How Francis Bacon read books

and so suffer no moment of time to slip from him

He was no plodder upon books; though he read much, and that with great judgment, and rejection of impertinences incident to many authors; for he would ever interlace a moderate relaxation of his mind with his studies, as walking, or taking the air abroad in his coach,² or some other befitting recreation; and yet he would lose no time, inasmuch as upon his first and immediate return he would fall to reading again, and so suffer no moment of time to slip from him without some present improvement.

From William Rawley’s Life of Francis Bacon. It will be 400 years since Bacon died in April.