Concerning the extreme Reformers, Bacon says "there is a superstition in avoiding superstition, when men think to do best if they go furthest from the superstition formerly received," as in the Scottish Presbyterian burial of the Christian dead with no religious service, one of Knox's innovations. In his Essay on "Wisdom for a Man's Self," Bacon speaks, wittingly or unwittingly, of his own mischance: "Whereas they have all their times sacrificed to themselves, they become in the end themselves sacrifices to the inconstancy of fortune". A word of Bacon's is always apt. "Let no nation expect to be great that is not awake upon any just cause of arming." Of colonization, "it is a shameful and unblessed thing to take the scum of the people and wicked condemned men, to be the people with whom you plant". "If you plant where savages are... use them justly and graciously." Always the counsel is excellent, always the adviser is unheard! Bacon even advises on the stage management of Masques. On Gardening he writes at much length and with manifest pleasure. His advice to keep caged birds in "little turrets with a belly"--is not that of a poetical imagination. He did not like the _Ars Topiaria_, "images cut out in juniper" or box. His garden contained "a heath of a natural wildness," with many artificial additions. Bacon's _Promus of Elegancies_ is a commonplace book, full of germs of essays, _pensées._ The essays themselves are strings of connected aphorisms, without much consecutiveness of style or skilled transitions. "Aphorisms," says Bacon himself, "except they should be ridiculous, cannot be made but of the pith and heart of Sciences." His Aphorisms certainly were more popular, as he knew, than his connected work of 1605, "The Advancement of Learning, Divine and Humane".