is so great a merit in essays expressing his higher mind, makes the baseness of his thought when it is base, formidable to the last degree. When Bacon is giving bad advice, no man can give worse, or give it in a way more calculated to degrade.

He stands alone among writers of prose essays, but Alexander Pope who resembled him physically and mentally in so many ways, has written essays in verse which are hardly inferior in compactness of expression and in their far-reaching insight into human nature. Pope has the art of turning a phrase so that it sticks in the mind forever. Shakespeare has it also. He is the only writer of English who is superior to Pope in this respect. Bacon does not rank with either of them in it. The strength of his essays lies in the immediate effect they are capable of producing, and in the bent they unconsciously create. The reader who is influenced by Pope, ten years after reading one of his poems will know it to be his by recalling some such lines as the couplet:

"What can ennoble sots or slaves or cowards?
Alas, not all the blood of all the Howards.»

But if he read Bacon and take the trouble to think after him, he will forget the author, the style, the phrase, in the thought which raises and strengthens his own mind through Bacon's power of insight into human nature. To be able to operate thus on the mind of another is to have genius of the highest quality.

Bacon is the highest type of the essayist because his is, in its method, the highest type of intellect. To study his methods of expression is to have opportunity to see how childlike great genius is. It is the mind of the inferior order which complicates a question so that only experts can understand it. The great mind makes it so plain that a child can understand, if he will only take the trouble to try. To understand Bacon- to understand any one else whose mind really belongs to the highest class - it is only necessary to be willing to think as a child does in learning its letters.

A great linguist, a master mechanic in the craft of expression, Bacon has a secret of higher strength than any art can give. He held his intellect ad utilitates humanas, for the service of mankind. While others before him had cultivated philosophy in the hope of becoming superior to humanity, he sought to serve the every-day needs of humanity through philosophy. "Let him that is greatest among you be your servant" is the sentence which inspired his "Novum Organum "- his "new method" of using the intellect. The old philosophy sought to make an exclusive class of spiritual and intellectual aristocrats. Bacon sought to liberate the universal mind of man from its shackling inefficiency.