His manner of writing depends, not on a style, or a studied or acquired habit, but on the nature of the task which he has in hand.
Everywhere his matter is close to his words, and governs, animates, informs his words.

No one in England before had so much as he had the power to say what he wanted to say, and exactly as he wanted to say it.
No one was so little at the mercy of conventional language or customary rhetoric, except when he persuaded himself that he had to submit to those necessities of flattery, which cost him at last so dear.
The book by which English readers, from his own time to ours, have known him best, better than by the originality and the eloquence of the _Advancement_, or than by the political weight and historical imagination of the _History of Henry VII._, is the first book which he published, the volume of _Essays_.

It is an instance of his self-willed but most skilful use of the freedom and ease which the "modern language," which he despised, gave him.

It is obvious that he might have expanded these "Counsels, moral and political," to the size which such essays used to swell to after his time.

Many people would have thanked him for doing so; and some have thought it a good book on which to hang their own reflections and illustrations.