33. Thomas Hobbes, who is said to have acted as Bacon’s secretary on occasions, could evidently be just as insensitive to the difference between dead sentences and live ones. He reused the comparison in Leviathan, 1.2.5, where the ‘light of the sun obscureth the light of the stars’. There are other shapes in the Essays which are still to be considered by literary students. For example, the first essay, Of Truth, opens with a spoken question and giddiness in men’s minds, while the last essay closes with more giddiness and the word writing. And it tells us something about the design of the Essays that in the last sentence the study of language, philology, is linked to a circle of tales - a turning wheel of study, contemplation and narratives, the form of the Essays perhaps.

34. The fainting is recorded by his chaplain, Dr William Rawley (see Arber, p. xvii : full reference, p. 47 below). His attention to the times and cures of his body, and his fears for it, are recorded in a notebook of 1608 (see Letters and Life, IV.78–80).