One of Bacon's longest works is the "Silva Sylvarum,"--a sort of natural history, in which he treats of the various forces and productions of Nature,--the air the sea, the winds, the clouds, plants and animals, fire and water, sounds and discords, colors and smells, heat and cold, disease and health; but which varied subjects he presents to communicate knowledge, with no especial utilitarian end. "The Advancement of Learning" is one of Bacon's most famous productions, but I fail to see in it an objective purpose to enable men to become powerful or rich or comfortable; it is rather an abstract treatise, as dry to most people as legal disquisitions, and with no more reference to rising in the world than "Blackstone's Commentaries" or "Coke upon Littleton." It is a profound dissertation on the excellence of learning; its great divisions treating of history, poetry, and philosophy,--of metaphysical as well as physical philosophy; of the province of understanding, the memory, the will, the reason, and the imagination; and of man in society,--of government, of universal justice, of the fountains of law, of revealed religion. And if we turn from the new method by which he would advance all knowledge, and on which his fame as a philosopher chiefly rests,--that method which has led to discoveries that even Bacon never dreamed of, not thinking of the fruit he was to bestow, but only the way to secure it,--even as a great inventor thinks more of his invention than of the money he himself may reap from it, as a work of creation to benefit the world rather than his own family, and in the work of which his mind revels in a sort of intoxicated delight, like a true poet when he constructs his lines, or a great artist when he paints his picture,--a pure subjective joy, not an anticipated gain;--if we turn from this "method" to most of his other writings, what do we find? Simply the lucubrations of a man of letters, the moral wisdom of the moralist, the historian, the biographer, the essayist. In these writings we discover no more worldliness than in Macaulay when he wrote his "Milton," or Carlyle when he penned his "Burns,"--even less, for Bacon did not write to gain a living, but to please himself and give vent to his burning thoughts. In these he had no worldly aim to reach, except perhaps an imperishable fame. He wrote as Michael Angelo sculptured his Moses; and he wrote not merely amid the cares and duties of a great public office, with other labors which might be called Herculean, but even amid the pains of disease and the infirmities of age,--when rest, to most people, is the greatest boon and solace of their lives.