that extraordinary book, and they spoke with the greatest
admiration of his genius.

Even Sir Thomas Bodley, after perusing the Cogitata et Visa, one of
the most precious of those scattered leaves out of which the great
oracular volume was afterward made up, acknowledged that "in all
proposals and plots in that book, Bacon showed himself a master
workman"; and that "it could not be gainsaid but all the treatise
over did abound with choice conceits of the present state of
learning, and with worthy contemplations of the means to procure
it."

In 1612 a new edition of the Essays appeared, with additions
surpassing the original collection both in bulk and quality.

Nor did these pursuits distract Bacon's attention from a work the
most arduous, the most glorious, and the most useful that even his
mighty powers could have achieved, "the reducing and recompiling,"
to use his own phrase, "of the laws of England."

To serve the exacting and laborious offices of Attorney General and
Solicitor General would have satisfied the appetite of any other
man for hard work, but Bacon had to add the vast literary
industries just described, to satisfy his. He was a born worker.


The service which he rendered to letters during the last five years
of his life, amid ten thousand distractions and vexations, increase
the regret with which we think on the many years which he had
wasted, to use the words of Sir Thomas Bodley, "on such study as