would never have doubted for a moment that it was only by means of a series of experiments that a safety-lamp could be invented. Thomas Aquinas would never have thought that his barbara and baralipton would enable him to ascertain the proportion which charcoal ought to bear to saltpetre in a pound of gunpowder. Neither common sense nor Aristotle would have suffered him to fall into such an absurdity. By stimulating men to the discovery of new truth, Bacon stimulated them to employ the inductive method, the only method, even the ancient philosophers and the schoolmen themselves being judges, by which new truth can be discovered. By stimulating men to the discovery of useful truth he furnished them with a motive to perform the inductive process well and carefully. His predecessors had been, in his phrase, not interpreters, but anticipators, of nature. They had been content with the first principles at which they had arrived by the most scanty and slovenly induction. And why was this? It was, we conceive, because their philosophy proposed to itself no practical end, because it was merely an exercise of the mind. . . . What Bacon did for inductive philosophy may, we think, be fairly stated thus: The objects of preceding speculators were objects which could be attained without careful induction. Those speculators, therefore, did not perform the inductive process carefully. Bacon stirred up men to pursue an object which could be attained only by induction, and by induction carefully performed; and consequently induction was more carefully performed. We do not think that the importance of what Bacon did for inductive philosophy has ever been overrated. But we think that the nature of his services is often mistaken, and was not fully understood even by himself. It was not by furnishing philosophers with rules for performing the inductive process well, but by furnishing them with a motive for performing it well, that he conferred so vast a benefit on society. To give to the human mind a direction which it shall retain for ages is the rare prerogative of a few imperial spirits. It cannot, therefore, be uninteresting to inquire what was the moral and intellectual constitution

which enabled Bacon to exercise so vast an influence on the world.

LORD MACAULAY: Lord Bacon.

It is easy to perceive from the scanty remains of his oratory that the same compactness of expression and richness of fancy which appear in his writings characterized his speeches; and that his extensive acquaintance with literature and history enabled him to entertain his audience with a vast variety of illustrations and allusions which were generally happy and apposite, but which were probably not least pleasing to the taste of that age when they were such as would now be thought childish or pedantic. It is evident also that he was, as indeed might have been expected, perfectly free from those faults which are generally found in an advocate who, after having risen to eminence at the bar, enters the House of Commons; that it

was his habit to deal with every great question, not in small detached portions, but as a whole; that he refined little, and that his reasonings were those of a capacious rather than a subtle mind. Ben Jonson, a most unexceptionable judge, has decribed Bacon's eloquence in words, which, though often quoted, will bear to be quoted again. "There happened in my time one noble speaker who was full of gravity in his speaking. His language, where he could spare or pass by a jest, was nobly censorious. No man ever spoke more neatly, more pressly, more weighty, or suffered less emptiness, less idleness, in what he uttered. No member of his speech but consisted of his own graces. His hearers could not cough or look aside from him without loss. He commanded where he spoke, and had his judges angry and pleased at his devotion. No man had their affections more in his power. The fear of every man that heard him was lest he should make an end." From the mention which is made of judges, it would seem that Jonson had heard Bacon only at the Bar. Indeed, we imagine that the House of Commons was then almost inaccessible to strangers. It is not probable that a man of Bacon's nice observation would speak in Parliament exactly as he spoke in the Court of Queen's Bench. But the graces of manner and language must, to a great extent, have been common between the Queen's Counsel and the Knight of the Shire.

LORD MACAULAY: Lord Bacon, July, 1837.

Now, Bacon is a striking instance of a genius who could think so profoundly, and at the same stands readily most of his wisest sayings, and time so clearly, that an ordinary man underperhaps thinks them so self-evident as hardly to

need mention. But, on reconsideration and repeated meditation, you perceive more and more what extensive and important applications has been overlooked; and on returning to it one of his maxims will have, and how often it again and again, fresh views of its importance will continually open on you. One of his sayings will be like some of the heavenly bodies that are visible to the naked eye, but in which you see continually more and more, the better the telescope you apply to them.

