Essays (Francis Bacon)

Last updated August 27, 2024

Essayes: Religious Meditations. Places of Perswasion and Disswasion. Seene and Allowed (1597) was the first published book by the philosopher, statesman and jurist Francis Bacon. The Essays are written in a wide range of styles, from the plain and unadorned to the epigrammatic. They cover topics drawn from both public and private life, and in each case the essays cover their topics systematically from a number of different angles, weighing one argument against another. While the original edition included 10 essays, a much-enlarged second edition appeared in 1612 with 38. Another, under the title Essayes or Counsels, Civill and Morall, was published in 1625 with 58 essays. Translations into French and Italian appeared during Bacon's lifetime.^[1]^[2] In Bacon's Essay, "Of Plantations" published in 1625, he relates planting colonies to war. He states that such plantations should be governed by those with a commission or authority to exercise martial law.^[3]

Critical reception

Though Bacon considered the Essays "but as recreation of my other studies", he was given high praise by his contemporaries, even to the point of crediting him with having invented the essay form.^[4]^[5] Later researches made clear the extent of Bacon's borrowings from the works of Montaigne, Aristotle and other writers, but the Essays have nevertheless remained in the highest repute.^[6]^[7] The 19th-century literary historian Henry Hallam wrote that "They are deeper and more discriminating than any earlier, or almost any later, work in the English language".^[8]

The Essays stimulated Richard Whately to republish them with extensive annotations that Whately extrapolated from the originals.^[9]

Aphorisms

Bacon's genius as a phrase-maker appears to great advantage in the later essays. In Of Boldness he wrote, "If the Hill will not come to Mahomet, Mahomet will go to the hill", which is the earliest known appearance of that proverb in print.^[10] The phrase "hostages to fortune" appears in the essay Of Marriage and Single Life – again the earliest known usage.^[11] Aldous Huxley's book Jesting Pilate took its epigraph, "What is Truth? said jesting Pilate; and would not stay for an answer", from Bacon's essay Of Truth.^[12] The 1999 edition of The Oxford Dictionary of Quotations includes no fewer than 91 quotations from the Essays.^[13]

Contents listing

The contents pages of Thomas Markby's 1853 edition list the essays and their dates of publication as follows:^[14]

Of Truth (1625)
Of Death (1612, enlarged 1625)
Of Unity in Religion/Of Religion (1612, rewritten 1625)
Of Revenge (1625)
Of Adversity (1625)
Of Simulation and Dissimulation (1625)
Of Parents and Children (1612, enlarged 1625)
Of Marriage and Single Life (1612, slightly enlarged 1625)
Of Envy (1625)
Of Love (1612, rewritten 1625)
Of Great Place (1612, slightly enlarged 1625)
Of Boldness (1625)
Of Goodness and Goodness of Nature (1612, enlarged 1625)
Of Nobility (1612, rewritten 1625)
Of Seditions and Troubles (1625)
Of Atheism (1612, slightly enlarged 1625)
Of Superstition (1612, slightly enlarged 1625)
Of Travel (1625)
Of Empire (1612, much enlarged 1625)
Of Counsels (1612, enlarged 1625)
Of Delays (1625)
Of Cunning (1612, rewritten 1625)
Of Wisdom for a Man's Self (1612, enlarged 1625)
Of Innovations (1625)
Of Dispatch (1612)
Of Seeming Wise (1612)
Of Friendship (1612, rewritten 1625)
Of Expense (1597, enlarged 1612, again 1625)
Of the True Greatness of Kingdoms and Estates (1612, enlarged 1625)
Of Regiment of Health (1597, enlarged 1612, again 1625)
Of Suspicion (1625)
Of Discourse (1597, slightly enlarged 1612, again 1625)
Of Plantations (1625)
Of Riches (1612, much enlarged 1625)
Of Prophecies (1625)
Of Ambition (1612, enlarged 1625)
Of Masques and Triumphs (1625)
Of Nature in Men (1612, enlarged 1625)
Of Custom and Education (1612, enlarged 1625)
Of Fortune (1612, slightly enlarged 1625)
Of Usury (1625)
Of Youth and Age (1612, slightly enlarged 1625)
Of Beauty (1612, slightly enlarged 1625)
Of Deformity (1612, somewhat altered 1625)
Of Building (1625)
Of Gardens (1625)
Of Negotiating (1597, enlarged 1612, very slightly altered 1625)
Of Followers and Friends (1597, slightly enlarged 1625)
Of Suitors (1597, enlarged 1625)
Of Studies (1597, enlarged 1625)
Of Faction (1597, much enlarged 1625)
Of Ceremonies and Respects (1597, enlarged 1625)
Of Praise (1612, enlarged 1625)
Of Vain Glory (1612)
Of Honour and Reputation (1597, omitted 1612, republished 1625)
Of Judicature (1612)
Of Anger (1625)
Of Vicissitude of Things (1625)
A Fragment of an Essay of Fame
Of the Colours of Good and Evil

