DR. RAWLEY'S LIFE OF BACON. 11 



sufficiency he wrote, let the world judge ; but with what 

 celerity he wrote them, I can best testify. But for the fourth, 

 his elocution, I will only set down what I heard Sir Walter 

 Raleigh once speak of him by way of comparison (whose 

 judgment may well be trusted), That the Earl of Salisbury 

 was an excellent speaker, but no good penman ; that the Earl of 

 Northampton (the Lord Henry Howard) wax an excellent penman, 

 but no good speaker ; but that Sir Francis Bacon was eminent 

 in both. 



I have been induced to think, that if there were a beam of 

 knowledge derived from God upon any man in these modern 

 times, it was upon him. For though he was a great reader of 

 books, yet he had not his knowledge from books *, but from 

 some grounds and notions from within himself; which, notwith- 

 standing, he vented with great caution and circumspection. His 

 book of Instauratio Magna 2 (which in his own account was the 

 chiefest of his works) was no slight imagination or fancy of his 

 brain, but a settled and concocted notion, the production of 

 many years' labour and travel. I myself have seen at the least ^ 

 twelve copies of the Instauration, revised year by year one after 

 another, and every year altered and amended in the frame 

 thereof, till at last it came to that model in which it was com- 

 mitted to the press ; as many living creatures do lick their 

 young ones, till they bring them to their strength of limbs. 



In the composing of his books he did rather drive at a mas- 

 culine and clear expression than at any fineness or affectation of * 

 phrases, and would often ask if the meaning were expressed 

 plainly enough, as being one that accounted words to be but 

 subservient or ministerial to matter, and not the principal. 

 And if his style were polite 3 , it was because he would do no 

 otherwise. Neither was he given to any light conceits, or 

 descanting upon words, but did ever purposely and industriously 

 avoid them ; for he held such things to be but digressions or 

 diversions from the scope intended, and to derogate from the 

 weight and dignity of the style. 



1 t. e. not from books only Ex libris tamen soils scientiam suam deprompsisse 

 haudquttquam concedere licet. 



2 For Instauratio Magna in this place, and also for Instauration a few lines further 

 on, the Latin version substitutes Novum Organum. Rawley, when he spoke of the 

 Instauration, was thinking, no doubt, of the volume in which the Novum Organum 

 fir&t appeared, and which contains all the pieces that stand in this edition before the 

 De Auymentis. 



3 The Latin version adds : Siquidem apud nostratcs eloquii Anglicani artifex habitus 

 est. 



