Bacon stall

Bacon is proving hard going. I could make excuses about work stepping up and the evanescing summer, but really it just has not been very interesting. I was excited about The New Atlantis before reading it, but found I had nothing to say about it afterward. The Oxford selection starts off as slowly as possible, with advice to the queen about the Church of England and those tributes and other minor works. To keep any interest at all, I had to skip to the end for The New Atlantis before coming back to the set order. The editor would have done better to lead off with a short, complete work that showed Bacon's thought in its fullest form, so that the reader, now encouraged with the knowledge of a destination well-chosen, might speed his way through the intelligent but rather tedious early works. The editor, as he reveals himself in the lengthy, sawdust-packed endnotes, is also intelligent but tedious, which probably explains his choice. Skipping to Atlantis was a good idea, and I will have to start skipping at will. Still, it grates on my autodidactic soul to ignore an editor's ideas.