"--Preface to _Historia Naturalis_: translated, _Works_, v.
132-3.
CHAPTER IX.
BACON AS A WRITER.
Bacon's name belongs to letters as well as to philosophy. In his own
day, whatever his contemporaries thought of his _Instauration of
Knowledge_, he was in the first rank as a speaker and a writer. Sir
Walter Raleigh, contrasting him with Salisbury, who could speak but not
write, and Northampton, who could write but not speak, thought Bacon
eminent both as a speaker and a writer. Ben Jonson, passing in review
the more famous names of his own and the preceding age, from Sir Thomas
More to Sir Philip Sidney, Hooker, Essex, and Raleigh, places Bacon
without a rival at the head of the company as the man who had "fulfilled
all numbers," and "stood as the mark and [Greek: akme] of our language."
And he also records Bacon's power as a speaker. "No man," he says, "ever
spoke more neatly, more pressly, or suffered less emptiness, less
idleness, in what he uttered."..."His hearers could not cough or look
aside from him without loss.
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