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London Printed by WILLIAM CLOWES and SONS, Stamford Str

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B 1117 .C89.

BACON;

HIS WRITINGS, AND HIS PHILOSOPHY.

INTRODUCTION.

ACON has himself said, that, although some books may read by deputy, and extracts made of them by others, at should be only in the less important arguments and e meaner sort of books; "else," he adds, "distilled oks are like common distilled waters, flashy things." his is in his essay entitled 'Of Studies;' and undoubtly the works of a great writer can only be properly died in their original form.

But abridgements, compendiums, analyses, even of the orks of the greatest writers, may still serve important rposes. If properly executed, even the student of the iginal works may find them of use both as guides and remembrancers. A good compendium should be at ast the best index and synopsis. The more extensive e original book, or books, the more is such a compenDus analysis wanted, not to supersede or be a substite for the original, but to accompany it as an introducon and instrument of ready reference. It is like a ap of a country through which one has travelled, or is out to travel; or rather it is like what is called the keyap prefixed to a voluminous atlas, by which all the her maps are brought together into one view, and their nsultation facilitated.

To the generality of readers, again, a comprehensive rvey in small compass of an extensive and various mass writings is calculated to be more than such a mere connient table of contents or ground-plan. In the same ssay Bacon has said, "Some books are to be tasted,

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others to be swallowed, and some few to be chewed an digested; that is, some books are to be read only parts; others to be read, but not curiously; and so few to be read wholly, and with diligence and attention This must be understood, from the title and whole stra of the essay, to be addressed to students-to the com paratively few a large portion of whose time is occupie with books. If the illustrious author had been treatin of the subject of reading in general, with the "great culty," as he has himself called it, which he possessedi so eminent a degree, of contracting his view as well as dilating and dispersing it, of making his mental eye microscope to discern the parts of whatever he invest gated as well as a telescope to take in the whole, would not have omitted to remark also, that the sa book is often to be read in one way by one man and i another way by another. We cannot have a better ample than his own writings. In their entire form the fill many volumes; they have been collected in three four large folios, in five quartos, in a dozen or me octavos. Let the student of literature or philosophy, say again, by all means read and inwardly digest eve page of them; but it would be the height of pedantry recommend that anything like that should be done by readers. Even if the entire body of Bacon's works co be produced at so small a cost as to be within the re of all readers, the time to peruse them would be wantin Nor, even if such of them as are not in English were be all translated (which they have not yet been), wou they be found to be all, or nearly all, of universal in rest. Another remark that Bacon himself would have failed to make if he had been examining the que tion of reading books in its whole extent, and on all side is, that, with few exceptions, all books lose something their first importance, at least for the world at larg with the lapse of time. Works of science, or positi knowledge, especially, are always to some extent sup seded, at least for their main or primary purpose, byt growth or extension of that very branch of knowled

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