424 PREFACE. 



eration which induced him in 1609 to bring out his 

 little book De Sapientid Veterum ; where, fancying 

 that some of the cardinal principles of his own phi 

 losophy lay hid in the oldest Greek fables, he took 

 advantage of the circumstance to bring them forward 

 under the sanction of that ancient prescription, and 

 so made those fables serve partly as pioneers to pre 

 pare his way, and partly as auxiliaries to enforce his 

 authority. 



Altogether, the result of my endeavours to arrange 

 and understand these experimental essays and discarded 

 beginnings, is a conviction that Bacon was not more 

 profoundly convinced that he was right, than uneasily 

 apprehensive that his contemporaries would never think 

 him so ; and that for the first fifty years of his life his 

 chief anxiety was, not so much to bring his work into 

 the most perfect shape according to his own concep 

 tion, as to bring it before the world in a manner which 

 should insure patient and attentive listeners, and in 

 volve least risk of miscarriage, the carrying of the 

 world with him being in such an enterprise a condition 

 essential to success. And this I have thought the more 

 worth pointing out, because the course of proceeding 

 which he ultimately resolved on tends to hide it from 

 us. For his final resolution was, as we know, to 

 discard all fictions and disguises, and utter his own 

 thoughts in his own person after the manner which 

 was most natural to him. But we are to remember 

 that before he came to that determination, or at least 

 before he put it in execution, the case was materially 

 altered and the principal cause of embarrassment re 

 moved. For besides that he had then been four years 

 Lord Chancellor, the great reputation which he had 



