It will be a bad day for the mere quality of our language when it ceases to be read.
At the time the translators were sitting, Francis Bacon was at the height of his fame.

By profession a lawyer--time-serving and over-compliant to wealth and influence--he gives singularly little evidence of it in the style of his books.

Lawyers, from the necessity they are under of exerting persuasion, of planting an unfamiliar argument in the minds of hearers of whose favour they are doubtful, but whose sympathy they must gain, are usually of purpose diffuse.

They cultivate the gift, possessed by Edmund Burke above all other English authors, of putting the same thing freshly and in different forms a great many times in succession.

They value copiousness and fertility of illustration.