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chemistry, and Laplace for astronomy. We feel that such men as Spinoza, Leibnitz, Descartes, Kant, Fichte, Hegel, and Sir William Hamilton had their mental destiny in the contemplation of abstract ideas. They could not, we are sure, have been painters, sculptors, architects, poets, or musicians.

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Now here is the extraordinary fact with regard to Lord Bacon; that his mind was active in numerous directions, occupied itself in a variety of offices; that it had in each equality of original power, and in each gave evidence of pre-eminent and creative genius. Any one of the positions which he filled would have been arduous enough to have taxed the devotion of a life, and that the life of a man richly and nobly gifted. For example, he was early distinguished in one of the most difficult professions, one that is said to be so jealous as to tolerate no rival, and that exacts the undivided devotion of its faithful and favored votary. He was an able practising lawyer. He also proved himself a philosophic jurist and teacher. He was besides, as member of the House of Commons, a legislator of large and commanding wisdom. He understood men, not alone in their individualities of character, but also in the very foundation and structure of their human nature. He was a sagacious man of business, and in the management of all affairs except his own he was keen, clear, and practical. By his own grand ability,—in spite of a cold-hearted Queen, in spite of false-hearted kindred, he went upward step by step to the high station which has now become mean before the majesty of his fame. Slowly he reached it, and suddenly he fell; but his name has outlived misfortune, pity, and disgrace, by virtue of that immortal genius which neither his own errors nor the malice of his enemies could injure or dethrone. And while he was engaged in the multiplicity of pursuits connected with a most active and busy life, he found time for meditation, the results of which have not only reformed philosophy, but also through philosophy have done much to revolutionize the world. His greatness as a writer appears in almost every form of prose composition, and each in its own department is a masterpiece. His greatness was transcendent as a thinker and as an author; he was equally great as an ora

tor. "There happened in my time," writes Ben Jonson, "one noble speaker, who was full of gravity in his speaking. No man ever spake more neatly, more pressly, more weightily, or suffered less emptiness, less idleness, in what he uttered. No member of his speech but consisted of his own graces. His hearers could not cough, or look aside from him, without loss. He commanded where he spoke; and had his judges angry and pleased at his devotion. No man had their affections more in his power. The fear of every man that heard him was lest he should make an end." Nor does he seem to have been less wonderful as a table-talker. "His meals," says Dr. Rawley, "were refections of the ear as well as of the stomach, . wherein a man might be refreshed in mind and understanding no less than in his body. And I have known men of no mean parts, that have professed to make use of their note-books when they have risen from his table. In which conversation and otherwise he was no crushing man, as some men are, but ever a countenancer of another man's parts. Neither was he one that would appropriate the speech wholly to himself, or delight to outvie others, but leave a liberty to the co-assessors to take their turns. Wherein he would draw a man on and allure him to speak on such a subject as wherein he was peculiarly skilful, and would delight to speak. And for himself he contemned no man's observations, but would light his torch at every man's candle. His opinions and assertions were for the most part binding, and not contradicted by any; rather like oracles than discourses; which may be imputed either to the well-weighing of his sentences by the scales of truth and reason, or else to the reverence and estimation wherein he was commonly had, that no man would contest with him; so that there was no argumentation, or pro and con, as they call it, at his table; or if there chanced to be any, it was carried on with great submission and moderation."

When we look at all that Bacon accomplished, we are not only amazed at the magnitude and variety of his powers, but at his unresting energy and industry. Some one has said that "genius is the capacity for labor"; if so, even on this ground alone the genius of Bacon must be placed in the order of su

preme minds. Behold him as lawyer, legislator, lecturer, courtier, magistrate, adviser, counsellor near the throne, manager of his own concerns, and, latterly, the head of a princely household; beholding all this, the amount of his philosophical and literary achievement is a mystery that utterly confounds us. And that this department of his work was not done hastily or carelessly we have convincing evidence: first, in the finish and completeness of the work itself; secondly, from the knowledge that portions of it had been matured in his mind from the days of his early youth. If such kind of evidence fails to satisfy us, we have the direct testimony of Dr. Rawley, Bacon's friend, chaplain, and earliest biographer. "His book," observes the Doctor, of Instauratio Magna, which in his own account was the chiefest of his works, "was no slight imagination or fancy of his brain, but a settled and concocted notion, the production of many years' labor and travel. I myself have seen at least twelve copies of the Instauration revised year by year, one after another, and every year altered and amended in the frame thereof, till at last it came to that model in which it was committed to the press; as many living creatures do lick their young ones, till they bring them to their strength of limb." "Those abilities," he says again, "which commonly go single in other men, though of prime and observable parts, were all conjoined and met in him. Those are sharpness of wit, memory, judgment, and elocution. For the former three his books do abundantly speak them; which with what sufficiency he wrote them let the world judge; but with what celerity he wrote them I can best testify. But for the fourth, his elocution, I will only set down what I heard Sir Walter Raleigh once speak of him by way of comparison: that the Earl of Salsbury was an excellent speaker, but no good penman; that the Earl of Northampton, Lord Henry Howard, was an excellent penman, but no good speaker; but that Sir Francis Bacon was eminent in both.'

