UC-NRLF 
 
 'i mill III III iiiiiiiiiiiii 
 
 B 3 3Sb m3 
 
 ^N OF LETTERS 
 
 Edited by 
 
 John Morley 
 
 
 R . W. C HURCH 
 
V' 
 
 5f> 
 
 •» 
 
 K 
 
 
 JP 
 
 '^4?^ 
 
 if 
 
 5 
 
 
 
 
 ,,->j f 
 
 J,,;; 
 
 / 
 
 ' '' Mf'n , 
 

 
 •'if?'* .'. 
 
 
 
 
(SiXQii^i) Max of Itcttcrs; 
 
 EDITED BY JOHN MORLEY 
 
 BACON 
 
BACON 
 
 E. W. CHUECH, 
 
 DEAN OF ST. PAUL's, 
 HONORARY FELLOW OF ORIEL COLLEGE 
 
 EantJon: 
 MACMILLAN AND CO. 
 
 1884 
 
3 U^^ 
 
 PREFACE. 
 
 In preparing this sketch it is needless to say how 
 deeply I am indebted to Mr. Spedding and Mr. Ellis, 
 the last editors of Bacon's writings, the very able and 
 painstaking commentators, the one on Bacon's life, the 
 other on his philosophy. It is impossible to overstate 
 the affectionate care and high intelligence and honesty 
 with which Mr. Spedding has brought together and 
 arranged the materials for an estimate of Bacon's char- 
 acter. In the result, in spite of the force and ingenuity 
 of much of his pleading, I find myself most reluctantly 
 obliged to differ from him ; it seems to me to be a 
 case where the French saying, cited by Bacon, in 
 one of his commonplace books, holds good — " Par 
 trop se ddbattre, la viritd se perd." ^ But this does not 
 diminish the debt of gratitude which all who are in- 
 terested about Bacon must owe to Mr. Spedding. I 
 wish also to acknowledge the assistance which I have 
 received from Mr. Gardiner's Historij of England and 
 Mr. Fowler's edition of the Novum Organum : and not 
 least from M. de E^musat's work on Bacon, which seems 
 to me the most complete and the most just estimate 
 1 Promus : eilitcd b}- I^Irs. H. Pott, p. 475. 
 
 548 
 
vi PREFACE. 
 
 both of Bacon's character and worlc, which has yet 
 appeared ; though even in this clear and dispassionate 
 survey we are reminded by some misconceptions, strange 
 in M. de E^musat, how what one nation takes for granted 
 is incomprehensible to its neighbour, and what a gap 
 there is still, even in matters of philosophy and literature, 
 between the whole Continent and ourselves : — 
 " Penitus toto divisos orbe Britannos." 
 
CONTENTS, 
 
 CHAPTER I. PAGE 
 
 Early Life 1 
 
 CHAPTER II. 
 Bacon and Elizabeth 28 
 
 CHAPTER III. 
 Bacon and James 1 58 
 
 CHAPTER IV. 
 Bacon Solicitor-General 81 
 
 CHAPTER V. 
 Bacon Attorney-General and Chancellor . . . 100 
 
 CHAPTER VI. 
 Bacon's Fall 124 
 
CONTENTS. 
 
 CHAPTEK YII. pxoE 
 
 Bacon's Last Years— 1621-1626 156 
 
 CHATTER VIII. 
 B.a.con's Philosophy 177 
 
 CHAPTER IX. 
 BaCOX as a WlUTEll 209 
 
V 
 
 BACON. 
 
 CHAPTER I. 
 
 EARLY LIFE. 
 
 The life of Francis Bacon is one which it is a pain to 
 write or to read. Ifc is the life of a man endowed with 
 as rare a combination of noble gifts as ever was be- 
 stowed on a human intellect ; the life of one with whom 
 the whole purpose of living and of every day's work was 
 to do great things to enlighten and elevate his race, to 
 enrich it with new powers, to lay up in store for all' 
 ages to come a source of blessings which should never 
 fail or dry up ; it was the life of a man who had high 
 thoughts of the ends and methods of law and govern- 
 ment, and with Avhom the general and public good was 
 regarded as the standard by which the use of public 
 power was to be measured ; the life of a man who had 
 struggled hard and successfully for the material pros- 
 perity and opulence which makes work easy and gives a 
 man room and force for carrying out his purposes. All 
 his life long his first a nd never-sleeping passion was the 
 romantic and splendid ambition after knowledge, f or the. 
 
 co nquest of nature and fur the service of man j! gather- 
 ing up in himself the spirit and longings and efforts of 
 e B / 
 
2 BACON. [chap. 
 
 all discoverers and inventors of the arts, as they are 
 symbolised in the mythical Prometheus. He rose_to_ 
 the highest place and honour ; and yet that place and_ 
 honour were but The fringe and adornment of all tliat 
 made him great. It is difficult to imagine a grander 
 and more magnificent career ; and his name ranks 
 among the few chosen examples of human achievement. 
 And yet it was not only an unhappy life ; it was a poor 
 life. We expect that sucli an overwhelming weight of i 
 glory should be borne up by a character corresponding 
 to it in strength and nobleness. But that is not what 
 we find. No one ever had a greater idea of Avhat he 
 was made for, or was fired with a greater desire to 
 devote himself to it. He was all this. And yet being 
 all this, seeing deep into man's worth, his capacities, his 
 greatness, his weakness, his sins, he was not true to 
 what he knew. He cringed to such a man as Bucking- 
 ham. He sold himself to the corrupt and ignominious 
 Government of James I. He was willing to be employed 
 to hunt to death a friend like Essex, guilty, deeply 
 guilty to the State, but to Bacon the most loving and 
 generous of benefactors. AVitli his eyes open he gave him- 
 self up Avithout resistance to a system unworthy of him ; 
 he would not see what was evil in it, and chose to call its 
 evil good ; ^djiewas itsfirst and most signaj _Yictim<^ 
 
