NOTICE OF FRANCIS BACON.

ingenuous, sportive. Bacon’s “Essays or Counsels, civil and moral,” “the fragments of his conceits,” as he styles them, are all study, art, and gravity; but the reflections in them are true and profound. Montaigne confessedly painted himself, declared that he was the matter of his own book,³⁴ while with Bacon the man was merged in the author and the philosopher, who propounded like Seneca, and somewhat in Seneca’s style, the maxims of practical wisdom, that, to use Bacon’s own language, “come home to men’s business and bosoms,” and clothed them in a garb, new, elegant, and rich, hitherto unknown in England. But our author, if we may judge by the matter and even manner of his Essays, may have had in view, not so much Montaigne’s Essais as Seneca’s Letters to Lucilius. The Essay of Death is obviously founded on Seneca’s Epistles on this subject. That he was well acquainted with Seneca’s Letters, is incontrovertible. He alludes to them thus in the dedication to Prince Henry, in 1612: “The word (Essays),” says he, “is late, but the thing is ancient; for Seneca’s Epistles to Lucilius, if you mark them well, are but Essays, that is, dispersed meditations, though conveyed in the form of epistles.” Bacon justly foretold of his Essays that they “would live as long as books last.”