submission is wise, and is an honour to them. But it is a device of the Evil One to lead us into sin, to make us venerate impostors as if they were wise.

1. 19. have a superiority in the faith and conscience, control men's beliefs, and determine their ideas of right and wrong.

1. 20. great, qualifies ‘pleasure,' in l. 17.

1. 23. revelation, the name of the last book of the Christian Scriptures.

1. 30. as, that. Learning is not so liberal to states, that it has nothing left for individuals.

Page 65, 1. 1. descent, hereditary right. carried away, obtained. The traditional authority of the Brahman caste is a good illustration of Bacon's remark.

1. 6. so exceed... as much as, i.e., exceed as much as. The superiority of a victory to a dinner is the measure of the superiority of the pleasures of the affections to those of sense.

1. 8. of consequence, consequently. The pleasures of the intellect are as far above those of the affections as the latter are above those of sense.

1. 10. By the affections are meant the emotions and desires distinct from the bodily appetites.

1. 11. after they be used, when we have experienced them for some time. verdure, freshness.

1. 12. deceits of pleasure, unreal pleasures.

1. 15. ambitious princes, etc., Alexander sighed for new worlds to conquer and Charles V. resigned the crown of Spain to his son and retired into a monastery. Cf. Essay xix.: "We see also that kings that have been fortunate conquerors in their first years, it being not possible for them to go forward infinitely, but that they must have some check or arrest in their fortunes, turn in their latter years to be superstitious and melancholy, as did Alexander the Great, Dioclesian, and, in our memory, Charles the Fifth : and others. For he that is used to go forward, and findeth a stop, falleth out of his own favour, and is not the thing he was."

1. 16. satisfaction, full enjoyment. They never pall: however much we have of knowledge, we still wish for more.

1. 21. Lucretius, a Roman poet, born about B.C. 95. He wrote a poem 'On the Nature of Things,' expounding and defending the atomistic philosophy. The same idea is expressed in the Mahabharata :—

Cf. Essay i.

"As men who climb a hill behold

The plain beneath them all unrolled,
And thence with searching eye survey

The crowds that pass along the way,
So those on wisdom's mount who stand
A lofty vantage ground command.
They thence can scan the world below
Immersed in error, sin, and woe:
Can mark how mortals vainly grieve,
The true reject, the false receive,
The good forsake, the bad embrace,
The substance flee, the shadows chase.
But none who have not gained that height
Can good and ill discern aright."

Page 66, 1. 1. to this tendeth, this is the object of.
1. 2. generation, the begetting of children.

1. 4. celebration, we should now say celebrity.

1. 6. the monuments of wit, etc., cf. the boast of the Latin poet Horace "I have raised a monument more lasting than brass, and loftier than the kingly structure of the pyramidsone which neither piercing rain, nor raging wind, nor lapse of time can destroy."

1. 9. without the loss, Bacon wrote before the days of Homeric criticism.

1. 10. have been decayed, we should now say have decayed. 1. 16. the wrong, the injury.

1. 18. still, p. 36. 1. 6. With this passage cf. Milton's Areopagitica, pp. 5-6 (Ed. Clarendon Press), "Books are not absolutely dead things, but do contain a potencie of life in them to be as active as that soule was whose progeny they are: nay, they do preserve as in a violl the purest efficacie and extraction of that living intellect that bred them."

1. 22. consociateth, joins.

1. 28. most immersed in the senses, i.e., materialistic: explaining the functions of the mind by the activity of the senses, and denying the existence of any divine or immortal part in man.

1. 30. came to this point that, confessed so much that. The Latin translation has-'were compelled by force of truth to allow that.' Bacon is referring here to the doctrine of Aristotle and his followers. Plato had taught the immortality of the individual soul. This Aristotle denied. All the lower functions of the soul, he said, are destroyed by death; but the highest function of the soul, viz., the creative intellect, is indestructible. Therefore though after death the individual ceases to exist, yet the creative intellect is not destroyed, but is resumed into the universal mind.

1. 33. affections, see on p. 65, 1. 10.

Page 67, 1. 2. do disclaim in, do renounce. These imperfect suggestions of Aristotle, says Bacon, are nothing to the Christian, for he knows that after death body as well as soul shall be purified, and enjoy immortality: still I have mentioned them, because they are a human testimony to the dignity of knowledge. 1. 4. probation, proof. We use the word now in the sense of 'trial.'

1. 10. Esop's cock, see Phaedrus, iii. 12. Bacon alludes to the fable again in Essay xiii.

1. 13. judged for plenty, decided in favour of plenty. Midas was a king of Phrygia, and it is said that, as a punishment for the judgment referred to in the text, Apollo turned his ears into those of an ass.

Paris, Juno the Goddess of Power, Minerva the Goddess of Wisdom, and Venus the Goddess of Love and Beauty, all claimed the golden apple inscribed for the fairest,' which Discord threw into heaven. Paris, a Trojan shepherd, was made umpire, and gave the prize to Venus. See Tennyson's Enone.

1. 14. Agrippina, mother of the Emperor. Many years before Agrippina had anticipated this end for herself, and had spurned the thought. For when she consulted the astrologers about Nero, they replied that he would be Emperor and kill his mother. "Let him kill her," she said, "provided he is Emperor,' Tacitus, Annals xiv. 9. To please his mistress, the Emperor Nero caused his mother Agrippina to be murdered in the year 59 A.D.

1. 17. Ulysses, the most crafty Greek who joined the expedition against Troy, in the course of his wanderings fell into the hands of the enchantress Calypso, who promised him immortality, if he would stay with her. He preferred to return to his wife Penelope.

1. 24. Wisdom is justified, etc., i.e., that nothing is better than wisdom is shown by the superiority of those who possess wisdom. This is one of the sayings of Jesus-Matthew xi. 19.

K

INDEX TO THE NOTES.

The references are to the pages of this volume.