 Bacon has been judged with merciless severity. But 
 he has also been defended by an advocate whose name 
 alone is almost a guarantee for the justness of the cause 
 which he takes up, and the innocency of the client for 
 whom he argues. Mr. Spedding devoted nearly a life- 
 time and all the resources of a fine intellect and an 
 earnest conviction to make us revere as well as admire 
 
I.] EARLY LIFE. 3 
 
 Bacon. But it is vain. It is vain to fight against the 
 facts of his life : his words, his letters. *' Men are 
 made up," says a keen observer, " of professions, gifts 
 and talents; and also of themselves."'^ With all his 
 greatness, his splendid genius, his magnificent ideas, his 
 enthusiasm for truth, his passion to be the benefactor 
 of his kind, with all the charm that made him loved by 
 good and worthy friends, amiable, courteous, patient, 
 delightful as a companion, ready to take any trouble, — 
 there was in Bacon's "self" a deep and fatal flaw. He 
 was a pleaser of men. There was in him that subtle 
 fault, noted and named both by philosophy and religion, 
 in the apeo-Ko? of Aristotle, the dvOpwirdpea-Ko^ of St. 
 Paul, which is more common than it is pleasant to think, 
 even in good people, but which if it becomes dominant 
 in a character is ruinous to truth and power. He was 
 one of the men, there are many of them, who are unable 
 to release their imagination from the impression of 
 present and immediate power, face to face with them- 
 selves. It seems as if he carried into conduct the lead- 
 ing rule of his philosophy of nature, parendo vincitur. 
 In both worlds, moral and physical, he felt himself 
 encompassed by vast forces, irresistible by direct opposi- 
 tion. Men whom he wanted to bring round to his 
 purposes were as strange, as refractory, as obstinate, 
 as impenetrable as the phenomena of the natural world. 
 It was no use attacking in front and by a direct trial of 
 strength people like Elizabeth or Cecil or James : he 
 might as well think of forcing some natural power in 
 defiance of natural law. The first word of his teaching 
 about nature is that she must be won by observation of 
 
 ^ Dr. Mozley. 
 
4 BACON. [OHAP. 
 
 her tendencies and demands ; the same radical disposi- 
 tion of temper reveals itself in his dealings with men ; 
 they, too, must be won by yielding to them, by adapting 
 himself to their moods and ends ; by spying into the 
 drift of their humour, l)y subtly and pliantly falling in 
 with it, by circuitous and indirect processes, the fruit 
 of vigilance and patient thought. He thought to direct, 
 while submitting apparently to be directed. But he 
 mistook his strength. Nature and man are different 
 powers and under different laws. He chose to please 
 man, and not to follow what his soul must have told 
 him was the better way. He wanted, in his dealings 
 with men, that sincerity on which he insisted so strongly 
 in his dealings with nature and knowledge. And the 
 ruin of a great life was the consequence. 
 
 Francis Bacon was born in London on the 2 2d of 
 January 15f^, three years before Galileo. He was born 
 at York House, in the Strand; the house which, though 
 it belonged to the Archbishops of York, had been lately 
 tenanted by Lord Keepers and Lord Chancellors, iu 
 which Bacon himself afterwards lived as Lord Chancellor, 
 and which passed after his fall into the hands of the 
 Duke of Buckingham, who has left his mark in the 
 Water Gate which is now seen, far from the river, in the 
 garden of the Thames Embankment. His father Avas 
 Sir Nicholas Bacon, Ehzabeth's first Lord Keeper, the 
 fragment of Avhose effigy in the Crypt of St. Paul's is 
 one of the few relics of the old Cathedral before the fire. 
 His uncle by marriage was that AVilliam Cecil who was 
 to be Lord Burghley. His mother, the sister of Lady 
 Cecil, was one of the daughters of Sir Antony Cook, a 
 person deep in the confidence of the reforming party. 
 
I.] EARLY LIFE. 5 
 
 who had been tutor of Edward VI. She was a remark- 
 able woman, highly accomplished after the fashion of 
 the ladies of her party, and as would become her father's 
 daughter and the austere and laborious family to which 
 she belonged. She was "exquisitely skilled in the 
 Greek and Latin tongues ;" she was passionately religious 
 according to the uncompromising religion which the 
 exiles had brought back "sWth them from Geneva, Strass- 
 burg, and Zurich, and which saw in Calvin's theology a 
 solution of all the difficulties, and in his discipline a 
 remedy for all the e-s-ils, of mankind. This means that 
 his boyhood from the first was passed among the high 
 places of the world — at one of the greatest crises of 
 English history — in the very centre and focus of its 
 agitations. He was brought up among the chiefs and 
 leaders of the rising religion, in the houses of the greatest 
 and most powerful persons of the State, and naturally, as 
 their child, at times in the Court of the Queen, who 
 joked ■\\-ith him, and called him " her young Lord 
 Keeper." It means also that the religious atmosphere 
 in which he was brought up was that of the nascent 
 and aggressive Piu-itanism, which was not satisfied Avith 
 the compromises of the Elizabethan Reformation, and 
 which saw in the moral poverty and incapacity of many 
 of its chiefs a proof against the great traditional system 
 of the Chiu-ch Avhich Elizabeth was loath to part with, 
 and which, in spite of all its present and inevit- 
 able shortcomings, her political sagacity taught her to 
 reverence and trust. 
 
