[45] Not only do the cases, so far as they are known, support Bacon's plea of innocence, but it is remarkable that no attempt at a reversal of any of his numerous decrees appears to have been successful. Had his decrees been wilful perversions of justice, it is scarcely conceivable that some of them should not have been overturned. See Letters and Life, vii. 555-562.
[46] The peculiarities of Bacon's style were noticed very early by his contemporaries. (See Letters and Life, i. 268.) Raleigh and Jonson have both recorded their opinions of it, but no one has characterized it more happily than his friend, Sir Tobie Matthews, "A man so rare in knowledge, of so many several kinds, endued with the facility and felicity of expressing it all in so elegant, significant, so abundant, and yet so choice and ravishing a way of words, of metaphors, of allusions, as perhaps the world hath not seen since it was a world."—"Address to the Reader" prefixed to Collection of English Letters (1660).
[47] The division of the sciences adopted in the great French Encyclopédie was founded upon this classification of Bacon's. See Diderot's Prospectus (Œuvres, iii.) and d'Alembert's Discours (Œuvres, i.) The scheme should be compared with later attempts of the same nature by Ampère, Cournot, Comte and Herbert Spencer.
[48] See also "Letter to Fulgentio," Letters and Life, vii. 533.
[49] Fil. Lab.; Cog. et Visa. i.; cf. Pref. to Ins. Mag.
[50] Val. Ter. 232; cf. N. O. i. 124.
[51] Letters, i. 123.
[52] N. O. i. 116.
[53] Fil. Lab. 5; cf. N. O. i. 81; Val. Ter. (Works, iii. 235); Advancement, bk. i. (Works, iii. 294).
[54] Fil. Lab. 5; cf. N. O. i. 81; Val. Ter. (Works, iii. 222-233); New Atlantis (Works, iii. 156).