together in great profusion mere forms, varied turns of expression, heads and tails of clauses and paragraphs, transitions, connections; he notes down fashions of compliment, of excuse or repartee, even morning and evening salutations; he records neat and convenient opening and concluding sentences, ways of speaking more adapted than others to give a special colour or direction to what the speaker or writer has to say—­all that hook-and-eye work which seems so trivial and passes so unnoticed as a matter of course, and which yet is often hard to reach, and which makes all the difference between tameness and liveliness, between clearness and obscurity—­all the difference, not merely to the ease and naturalness, but often to the logical force of speech.  These collections it was his way to sift and transcribe again and again, adding as well as omitting.  From one of these, belonging to 1594 and the following years, the Promus of Formularies and Elegancies, Mr. Spedding has given curious extracts; and the whole collection has been recently edited by Mrs. Henry Pott.  Thus it was that he prepared himself for what, as we read it, or as his audience heard it, seems the suggestion or recollection of the moment.  Bacon was always much more careful of the value or aptness of a thought than of its appearing new and original.  Of all great writers he least minds repeating himself, perhaps in the very same words; so that a simile, an illustration, a quotation pleases him, he returns to it—­he is never tired of it; it obviously gives him satisfaction to introduce it again and again.  These collections of odds and ends illustrate another point in his literary habits.  His was a mind keenly sensitive to all analogies and affinities, impatient of a strict and rigid logical groove, but spreading as it were tentacles on all sides in quest of chance prey, and quickened into a whole system of imagination by the electric quiver imparted by a single word, at once the key and symbol of the thinking it had led to.  And so he puts down word or phrase, so enigmatical to us who see it by itself, which to him would wake up a whole train of ideas, as he remembered the occasion of it—­how at a certain time and place this word set the whole moving, seemed to breathe new life and shed new light, and has remained the token, meaningless in itself, which reminds him of so much.

When we come to read his letters, his speeches, his works, we come continually on the results and proofs of this early labour.  Some of the most memorable and familiar passages of his writings are to be traced from the storehouses which he filled in these years of preparation.  An example of this correspondence between the note-book and the composition is to be seen in a paper belonging to this period, written apparently to form part of a masque, or as he himself calls it, a “Conference of Pleasure,” and entitled the Praise of Knowledge.  It is interesting because it is the first draught which we have from him of some of the leading ideas and most characteristic language about the defects and the improvement of knowledge, which were afterwards embodied in the Advancement and the Novum Organum.  The whole spirit and aim of his great reform is summed up in the following fine passage: