long as books last.”
The following is the opinion of Dugald Stewart, himself an eminent philosopher and elegant writer:
“His Essays are the best known and most popular of all his works. It is also one of those where the superiority of his genius appears to the greatest advantage; the novelty and depth of his reflections often receiving a strong relief from triteness of the subject. It may be read from beginning to end in a few hours; and yet, after the twentieth perusal, one seldom fails to remark in it something unobserved before. This, indeed, is a characteristic of all Bacon’s writings, and only to be accounted for by the inexhaustible aliment they furnish to our own thoughts, and the sympathetic activity they impart to our torpid faculties.”[37]
The reader will, perhaps, be rather gratified than wearied with another appreciation of this valuable production of our young moralist of twenty-six. It is of no incompetent judge,—Mr. Hallam.
“The transcendent strength of Bacon’s mind is visible in the whole tenor of these Essays, unequal as they must be from the very nature of such compositions. They are deeper and more discriminating than any earlier, or almost any later work in the English language, full of recondite observation, long matured and carefully sifted. It is true that we might wish for more vivacity and ease; Bacon, who had much wit, had little gayety; his Essays are consequently stiff and grave where the subject might have been touched with a lively hand; thus it is in those on Gardens and on Building. The sentences have sometimes too apophthegmatic a form and want coherence; the historical instances, though far less frequent than with Montaigne, have a little the look of pedantry to our eyes. But it is from this condensation, from this gravity, that the work derives its peculiar impressiveness. Few books are more quoted, and what is not always the case with such books, we may add that few are more generally read. In this respect they lead the van of our prose literature; for no gentleman is ashamed of owning that he has not read the Elizabethan writers; but it would be somewhat derogatory to a man of the slightest claim to polite letters, were he unacquainted with the Essays of Bacon. It is, indeed, little worth while to read this or any other book for reputation sake; but very few in our language so well repay the pains, or afford more nourishment to the thoughts. They might be judiciously introduced, with a small number more, into a sound method of education, one that should make wisdom, rather than mere knowledge, its object, and might become a text-book of examination in our schools.”[38]
ADVANCEMENT OF LEARNING.
The Advancement of Learning was published in 1605. It has usually been considered that the whole of Bacon’s philosophy is contained in this work, excepting, however, the second book of the Novum Organum. Of the Advancement of Learning he made a Latin translation, under the title of De Dignitate et Augmentis Scientiarum, which, however, contains about one third of new matter and some slight interpolations; a few omissions have been remarked in it.