The "dark sayings," on the contrary, of some admired writers may be compared to a fog-bank at sea, which the navigator at first glance takes for a chain of majestic mountains, but which, when approached closely, or when viewed through a good glass, proves to be a mere mass of unsubstantial vapours.

WHATELY:
Pref. to Bacon's Essays.

BEARDS.

The beard, conformable to the notion of my friend Sir Roger, was for many ages looked upon as the type of wisdom. Lucian more than once rallies the philosophers of his time, who

endeavoured to rival one another in beards; and represents a learned man who stood for a professorship in philosophy, as unqualified for it by the shortness of his beard.

Ælian, in his account of Zoilus, the pretended critic, who wrote against Homer and Plato, and thought himself wiser than all who had gone before him, tells us that this Zoilus had a very long beard that hung down upon his breast, but no hair upon his head, which he always kept close shaved, regarding, it seems, the hairs of his head as so many suckers, which, if they had been suffered to grow, might have

drawn away the nourishment from his chin, and by that means have starved his beard.

I have read somewhere that one of the popes refused to accept an edition of a saint's works, which were presented to him, because the saint, in his effigies before the book, was drawn without a beard.

We see by these instances what homage the world has formerly paid to beards; and that a barber was not then allowed to make those depredations on the faces of the learned which have been permitted him of late years.

BUDGELL: Spectator, No. 331.

If we look into the history of our own nation, we shall find that the beard flourished in the Saxon heptarchy, but was very much discouraged under the Norman line. It shot out, however, from time to time, in several reigns under different shapes. The last effort it made seems to have been in Queen Mary's days, as the curious reader may find, if he pleases to peruse the figures of Cardinal Pole and Bishop Gardiner; though, at the same time, I think it may be questioned, if zeal against popery has not induced our Protestant painters to extend the beards of these two persecutors beyond their natural dimensions, in order to make them appear the more terrible.

I find but few beards worth taking notice of in the reign of King James the First.

During the civil wars there appeared one, which makes too great a figure in story to be passed over in silence; I mean that of the redoubted Hudibras, an account of which Butler has transmitted to posterity in the following lines:

"His tawny beard was th' equal grace
Both of his wisdom and his face;

In cut and dye so like a tile,

A sudden view it would beguile;

The upper part thereof was whey,
The nether, orange mixt with gray."

BUDGELL: Spectator, No. 331.

There is great truth in Alphonse Karr's remark that modern men are ugly because they don't wear their beards. Take a fine man of forty with a handsome round Medicean beard (not a pointed Jew's beard); look at him well, so as to retain his portrait in your mind's eye; and then shave him close, leaving him, perhaps, out of charity, a couple of mutton-chop whiskers, one on each cheek, and you will see the humiliating difference. And if you select

an old man of seventy for your experiment, and convert a snowy-bearded head that might sit for a portrait in a historical picture, into a closescraped weazen-faced visage, like an avaricious French peasant on his way to haggle for swine at a monthly franc-marché, the descent from the sublime to the ridiculous is still more painfully apparent. Household Words.

in

England to wear beards. It became, in course During hundreds of years it was the custom

Whereas, in almost all the other countries of Europe, more or less of moustache and beard was habitually worn, it came to be established which there was no appeal, that an Englishman, in this speck of an island, as an Insularity from whether he liked it or not, must hew, hack, and rasp his chin and upper lip daily. The inconvenience of this infallible test of British respectability was so widely felt, that fortunes were made by razors, razor-strops, hones, pastes, shaving-soaps, emollients for the soothing of the tortured skin, all sorts of contrivances to lessen the misery of the shaving process and diminish the amount of time it occupied. Household Words.

of time, one of our Insularities to shave close.

BEAUTY.

There is nothing that makes its way more directly to the soul than beauty, which immediately diffuses a secret satisfaction and complacency through the imagination, and gives a finishing to anything that is great or uncommon. The very first discovery of it strikes the mind with an inward joy, and spreads a cheerfulness and delight through all its faculties.

