imaginative power of illustration drawn from the most remote and most
unlikely analogies; analogies often of the quaintest and most unexpected
kind, but often also not only felicitous in application but profound and
true. His powers were early called upon for some of those sportive
compositions in which that age delighted on occasions of rejoicing or
festival. Three of his contributions to these "devices" have been
preserved--two of them composed in honour of the Queen, as "triumphs,"
offered by Lord Essex, one probably in 1592 and another in 1595; a
third for a Gray's Inn revel in 1594. The "devices" themselves were of
the common type of the time, extravagant, odd, full of awkward allegory
and absurd flattery, and running to a prolixity which must make modern
lovers of amusement wonder at the patience of those days; but the
"discourses" furnished by Bacon are full of fine observation and
brilliant thought and wit and happy illustration, which, fantastic as
the general conception is, raises them far above the level of such
fugitive trifles.

Among the fragmentary papers belonging to this time which have come
down, not the least curious are those which throw light on his manner of
working. While he was following out the great ideas which were to be the
basis of his philosophy, he was as busy and as painstaking in fashioning
the instruments by which they were to be expressed; and in these papers
we have the records and specimens of this preparation. He was a great
collector of sentences, proverbs, quotations, sayings, illustrations,
anecdotes, and he seems to have read sometimes simply to gather phrases
and apt words. He jots down at random any good and pointed remark which
comes into his thought or his memory; at another time he groups a set of
stock quotations with a special drift, bearing on some subject, such as
the faults of universities or the habits of lawyers. Nothing is too
minute for his notice. He brings together in great profusion mere forms,