19-21.] NOTES. 93 



1. 16. caveats, warnings. Cf. below, 1. 24. walks, lines of 

 life, i.e., relatively to a student, books. 



Solon, a celebrated Athenian legislator, born about 

 638 B.C. 



1. 23. contestation, strife. See Cicero, Ep. ad Fam. 1. 9. 

 Improvements, according to Plato, should be effected by per 

 suasion, not by force : and as he saw that, if he held office, he 

 could not introduce the reforms which he considered necessary 

 without using force, he preferred not to hold office. In the Crito, 

 Socrates is represented as refusing to violate the laws of his 

 country by escaping from the prison to which he had been 

 condemned. 



Caesar's counsellor, See p. 18, 1. 2. 



1. 28. Cato the second, p. 13, 1. 32. No violent revolution 

 should be attempted either in morals or politics. We should 

 attempt to raise the standard of both gradually, as the people 

 advance in respect of education. 



1. 33. Plato's republic, an ideally perfect state sketched by 

 Plato : a Utopia. 



1. 34. excuse and expound, at the same time apologises for 

 them, and shows why they did it. The philosophers, says Cicero, 

 purposely proposed an unattainable standard of perfection, in 

 order that, in their attempts to attain to it, men might not fail to 

 attain to the highest perfection of which they were capable. 



Page 21, 1. 21. those five years, cf. p. 12, 1. 7. 

 L 25. endueth, an old spelling of endoweth. 



1. 26. casualty, uncertainty. We use the word in the sense of 

 ' an accident.' Here it means ' liability to accident.' With this 

 paragraph cf. pp. 13-14, and Essay xxxiii. In the Latin transla 

 tion Bacon says that scrupulous honesty and unselfishness are 

 attributed to learned men ' perhaps not unjustly.' 



1. 28. to esteem, to think. We no longer say ' to esteem that.' 



1.30. ordainment, position : appointment. Cod ordained them 

 for something higher than mere happiness. In illustration of this 

 passage the student may profitably read two fine chapters in 

 Carlyle's Past and Present, bk. iii. ch. 4 and 12. 



1. 31. as kings and the states, etc., i.e., whether they serve 

 under a king or a republic. 



1. 33. I have made profit, etc. Wishing to emphasize the fact 

 that power is a trust, Bacon appropriately uses words taken from 

 the well-known parable of the talents "The kingdom of heaven 

 is as a man travelling into a far country, who called his own 

 servants, and delivered unto them his goods, and unto one he 

 gave five talents, to another two, and to another one ; to every 