ADDISON: Spectator, No. 412.

There is a second kind of beauty that we find in the several products of art and nature; which does not work in the imagination with that warmth and violence as the beauty that appears in our proper species, but is apt, however, to raise in us a secret delight, and a kind of fondness for the places or objects in which we discover it. This consists either in the gaiety or variety of colours, in the symmetry and proportion of parts, in the arrangement and disposition of bodies, or in a just mixture and concurrence of all together. Among these several kinds of beauty the eye takes most delight in colours. ADDISON: Spectator, No. 412.

The head has the most beautiful appearance, as well as the highest station, in a human figure. Nature has laid out all her art in beautifying the face; she has touched it with vermilion, planted in it a double row of ivory, made it the seat of smiles and blushes, lighted it up and enlivened it with the brightness of the eyes, hung it on each side with curious organs of sense, given it airs and graces that cannot be described, and surrounded it with such a flowing shade of hair as sets all its beauties in the most agreeable

Ask any of the husbands of your great beauties, and they will tell you that they hate their wives nine hours of every day they pass together. There is such a particularity ever affected by them that they are encumbered with their charms in all they say or do. They pray at public devotions as they are beauties. They converse on ordinary occasions as they are beauties. . . . Good nature will always supply the absence of beauty, but beauty cannot long supply the absence of good nature.

ADDISON: Spectator, No. 306.

In beauty, that of favour is more than that of colour; and that of decent and gracious motion more than that of favour. That is the best part of beauty which a picture cannot express; no, nor the first sight of the life. There is no excellent beauty that hath not some strangeness in the proportion.

LORD BACON:

Essay XLIV., Of Beauty.

A man shall see faces that, if you examine them part by part, you shall find never a good; and yet altogether do well. If it be true that the principal part of beauty is in decent motion, certainly it is no marvel though persons in years seem many times more amiable: "pulchorum autumnus pulcher;" for no youth can be comely but by pardon, and considering the youth as to make up the comeliness. Beauty is as summer fruits, which are easy to corrupt, and that cannot last; and for the most part, it makes a dissolute youth, and an age a little out of countenance: but yet certainly again, if it light well,

it maketh virtues shine and vices blush.

LORD BACON: Essay XLIV., Of Beauty. Expression is of more consequence than shape; it will light up features otherwise heavy. SIR C. BELL.

Female beauties are as fickle in their faces as their minds; though casualties should spare them, age brings in a necessity of decay; leav ing doters upon red and white perplexed by incertainty both of the continuance of their mistress's kindness and her beauty, both of which are necessary to the amorist's joy and quiet.

BOYLE.

Exalt your passion by directing and settling it upon an object the due contemplation of whose loveliness may cure perfectly all hurts received from mortal beauty. BOYLE.

I cannot understand the importance which certain people set upon outward beauty or plainness. I am of opinion that all true education, such at least as has a religious foundation, must infuse a noble calm, a wholesome coldness, an indifference, or whatever people may call it,

towards such-like outward gifts, or the want of them. And who has not experienced of how little consequence they are in fact for the weal or woe of life? Who has not experienced how, on nearer acquaintance, plainness becomes beautified, and beauty loses its charm, exactly according to the quality of the heart and mind? And from this cause am I of opinion that the want of outward beauty never disquiets a noble nature or will be regarded as a misfortune. It never can prevent people from being amiable and beloved in the highest degree; and we have daily proof of this.

FREDERIKA BREMER.

An appearance of delicacy, and even of fragility, is almost essential to it [beauty]. BURKE.

Beauty is an all-pervading presence. It unfolds to the numberless flowers of the spring; it waves in the branches of the trees and the green blades of grass; it haunts the depths of the earth and the sea, and gleams out in the hues of the shell and the precious stone. And not only these minute objects, but the ocean, the mountains, the clouds, the heavens, the stars, the rising and setting sun, all overflow with beauty. The universe is its temple; and those men who are alive to it cannot lift their eyes without feeling themselves encompassed with it on every side. Now, this beauty is so precious, the enjoyments it gives are so refined and pure, so congenial with our tenderest and noblest feelings, and so akin to worship, that it is painful to think of the multitude of men as living in the midst of it, and living almost as blind to it as if, instead of this fair earth and glorious sky, they were tenants of a dungeon. An infinite joy is lost to the world by the want of culture of this spiritual endowment. The greatest truths are wronged if not linked with beauty, and they win their way most surely and deeply into the soul when arrayed in this their natural and fit attire.

