Of Friendship:--“This communicating of a man’s self to his friend, works two contrary efforts; for it redoubleth joys and cutteth griefs in halves.” Again, of the advantages of talk with a friend:--“Certain it is, that whosoever hath his mind fraught with many thoughts, his wits and understanding do clarify and break up, in the communicating and discoursing with another; he tosseth his thoughts more easily; he marshalleth them more orderly; he seeth how they look when they are turned into words; finally, he waxeth wiser than himself: and that more by an hours discourse than by a days meditation.” Thus I could go on for page after page of citations which you would approve, and which are so put in words that no mending or shortening or deepening of their force seems anyway possible. And yet this book of Essays--with all its sagacities, its ringing terseness, its stanch worldly wisdom--is one we do not warm toward. Even when he talks of friendship or marriage, death or love, a cold line of self-seeking pervades it. Of sacrifice for love’s sake, for friendship’s sake, or for charity’s sake, there is nothing; and in that Essay on “Parents and Children”--what iciness of reflection--of suggestion! A man might talk as Bacon talks there, of the entries in a “Herd-book.” As for the _Novum Organum_ and the _Augmentis Scientiarum_--you would not read them if I were to suggest it: indeed, there is no need for reading them, except as a literary _excursus_, seeing that they have wrought their work in breaking up old, slow modes of massing knowledge, and in pouring light upon new ways;--in serving, indeed, so far as their reach went, as a great logical lever, by which subsequent inquirers have prised up a thousand hidden knowledges and ways of knowledge to the comprehension and cognizance of the world. And the two lines of life in Francis Bacon were joined by a strange hyphen at last: He got out of his coach (which was not paid for), and in his silk stockings walked through the snow, to prosecute some scientific post-mortem experiment upon the body of a chicken he had secured by the roadside, near to London. He caught cold--as lesser men would have done; and he died of it. This date of his death (1626) brings us beyond Elizabeth’s time--beyond James’ time, too, and far down to the early years of Charles I. He was born, as I said, three years before Shakespeare, three years after Elizabeth came to the throne; and the _Novum Organum_ was published in the same year in which the Pilgrims landed at Plymouth Rock--a convenient peg on which to hang the date of two great events.