66 Bacon 



exercises, and other customs appertaining unto learning, 

 anciently begun, and since continued, be well instituted or 

 no ; and thereupon to ground an amendment or reformation 

 in that which shall be found inconvenient. For it is one 

 of your majesty s own most wise and princely maxims, 

 That in all usages and precedents, the times be considered 

 wherein they first began ; which, if they were weak or ignorant, 

 it derogateth from the authority of the usage, and leaveth it for 

 suspect. And therefore inasmuch as most of the usages 

 and orders of the universities were derived from more 

 obscure times, it is the more requisite they be re-examined. 

 In this kind I will give an instance or two, for example sake, 

 of things that are the most obvious and familiar. The one 

 is a matter, which though it be ancient and general, yet I 

 hold to be an error; which is, that scholars in universities 

 come too soon and too unripe to logic and rhetoric arts 

 fitter for graduates than children and novices: for these 

 two, rightly taken, are the gravest of sciences, being the 

 arts of arts; the one for judgment, the other for ornament : 

 and they be the rules and directions how to set forth and 

 dispose matter; and therefore for minds empty and un- 

 fraught with matter, and which have not gathered that 

 which Cicero calleth Sylva and Supellex, 1 stuff and variety, 

 to begin with those arts (as if one should learn to weigh, 

 or to measure, or to paint the wind), doth work but this 

 effect, that the wisdom of those arts, which is great and 

 universal, is almost made contemptible, and is degenerate 

 into childish sophistry and ridiculous affectation. And 

 further, the untimely learning of them hath drawn on, by 

 consequence, the superficial and unprofitable teaching and 

 writing of them, as fitteth indeed to the capacity of children. 

 Another is a lack I find in the exercises used in the Univer 

 sities, which do make too great a divorce between invention 

 and memory ; for their speeches are either premeditate, In 

 verbis conceptis, where nothing is left to invention, or merely 

 extemporal, where little is left to memory: whereas in life 

 and action there is least use of either of these, but rather 

 of intermixtures of premeditation and invention, notes 

 and memory; so as the exercise fitteth not the practice, 

 nor the image the life ; and it is ever a true rule in exercises, 

 that they be framed as near as may be to the life of practice ; 

 1 Sylva, cle Orat. iii. 26 (103). Supellex, Orat. 24 (80). 



