XXV. OF DISPATCH.

1. Affected dispatch is one of the most dangerous things to business that can be. It is like that which the physicians call redigestion, or hasty digestion; which is sure to fill the body full of crudities, and secret seeds of diseases. Therefore measure not dispatch by the times of sitting, but by the advancement of the business. And as, in races, it is not the large stride, or high lift, that makes the speed; so, in business, the keeping close to the matter, and not taking of it too much at once, procureth dispatch. It is the care of some only to come off speedily for the time; or to contrive some false periods of business, because they may seem men of dispatch. But it is one thing to abbreviate by contracting, another by cutting off and business so handled at several sittings, or meetings, goeth commonly backward and forward in an unsteady manner. I knew a wise man1, that had it for a by-word, when he saw men hasten to a conclusion, "Stay a little, that we may make an end the sooner."

2. On the other side, true dispatch is a rich thing. For time is the measure of business, as money is of wares; and business is bought at a dear hand where there is small dispatch. The Spartans and Spaniards have been noted to be of small dispatch: "Mi venga la muerte de Spagna, ""Let my death come from Spain," for then it will be sure to be long in coming.

3. Give good hearing to those that give the first information in business, and rather direct them in the beginning than interrupt them in the continuance of their speeches: for he that is put out of his own order will go forward and backward, and be more tedious while he waits upon his memory, than he could have been if he had gone on in his own course. But sometimes it is seen that the moderator is more troublesome than the actor.

'Sir Amyas Paulet, Queen Elizabeth's ambassador to the court of France.

2 Of small dispatch for not expeditious.

4. Iterations' are commonly loss of time; but there is no such gain of time as to iterate often the state of the question; for it chaseth away many a frivolous speech as it is coming forth. Long and curious speeches are as fit for dispatch as a robe, or mantle, with a long train, is for a race. Prefaces, and passages, and excusations, and other speeches of reference to the person, are great wastes of time; and though they seem to proceed of modesty, they are bravery. Yet beware of being too material when there is any impediment, or obstruction, in men's wills; for preoccupation of mind ever requireth preface of speech, like a fomentation to make the unguent enter.

5. Above all things, order, and distribution, and singling out of parts, is the life of dispatch; so as the distribution be not too subtile: for he that doth not divide will never enter well into business; and he that divideth too much will never come out of it clearly. To choose time is to save time; and an unseasonable motion is but beating the air. There be three parts of business: the preparation, the debate or examination, and the perfection. Whereof, if you look for dispatch, let the middle only be the work of many, and the first and last the work of few. The proceeding upon somewhat conceived in writing doth for the most part facilitate dispatch for though it should be wholly rejected, yet that negative is more pregnant of direction than an indefinite; as ashes are more generative than dust.

XXVI. OF SEEMING WISE.

It hath been an opinion that the French are wiser than they seem, and the Spaniards seem wiser than they are. But howsoever it be between nations, certainly it is so between man and man. For, as the apostle saith of godliness, “Having a show of godliness, but denying the power thereof;" so certainly there are in points of wisdom and sufficiency' that do nothing

or little very solemnly; "magno conatu nugas." It is a ridiculous thing, and fit for a satire to persons of judgment, to see what shifts these formalists have, and what prospectives1 to make superficies to seem body that hath depth and bulk. Some are so close and reserved as they will not show their wares but by a dark light; and seem always to keep back somewhat; and when they know within themselves they speak of that they do not well know, would nevertheless seem to others to know of that which they may not well speak. Some help themselves with countenance and gesture, and are wise by signs; as Cicero saith of Piso, that when he answered him he fetched one of his brows up to his forehead, and bent the other down to his chin; "respondes, altero ad frontem sublato, altero ad mentum depresso supercilio, crudelitatem tibi non placere. Some think to bear it by speaking a great word, and being peremptory; and go on, and take by admittance that which they cannot make good. Some, whatsoever is beyond their reach, will seem to despise, or make light of it, as impertinent or curious : and so would have their ignorance seem judgment. Some are never without a difference, and commonly by amusing men with a subtilty blanch the matter; of whom Aulus Gellius saith, "hominem delirum, qui verborum minutiis rerum frangit pondera." Of which kind also Plato, in his Protagoras, bringeth in Prodicus in scorn, and, maketh him make a speech that consisteth of distinctions from the beginning to the end. Generally such men, in all deliberations, find ease to be of the negative side, and affect a credit to object and foretell difficulties for when propositions are denied, there is an end of them; but if they be allowed, it requireth a new work which false point of wisdom is the bane of business. To conclude, there is no decaying merchant, or inward beggar, hath so many tricks to uphold the credit of their wealth, as these empty persons have to maintain the credit of their sufficiency. Seeming wise men may make shift to get opinion; but let no man choose them for employment;

Prospective (old) for perspective glass. 2 Blanch (obsolete) for evade.

for certainly, you were better take for business a man somewhat absurd than over formal.

