The matters of interest in the volume before us are by no means exhausted, but we can proceed no farther in the examination of them, and must refer those readers who desire to know more of its contents to the volume itself. We can assure them that they will find it full of vivid illustrations of the character of Bacon's time,--of the thoughts of men at an epoch of which less is commonly known than of periods more distant, but less connected by intellectual sympathy and moral relations with our own. But the chief interest of Bacon's works lies in their exhibition to us of himself, a man foremost in his own time in all knowledge, endowed by Nature with a genius of peculiar force and clearness of intuition, with a resolute energy that yielded to no obstacles, with a combination so remarkable of the speculative and the practical intellect as to place him in the ranks of the chief philosophers to whom the progress of the world in learning and in thought is due. They show him exposed to the trials which the men who are in advance of their contemporaries are in every age called to meet, and bearing these trials with a noble confidence in the final prevalence of the truth,--using all his powers for the advantage of the world, and regarding all science and learning of value only as they led to acquaintance with the wisdom of God and the establishment of Christian virtue. He himself gives us a picture of a scholar of his times, which we may receive as a not unworthy portrait of himself. "He does not care for discourses and disputes of words, but he pursues the works of wisdom, and in them he finds rest. And what others dim-sighted strive to see, like bats in twilight, he beholds in its full splendor, because he is the master of experiments; and thus he knows natural things, and the truths of medicine and alchemy, and the things of heaven as well as those below. Nay, he is ashamed, if any common man, or old wife, or soldier, or rustic in the country knows anything of which he is ignorant. Wherefore he has searched out all the effects of the fusing of metals, and whatever is effected with gold and silver and other metals and all minerals; and whatever pertains to warfare and arms and the chase he knows; and he has examined all that pertains to agriculture, and the measuring of lands, and the labors of husbandmen; and he has even considered the practices and the fortune-telling of old women, and their songs, and all sorts of magic arts, and also the tricks and devices of jugglers; so that nothing which ought to be known may lie hid from him, and that he may as far as possible know how to reject all that is false and magical. And he, as he is above price, so does he not value himself at his worth. For, if he wished to dwell with kings and princes, easily could he find those who would honor and enrich him; or, if he would display at Paris what he knows through the works of wisdom, the whole world would follow him. But, because in either of these ways he