believe will be made to enable (for it is often less the will than the power which is wanting) these schools to do better what they were founded to do; viz., to keep up a high educational tone, so to speak, in their different districts, by teaching soundly whatever it may seem desirable that they should teach. And then we shall hope to see them really useful to the people, instead of almost useless, except to the master, and often of very questionable advantage even to him.

ART. IV.-(1.) Bacon's Essays and Colours of Good and Evil. With Notes and Glossarial Index. By W. ALDIS WRIGHT, M.A. Second Edition. Macmillan & Co.

(2.) Bacon's Essays. With Annotations. By RICHARD WHATELY, D.D., Archbishop of Dublin. Fifth Edition. Parker & Son.

FOR more than two centuries these Essays have been popular among thoughtful practical men. Archbishop Whately by his admirable edition introduced them to a larger circle of readers, and his Annotations formed, as it were, a precious setting for these jewels of rare value.

With those Annotations Mr. Wright's Notes do not enter into competition they have an object entirely different; namely, to afford evidence of the patient, careful labour and oft-repeated revision, bestowed by Francis Bacon upon the Essays, and to show how he wove into them the best of ancient proverbs, and his own wisest thoughts and weightiest words.

The first edition of the Essays seems to have been published in the beginning of the month of February, 1596-7. The 'Epistle Dedicatorie,' addressed by Francis Bacon to M. 'Anthony Bacon, his deare brother,' is dated from my Chamber 'at Graies Inne, this 30. of Januarie, 1597.' But on the titlepage of a copy in the British Museum is a note written by the first purchaser of the volume: 'Septimo die ffebrurye 39 E. ‘(I paid xxd.).' The reign of Elizabeth commenced on the 17th November, 1558, and February, 39 Eliz., would therefore be February, 1596-7. The book, a small, thin octavo, is entitled, Essayes Religious Meditations: Places of perswasion and 'disswasion.' It contains ten Essays: 1, Of Studie; 2, Of 'Discourse; 3, Of Ceremonies and Respects; 4, Of Followers and Friends; 5, Sutors; 6, Of Expence; 7, Of Regiment of 'Health; 8, Of Honour and Reputation; 9, Of Faction; 10, Of 'Negociating.'

The Religious Meditations' are in Latin. With the tenth

Meditation, entitled 'De Atheismo,' very nearly corresponds the English Essay, 'Of Atheism,' first printed in 1612. The 'Places of perswasion and disswasion' are entitled, 'Of the 'Coulers of Good and Evill: a Fragment,' and are generally known by this name. They were afterwards translated into Latin, with some alterations, and were inserted in the third chapter of the sixth book of the 'De Augmentis Scientiarum,' where they are called 'Sophismata Rhetorica.'

The ten Essays printed in 1597 had been written long before that time, and had been read in manuscript by many of the author's friends, having been circulated before their publication, as were the Sonnets of Shakspeare, Sir Philip Sidney's 'Arcadia and 'Defence of Poesie,' and the poems of Sir Walter Raleigh. They had thus become widely known; thoughts were borrowed from them, and words stolen; and at length some bookseller was about to print them without the leave of their author, who therefore, in order to prevent the wrong they might receive by 'untrue copies, or by some garnishment, which it might please 'any that should set them forth to bestow upon them,' himself directed their publication as they had passed from his pen, though without the further revision and the additions which he had intended.

