Among the fragmentary papers belonging to this time which have come down, not the least curious are those which throw light on his manner of working. While he was following out the great ideas which were to be the basis of his philosophy, he was as busy and as painstaking in fashioning the instruments by which they were to be expressed; and in these papers we have the records and specimens of this preparation. He was a great collector of sentences, proverbs, quotations, sayings, illustrations, anecdotes, and he seems to have read sometimes simply to gather phrases and apt words. He jots down at random any good and pointed remark which comes into his thought or his memory; at another time he groups a set of stock quotations with a special drift, bearing on some subject, such as the faults of universities or the habits of lawyers. Nothing is too minute for his notice. He brings together in great profusion mere forms, varied turns of expression, heads and tails of clauses and paragraphs, transitions, connections; he notes down fashions of compliment, of excuse or repartee, even morning and evening salutations; he records neat and convenient opening and concluding sentences, ways of speaking more adapted than others to give a special colour or direction to what the speaker or writer has to say--all that hook-and-eye work which seems so trivial and passes so unnoticed as a matter of course, and which yet is often hard to reach, and which makes all the difference between tameness and liveliness, between clearness and obscurity--all the difference, not merely to the ease and naturalness, but often to the logical force of speech. These collections it was his way to sift and transcribe again and again, adding as well as omitting. From one of these, belonging to 1594 and the following years, the _Promus of Formularies and Elegancies_, Mr. Spedding has given curious extracts; and the whole collection has been recently edited by Mrs. Henry Pott. Thus it was that he prepared himself for what, as we read it, or as his audience heard it, seems the suggestion or recollection of the moment. Bacon was always much more careful of the value or aptness of a thought than of its appearing new and original. Of all great writers he least minds repeating himself, perhaps in the very same words; so that a simile, an illustration, a quotation pleases him, he returns to it--he is never tired of it; it obviously gives him satisfaction to introduce it again and again. These collections of odds and ends illustrate another point in his literary habits. His was a mind keenly sensitive to all analogies and affinities, impatient of a strict and rigid logical groove, but spreading as it were tentacles on all sides in quest of chance prey, and quickened into a whole system of imagination by the electric quiver imparted by a single word, at once the key and symbol of the thinking it had led to. And so he puts down word or phrase, so