 At the age of twelve he was sent to Cambridge, and 
 put under "Whitgift at Trinity. It is a question which 
 recurs continually to readers about those times and their 
 
« BACON. [chap. 
 
 precocious boys, what boys were then? For Avhatever 
 was the learning of the universities, these boys took 
 their place with men and consorted with them, sharing 
 such knowledge as men had, and performing exercises 
 and hearing lectures according to the standard of men. 
 Grotius at eleven was the pupil and companion of 
 Scaliger and the learned band of Leydcn ; at fourteen 
 he was part of the company which went Avith the 
 ambassadors of the States -General to Henry lY. ; at 
 sixteen, he was called to the bar, he published an out- 
 of-the-way Latin Arater, Martianus Capella, with a 
 learned commentary, and he was the correspondent of 
 De Thou. When Bacon was hardly sixteen he was 
 admitted to the Society of " Ancients " of Gray's Inn, 
 and he went in the household of Sir Amyas Paulet, the 
 Queen's Ambassador, to France. He thus spent two 
 years in France, not in Paris alone, but at Blois, Tours, 
 and Poitiers, If this was precocious, there is no indica- 
 tion that it was thought precocious. It only meant that 
 clever and promising boys were earlier associated "snth 
 men in important business than is customary noAV. The 
 old and the young heads began to work together sooner. 
 Perhaps they felt that there was less time to spare. 
 In spite of instances of longevity, life Avas shorter for 
 the average of busy men, for the conditions of life Avere 
 worse. 
 
 Tavo recollections only have been preserved of his 
 early years. One is that, as he told his chaplain, Dr. 
 Rawley, late in life, he had discoA^ered, as far back as 
 his Cambridge days, the " unfruitfulness " of Aristotle's 
 method. It is easy to make too much of this. It is 
 not uncommon for undergraduates to criticise their text- 
 
I.] EARLY LIFE. 7 
 
 books : it was the fashion with clever men, as, for 
 instance, Montaigne, to talk against Aristotle without 
 knowing anything about him : it is not xmcommon for 
 men who have worked out a great idea to find traces of 
 it, on precarious grounds, in their boyish thinking. Still, 
 it is worth noting that Bacon himself believed that his 
 fundamental quarrel with Aristotle had begun with the 
 first efforts of thought, and that this is the one recollec- 
 tion remaining of his early tendency in speculation. 
 The other is more trustworthy, and exhibits that in- 
 ventiveness which was chai'acteristic of his mind. He 
 tells us in the De Augmentis that when he was in France 
 he occupied himself with devising an improved system 
 of cypher-writing — a thing of daily and indispensable 
 use for rival statesmen and rival intriguers. But the 
 investigation, with its call on the calculating and com- 
 bining faculties, would also interest him, as an example 
 of the discovery of new powers by the human mind. 
 
 In the beginning of 1579 Bacon, at eighteen, was 
 called home by his father's death. This was a great 
 blow to his prospects. His father had not accom- 
 plished what he had intended for him, and Francis 
 Bacon was left -with only a younger son's "narrow 
 portion." What was worse, he lost one whose credit 
 Avould have served him in high places. He entered 
 on life, not as he might have expected, independent 
 and with court favour on his side, but with his very 
 livelihood to gain — a competitor at the bottom of 
 the ladder for patronage and countenance. This great 
 change in his fortunes told very unfavourably on his 
 happiness, his usefulness, and, it must be added, on his 
 character. He accepted it, indeed, manfully, and at 
 
8 BACON, [CUAP. 
 
 once threw himself into the study of the law as the 
 Urofession by which he Avas to live. But the law, 
 though it was the only path open to him, was not the 
 one which suited his genius, or his object in life. To 
 the last he worked hard and faithfully, but with doubt- 
 ful reputation as to his success, and certainly against 
 the grain. And this was not the worst. To make up 
 for the loss of that start in life of M'hich his father's 
 untimely death had deprived him, he became, for almost 
 the rest of his life, the most importunate and most 
 untiring of suitors. 
 