The name by which he called them was new in English speech. He may have borrowed it from Montaigne, whose Essais' had been first printed at Bordeaux in 1580, about which time Anthony Bacon was lodging in that town. The word 'Essay' had not then the meaning, which it has since acquired, of a finished, though brief, treatise or dissertation. Pronounced always with the accent on the last syllable, it signified only a trial or attempt. Franciscus Baconus in tentamentis suis 'Ethico-politicis' is the phrase used in a Latin letter, dated the 14th July, 1619, quoted by Mr. Aldis Wright in his Preface. In the Dedication to Prince Henry, intended to have been prefixed to the second edition, published in 1612, Sir Francis Bacon styles his work 'certain brief notes, set down rather significantly than curiously, which I have called Essaies,' and adds, The word is late, but the thing is ancient. For Seneca's 'Epistles to Lucilius, if one mark them well, are but Essaies; 'that is, dispersed meditations, though conveyed in the form of Epistles.' But the title soon became popular, and the name Essayists,' is applied by Ben Jonson, in his 'Discoveries,' to a class of writers whose master, he says, is Montaigne.

At the time of the publication of the first edition of the Essays Francis Bacon was thirty-six years of age. For ten years he had been a Bencher of Gray's Inn, and for twelve years he had sat in Parliament. When his friend Sir Thomas

Egerton, the Attorney-General, was appointed Master of the Rolls in 1593, he became a suitor for the vacant office. But it was given to Edward Coke, in whose place Mr. Serjeant Fleming was made Solicitor-General. The Queen knew that Francis Bacon was witty, eloquent, and possessed of much good learning, but in law she rather thought that he could 'make shew to the ' uttermost of his knowledge' than that he was deep. His uncle, Lord Burleigh, and cousin, Sir Robert Cecil, the newly appointed Secretary of State, had a grudge against him as one of the ablest of the adherents of Essex, and were perhaps jealous of his fame. But he was from year to year admitted to more frequent and familiar intercourse with the Queen, and his loyalty to her was neither affected by the refusal of his suit, nor lessened after her death by his desire to please a king who delighted to disparage the acts and disgrace the servants of his predecessor. By the good fortune or by the art of Elizabeth, the odium of such disappointments as those experienced by Francis Bacon fell chiefly upon her counsellors, and thus she retained unabated the devotion of the courtiers; a devotion all the more remarkable because rendered by those who to one another were proud, insolent and overbearing; a devotion the fulness and constancy of which are quite inexplicable on any other supposition than that it was a voluntary homage to her mental and moral excellence.

It is not improbable that the Essay Of Sutors' may have been composed in the year 1594, perhaps in the park at Twickenham, where Francis Bacon went in the autumn of that year, to be alone, and whence he wrote to his brother Anthony that soli'tariness collecteth the mind as shutting the eyes doth the sight.' Two other Essays, 'Of Expence' and 'Of Regiment of Health,' were probably written about the same time. The first reminds us of the letters of Lady Anne Bacon, the careful, anxious mother, to her sons Anthony and Francis, chiding them for their wastefulness and extravagance, and warning them of the deceitfulness of their servants, who would 'all seek to abuse' their 'want of ' experience.' The second affords further evidence of what we learn from the same letters-the sickliness of the brothers, who bought a coach because Anthony was too lame to walk to Court, and tried to cure themselves by a 'prescribed diet' and 'new-inhand physic,' of which Lady Anne heard, and wrote,—

'My Lord Treasurer about five years past was greatly pressed by the great vaunt of a sudden start-up glorious stranger, that would needs cure him of the gout by boast; "But," quoth my lord, 'have you cured any? Let me know and see them." "Nay," saith the fellow, "but I am sure I can." "Well," concluded my lord, and said, Go, go and cure first, and then come again, or else not.”

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I would you had so done. But I pray God bless it to you, and pray heartily to God for your good recovery and sound.'

A second edition of the Essays was published in the year 1612. In 1598 the first edition had been reprinted by Humfrey Hooper, with the Religious Meditations' in English and the 'Colours of Good and Evil,' and a pirated edition had been published in 1606 by John Jaggard.

