They are like chapters in Aristotle's Ethics and Rhetoric on virtues and characters; only Bacon's takes Aristotle's broad marking lines as drawn, and proceeds with the subtler and more refined observations of a much longer and wider experience.

But these short papers say what they have to say without preface, and in literary undress, without a superfluous word, without the joints and bands of structure; they say it in brief, rapid sentences, which come down, sentence after sentence, like the strokes of a great hammer.

No wonder that in their disdainful brevity they seem rugged and abrupt, "and do not seem to end, but fall." But with their truth and piercingness and delicacy of observation, their roughness gives a kind of flavour which no elaboration could give.

It is none the less that their wisdom is of a somewhat cynical kind, fully alive to the slipperiness and self-deceits and faithlessness which are in the world and rather inclined to be amused at them.

In some we can see distinct records of the writer's own experience: one contains the substance of a charge delivered to Judge Hutton on his appointment; another of them is a sketch drawn from life of a character which had crossed Bacon's path, and in the essay on _Seeming Wise_ we can trace from the impatient notes put down in his _Commentarius Solutus_, the picture of the man who stood in his way, the Attorney-General Hobart.
Some of them are memorable oracular utterances not inadequate to the subject, on _Truth_ or _Death_ or _Unity_.