tone is hardly elevating; the moral obliquity of his public life is to a certain extent explained, in all but its grosser elements, in his published writings.  The essays, of course, contain much more than this; the spirit of curious and restless enquiry which animated Bacon finds expression in those on “Health,” or “Gardens” and “Plantations” and others of the kind; and a deeper vein of earnestness runs through some of them—­those for instance on “Friendship,” or “Truth” and on “Death.”

The Essays sum up in a condensed form the intellectual interests which find larger treatment in his other works.  His Henry VII., the first piece of scientific history in the English language (indeed in the modern world) is concerned with a king whose practice was the outcome of a political theory identical with Bacon’s own.  The Advancement of Learning is a brilliant popular exposition of the cause of scientific enquiry and of the inductive or investigatory method of research.  The New Atlantis is the picture of an ideal community whose common purpose is scientific investigation.  Bacon’s name is not upon the roll of those who have enlarged by brilliant conjectures or discoveries the store of human knowledge; his own investigations so far as they are recorded are all of a trivial nature.  The truth about him is that he was a brilliantly clever populariser of the cause of science, a kind of seventeenth century Huxley, concerned rather to lay down large general principles for the guidance of the work of others, than to be a serious worker himself.  The superstition of later times, acting on and refracting his amazing intellectual gifts, has raised him to a godlike eminence which is by right none of his; it has even credited him with the authorship of Shakespeare, and in its wilder moments with the composition of all that is of supreme worth in Elizabethan literature.  It is not necessary to take these delusions seriously.  The ignorance of mediaevalism was in the habit of crediting Vergil with the construction of the Roman aqueducts and temples whose ruins are scattered over Europe.  The modern Baconians reach much the same intellectual level.

A similar enthusiasm for knowledge and at any rate a pretence to science belong to the author of the Anatomy of Melancholy, Robert Burton.  His one book is surely the most amazing in English prose.  Its professed object was simple and comprehensive; it was to analyze human melancholy, to describe its effects, and prescribe for its removal.  But as his task grew, melancholy came to mean to Burton all the ills that flesh is heir to.  He tracked it in obscure and unsuspected forms; drew illustrations from a range of authors so much wider than the compass of the reading of even the most learned since, that he is generally credited with the invention of a large part of his quotations.  Ancients and moderns, poets and prose writers, schoolmen and dramatists are all drawn upon for the copious store of his examples;