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FRANCIS BACON’S APHORISM AND EPIGRAMMATIC STYLE: A CRITICAL PERSPECTIVE

ABSTRACT

Bacon made essay the vehicle of conveying what he felt about various aspects of human transactions. He tells about a subject as much as he knows and does not try to exhaust the matter. He looks at the practical relevance of subjects usually considered theological or philosophical. He speaks on some of the subjects authoritatively not with the authority of a Plato or Aristotle or St. Augustine, but with the authority of a man who has a wide range of interests & first-hand experience of some of the things. His prose has regularity, uniformity, precision and balance, his tone is essentially impersonal & formal. Some of the characteristic features of Bacon’s prose are clarity, precision & balance. Bacon is well known for his aphoristic style & sentences with three-fold balance. Bacon’s method of development of the idea in every one of his essays is deductive. He precedes with a general statement, usually enumerating various aspects & than analyses the aspects one by one in the same order. Bacon makes brilliant use of quotation. He knows well whom & where an argument may run into boredom & staleness, and at the right moment he uses some quotations & similes becomes means to an end. Examples are too numerous to quote. His quotations are from diverse sources & his similes are fresh & apt. Bacon’s essay, many of them are in the form of practical advice. E.g. ‘Of Great Places’ advises people holding and aspiring for high public offices to learn from the examples of others, to be serious but not to be taunting, to avoid delays, corruption & facility, & so on.

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