Recent editions

Michael J. Hawkins (ed.) Essays (London: J. M. Dent, 1973). No. 1010 in Everyman's Library.
Michael Kiernan (ed.) The Essayes or Counsels, Civill and Morall (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1985). Vol. 15 of The Oxford Francis Bacon.
John Pitcher (ed.) The Essays (Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1985). In the Penguin Classics series.
Brian Vickers (ed.) The Essays or Counsels, Civil and Moral (New York: Oxford University Press). In the Oxford World's Classics series.

Footnotes

↑ Burch, Dinah, ed. (January 2009). The Essays. Oxford Reference Online (Subscription service). ISBN 978-0-19-280687-1 . Retrieved 12 May 2012.{{cite book}}: |work= ignored (help)
↑ "Catalogue entry". Copac . Retrieved 12 May 2012.
↑ Zeitlin, Samuel Garrett (2021). "Francis Bacon on Imperial and Colonial Warfare". The Review of Politics. 83 (2): 196–218. doi: 10.1017/S0034670520001011 . ISSN 0034-6705.
↑ Heard, Franklin Fiske. "Bacon's Essays, with annotations by Richard Whately and notes and a glossarial index". Making of America Books. Retrieved 13 May 2012.
↑ Bacon, Francis (2000) [1985]. Kiernan, Michael (ed.). The Essayes or Counsels, Civill and Morall. New York: Oxford University Press. p. xlix. ISBN 0198186738 . Retrieved 13 May 2012.
↑ Matthew, H. C. G.; Harrison, Brian, eds. (2004). The Oxford Dictionary of National Biography, vol. 3. Oxford University Press. p. 142.
↑ Ward, A. W.; Waller, A. R., eds. (1907–27). The Cambridge History of English and American Literature. Cambridge University Press. pp. 395–98.
↑ Hallam, Henry (1854). Introduction to the Literature of Europe in the Fifteenth, Sixteenth, and Seventeenth Centuries, Vol 2. Boston: Little, Brown. p. 514.
↑ Richard Whately (1858) Bacon’s Essays with Annotations via Internet Archive
↑ Simpson, John (1993). The Concise Oxford Dictionary of Proverbs. Oxford University Press. p. 176.
↑ The Oxford English Dictionary Vol 7. Oxford. 1989. p. 418.
↑ Huxley, Aldous (1930). Jesting Pilate. London: Chatto and Windus.
↑ Knowles, Elizabeth M., ed. (1999). The Oxford Dictionary of Quotations . Oxford University Press. pp. 42–44.
↑ Markby, Thomas (1853). The Essays, or, Counsels, Civil and Moral; With a Table of the Colours of Good and Evil. London: Parker. pp. xi–xii. Retrieved 13 May 2012.

External links

Original Scan of the University of Toronto (including Meditationes Sacræ)
Discussion of the Essays from The Cambridge History of English and American Literature
Richard Whately's 1857 edition of Essays at Google Books.

