Fear is a fruit of sin, which drove the first father of our flesh from
the presence of God, and hath bred an imperfection in a number of the
worse part of his posterity. It is the disgrace of nature, the foil of
reason, the maim of wit, and the slur of understanding. It is the palsy
of the spirit where the soul wanteth faith, and the badge of a coward
that cannot abide the sight of a sword. It is weakness in nature and a
wound in patience, the death of hope and the entrance into despair. It
is children's awe and fools' amazement, a worm in conscience and a curse
to wickedness. In brief, it makes the coward stagger, the liar stammer,
the thief stumble, and the traitor start. It is a blot in arms, a blur
in honour, the shame of a soldier, and the defeat of an army.
* * * * *
_Breton's next little prose book, published in the following year,
1616--year of the death of Shakespeare--was a set of Characters, "The
Good and the Bad," without suggestion that they were built upon the
lines of Bacon's Essays. Bacon's Essays first appeared as a set of ten
in 1597, became a set of forty in the revised edition of 1612, and of
fifty-eight in the edition of 1625, published a year before their
author's death. In their sententious brevity Bacon's Essays have, of
course, a style more nearly allied to the English Character Writing of
the Seventeenth Century than to the Sixteenth Century Essays of
Montaigne, which were altogether different in style, matter, and aim.
This, for example, was Bacon's first Essay in the 1597 edition:--_