_Guild_. To think, my lord, if you delight not in _man_, what lenten entertainment THE PLAYERS shall receive from you. We coted them on the way, and thither are they coming to offer you--SERVICE. BOOK I. THE ELIZABETHAN ART OF DELIVERY AND TRADITION. PART I. MICHAEL DE MONTAIGNE'S 'PRIVATE AND RETIRED ARTS.' And thus do we of wisdom and of reach, With windlaces and with _assays_ of _bias_, By _indirections_, find _directions out_; So by my former lecture and advice, Shall you, my son.--_Hamlet_. CHAPTER I. ASCENT FROM PARTICULARS TO THE 'HIGHEST PARTS OF SCIENCES,' BY THE ENIGMATIC METHOD ILLUSTRATED. Single, _I'll_ resolve you.--_Tempest_. Observe his inclination in yourself.--_Hamlet_. For ciphers, they are commonly in letters, but may be in words. _Advancement of Learning_. The fact that a Science of Practice, not limited to Physics and the Arts based on the knowledge of physical laws, but covering the whole ground of the human activity, and limited only by the want and faculty of man, required, in the reigns of Elizabeth and James the First, some special and profoundly artistic methods of 'delivery and tradition,' would not appear to need much demonstration to one acquainted with the peculiar features of that particular crisis in the history of the English nation. And certainly any one at all informed in regard to the condition of the world at the time in which this science,--which is the new practical science of the modern ages,--makes its first appearance in history,--any one who knows what kind of a public opinion, what amount of intelligence in the common mind the very fact of the first appearance of such a science on the stage of the human affairs presupposes,--any one who will stop to consider what kind of a public it was to which such a science had need as yet to address itself, when that engine for the diffusion of knowledge, which has been battering the ignorance and stupidity of the masses of men ever since, was as yet a novel invention, when all the learning of the world was still the learning of the cell and the cloister, when the practice of the world was still in all departments, unscientific,--any one at least who will stop to consider the nature of the 'preconceptions' which a science that is none other than the universal science of practice, must needs encounter in its principal and nobler fields, will hardly need to be told that if produced at all under such conditions, it must needs be produced covertly. Who does not know, beforehand, that such a science would have to concede virtually, for a time, the whole ground of its nobler fields to the preoccupations it found on them, as the inevitable condition of its entrance upon the stage of the human affairs in any capacity, as the basis of any toleration of its claim to dictate to the men of practice in any department of their proceedings.