 In 1579 or 1580 Bacon took up his abode at 
 Gray's Inn, which for a long time was his home. He 
 went through the various steps of his profession. He 
 began, what he never discontinued, his earnest and 
 humble appeals to his relative the great Lord Burghley, 
 to employ him in the Queen's serA-ice, or to put him in 
 some place of independence : through Lord Burghley's 
 favour he seems to have been pushed on at his Inn, 
 where, in 1586, he was a Bencher ; and in 1584 he came 
 into Parliament for Melcombe Regis. He took some 
 small part in Parliament : bvit the only record of liis 
 speeches is contained in a surly note of Recorder Fleet- 
 wood, who writes as an old member might do of a yoimg 
 one talking nonsense. He sat again for Liverjiool in 
 the year of the Armada (1588), and his name begins to 
 appear in the proceedings. These early years, we know, 
 were busy ones. In them Bacon laid the fovmdation of 
 his observations and judgments on men and affairs ; and 
 in them the great purpose and work of his life was con- 
 ceived and shaped. But they are more obscure years 
 than might have been expected in the case of a man of 
 
I,] EARLY LIFE. 9 
 
 Bacon's genius and family, and of such eager and un- 
 concealed desire to rise and be at work. No doubt he 
 was often pinched in his means ; his health was weak, 
 and he was delicate and fastidious in his care of it : 
 plunged in work, he lived very much as a recluse in his 
 chambers, and was thought to be reserved, and what 
 those who disliked him called arrogant. But Bacon was 
 ambitious — ambitious, in the first place, of the Queen's 
 notice and favour. He was versatile, brilliant, courtly, 
 besides "being his father's son; and considering how 
 rapidly bold and brilliant men were able to push their 
 way and take the Queen's favour by storm, it seems 
 strange that Bacon should have remained fixedly in the 
 shade. Something must have kept him back. Burghley 
 was not tlie man to neglect a useful instrument with 
 such good will to serve him. But all that Mr. Spedding's 
 industry and profoimd interest in the subject has brought 
 together throws but an uncertain light on Bacon's long 
 disappointment. "Was it the rooted misgiving of a man 
 of affairs like Burghley at that passionate contempt of 
 all existing knowledge and that undoubting confidence 
 in his OAATi power to make men know, as they never had 
 known, which Bacon was even now professing ? Or was 
 it something soft and over-obsequious in character which 
 made the uncle, who knew well what men he wanted, 
 disinclined to encourage and employ the nephew? 
 Was Francis not hard enough, not narrow enough, too 
 full of ideas, too much alive to the shakiness of current 
 doctrines and arguments on religion and policy 1 Was 
 he too open to new impressions, made by objections or 
 rival views 1 Or did he show signs of wanting backbone 
 to stand amid difficulties and threatening prospects 1 
 
10 BACON. [CHAP. 
 
 Did Burghley see something in him of the pliability 
 Avhicli he could remember as the serviceable quality of 
 his own young days — which suited those days of rapid 
 change, but not days when change was supposed to be 
 ovei", and when the qualities which were wanted were 
 those which resist and defy it 1 The only thing that is 
 clear is that Burghley, in spite of Bacon's continual 
 applications, abstained to the last from advancing his 
 fortunes. 
 
 "Whether employed by government or not, Bacon 
 began at this time to prepare those carefully-Avritten 
 papers on the public affairs of the day, of which he has 
 left a good many. In our day they would have been 
 })amphlets or magazine articles. In his they were cii'cu- 
 lated in manuscript, and only occasionally printed. The 
 first of any importance is a letter of advice to the Queen, 
 about the year 1585, on the policy to be followed with 
 a view to keeping in check the Roman Catholic interest 
 at home and abroad. It is calm, sagacious, and, according 
 to the fashion of the age, slightly Machiavellian. But the 
 first siibject on which Bacon exhibited his characteristic 
 qualities, his appreciation of facts, his balance of thought, 
 and his power, when not personally committed, of stand- 
 ing aloof from the ordinary prejudices and assumptions 
 of men round him, Avas the religious condition and pros- 
 pects of the English Church. Bacon had been brought 
 up in a Puritan household of the straitest sect. His 
 mother was an earnest, severe, and intolerant Calvinist, 
 deep in the interests and cause of her party, bitterly re- 
 senting all attempts to keep in order its pretensions. 
 She was a masterful woman, claiming to meddle wath her 
 brother-in-law's policy, and though a most affectionate 
 
I.] EAELY LIFE. 11 
 
 mother she was a woman of violent and ungovernable 
 temper. Her letters to her son Antony, whom she loved 
 passionately, but whom she suspected of keeping dan- 
 gerous and papistical company, show us the imperious 
 spirit in which she claimed to interfere with her sons ; 
 and they show also that in Francis she did not find 
 all the deference which she looked for. Eecommend- 
 ing Antony to frequent "the religious exercises of 
 the sincerer sort," she warns him not to follow his 
 brother's advice or example. Antony was advised to 
 use prayer twice a day with his servants. "Your 
 brother," she adds, "is too negligent therein." She is 
 anxious about Antony's health, and warns him not to 
 fall into his brother's ill-ordered habits ; "I verily think 
 your brother's weak stomach to digest hath been much 
 caused and confirmed by untimely going to bed, and then 
 musing nescio quid when he should sleep, and then in con- 
 sequent by late rising and long lying in bed ; whereby 
 his men are made slothful and himself continueth 
 sickly. But my sons haste not to hearken to their 
 mother's good counsel in time to prevent." It seems 
 clear that Francis Bacon had shown his mother that not 
 only in the care of his health, but in his judgment on 
 religious matters, he meant to go his own way. Mr. 
 Spedding thinks that she must have had much influence 
 on him : it seems more likely that he resented her inter- 
 ference, and that the hard and narrow arrogance which 
 she read into the Gospel produced in him a strong reac- 
 tion. Bacon was obsequious to the t}Tanny of power, but 
 he was never inclined to bow to the tyranny of opinion ; 
 and the tjTanny of Puritan infallibility Avas the last 
 thing to which he was likely to submit. His mother 
 
12 BACON. [chap. 
 
 would have wished him to sit under Cartwright and 
 Travcrs. The friend of his choice was the Anglican 
 preacher, Dr. Andrewes, to whom he submitted all his 
 works, and whom he called his "inquisitor general;" 
 and he was proud to sign himself the pupil of Whitgift, 
 and to "write for him — the archbishop of whom Lady- 
 Bacon Avrote to her son Antony, veiling the dangerous 
 sentiment in Greek, *' that he was the ruin of the church, 
 for he loved his own glory more than Christ's." 
 
