72 16.

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.

Celebration. Celebrity.

72 22. Infinite. Innumerable.

72 31.

Wrong. Injury.

They generate. Cf. Milton's Areopagitica: 'Books are not absolutely dead things, but do contain a potency of life in them to be as active as that soul was whose progeny they are; nay, they do preserve as in a vial the purest efficacy and extraction of that living intellect that bred them.' Still. Ever.

73 6. Some of the philosophers. 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' (Selby).

73 12. Affection. Wright thinks the true reading is probably affections; cf. 1. 15.

73 17.

73 19.

73 20.

Disclaim in. Abjure.

Probation. Proof.

In the beginning. Cf. 44 8 ff., 51 14 ff.

73 26. Æsop's cock. Phædrus 3. 12. Bacon adduces it again in Essay 13, and in The True Greatness of Britain. Wright compares Commines, Bk. 5, chap. 2.

73 27. Midas. Ovid, Met. 11. 153 ff.

73 30. Paris. Cf. Euripides, Trojan Women 924 ff., and see Tennyson's Oenone.

73 31. Agrippina. The mother of Nero, Agrippina II, is meant. Tacitus, Annals 14. 9: Occidat dum imperet. On this awful sentence De Quincey remarks (Cæsars, Chap. 5): 'There is a remarkable story told of Agrippina, that, upon some occasions, when a wizard announced to her, as truths which he had read in the heavens, the two fatal necessities impending over her son,—one that he should ascend to empire, the other that he should murder herself, she replied in these stern and memorable words - Occidat dum imperet. Upon which a continental writer comments thus: "Never before or since have three such words issued from the lips of woman"; and in truth, one knows not which most to abominate or admire the aspiring princess or the loving mother. Meantime, in these few words lies naked to the day, in its whole hideous deformity, the very essence of Romanism and the imperatorial power, and one might here consider the mother of Nero as the impersonation of that monstrous condition.'

73 33. Ulysses. Homer, Od. 5. 218; Plutarch, Gryll. 1; Cicero, De Oratore 1. 44. Cf. Essay 8.

74 6. Wisdom is justified of her children. Matt. 11. 19.

Agrippa (Herod Agrippa II) 56 28. Cæsars 17 12.

Augustus Cæsar 2 23, 57 22, 70 6, Darius 59 18, 62 15.

143

Demosthenes 16 10, 21 24, 23 3, 29 22. | Julius Cæsar 3 19, 11 19, 199, 227,

Diogenes 26 24, 60 4 ff.

Diomedes 60 27.

59 2 ff., 62 25, 63 4, 64 20 ff., 65 4 ff.,

71 4, 72 25.

Dionysius (of Syracuse) 26 30 ff., Junia 20 10.

57 3 ff.
Martial 57 2.

Falinus (properly Phalinus) 66 7 ff. Marcus Aurelius (Antoninus) 3 21,

Faustina 26 11.

Gilbert 41 3.

Mercury 52 7.

Homer 54 19, 59 16 ff., 60 26, 71 3, Parmenio 61 31, 62 16 ff.

Paul 5 14, 7 23, 31 4, 49 18, 56 29.

Phalinus, see Falinus.

Pharnabazus 21 10.

72 20.

Ixion 14 31.

Socrates 11 4, 17 17 ff., 25 23, 41 31, Virgil 10 30,