The edition of 1612 is a small octavo volume, entitled 'The Essaies of S Francis Bacon, Knight, the Kings Solliciter 'Generall.' The' Religious Meditations' and 'Places of Persuasion 'and Dissuasion' are omitted. The book contains thirty-eight Essays, which are printed in a large, clear type, each page having a ruled margin. The table of contents names forty Essays; but the thirty-ninth and fortieth, 'Of the Publike' and 'Of Warre 'and Peace,' were never printed. Of the ten original Essays, the eighth, that of Honour and Reputation,' was omitted in this edition; the rest were more or less altered and enlarged. Twentynine new Essays were added.

The alterations made by the author, though in many cases important, were in some instances exceedingly minute; being such as the insertion or change of a particle, the substitution for one word of another entirely or nearly synonymous, or the addition of a word for the purpose of rendering a sentence clearer or more forcible. Such alterations in new editions, and even in reprints of the same edition, were far more common in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries than at present. The printing of a book, having become more common, is now more lightly regarded; and the prospect of a wide present circulation and a speedy oblivion has rendered authors in these times less painstaking and scrupulously accurate than were those who wrote for readers more critical, though fewer in number. In the year 1605 Sir Francis Bacon had published the "Twoo Bookes of the Proficience and 'Advancement of Learning, Divine and Humane,' in which was foreshadowed, and that not dimly, the plan of the 'Great In'stauration of the Sciences.' Many thoughts and illustrations taken from these two books were incorporated in the second edition of the Essays. The use of the same ideas and quotations in different compositions is eminently characteristic of the works of Bacon; and he gathered from his other writings 'the 'best fruit' of his mind, that he might bestow it upon the revised and enlarged editions of the Essays which were published in 1612 and 1625. The circle of intelligent readers of his philosophical works was then very narrow, and would always be comparatively small; the depth of the learning displayed in his law tracts, and the skill with which it was applied, could be appre

ciated only by a few; the interest excited by his political and ecclesiastical pamphlets must be transient; but his Essays of all his other works were 'most current,' for they came home 'to 'men's business and bosoms.' Through them, therefore, he hoped that the spirit of his new philosophy might pass into the minds of many who would never hear of the 'idola mentis' and 'prærogativæ instantiarum' of the 'Novum Organum;' and in them, accordingly, he applied to the passions, duties, and pleasures of common life, ideas and illustrations borrowed from his more recondite works. In the second book of the Advancement of 'Learning' he had noted that the writing of speculative men of ' active matter, for the most part doth seem to men of experience 'as Phormio's argument of the wars seemed to Hannibal, to be 'but dreams and dotage;' and that 'generally it were to be 'wished, as that which would make learning indeed solid and 'fruitful, that active men would or could become writers.' Mindful of this in the composition of his Essays, he ‘endeavoured to make them not vulgar, but of a nature whereof a 'man shall find much in experience, little in books.'

The third edition, 'The Essayes or Counsels Civill and Morall, of Francis Lo. Verulam, Viscount St. Alban, newly enlarged,' is dedicated by the author to the Right Honorable my very good 'Lord the Duke of Buckingham his Grace, Lord High Admiral of England.' This edition, published in March, 1624-5, contained the ten original Essays, including that one which had been omitted in the second edition, with the twenty-nine added in 1612, and nineteen new Essays. All those which had been previously published were more or less altered, to many of them great additions were made, and two which had been first printed in the second edition, those 'Of Religion' (now entitled Of Unitie in Religion') and 'Of Friendshippe,' were entirely re-written. To the former were added many passages from the 'Advertisement touching the Controversies of the Church of 'England.' The latter seems to have been revised at the request of Mr. Tobie Matthew, who, notwithstanding his perversion to the Church of Rome, had been for upwards of twenty years the intimate friend of Sir Francis Bacon, and as such had edited the Italian translation of the Essays published in London in 1618, and was frequently consulted by him about his writings.

At the time of the publication of this last edition Lord St. Alban had been living for nearly four years in retirement at Gorhambury and at his house in Gray's Inn.

The sentence passed upon him by the Lords had, in fact, never been executed. His imprisonment in the Tower had lasted but a few hours; the fine imposed had been vested in