Related Research Articles

An essay is, generally, a piece of writing that gives the author's own argument, but the definition is vague, overlapping with those of a letter, a paper, an article, a pamphlet, and a short story. Essays have been sub-classified as formal and informal: formal essays are characterized by "serious purpose, dignity, logical organization, length," whereas the informal essay is characterized by "the personal element, humor, graceful style, rambling structure, unconventionality or novelty of theme," etc.

Francis Bacon, 1st Viscount St Alban,1st Lord Verulam, PC was an English philosopher and statesman who served as Attorney General and Lord Chancellor of England under King James I. Bacon argued the importance of natural philosophy, guided by scientific method, and his works remained influential throughout the Scientific Revolution.

Michel Eyquem, Seigneur de Montaigne, commonly known as Michel de Montaigne, was one of the most significant philosophers of the French Renaissance. He is known for popularizing the essay as a literary genre. His work is noted for its merging of casual anecdotes and autobiography with intellectual insight. Montaigne had a direct influence on numerous Western writers; his massive volume Essais contains some of the most influential essays ever written.

William Camden was an English antiquarian, historian, topographer, and herald, best known as author of Britannia, the first chorographical survey of the islands of Great Britain and Ireland that relates landscape, geography, antiquarianism, and history, and the Annales, the first detailed historical account of the reign of Elizabeth I of England.

Joseph Hall was an English bishop, satirist and moralist. His contemporaries knew him as a devotional writer, and a high-profile controversialist of the early 1640s. In church politics, he tended in fact to a middle way.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Richard Whately</span> English academic, philosopher, and theologian

Richard Whately was an English academic, rhetorician, logician, philosopher, economist, and theologian who also served as a reforming Church of Ireland Archbishop of Dublin. He was a leading Broad Churchman, a prolific and combative author over a wide range of topics, a flamboyant character, and one of the first reviewers to recognise the talents of Jane Austen.

Sir Julius Caesar was an English lawyer, judge and politician who sat in the House of Commons at various times between 1589 and 1622. He was also known as Julius Adelmare.

John Gerard was an English herbalist with a large garden in Holborn, now part of London. His 1,484-page illustrated Herball, or Generall Historie of Plantes, first published in 1597, became a popular gardening and herbal book in English in the 17th century. Except for some added plants from his own garden and from North America, Gerard's Herbal is largely a plagiarised English translation of Rembert Dodoens's 1554 herbal, itself highly popular in Dutch, Latin, French and other English translations. Gerard's Herball drawings of plants and the printer's woodcuts are mainly derived from Continental European sources, but there is an original title page with a copperplate engraving by William Rogers. Two decades after Gerard's death, the book was corrected and expanded to about 1,700 pages.

The Essays of Michel de Montaigne are contained in three books and 107 chapters of varying length. They were originally written in Middle French and published in the Kingdom of France. Montaigne's stated design in writing, publishing and revising the Essays over the period from approximately 1570 to 1592 was to record "some traits of my character and of my humours." The Essays were first published in 1580 and cover a wide range of topics.

Sir William Cornwallis was an early English essayist and served as a courtier and member of Parliament. His essays, influenced by the style of Montaigne, rather than that of Francis Bacon, became a model for later English essayists. He has sometimes been confused with his uncle of the same name.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Christopher Yelverton</span> English judge and politician

Sir Christopher Yelverton was an English judge and Speaker of the House of Commons.

Richard Bernard (1568–1641) was an English Puritan clergyman and writer.

Sir Nathaniel Bacon, of Stiffkey in Norfolk, was an English lawyer and Member of Parliament (MP).

In the Kingdom of England, the title of Secretary of State came into being near the end of the reign of Elizabeth I, the usual title before that having been King's Clerk, King's Secretary, or Principal Secretary.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Anthony Bacon (1558–1601)</span> English politician (1558–1601)

Anthony Bacon (1558–1601) was a member of the powerful English Bacon family and was a spy during the Elizabethan era. He was Francis Bacon's elder brother.

