ShmoopTube

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Here's your shmoop du jour... If you haven't had your eyeballs on the following

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passage lately, hit pause and give 'er a skim...

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The primary purpose of lines 5 through 9 is to... what? Here are the potential answers...

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All righty... well, let's take a look at lines 5 through 9 and see what we're working with...

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"...except it proceed, not out of a pleasure in solitude, but out of a love and desire

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to sequester a man's self, for a higher conversation: such as is found to have been falsely and

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feignedly in some of the heathen; as Epimenides the Candian, Numa the Roman, Empedocles the

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Sicilian, and Apollonius of Tyana; and truly and really, in divers of the ancient hermits

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and holy fathers of the church." Okay, so... what's the gist?

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Bacon is talking about solitude here... and he's saying that solitude for solitude's sake

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is... kinda stupid.

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He says it more eloquently than that, of course, but... gists aren't always pretty.

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On the other hand... if you pass on hanging out with friends because you want to get some

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"me" time and really do some serious thinking about major life stuff... well, then it's

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perfectly acceptable. Now... which of our answer choices fits with

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that concept?

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Boom... we hit it right out of the gate.

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Option A is "qualify the instances in which solitude is preferable to friendship."

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Yeah, that's uh... what we just said.

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We don't even need to waste our time looking over the other answers -- A's the one we're looking for.

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We hope you watched this video with a friend.

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