FRANCIS BACON. 15 



buttiulinji" upon his house; Avliicli iniuht mend his prospect but did 

 not till his barn." He had it in i)rospcet only for nearly twenty 

 years. His uncle, Lord Burleigh, -who was the Queen's chief 

 adviser, never warmly espoused his suit, either, it appears probable, 

 deeming him a better philosopher than statesman or lawyer, or 

 thinking that his advancement would interfere with the advance- 

 ment of liis son, Loi'd Cecil, who, also, seems so have opposed his 

 cousin fi'om no other motive than jealousy. 



James the First was known to be learned, and, on his accession 

 in 1603, Bacon sees a chance of obtaining royal patronage for his 

 long-cherished schemes for promoting the advancement of the arts 

 and sciences. He hurriedly completes a work ' On the Advance- 

 ment of LeaiTiing,' dedicates it to the King, and presents a copy of 

 it in MS. to him. In this work he first brings forward testimony 

 to the excellence of learning, and shows how it has been discredited ; 

 and then narrates what has been done for its advancement and 

 where it is defective. He classifies learning, first human and then 

 divine, on the basis of the three faculties, memory, imagination, 

 and reason, and carries ont the ramification to arts which did not 

 then exist. The literary merits of this work are not less than the 

 scientific. Dr. Abbot says that "it will always be important for 

 its literary value as well as for its suggestiveness and stimulating 

 effect upon every seeker after truth." Dean Church considers it 

 to be " the first great book in English prose of secular interest," 

 "It is," he says, "a book which we can never open without coming 

 on some noble intei'pretation of the realities of nature or the mind ; 

 some unexpected discovery of that quick and keen eye which 

 arrests us by its truth ; some felicitous and unthought-of illustra- 

 tion ; some bright touch of his incorrigible imaginativeness, ever 

 ready to force itself in amid the driest details of his argument." 

 Of its scientific value perhaps no higher testimony can be given 

 than the fact that the editors of the French ' Encyclopedic ' made 

 it the basis of that great national work. " If we emerge from this 

 vast operation," wrote Diderot in the Prospectus, "we shall owe 

 it mainly to the chancellor Bacon, who sketched the plan of an 

 universal dictionary of sciences and arts at a time when there were 

 not, so to speak, either arts or sciences. This extraordinary genius, 

 when it was impossible to write a history of what men already 

 knew, wrote one of that which they had to learn." 



Fault has been found with the classification of knowledge pro- 

 posed by Bacon, but it should be borne in mind that this was the 

 fii'st attempt of the kind ever made. No scheme of classification, 

 moreover, which has ever been proposed, and probably no scheme 



