But he saw how much could be done by leaving the beaten track of set treatise and discourse, and setting down unceremoniously the observations which he had made, and the real rules which he had felt to be true, on various practical matters which come home to men's "business and bosoms." He was very fond of these moral and political generalisations, both of his own collecting and as found in writers who, he thought, had the right to make them, like the Latins of the Empire and the Italians and Spaniards of the Renaissance.

But a mere string of maxims and quotations would have been a poor thing and not new; and he cast what he had to say into connected wholes.

But nothing can be more loose than the structure of the essays.
There is no art, no style, almost, except in a few--the political ones--no order: thoughts are put down and left unsupported, unproved, undeveloped.

In the first form of the ten, which composed the first edition of 1597, they are more like notes of analysis or tables of contents; they are austere even to meagreness.

But the general character continues in the enlarged and expanded ones of Bacon's later years.