same hand," writes Dawson, "which dispensed the bread of eternal life held in jealous custody the pearl of earthly wisdom; within the same walls the priest practiced the mysteries of his religion and inculcated the rudiments of literature; and to these centers of ‘light and leading,' the whole studious youth of Europe flocked." The poor scholar, of necessity begging his way from city to city that he might save himself from being treated as a criminal, like the ordinary beggar, had to carry with him a letter given by the chancellor of a university. In those days, when severe feudal laws had little patience indeed with freedom of occupation or of movement, no provision for education was made. Thus, learning was to be attained only in schools, where the teacher, not the textbook, was the authority, and where the young were taught by spoken essays still sermonic in character. So trained, the scholar produced the learned, or classic, essay, the parish priest made his sermon into the attractive short-story essay, and the traveling friar indulged the satiric essay. Then came the printing press to change the songs of bards into written narrative in prose or in verse, to make possible the publication of plays, and to turn the oral essay into the written essay. Time was indeed full ripe for the publication of Bacon's little book of essays. It remains to be recalled that in 1308 Wycliffe translated the Bible into English, and that in 1670 the King James version gave us the most beautiful English in the world, unfaithful though it be as translation. As the most sublime poetry ever written is the Hebrew poetry of the Bible, the translators had to dignify and beautify the English

language to make it a fit vehicle for translation. 'The importance of this translation to the aphoristic essay, which is modeled on the Book of Wisdom and the Book of Proverbs, is obvious.

DEFINITION

The wisest man of all times tells us in his proverbs that words of wisdom spoken in due time are "like apples of gold on beds of silver," and that the minds of those who gather these apples shall be storehouses "filled with all precious and most beautiful wealth!" The wisest of all Englishmen has prepared for us in his essays these apples of gold, and it is our privilege to gather them at leisure into our mental storehouses. Aphoristic apples of gold are wise observations characterized by terse, extremely compact expression; and their bed of silver is their common and magnificent subject matter, which gives them the charm of unity in disunity. Containing but little of the subjective or personal element, the aphoristic essay seems somewhat akin to the meditations of Marcus Aurelius. Bacon gives us the tone of this form in the Dedicatory Epistle to the 1612 edition of his collection: "To write just treatises, requireth leisure in the writer, and leisure in the reader, and therefore are not so fit, neither in regard of your highness's princely affairs, nor in regard of my continual service; which is the cause that hath made me choose to write certain brief notes, set down rather significantly than curiously, which I have called Essays. The word is late, but the thing is ancient; for Seneca's Epistles to Lucilius, if you mark them well, are but

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essays, that is, dispersed meditations, though conveyed in the form of epistles." Evidently Bacon kept to the French idea of the essay, a tentative and incomplete production which was to be but the receptacle, the bed of silver, whereon to lay his apples of gold-his detached thoughts, or "dispersed meditations." Yet it is the essay that has made us know the man, for, as he said, it comes "most home to men's business and bosoms." The essays of Bacon are particularly noteworthy because, in addition to having been translated into numerous languages, they have furnished more quotations than any other prose writing in the English language. If when we come to read them we find ourselves inclined to grumble a bit because the paragraphs lack the composition and harmonious progression of thought which we have been taught to consider essential to good writing, let us remember that we are away back in the sixteenth century, when English prose, in its formative stage and still wearing the shackles of several dialects, can in its most literary aspects be but an uncouth and ungainly thing. We must remember that our study of the literary essay in English means necessarily a study of its development, and we must expect to meet with varying standards of literary taste and varying degrees of literary excellence in the several types of

essay.

FRANCIS BACON, BARON VERULAM (1561-1626)

Bacon was born into prominence in London as the son of the lord-keeper of the privy seal. After passing his early years in the court, where he won the attention of

the redoubtable queen, he went, at twelve years of age, to Cambridge, but at fourteen left the school in deep disgust with the whole plan of education. To us moderns, who still study Aristotle's logic, the youngster's wrath against the worthy Greek gentleman whose teaching "produced no fruit, but only a jungle of dry and useless branches" is laughably futile. After his return from travel in France, Bacon applied to his uncle, Lord Burleigh, for some lucrative position at the court, but this stern relative, hoping to make his nephew more practical, meted out to the youth opposition rather than aid. The ruse of the uncle succeeded beyond expectation and soon Bacon was a lawyer so admired as to elicit from Ben Jonson the comment that "the fear of every man that heard him speak was, lest he should make an end." He presently attained to greater fame by the publication of his Essays. Later, after becoming one of the queen's Learned Counsel, he won just opprobrium by conducting the prosecution of his friend and benefactor, the Earl of Essex, for certain offenses which in their very commission had been known to be of assistance to Bacon's own ends. Under James I Lord Bacon was honored successively with the titles of Lord Chancellor, of Baron Verulam, and, finally, of Viscount St. Albans, which was his proudest boast. Two years later the great Novum Organum was published, to place him among literary immortals, but, sadly enough, also to herald his downfall. The rising and hostile democratic spirit in England chose this spoiled son of royalty as its first target. Bacon was convicted of bribery before adverse judges, and though his heavy sentence was soon

remitted his political career was ended. The essay "Of Great Place" is the bitter philosophical fruit of this period of his life. His remaining years he devoted to literary and scientific work.

Bacon is the first and in mental power the greatest of English essayists, who "took all knowledge for his province," whose mind was a veritable encyclopedia, and who could talk on any subject. Though careless of material wealth he was thrifty and tireless of thought. Macaulay tells us that the best collection of jests in the world-being Bacon's they are deeper than jests—was dictated by him when he was too ill for serious work. There are many phases of Bacon's greatness, but we are concerned with him only as an essayist. Of his Essays he said, "I am not ignorant that those kind of writings would with less pains and embracement (perhaps) yield more lustre and reputation to my name than those other which I have in hand," and so pleased with them was he that he increased their number from the original ten essays of 1597 to the fifty-eight of 1625. Their popularity is shown not only by the fact that they were soon translated into Latin, French, and Italian, but also by their enduring fame. Strangely enough it was the Latin version which Bacon, the first great master of English prose, predicted "would last as long as books last."

There seem to be two styles in the essays of Bacon, in consequence probably of a change in the author's conception of the function and possibilities of this form of literature. The earlier essays, in which the sentences are all short and packed with thought, show a dearth of