XXVII. OF FRIENDSHIP'.

4. It had been hard for him that spake it to have put more truth and untruth together in few words, than in that speech, "Whosoever is delighted in solitude, is either a wild beast or a god." For it is most true, that a natural and secret hatred and aversation towards society, in any man, hath somewhat of the savage beast; but it is most untrue, that it should have any character at all of the divine nature, except it proceed, not out of a pleasure in solitude, but out of a love and desire to sequester a man's self for a higher conversation; such as is found to have been falsely and feignedly in some of the heathen, as Epimenides the Candian, Numa the Roman, Empedocles

! Montaigne has an essay on Friendship but it differs totally from this.

Aristotle. The following is the passage (Politics, Book 1) 'O ôè μὴ δυνάμενος κοινωνεῖν, ἢ μηθὲν δεόμενος δι' αὐτάρκειαν, οὐθὲν μέρος πόλεως, ὥστε ἢ θηρίον ἢ θεός, “ he who cannot mingle with society, or who needs nothing from it because he suffices for himself, forms no part of the city; he must be either a beast or a god." Bacon wished perhaps to give the substance only of the quotation and reduced it intentionally to the plthy form in which we find it in the text, or he quoted from a Latin translation (a mode not unusual in our author's time), in which this sentiment is found much as Bacon has rendered it, i. e. "Homo solitarius, aut Deus aut bestia. "

Spake (old) for spoke.

4 Aversation (old) for aversion.

5 Epimenides, reputed for his piety,' is said to have fallen into a sleep which lasted 57 years. He was considered to be the favourite of the gods; and when the oracle of Delphi ordered the Athenians to purify their city for the purpose of delivering it from the plague, Epimenides was sent for from Crete to perform the purification. He lived, it is said, to the age of 154 or 157 years; some assert that he attained the age of 299, He was supposed by the ancients to possess superhuman power and wisdom and to be a seer and a prophet.

Empedocles laid claim to miraculous gifts, promised remedies for the power of evil and of old age and said of himself: " An immortal god, and no longer a mortal man, I wander among you accompanied by thousands who thirst for deliverance, some being desirous to know the future, others remedies for diseases." One tradition represents him as having been removed from the earth

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the Sicilian, and Apollonius' of Tyana; and truly and really in divers of the ancient hermits and holy fathers of the church. But little do men perceive what solitude is, and how far it extendeth; for a crowd is not company, and faces are but a gallery of pictures, and talk but a tinkling cymbal where there is no love. The Latin adage meeteth with it a little; magna civitas, magna solitudo;" because in a great town friends are scattered; so that there is not that fellowship, for the most part, which is in less neighbourhoods. But we may go further, and affirm most truly, that it is a mere and miserable solitude to want true friends, without which the world is but a wilderness and even in this sense also of solitude, whosoever in the frame of his nature and affections is unfit for friendship, he taketh it of the beast, and not from humanity.

:

2. A principal fruit of friendship is the ease and discharge of the fulness and swellings of the heart, which passions of all kinds do cause and induce. We know diseases of stoppings and suffocations are the most dangerous in the body; and it is not much otherwise in the mind you may take sarza3 to open the liver; steel to open the spleen; flour of sulphur for the lungs; castoreum for the brain; but no receipt openeth the heart but a true friend, to whom you may impart griefs, joys, fears, hopes, suspicions, counsels, and whatsoever lieth upon the heart to oppress it, in a kind of civil shrift or confession.

3. It is a strange thing to observe how high a rate great kings and monarchs do set upon this fruit of friendship whereof we speak so great, as they purchase it many times at the hazard of their own safety and greatness. For princes, in re

like a divine being; another as having perished in the flames of Mount Etna, into the crater of which some affirm that he threw himself. Empedocles has left fragments of poems of which Lucretius speaks with enthusiasm as his models.

Apollonius of Tyana began from his youth to seclude himself from all society and to impose on himself the asceticism of the Pythagoreans. He was recalled to Tyana in his twentieth year by the death of his father, but he returned to the temple of Esculapius to preserve for five years the mystic silence during which the secret truths were revealed. He afterwards pretended to miraculous powers. A temple was dedicated to him at Tyana.

* Sarza (old) for sarsaparilla.