sentence than we can bring back their tournaments. Montaigne, in his
serious moods, has a curiously rich and intricate eloquence; and
Bacon's sentence bends beneath the weight of his thought, like a branch
beneath the weight of its fruit. Bacon seems to have written his
essays with Shakspeare's pen. There is a certain want of ease about
the old writers which has an irresistible charm. The language flows
like a stream over a pebbled bed, with propulsion, eddy, and sweet
recoil--the pebbles, if retarding movement, giving ring and dimple to
the surface, and breaking the whole into babbling music. There is a
ceremoniousness in the mental habits of these ancients. Their
intellectual garniture is picturesque, like the garniture of their
bodies. Their thoughts are courtly and high mannered. A singular
analogy exists between the personal attire of a period and its written
style. The peaked beard, the starched collar, the quilted doublet,
have their correspondences in the high sentence and elaborate ornament
(worked upon the thought like figures upon tapestry) of Sidney and
Spenser. In Pope's day men wore rapiers, and their weapons they
carried with them into literature, and frequently unsheathed them too.
They knew how to stab to the heart with an epigram. Style went out
with the men who wore knee-breeches and buckles in their shoes. We
write more easily now; but in our easy writing there is ever a taint of
flippancy: our writing is to theirs, what shooting-coat and wide-awake
are to doublet and plumed hat.

Montaigne and Bacon are our earliest and greatest essayists, and
likeness and unlikeness exist between the men. Bacon was
constitutionally the graver nature. He writes like one on whom presses
the weight of affairs, and he approaches a subject always on its
serious side. He does not play with it fantastically. He lives
amongst great ideas, as with great nobles, with whom he dare not be too