W. ELLERY CHANNING.

It was a very proper answer to him who asked why any man should be delighted with beauty, that it was a question that none but a blind man could ask. LORD CLARENDON.

A graceful presence bespeaks acceptance, gives a force to language, and helps to convince by look and posture. JEREMY COLLIER.

Beauty is nothing else but a just accord and mutual harmony of the members, animated by a healthful constitution.

Dryden's Dufresnoy, Pref.

There are of these sorts of beauties which last but for a moment; as the different airs of an assembly upon the sight of an unexpected and uncommon object; some particularity of a violent passion, some graceful passion, some graceful action, a smile, a glance of an eye, a disdainful look, a look of gravity, and a thousand other such-like things.

Dryden's Dufresnoy.

Beauty is only that which makes all things as they are in their proper and perfect nature; which the best painters always choose by contemplating the forms of each. DRYDEN.

The most important part of painting is to know what is most beautiful in nature; that which is most beautiful is the most noble subject. DRYDEN.

Beauty charms, sublimity moves us, and is often accompanied with a feeling resembling fear, while beauty rather attracts and draws us towards it. FLEMING.

The fashion of the day should always be reflected in a woman's dress, according to her position and age; the eye craves for variety as keenly as the palate; and then, I honestly protest, a naturally good-looking woman is always handsome. For, happily, there exists more than one kind of beauty. There is the beauty of infancy, the beauty of youth, the beauty of maturity, and, believe me, ladies and gentlemen, the beauty of age, if you do not spoil it by your own want of judgment. At any age, a woman may be becomingly and pleasingly dressed.

Household Words.

Leanness, hitherto, has been considered a reproach, rather than a merit, either in an individual or a nation. . . We cannot fancy a fat Macbeth; a corpulent traitor in Venice Preserved, or an obese Iago, are impossibilities. Assuredly, Falstaff was not scrupulously honest or honourable; but what was he, after all, but | a merry rogue? Plumpness and beauty have often been regarded as inseparable Siamese twins, from the illustrious regent whose ideal of female loveliness was summed up in "fat, fair, and forty," to the Egyptians who fattened their dames systematically, by making them sit in a bath of chicken-broth; the etiquette being that the lady under treatment is to eat, while sitting in the broth-bath, one whole chicken of the number of those of which the bath was made, and that she is to repeat both bath and dose for many days. A doubt, one should think, must have sometimes arisen, whether the beauty thus in training would fatten or choke first. Household Words.

I can tell Parthenissa, for her comfort, that the beauties, generally speaking, are the most impertinent and disagreeable of women. An apparent desire of admiration, a reflection upon their own merit, and a precise behaviour in their general conduct, are almost inseparable accidents in beauties. All you obtain of them is granted to importunity and solicitation for what did not deserve so much of your time, and you recover from the possession of it as out of a dream.

You are ashamed of the vagaries of fancy which so strangely misled you, and your admiration of a beauty, merely as such, is inconsistent with a tolerable reflection upon yourself. The cheerful good-humoured creatures, into whose heads it never entered that they could

make any man unhappy, are the persons formed for making men happy. HUGHES: Spectator, No. 306.

Take the whole sex together, and you find those who have the strongest possession of men's hearts are not eminent for their beauty. You see it often happen that those who engage men to the greatest violence are such as those who are strangers to them would take to be remarkably defective for that end.

HUGHES: Spectator, No. 306.

He will always see the most beauty whose affections are warmest and most exercised, who has the most accustomed himself to attend whose imagination is the most powerful, and to the objects by which he is surrounded.