In commenting upon Bacon’s Atlantis, Spedding justly says: “Perhaps there is no single work of his which has so much of himself in it. The description of Solomon’s House is the description of the vision in which he lived, the vision not of an ideal world released from the natural conditions to which ours is subject, but of our own as it might be made if we did our duty by it, of a state of things which he believed would one day be actually seen upon this earth, such as it is, by men such as we are, and the coming of which he believed that his own labours were sensibly hastening.”