varied turns of expression, heads and tails of clauses and paragraphs,
transitions, connections; he notes down fashions of compliment, of
excuse or repartee, even morning and evening salutations; he records
neat and convenient opening and concluding sentences, ways of speaking
more adapted than others to give a special colour or direction to what
the speaker or writer has to say--all that hook-and-eye work which seems
so trivial and passes so unnoticed as a matter of course, and which yet
is often hard to reach, and which makes all the difference between
tameness and liveliness, between clearness and obscurity--all the
difference, not merely to the ease and naturalness, but often to the
logical force of speech. These collections it was his way to sift and
transcribe again and again, adding as well as omitting. From one of
these, belonging to 1594 and the following years, the _Promus of
Formularies and Elegancies_, Mr. Spedding has given curious extracts;
and the whole collection has been recently edited by Mrs. Henry Pott.
Thus it was that he prepared himself for what, as we read it, or as his
audience heard it, seems the suggestion or recollection of the moment.
Bacon was always much more careful of the value or aptness of a thought
than of its appearing new and original. Of all great writers he least
minds repeating himself, perhaps in the very same words; so that a
simile, an illustration, a quotation pleases him, he returns to it--he
is never tired of it; it obviously gives him satisfaction to introduce
it again and again. These collections of odds and ends illustrate
another point in his literary habits. His was a mind keenly sensitive to
all analogies and affinities, impatient of a strict and rigid logical
groove, but spreading as it were tentacles on all sides in quest of
chance prey, and quickened into a whole system of imagination by the
electric quiver imparted by a single word, at once the key and symbol of
the thinking it had led to. And so he puts down word or phrase, so
enigmatical to us who see it by itself, which to him would wake up a