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Another quality in the genius of Bacon we may call Wealth, wealth first as to quantity, secondly as to quality, and thirdly as to faculty.

Quantity, if not in itself alone, is, in connection with other attributes, a usual distinction of high genius. There

hardly ever has been a genius powerfully great that has not also been productively great. Those who do the noblest work do also the most work. So it is in all the arts, as well as in the art of writing. "I looked round my library," writes Scott, in his Introduction to "The Abbot," "and could not but observe that, from the time of Chaucer to that of Byron, the most popular authors had been the most prolific." Even the aristarch Johnson allowed that the quality of readiness and profusion had a merit in itself independent of the intrinsic value of the composition. Talking of Churchill, who had little merit in his prejudiced eyes, he allowed him that of fertility, with some such qualification as this: "A crab-apple can bear but crabs after all; but there is a great difference in favor of that which bears a large quantity of fruit, however indifferent, and that which bears only a few." Scott himself is an instance of astonishing prodigality. The whole of literary history goes to show that the men who write well likewise write much; although the men who write much do not always write well.

Nor is it men alone who have the popular demand and taste in their favor who are thus abundant, but also men whose minds were concerned with the severest sciences and the most abstract speculations. Laplace wrote amply and hugely in the loftiest sphere of Mathematics and its most recondite applications. Of the "Mécanique Céleste" alone a writer observes: "Its bulk is about 2,000 quarto pages, and, owing to the omission of all the steps which a good mathematician may be relied on as able to supply, it would, if expanded to the extent in which Euler would have written the same matter, have probably reached 10,000 pages." Think of 10,000 pages of the most abstruse calculations, and this but one among other such works by the same author! Blaise Pascal wrote extensively on science, on theology, and left behind him a work in which a temporary controversy has become an inimitable classic; yet Pascal died at the early age of thirtynine. The celebrated Thomas Aquinas died in the forty-eighth year of his age, and had written seventeen mighty folios on divinity, morals, and philosophy. Kepler died in the fiftyninth year of his age, and left behind thirty-two separate works

in print, besides four volumes in manuscript. Considering that Bacon was an active and busy man of the world, he takes rank in mere quantity alone with the strong-working giants of the literary universe. And yet his writings were but simply incidental to daily activities, most constant and most exacting.

Quality, however, it is that determines the value of quantity. It would be possible to pile rude logs into a building bigger than St. Peter's. But the building would not on that account be greater than St. Peter's. Nay, make it of marble; even then, unless it has order, grace, and beauty, it is still only a massive heap. Ranges of warehouses may be more extensive than the Vatican. But contain what they may, their extent does not give them the worth of the Vatican. Burn up such warehouses, all that they were and all that they held can be replaced; burn up the Vatican, the world suffers then an irreparable loss of inestimable treasures. diamond might be worth a coal-mine, a single pearl worth whole cargoes of oysters, a nugget of gold worth a quarry of granite; the legion that had Cæsar at its head was worth an army; the frigate that carried Nelson was worth a fleet; and so a small volume may be worth a library. Now Bacon not only wrote many large volumes, but large volumes of the rarest quality. They are packed and filled with mental riches. It is not merely that any subject on which Bacon treats is fully sounded in its depths and thoroughly measured in its outlines, but the treatment is pregnant in every part with life and power. Bacon is prodigal in this force of life and power; every sentence is burdened with it. He has, even among great minds, a striking distinction for the weight and energy which he puts into separate sentences. Thoughtful men, even of the higher order, regard those instances in which their writings or their sayings are pregnant with original and suggestive ideas as happy accidents or angelic visitations. If a thinker has such ideas habitually, he is seldom consecutive, logical, or systematic; usually he is all the contrary. A wonderful excellence in Bacon is, that he unites the spontaneous with the deliberative, the intuition of inspiration with the organism of method. Method was an essential characteristic of Bacon's genius; not method that consists in verbal

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