 Certainly, in the remarkable pajDer on Controversies in 
 the Church (1589), Bacon had ceased to feel or to speak as 
 a Puritan. The paper is an attempt to compose the con- 
 troversy by pointing out the mistakes in judgment, in 
 temper, and in method on both sides. It is entirely unlike 
 what a Puritan would have Avritten ; it is too moderate, 
 too tolerant, too neutral, though like most essays of 
 conciliation it is open to the rejoinder from both sides — 
 certainly^ from the Puritan — that it begs the question by 
 assuming the unimportance of the matters about which 
 each contended with so much zeal. It is the confirmation, 
 but also the complement, and in some ways the cor- 
 rection of Hooker's contemporary view of the quarrel 
 wdiich was threatening the life of the English Church, 
 and not even Hooker could be so comprehensive and so 
 fair. For Hooker had to defend much that was inde- 
 fensible : he had to defend a great traditional system, 
 just convulsed by a most tremendous shock — a shock 
 and alteration, as Bacon says, " the greatest and most 
 dangerous that can be in a State," in which old clues and 
 habits and rules Avere confused and all but lost ; in which 
 a frightful amount of personal incapacity and worthless- 
 ness had, from sheer want of men, risen to the high 
 
I.] EAELY LIFE. 13 
 
 places of the Church ; and in which force and violence, 
 sometimes of the most hateful kind, had come to be 
 accepted as ordinary instruments in the government of 
 souls. Hooker felt too strongly the unfairness, the folly, 
 the intolerant aggressiveness, the malignity of his_ 
 opponents, — he was too much alive to the -svrongs in- 
 flicted by them on his own side, and to the incredible 
 absurdity of their arguments, — to do justice to what was 
 only too real in the charges and complaints of those 
 opponents. But Bacon came from the very heart of the 
 Puritan camp. He had seen the inside of Puritanism — 
 its best as well as its worst side. He witnesses to the 
 humility, the conscientiousness, the labour, the learning, 
 the hatred of sin and wrong, of many of its preachers. 
 He had heard, and heard with sympathy, all that could 
 be urged against the bishops' administration, and against 
 a system of legal oppression in the name of the Church. 
 Where religious elements were so confusedly mixed, and 
 where each side had apparently so much to urge on behalf 
 of its claims, he saw the deep mistake of loftily ignoring 
 facts, and of want of patience and forbearance Avith those 
 who were scandalised at abuses, while the abuses, in some 
 cases monstrous, were tolerated and turned to profit. 
 Towards the bishops and their policy, though his lan- 
 guage is very respectful, for the government was impli- 
 cated, he is very severe. They punish and restrain, but 
 they do not themselves mend their ways or supply what 
 was wanting ; and theirs are ^Hnjurke potentiorum,'' — "in- 
 juries come from them that have the upper hand." But 
 Hooker himself did not put his finger more truly and more 
 surely on the real mischief of the Puritan movement : 
 on the immense outbreak in it of unreasonable party 
 
1 i BACON. [chap. 
 
 spirit and visible personal ambition, — "these are the 
 true successors of Diotrephes and not my lord bishops : " 
 — on the gradual development of the Puritan theory till 
 it came at last to claim a supremacy as unquestionable 
 and intolerant as that of the Papacy : on the servile 
 affectation of the fashions of Geneva and Strassburg : on 
 the poverty and foolishness of much of the Puritan teach- 
 ing — its inability to satisfy the great questions which it 
 raised in the soul, its unworthy dealing with scripture 
 — "naked examples, conceited inferences, and forced 
 allusions, which mine into all certainty of religion" — 
 "the word, the bread of life, they toss up and down, 
 they break it not : " on their undervaluing of moral worth, 
 if it did not speak in their phraseology — " as they cen- 
 sure virtuous men by the names of civil and maral, so do 
 they censure men truly and godly wise, who see into the 
 vanity of their assertions, by the name of jwlifiques ; 
 saying that their wisdom is but carnal and savouring of 
 man's brain." Bacon saw that the Puritans were aiming 
 at a tyrannj', Avhich, if they established it, would be more 
 comprehensive, more searching, and more cruel than that 
 of the older systems ; but he thought it a remote and 
 improbable danger, and that they might safely be tole- 
 rated for the work they did in education and preaching, 
 "because the work of exhortation doth chiefly rest upon 
 these men, and they have a zeal and hate of sin." But he 
 ends by warning them lest " that be true which one of 
 their adversaries said, that they have hut two small loants — 
 knoidedge and love." One complaint that he makes of 
 them is a curious instance of the changes of feeling, or at 
 least of language, on moral subjects. He accuses them 
 of "having pronounced generally, and without difference. 
 
