“Madam,” he says, “you shall with right good-will be made acquainted with anything that concerneth your daughters, if you bear a mind of love and concord: Otherwise you must be content to be a stranger to us. For I may not be so unwise as to suffer you to be an author or occasion of dissension between your daughters and their husbands; having seen so much misery of that kind in yourself.” This looks a little as if the mother-in-law found the “grapes sour” in the Bacon gardens. I do not think there was much domesticity about him, even if home influences had encouraged it: he was without children, and not one to read poetry to his wife in a boudoir; yet his essays concerning marriage and concerning children and concerning friendship and concerning extravagance, are full of piquant truths. Indeed two distinct lines of life ran through the career of this extraordinary man. In one he loved parade, ceremony, glitter; he stooped ungraciously to those who ranked him in factitious distinctions; was profuse and heartless in his adulation; taking great gifts with servile acknowledgment; shunning friends who were falling; courting enemies who were rising: and yet through all this, and looking out from the same keen inscrutable eyes was the soul of a philosopher cognizant of all humanities, searching sharply after the largest and broadest truths; too indifferent to small ones; weighing his own shortcomings with bitter remorse; alive to everything in science that should help the advancement of the world, and absorbed in high ranges of thinking which the animosities and cares and criminalities and accidents of every-day life did not seem to reach or to disturb. In such mood he wrote those essays, of some of which I have spoken--wonderfully compact of thought, and as wonderfully compact of language--which one should read and read again. No private library of a hundred English books is complete without a copy of Bacon’s Essays. The keen sagacity and perdurable sense of his observations always engage one. Thus of Travel, he says,-- “Let him [the Traveller] sequester himself from the company of his countrymen, and diet in such places where there is good company of the nation where he travelleth. He that travelleth into a country before he hath some entrance into the language, goeth to school and not to travel.”