OR COUNSELS CIVIL AND MORAL OF FRANCIS BACON FIRST PUBLISHED IN 1597, AND AS HE LEFT THEM NEWLY WRITTEN WITH AN INTRODUCTION BY HENRY MORLEY LL.D. PROFESSOR OF ENGLISH LITERATURE AT FIFTH EDITION LONDON GEORGE ROUTLEDGE AND SONS BROADWAY, LUDGATE HILL (GLASGOW AND NEW YORK 1888 KE8531 HARVARD 46 254 MORLEY'S UNIVERSAL LIBRARY. 1. Sheridan's Plays. 3. Marlowe's Faustus and 4. Chronicle of the Cid. 5. Rabelais' Gargantua and the Heroic Deeds of Pantagruel. 6. Machiavelli's Prince. 7. Bacon's Essays. 8. Defoe's Journal of the Plague Year. 9. Locke on Civil Government and Filmer's "Patriarcha." 10. Butler's Analogy of Religion. II. Dryden's Virgil. 12. Scott's Demonology and Witchcraft. 13. Herrick's Hesperides. 14. Coleridge's Table-Talk. 15. Boccaccio's Decameron. 16. Sterne's Tristram Shandy. 17. Chapman's Homer's Iliad. 18. Medieval Tales. 19. Voltaire's Candide, and Johnson's Rasselas. 20. Jonson's Plays and Poems. 21. Hobbes's Leviathan. 22. Samuel Butler's Hudibras. 23. Ideal Commonwealths. 24. Cavendish's Life of Wolsey. 25 & 26. Don Quixote. 27. Burlesque Plays and Poems. 28. Dante's Divine Comedy. LONGFELLOW's Translation. 29. Goldsmith's Vicar of Wakefield, Plays, and Poems. 30. Fables and Proverbs from the Sanskrit. (Hitopadesa.) 31. Lamb's Essays of Elia. 32. The History of Thomas Ellwood. 33. Emerson's Essays, &c. 34. Southey's Life of Nelson. 35. De Quincey's Confessions of an Opium-Eater, &c. 36. Stories of Ireland. By Miss EDGEWORTH. 37. Frere's Aristophanes: Acharnians, Knights, Birds. 38. Burke's Speeches and Letters. 39. Thomas à Kempis. 40. Popular Songs of Ireland. 41. Potter's Eschylus. 42. Goethe's Faust: Part II. ANSTER'S Translation. 43. Famous Pamphlets. 44. Francklin's Sophocles. 45. M. G. Lewis's Tales of Terror and Wonder. 46. Vestiges of the Natural History of Creation. 47. Drayton's Barons' Wars, Nymphidia, &c. 48. Cobbett's Advice to Young Men. "Marvels of clear type and general neatness."-Daily Telegraph. INTRODUCTION. FRANCIS BACON was born three years before Shakespeare, on the 22nd of January, 1561, and died ten years after Shakespeare, on the 9th of April, 1626. Shakespeare's age when he died was 52, and Bacon's 65. The two men were the greatest births of their own time. One glanced "from heaven to earth, from earth to heaven" as a poet. The other taught men tc look abroad into God's world, and by patient experiment to find their way from outward signs to knowledge of the inner working of those laws of Nature which are fixed energies appointed by the wisdom of the Creator as sources of all that we see and use. As the working of each law is discovered, Bacon would have the searcher next look for its applications to the well-being of man. Sir William Cecil, afterwards Lord Burleigh, and Sir Nicholas Bacon, Queen Elizabeth's Lord Keeper, married two daughters of Sir Anthony Cooke. Anne Cooke was the second wife of Sir Nicholas, who had six children by a former marriage. His second wife had two sons, Anthony and Francis. Francis was thus the youngest in a family of eight, living sometimes in London, at York House, and sometimes at Gorhambury, near St. Albans. In April, 1573, Francis Bacon, twelve years old, entered, with his elder brother Anthony, as fellow-commoner, at Trinity College, Cambridge. He left Cambridge after about four years' study there. At Cambridge he felt the fruitlessness of those teachings in philosophy which bade him get clear understanding by beating the bounds of his own brain. This was a philosophy, he used to say, only strong for dispu tations and contentions, but barren of the production of works for the benefit of the life of man. The desire to turn philosophic thought into a more useful course became strong in him even then. He was to be trained for the service of the State, and after leaving Cambridge, at sixteen, went in the suite of an ambassador to Paris. But while he was in France his father died, before he had made the provision he designed for his sons by the second marriage. Bacon then, at the age of eighteen, came to London to prepare for earning by the practice of the law. He became a barrister in June, 1582. He entered the House of Commons in November, 1584, as member for Melcombe Regis in Dorsetshire. He sat for Taunton in the Parliament that met in October, 1586, and was among those who petitioned for the execution of Mary Queen of Scots. He sat next for Liverpool, and in October, 1589, obtained by his Court interest the reversion to the office of Clerk of the Council in the Star Chamber, which was of great money value; but it did not become vacant for him until 1608. He was member for Middlesex in the Parliament that met in 1593, and piqued the Queen by raising constitutional objections to her manner |