1878 THE BACONIAN METHOD 239 



FROM JAMES SPEDDING 



Feb. 1, 1878. 



. When you admit that you study Bacon with a 

 prejudice, you mean of course an unfavourable opinion 

 previously formed on sufficient grounds. Now I am 

 myself supposed to have studied him with a prejudice the 

 other way : but this I cannot admit, in any sense of the 

 word ; for when I first made his acquaintance I had no 

 opinion or feeling about him at all more than the 

 ordinary expectation of a young man to find what he is 

 told to look for. My earliest impression of his character 

 came probably from Thomson whose portrait of him, 

 except as touched and softened by the tenderer hand of 

 " the sweet-souled poet of the Seasons," did not differ 

 from the ordinary one. It was not long indeed before I 

 did begin to form an opinion of my own ; one of those 

 a/for-judgments which are liable to be mistaken for 

 prejudices by those who judge differently, and w.hich, 

 being formed, do, no doubt, tell upon the balance. For 

 it was not long before I found myself indebted to him 

 for the greatest benefit probably that any man, living or 

 dead, can confer on another. In my school and college 

 days I had been betrayed by an ambition to excel in 

 themes and declamations into the study, admiration, and 

 imitation of the rhetoricians. In the course of my last 

 long vacation the autumn of 1830 I was inspired 

 with a new ambition, namely, to think justly about 

 everything which I thought about at all, and to act 

 accordingly ; a conviction for which I cannot cease to feel 

 grateful, and which I distinctly trace to the accident of 

 having in the beginning of that same vacation given two 

 shillings at a second-hand bookstall for a little volume of 

 Dove's classics, containing the Advancement of Learning. 

 And if I could tell you how many superlatives I have 

 since that time degraded into the positive ; how many 



