Bio:

Entries: Apothegm - "One of the best known, attributed by Francis Bacon to Queen Elizabeth I, is 'Hope is a good breakfast, but it is a bad supper.'" Criticism - "Important critical ideas came from Francis Bacon (Advancement of Learning, 1605)..." Elizabethan Age - "...and Bacon, Jonson, and Donne first stepped forward." Enlightenment - "It grew out of a number of seventeenth-century intellectual attainments: ...and the empiricism of Francis Bacon and John Locke." Essay - "The informal essay includes aphoristic essays such as Bacon's..." "When Francis Bacon published in 1597 his first collection of aphoristic essays, he borrowed his title--Essays--from Montaigne's book--and became the first English 'essayist.' The ten essays initially published were short and consisted chiefly of a collection of maxims on a given subject. The book was very popular, and enlarged editions were issued in 1612 and 1625. Later essays are longer, more personal, and developed by a wealth of illustration and quotation. The 'aphoristic' quality of Bacon''s style is seen in such typical quotations as these: 'The errors of young men are the ruin of business' and 'He hath a wife and children hath given hostages to fortune.' Bacon's essays--like the Renaissance courtesy books--had for their chief purpose the giving of useful advice to those who wished to get on in practical life." Forgeries, Literary - "Their motive may be to supply authority for some religious or political doctrine or scheme or it may be to cater to some prevailing literary demand or it may be--as Bacon would say--'for the love of the lie itself.'" Gnomic - "Although more properly applied to a style of poetry, as to some of the verse of Francis Quarles, the prose style of Bacon's early essays is also called gnomic when marked by the use of aphorisms." Imagination - "Bacon cited it as one of the three faculties of the rational soul: 'History has reference to the memory, poetry to the imagination, and philosophy to the reason.'" Jacobean Age - "In prose [...] Bacon's major works..." Utopia - "Many utopian fictions have been produced since More's including [...] Bacon's New Atlantis (1627)..."