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 whole train of ideas, as he remembered the occasion of it--how at a certain time and place this word set the whole moving, seemed to breathe new life and shed new light, and has remained the token, meaningless in itself, which reminds him of so much.
When we come to read his letters, his speeches, his works, we come continually on the results and proofs of this early labour.