critical analysis of of studies by bacon
Bacon’s style is most remarkable for its terseness. Bacon displays a great talent for condensation. Every sentence in his essays is pregnant with meaning and is capable of being expanded into several sentences. Many of sentences appear to be proverbial saying by virtue of their gems of thoughts expressed in a pithy manner. Its can say two most in the fewest words. Its essays combine wisdom in thoughts with extreme brevity. The short pithy sayings in his essays have become popular mottoes and house hold expressions. Bacon appears before the reader in these essays not in the character of a scientist or philosopher, but as a man of the world. We may call him “a citizen of the world” a term which he himself has used in one place in these essays, but for the fact that he is too much an English man, a protestant Englishman, and an Elizabethan Jacobean Englishman. He writes of thoughts his dispersed meditations about human life and society.
Bacon remains singularly aloof from moral consideration. He judges the validity of a course of an action not on moral but prudential ground. He condemns cunning not as a thing loath some and vile, but as a thing unwise. Likewise, he considers the disadvantage of simulation and dissimulation not as a moralist but as a practical man of the world. In three ways they prove disadvantageous to man in the practical affairs of life.
The word “essay” was first used by French writer Montaigne from whom bacon adopted it. Bacons essays are in class apart from those of the other essayists like lamb, Macaulay and Addison. He himself called them “pithy jottings” rather apt than curious. The description exactly fits his writings especially earlier assay like “of studies”.
In “of studies” the sentences are nearly all short, crisp and sententious. There are few connectives. Each sentence stands, by itself, expressing briefly and precisely his weighty thought. The epigrammatic terseness and the sharp antithesis and balance are seen as found in all
Bacon remains singularly aloof from moral consideration. He judges the validity of a course of an action not on moral but prudential ground. He condemns cunning not as a thing loath some and vile, but as a thing unwise. Likewise, he considers the disadvantage of simulation and dissimulation not as a moralist but as a practical man of the world. In three ways they prove disadvantageous to man in the practical affairs of life.
The word “essay” was first used by French writer Montaigne from whom bacon adopted it. Bacons essays are in class apart from those of the other essayists like lamb, Macaulay and Addison. He himself called them “pithy jottings” rather apt than curious. The description exactly fits his writings especially earlier assay like “of studies”.
In “of studies” the sentences are nearly all short, crisp and sententious. There are few connectives. Each sentence stands, by itself, expressing briefly and precisely his weighty thought. The epigrammatic terseness and the sharp antithesis and balance are seen as found in all
References: o Francis Bacon (1561) An Introduction, Text & Summary o Francis bacon, Selected Essay o www.cliffsnotes.com o neoenglish.wordpress.com/