The industry of his biographer, Mr. Spedding, has not wholly redeemed the character of Bacon, whose personality does not endear him to mankind, and was not on a level with his genius. That genius was literary in a very high degree, and was influenced by a desire to benefit humanity through scientific knowledge of the laws of Nature and of human nature. To this task he brought an enthusiasm which reminds us of a man so different from himself as Shelley. In Bacon's belief, man might be and ought to be the master of things; and a reasoned account of all things in nature was the inventory of human possessions. To make this inventory, and to discover a new method of "interrogating nature," putting her to the question and wrenching from her all her precious secrets, was the main object of his scientific meditations. His first important book, however, the "Essaies" (1597), was literary, and no doubt was suggested by the Essays of Montaigne, which were also familiar to Shakespeare. In its original form the book contained but ten brief studies, but Bacon kept improving them and adding to their number. There are thirty-four in the edition of 1612, fifty-eight in that of 1625. It is dedicated to Buckingham, who is informed that he has "planted things that are like to last," an unlucky prediction. "Of all my other works," adds Bacon, "my essays have been most current; for that, as it seems, they come home to men's business and bosoms". The phrase is a proverb,--indeed the essays, as the man said of "Hamlet," are "made up of quotations" of phrases that are now household words. The genius of Bacon, in the essay, and even in his scientific works, "The Advancement of Learning" (1605), and the Latin "Novum Organum" (1620), was not desultory, like Montaigne's, but aphoristic. He coined Maxims or Aphorisms, brief sayings, weighty with wisdom, brilliant with points of wit and fancy, which sometimes remind us of La Rochefoucauld. It is interesting to compare the first drafts of the Essays in 1597 with the finished work in 1625, where they are considerably enlarged, and altered in details. "Of Faction" is increased fourfold, and strengthened by examples from Roman history. Like all the men of his time, Bacon is rich in classical references and anecdotes which, with him, are not tedious and pedantic. When he quotes Homer it is in _Latin_ hexameters, he cites a Roman altered adaptation, "a prophecy, as it seems, of the Roman Empire," which, of course, Homer never predicted; but the Latin form serves Bacon's theory of "prophecies that have been of certain memorys and from hidden causes". This wise man notes that "the King of Spain's surname, they say, is Norway," in order that a folk-prophecy may be fulfilled by the defeat of the Armada. However on the whole he regards fulfilled prophecies, not scriptural, as accidental coincidences. "Men mark when they hit, and never mark when they miss, as they do generally also of dreams."