in Elizabethan times or in any other, a happier combination of solid good sense with eager poetic sentiment, of sound scholarship with wide-glancing intelligence, than in this little tractate of some thirty or forty ordinary pages, which dispelled the delusions of two generations, and made the poetical fortune of England sure. ----- Footnote 262: Chalmers’s _Poets_, iii. 551-560; Grosart’s _Works of Samuel Daniel_, iv. 29-67. ----- The contributions of “large-browed Verulam” to criticism have sometimes been spoken of with reverence: and it is not uncommon to find, amid the scanty classics of the subject, which until recently have been recommended to the notice of inquirers, not merely a place, but a place of very high honour, assigned to _The Advancement of Learning_. [Sidenote: _Bacon._] Actual, unprejudiced, and to some extent expert, reference to the works, however, will not find very much to justify this estimate: and, indeed, a little thought, assisted by very moderate knowledge, would suffice to make it rather surprising that Bacon should give us so much, than disappointing that he should give us little or nothing. A producer of literature who at his best has few superiors, and a user of it for purposes of quotation, who would deserve the name of genius for this use alone if he had no other title thereto—Bacon was yet by no means inclined by his main interests and objects, or by his temperament, either towards great exaltation of letters, or towards accurate and painstaking examination of them. Indeed, it is in him—almost first of all men, certainly first of all great modern men—that we find that partisan opposition between literature and science which has constantly developed since. It is true that his favourite method of examination into “forms” might seem tempting as applied to literature; and that it would, incidentally if not directly, have yielded more solid results than his Will-o'-the-wisp chase of the Form of Heat. But this very craze of his may suggest that if he had undertaken literary criticism it would have been on the old road of Kinds and Figures and Qualities, in which we could expect little but glowing rhetorical generalisation from him. Nor is the nature of such small critical matter as we actually have from him very different. [Sidenote: _The_ Essays.] The Essays practically give us nothing but the contents of that _Of Studies_, a piece too well known to need quotation; too much in the early pregnant style of the author to bear compression or analysis; and too general to repay it. For the critic and the man of letters generally it is, in its own phrase, to be not merely tasted, nor even swallowed, but chewed and digested; yet its teachings have nothing more to do with the critical function of “study” than with all others.