FRANCIS BACON (1561-1626) N BACON'S "Essays Civil and Moral" an intellect of the highest order expresses itself with an art so subtle that it does not seem to be art at all. Literary form is lost sight of and the thought engrosses attention to the exclusion even of admiration for the greatness of the mind which conceived it. Admiration is excited only in the presence of what seems higher than our own level. It is the peculiarity and the touchstone of all great art, that admiration for it comes only as an afterthought. Its first office is that of sympathy. It expresses what is strongest and truest in us as if it were wholly our right to have it expressed. We feel no sense of obligation to it, but rather of comradeship with it, as if, by some process too simple and natural to be even surprising, we had regained consciousness of a higher life in us than we had suspected, -of a life which belongs to our common lives as much as it does to the highest genius of earth or to the healthiest and most natural souls in whatever state of natural healthiness of soul is to constitute hereafter our heaven. When from this high future that is to be ours, some great soul comes to us as Bacon does, it is always in the simplicity of good neighborliness. He goes in and out among us, speaking our every-day language and ministering to our every-day needs, and we do not feel his superiority until he has gone. Then we look among ourselves and back through the ages of civilization to find his equal, learning thus for the first time to admire him as we had not thought to do before. To read twenty lines into one of the most commonplace of his essays is to come into the presence of one of the most potent forces of the world-an intellect of childlike directness of expression and an almost superhuman strength of conception. No one who has written since his day has done anything that will compare in force, in comprehensiveness, in terse compactness of expression, with any one of a score of his short essays. In these respects they call for reverence, and where they express the lower part of his nature, the cunning of the courtier, the lack of scruple of the weak and timeserving politician, loving virtue in theory, but not brave enough in practice to make a stand for it, then the strength of intellect, which |