Henry Atkins (1558–1635) was an English physician.

Francis Bacon, 1st Viscount St Alban, KC was an English philosopher, statesman, scientist, lawyer, jurist, author, and pioneer of the scientific method. He served both as Attorney General and Lord Chancellor of England. Although his political career ended in disgrace, he remained extremely influential through his works, especially as philosophical advocate and practitioner of the scientific method during the scientific revolution.

This is a complete chronological bibliography of Francis Bacon. Many of Bacon's writings were only published after his death in 1626.

Thomas Speght was an English schoolmaster and editor of Geoffrey Chaucer.

The following bibliography of Aldous Huxley provides a chronological list of the published works of English writer Aldous Huxley (1894–1963). It includes his fiction and non-fiction, both published during his lifetime and posthumously.

This page is based on this Wikipedia article
Text is available under the CC BY-SA 4.0 license; additional terms may apply.
Images, videos and audio are available under their respective licenses.

[1] Burch, Dinah, ed. (January 2009). The Essays. Oxford Reference Online (Subscription service). ISBN 978-0-19-280687-1 . Retrieved 12 May 2012.{{cite book}}: |work= ignored (help)

[2] "Catalogue entry". Copac . Retrieved 12 May 2012.

[3] Zeitlin, Samuel Garrett (2021). "Francis Bacon on Imperial and Colonial Warfare". The Review of Politics. 83 (2): 196–218. doi: 10.1017/S0034670520001011 . ISSN 0034-6705.

[4] Heard, Franklin Fiske. "Bacon's Essays, with annotations by Richard Whately and notes and a glossarial index". Making of America Books. Retrieved 13 May 2012.

[5] Bacon, Francis (2000) [1985]. Kiernan, Michael (ed.). The Essayes or Counsels, Civill and Morall. New York: Oxford University Press. p. xlix. ISBN 0198186738 . Retrieved 13 May 2012.

[6] Matthew, H. C. G.; Harrison, Brian, eds. (2004). The Oxford Dictionary of National Biography, vol. 3. Oxford University Press. p. 142.

[7] Ward, A. W.; Waller, A. R., eds. (1907–27). The Cambridge History of English and American Literature. Cambridge University Press. pp. 395–98.

[8] Hallam, Henry (1854). Introduction to the Literature of Europe in the Fifteenth, Sixteenth, and Seventeenth Centuries, Vol 2. Boston: Little, Brown. p. 514.

[9] Richard Whately (1858) Bacon’s Essays with Annotations via Internet Archive

[10] Simpson, John (1993). The Concise Oxford Dictionary of Proverbs. Oxford University Press. p. 176.

[11] The Oxford English Dictionary Vol 7. Oxford. 1989. p. 418.

[12] Huxley, Aldous (1930). Jesting Pilate. London: Chatto and Windus.

[13] Knowles, Elizabeth M., ed. (1999). The Oxford Dictionary of Quotations . Oxford University Press. pp. 42–44.

[14] Markby, Thomas (1853). The Essays, or, Counsels, Civil and Moral; With a Table of the Colours of Good and Evil. London: Parker. pp. xi–xii. Retrieved 13 May 2012.

[1]

[2]

[3]

[4]

[5]

[6]

[7]

[8]

[9]

[10]

[11]

[12]

[13]

[14]

v t e Francis Bacon
Philosophy	Baconian method Idola fori Idola theatri Idola specus Idola tribus Salomon's House
Works	Essays (1597) The Advancement of Learning (1605) Novum Organum (1620) History of the Reign of King Henry VII (1622) New Atlantis (1627) Complete bibliography
Family	Alice Barnham (wife) Nicholas Bacon (father) Anne Bacon (mother)
Other	Bacon's cipher Baconian theory of Shakespeare authorship An Examination of the Philosophy of Bacon Occult theories Romanticism and Bacon

Authority control databases
International	VIAF
National	France BnF data Germany Israel United States
Other	IdRef