I.] EARLY LIFE. 15 
 
 all untruths unlawful," forgetful of the Egyptian mid- 
 wives and Eahab, and Solomon, and even of Him " who, 
 the more to touch the hearts of the disciples "w-ith a holy 
 dalliance, made as though he would have passed Em- . 
 maus." He is thinking of their failure to apply a ' 
 principle which was characteristic of his mode of 
 thought, that even a statement about a virtue like veracity 
 " hath limit as all things else have : " but it is odd to 
 find Bacon bringing against the Puritans the converse of 
 the charge which his age, and Pascal afterwards, brought 
 against the Jesuits. The essay, besides being a picture 
 of the times as regards religion, is an example of what 
 was to be Bacon's characteristic strength and weakness : 
 his strength, in lifting up a subject, which had been 
 de<yradt'l l)y mean and wrangling disputations, into a 
 higher and larger light, and bringing to bear on it great 
 principles and the results of the best hxunan wisdom and 
 experience, expressed in weighty and pregnant maxims ; 
 his weakness, in forgetting, as, in spite of his philosophy, 
 he so often did, that the grandest major premisses need 
 well-proved and ascertained minors, and that the enuncia- 
 tion of a principle is not the same thing as the appli- 
 cation of it. Doubtless there is truth in his closing 
 words ; but each party would have made the comment 
 that what he had to prove, and had not proved, was that 
 by following his counsel they would " love the whole 
 better than a part." 
 
 "Let them not fear . . . the ioni calnmnj of neutrality : but 
 let them know that is true which is said by a vdse man, that 
 neuters in contentions are cither better or tvorse than cither side. 
 These things have I in all sincerity and simplicity set down touch- 
 ing the controversies which now trouble the Church of England : 
 and that Avithout all art and insinuation, and therefore not like to 
 
16 BACON. [CHAP. 
 
 be grateful to either part. Notwithstanding, I trust what has been 
 said shall find a correspondence in their minds which are not em- 
 barked in partiality, and which love the toholc better than apart." 
 
 Up to this time, though Bacon had showed himself 
 capable of taking a broad and calm view of questions 
 which it was the fashion among good men, and men 
 who were in possession of the popular ear, to treat with 
 narrowness and heat, there was nothing to disclose his 
 deeper thoughts — nothing foreshadowed the jmrpose 
 which was to fill his life. He had, indeed, at the age of 
 twenty -five, written a " youthfid " philosophical essay, to 
 which he gave the pompous title " Tempoiis Partus Maxi- 
 mus," " the Greatest Birth of Time." But he was thirty- 
 one when we first find an indication of the great idea and 
 the great projects which were to make his name famous. 
 This indication is contained in an earnest appeal to Lord 
 Burghley for some help which should not be illusory. 
 Its words are distinct and far-reaching ; and they are the 
 first words from him which tell us what was in his heart. 
 The letter has the interest to us of the first announce- 
 ment of a promise which, to ordinary minds, must have 
 appeared visionary and extravagant, but which was so 
 splendidly fulfilled ; the first distant sight of that sea of 
 knowledge Avhich henceforth was opened to mankind, 
 but on which no man, as he thought, had yet entered. 
 ' It contains the famous avowal — " / have taken all know- 
 ledge to be my province " — made in the confidence born of 
 long and silent meditations and questionings, but made 
 in a simple good faith which is as far as possible from 
 vain boastfulness. 
 
 " My Lord — With as much confidence as mine own honest and 
 faithful devotion unto your service and your honourable correspon- 
 
I.] EABLY LIFE. 17 
 
 dence unto me and my poor estate can breed in a man, do I com- 
 mend m3'self unto your Lordship. I wax now somewhat ancient ; 
 one and thirty years is a great deal of sand in the hour glass. My 
 healtli, I thank God, I find confirmed ; and I do not fear that action 
 shall impair it, because I account my ordinary course of study 
 and meditation to be more painful than most parts of action are, 
 I ever bare a mind (in some middle place that I could discharge) to 
 serve her Majesty, not as a man born under Sol, that loveth honour ; 
 nor under Jupiter, that loveth business (for the contemplative 
 planet carrieth me away whoUy) ; but as a man bom under an 
 excellent sovereign, that deserveth the dedication of all men's 
 abilities. Besides, I do not find in myself so much self-love, but 
 that the greater parts of my thoughts are to deserve well (if I be 
 able) of my friends, and namely of your Lordship ; who, being the 
 Atlas of this commonwealth, the honour of my house, and the 
 second founder of my poor estate, I am tied by all duties, both of 
 a good patriot and of an unworthy kinsman, and of an obliged 
 servant, to employ whatsoever I am to do you service. Again, the 
 meanness of my estate doth somewhat move me : for, though I 
 cannot accuse myself that I am either prodigal or slothful, yet my 
 health is not to spend, nor my course to get. Lastly, I confess 
 that I have as vast contemplative ends, as I have moderate civil 
 ends : for I have taken all knowledge to be my province ; and if 
 I could purge it of two sorts of rovers, whereof the one with frivo- 
 lous disputations, confutations, and verbosities, the other with 
 blind experiments and auricular traditions and impostm-es, hath 
 committed so many spoils, I hope I should bring in industi-ious 
 observations, grounded conclusions, and profitable inventions and 
 discoveries ; the best state of that province. This, whether it be 
 curiosity or vain glory, or nature, or (if one take it favourably), 
 philanthropia, is so fixed in my mind as it cannot be removed. 
 And I do easily see, that place of any reasonable countenance doth 
 bring commandment of more wits than of a man's own ; which is the 
 thing I greatly affect. And for your Lordship, perhaps you shall 
 not find more strength and less encounter in any other. And if 
 your Lordship shall find now, or at any time, that I do seek or affect 
 any place whereunto any that is nearer unto your Lordship shall 
 be concurrent, say then that I am a most dishonest man. And if 
 your Lordship will not carry me on, I will not do as Anaxagoras 
 
