ESSAYS OF BACON. Bacon's 'Essays> were practically the first things in English liter ature to be called by the name °Essay? That word, in the 16th century, generally car ried the idea of attempt or trial and it was in some such sense that Bacon used it. In the 10 essays first published he gave, not finished treatments but rather tentative reflections. He himself calls them °certain brief notes set down rather significantly than curiously (i.e., sug gestively rather than carefully), which I have called Essays." Montaigne had used practi cally the same word in French a few years be fore and almost immediately after Bacon's col lection it began to be common. The essay developed into several forms in the 17th century, but in the earlier essays there was something of the experimental, incomplete char acter which we do not generally have in mind when we think of the essay at present. The subject matter of Bacon's 'Essays' was also informal and familiar. His own often-quoted words are that the 'Essays' have been °the most current" of his works because 'as it seems, they come home to men's business and bosoms." The 'Essays' are, in fact, the sincere and nat ural thoughts of a great man, not elaborately molded into a monumental work, but set down much as they may have come to his mind when he had leisure to think of the things that inter ested him. Bacon was a great figure in the development of philosophy and science, but it is not for such reasons that his 'Essays' have been read. The subject matter of thc'Essays'
is mostly the thoughts and ideas that come to the private heart of man as he thinks of him self, of how he gets on in the world, and how he stands with eternity and with God. There is in them much that belongs especially to the private thought of Bacon, who lived the life of a courtier and a man of affairs as well as that of a scholar. But everyone finds something of interest in the 'Essays,' for they give the natural reflections of a powerful mind as it considered the things that are likely to occur to everybody. In style the 'Essays' are gen erally less familiar than in substance. In the matter of expression they are concise and pol ished, by no means the sort of thing that a man could write offhand. Though, each as a whole, they do not make complete and finished treat ments, yet the separate sentences are condensed and often proverbial and seem carefully cor rected, as a comparison of the different editions shows they are. The 'Essays' were first pub lished in 1597, when 10 only appeared, dedi cated to his brother. In 1612 appeared a new edition containing 38 essays, nine of them of the earlier collection. In 1625 the last edition in Bacon's life contained 19 essays more. There have been numberless editions since, among which are E. Arber's 'Harmony,' and the editions with annotation by R. Whately, W. A. Wright and J. Spedding.