We come back to the mystery of Francis Bacon, the possessor of the most exquisite intellect that was ever bestowed on any of the children of men. As an historian, he gives us a taste of his quality in "Henry VII." In the Essays and the "Novum Organum," sayings which have the effect of axioms are at once striking and self-evident. But he is always desultory. In perceiving analogies between things which have nothing in common he never had an equal, and this characteristic, to quote Macaulay, "occasionally obtained the mastery over all his other faculties and led him into absurdities into which no dull man could have fallen." His memory was so stored with materials, and these so diverse, that in similitude or with comparison he passed from subject to subject. In the "Advancement of Learning" are enumerated the deficiencies which Bacon observed, _nearly the whole of which were supplied during his lifetime_. The "Sylva Sylvarum" is the most extraordinary jumble of facts and observations that has ever been brought together. It is a literary curiosity. The "New Atlantis" and other short works in quantity amount to very little. Bacon's life has hitherto remained unaccounted for. In the foregoing pages an attempt has been made to offer an intelligible explanation of the work to which he devoted his life, namely, to supply the deficiencies which he had himself pointed out and which retarded the advancement of learning. Hallam has said of Bacon: "If we compare what may be found in the sixth, seventh, and eighth books of the 'De Augmentis,' and the various short treatises contained in his works on moral and political wisdom and on human nature, with the rhetoric, ethics, and politics of Aristotle, or with the historians most celebrated for their deep insight into civil society and human character--with Thucydides, Tacitus, Phillipe de Comines, Machiavel, David Hume--we shall, I think, find that one man may almost be compared with all of these together." Pope wrote: "Lord Bacon was the greatest genius that England, or perhaps any other country, ever produced." If an examination, more thorough than has hitherto been made, of the records and literature of his age establishes beyond doubt the truth of the suggestions which have now been put forward, what more can be said? This at any rate, that to him shall be given that title to which he aspired and for which he was willing to renounce his own name. He shall be called "The Benefactor of Mankind." APPENDIX. Sir Thomas Bodley left behind him a short history of his life which is of a fragmentary description. One-fourth of it is devoted to a record of how much he suffered in permitting Essex to urge his advancement in the State. The following is the passage:--