18 BACON. [chap. 
 
 did, ■who redxiced himself with contemplation unto voluntary 
 poverty, but this 1 will do — I will sell the inheritance I have, 
 and purchase some lease of quick revenue, or some office of gain 
 that shall be executed by deputy, and so give over all care of 
 service, and become some sorry book-maker, or a true pioner in that 
 mine of truth, which (he said) lay so deep. This which I have 
 writ unto your Lordship is rather thoughts than words, being set 
 down without all art, disguising, or reservation. "Wherein I have 
 done honour both to your Lordship's wisdom, in judging that that 
 will be best believed of your Lordship which is truest, and to your 
 Lordship's good nature, in retaining nothing from you. And even so 
 I wish your Lordship all happiness, and to myself means and 
 occasions to be added to my faithful desire to do you service. From 
 my lodgings at Gray's Inn." 
 
 This letter, to his unsympathetic and suspicious, but 
 probably not unfriendly relative, is the key to Bacon's 
 plan of life ; which, with numberless changes of form, 
 he followed to the end. That is, a profession, steadily, 
 seriously, and laboriously kept to, in order to provide 
 the means of living ; and beyond that, as the ultimate 
 and real end of his life, the pursuit, in a Avay un- 
 attempted before, of all possible human knowledge, and 
 of the methods to improve it and make it sure and fruit- 
 ful. And so his life was carried out. On the one hand, 
 it was a continual and pertinacious seeking after govern- 
 ment employment, which could give credit to his name 
 and put money in his pocket — attempts by general 
 behaviour, by professional services when the occasion 
 offered, by putting his original and fertile pen at the 
 service of the government, to win confidence, and to 
 overcome the manifest indisposition of those in power 
 to think that a man who cherished the chimera of 
 universal knowledge could be a useful public servant. 
 On the other hand, all the while, in the crises of his 
 
I.] EARLY LIFE. 19 
 
 disappointment or triumph, the one great subject lay- 
 next his heart, filling him Avith fire and passion — 
 how really to know, and to teach men to know^ in- 
 deed, and to use their knowledge so as to command 
 nature ; the great hope to be the reformer and re- 
 storer of knowledge in a more wonderful sense than the 
 world had yet seen in the reformation of learning and 
 religion, and in the spread of civilised order in the great 
 states of the Eenaissance time. To this he gave his 
 best and deepest thoughts; for this he was for ever 
 accumulating, and for ever rearranging and reshaping 
 those masses of observation and inquiry and invention 
 and mental criticism which were to come in as parts 
 of the great design which he had seen in the visions 
 of his imagination, and of which at last he was only 
 able to leave noble fragments, incomplete after number- 
 less recastings. This was not indeed the only, but it 
 was the predominant and governing interest of his life. 
 Whether as solicitor for Court favour or public ofiice ; 
 whether drudging at the work of the law, or manag- 
 ing State prosecutions ; whether Avriting an oppor- 
 tune pamphlet against Spain or Father Parsons, or in- 
 venting a "device " for his Inn or for Lord Essex to give 
 amusement to Queen Elizabeth ; whether fulfilling his 
 duties as member of Parliament or rising step by step 
 to the highest places in the Council Board and the State ; 
 whether in the pride of success or under the amazement 
 of unexpected and irreparable overthrow, while it 
 seemed as if he was only measuring his strength against 
 the rival ambitions of the day, in the same spirit and 
 with the same object as his competitors, the true motive 
 of all his eagerness and all his labours was not theirs. 
 
20 r.ACON. [chap. 
 
 H e wanted to be powerful, and still more to jjc rich : but 
 he wanted to be so, because without power aud without 
 money he could not follow what was to him the only 
 thing worth following on earth — a_rca l knowledge of 
 the amazing and hitherto almost unkno^var world in 
 Avhich ~Tre~had to live. Bacon, to us, at least, at this 
 distance, who can only judge him from partial and im- 
 perfect knowledge, often seems to fal l far short of what 
 a man should be . H e was not one of the high-minded 
 and proud sear chers after knowledge aud truth, lik e 
 D escartes. Avho were content to accept a frugal im](^pmid- 
 I en ^ so tha t their time and their thoughts mig htjbc_their 
 o wn. Bacon was a man of the world, and wished to live 
 in and Avith the world. He threatened sometimes retire- 
 ment, but never with any very serious intention. In the 
 Court was his element, and there Avere his hopes. 
 Often there seems little to distinguish him from the 
 ordinary place-hunters, obsequious and selfish, of every 
 age ; little to distinguish him from the servile and in- 
 sincere flatterers, of whom he liimself complains, who 
 crowded the antechambers of the great Queen, content to 
 submit Avith smiling face and thankful words to the inso- 
 lence of her waywardness and temper, in the hope, more 
 often disappointed than not, of hitting her taste on 
 some lucky occasion, and being rewarded for the accident 
 by a place of gain or honour. Bacon's history, as read 
 in his letters, is not an agreeable one ; after every 
 allowance made for the fashions of language, aud the 
 necessities of a suitor, there is too much of insincere 
 p rofession of disinterestedne ss, too muc h of exaggerated 
 profession of admiration and devote d service, too much 
 of disparagement and insinuation against others, for a 
 
