occasionally lighten the hereditary shackles that burthened the moral and philosophical writer."[512:A]
It is, however, to the profound genius of Lord Bacon that we must attribute the earliest legitimate specimen of essay-writing in this country; for though his "Essays on Councils, Civil and Moral," were not completed until 1612, the first part of them was printed in 1597; and in the intended dedication to Prince Henry of this second edition, he assigns his reason for adopting the term essay. "To write just treatises," he observes, "requires leisure in the writer, and leisure in the reader, and therefore are not so fit, neither in your Highness's princely affairs, nor in regard of my continual service, which is the cause that hath made me chuse to write certain brief notes, set down rather significantly than curiously, which I have called Essays. The word 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."[512:B] This invaluable work, in a moral and prudential light, perhaps the most useful which any English author has left to posterity, has been the fruitful parent of a more extensive series of similar productions, collectively or periodically published, than any other country can exhibit.
The age of Shakspeare was fertile, also, in what may be termed Parlour-window Miscellanies; books whose aim was to attract the attention of the idle, the dissipated, and the gossipping, by intermingling with the admonitions of the sage, a more than usual share of wit, narrative, and anecdote. Two of these, as exemplars of the whole class, it may be necessary to notice. In 1589, Leonard Wright published "A Display of dutie, dect with sage sayings, pythie sentences, and proper similies: Pleasant to reade, delightfull to heare, and profitable to practise;" a collection which Mr. Haslewood calls "an
early and pleasing specimen" of this species of miscellaneous writing. It contains observations and friendly hints on all the principal circumstances and events of life; "certaine necessarie rules both pleasant and profitable for preventing of sicknesse, and preserving of health: prescribed by Dr. Dyet, Dr. Quiet, and Dr. Merryman;" and concludes with "certaine pretty notes and pleasant conceits, delightfull to many, and hurtfull to none." The author closes "A friendly advertisement touching marriage," by enumerating the infelicities of the man who marries a shrew, where "hee shall finde compact in a little flesh, a great number of bones too hard to digest.—And therefore," adds he, "some do thinke wedlocke to be that same purgatorie, which learned divines have so long contended about, or a sharpe penance to bring sinnefull men to heaven. A merry fellow hearing a preacher say in his sermon, that whosoever would be saved, must take up and beare his cross, ran straight to his wife, and cast her upon his back. . . . .
"Finally, he that will live quiet in wedlocke, must be courteous in speech, cheareful in countinance, provident for his house, carefull to traine up his children in vertue, and patient in bearing the infirmities of his wife. Let all the keyes hang at her girdle, only the purse at his own. He must also be voide of jelosie, which is a vanity to thinke, and more folly to suspect. For eyther it needeth not, or booteth not, and to be jelious without a cause is the next way to have a cause.
"This is the only way, to make a woman dum:
To sit and smyle and laugh her out, and not a word, but mum."[513:A]
In 1600, appeared the first edition of "The Golden-grove, moralized in three books: A worke very necessary for all such, as would know how to governe themselves, their houses, or their countrey. Made by W. Vaughan, Master of Artes, and Graduate in the Civill Law."
A second edition, "reviewed and enlarged by the Authour," was printed in 1608.
Each book of this work, which displays considerable knowledge both of literature and of mankind, is divided, after a ridiculous fashion of the time, into plants, and these again into chapters. The first book, on the Supreme Being, and on man, contains eleven plants, and eighty-four chapters; the second, on domestic and private duties, five plants, and thirty chapters; and the third, upon the commonwealth, nine plants and seventy-two chapters.