I.] EARLY LIFE. 21 
 
 man who respected himself. He submitted too much to 
 the miserable conditions of rising which he found. But, 
 nevertheless it must be said that it was for no mean ob- 
 ject, for no mere private selfishness or vanity, that he en- 
 dured all this. He strove hard to be a great man and a 
 rich man. But it was that he might have hisTiands free 
 and strong and well furnished to carry forward the double 
 task of overthrowing ignorance and building up the new 
 and solid knowledge on which his heart was set : that 
 immense concpest of nature on behalf of man which he 
 believed to be possible, and of which he believed him- 
 self to have the key. 
 
 The letter to Lord Burghley did not help him much. 
 He received the reversion of a place, the Clerkship of the 
 Council, which did not become vacant for twenty years. 
 But these years of service declined and place Avithheldwere 
 busy and useful ones. What he was most intent upon, and 
 what occupied his deepest and most serious thought, was 
 imknown to the world round him, and probably not very 
 intelligible to his few intimate friends, such as his brother 
 Antony and Dr. Andrewes. Meanwhile he placed his pen 
 at the disposal of the authorities, and though they regarded 
 him more as a man of study than of practice and experi- 
 ence, they were glad to make use of it. His versatile genius 
 found another employment. Besides his affluence in 
 topics, he had the liveliest fancy and most active imagina-__ 
 tion. But that he wanted the sense of poetic fitness and 
 m elody, he m ight almost be supposed, with his reach and 
 play of thoiight. to have been capable, as i a. maintaine d 
 in some eccentric modern theori e s, of AATiting Shake - 
 speare's plays. No man ever had a more imaginative 
 power of illustration, dra^Ti from the most remote and 
 
22 BACON. [chap. 
 
 most unlikely analogies ; analogies often of the quaintest 
 and most unexpected kind, but often also not only feli- 
 citous in application but profound and true. His po"\vers 
 were early called upon for some of those sportive com- 
 positions in which that age delighted on occasions of 
 rejoicing or festival. Three of his contributions to these 
 " devices " have been preserved : two of them composed 
 in honour of the Queen, as " triumphs," offered by Lord 
 Essex, one probably in 1592 and another in 1595; a 
 third for a Gray's Inn revel in 1594. The "devices" 
 themselves were of the common type of the time, ex- 
 travagant, odd, full of awkward allegory and absurd 
 flattery, and running to a prolixity which must make 
 modern lovers of amusement wonder at the patience of 
 those days; but the " discourses " furnished by Bacon 
 are full of fine observation and brilliant thought and wifc 
 and happy illustration, which, fantastic as the general 
 conception is, raises them far above the level of such 
 fugitive trifles. 
 
 Among the fragmentary papers belonging to this time 
 which have come down, not the least curious are those 
 which throw light on his manner of working. While he 
 was following out the great ideas which were to be the 
 basis of his philosophy, he was as busy and as painstaking 
 in fashioning the instruments by which they were to be 
 expressed ; and in these papers we have the records and 
 specimens of this preparation. He Avas a great collector 
 of sentences, proverbs, quotations, sayings, illustrations, 
 anecdotes, and he seems to have I'ead sometimes, simply 
 to gather phrases and apt words. He jots down at 
 random any good and pointed remark which comes into 
 his thought or his memory ; at another time he groups 
 
I.] EARLY LIFE. 23 
 
 a set of stock quotations with a special drift, bearing 
 on some subject, such as the faults of universities or 
 the habits of lawyers. Nothing is too minute for his 
 notice. He brings together in great profusion mere 
 forms, varied turns of expression, heads and tails of 
 clauses and paragraphs, transitions, connections ; he notes 
 down fashions of compliment, of excuse or repartee, 
 even morning and evening salutations ; he records 
 neat and convenient opening and concluding sentences, 
 ways of speaking more adapted than others to give a 
 special colour or direction to what the speaker or writer 
 has to say — all that hook-and-eye work, which seems so 
 trivial and passes so unnoticed as a matter of course, and 
 which yet is often hard to reach, and which makes all the 
 difference between tameness and liveliness, between clear- 
 ness and obscurity — all the difference, not merely to the 
 ease and naturalness, but often to the logical force of 
 speech. These collections it was his way to sift and tran- 
 scribe again and again, adding as well as omitting. From 
 one of these, belonging to 1594 and the following years, 
 the Promus of Formularies and Elegancies, Mr. Spedding has 
 given curious extracts ; and the whole collection has been 
 recently edited by Mrs. Henry Pott. Thus it was that he 
 prepared himself for what, as we read it, or as his audi- 
 ence heard it, seems the suggestion or recollection of the 
 moment. Bacon was always much more careful of the 
 value or aptness of a thought than of its appearing new 
 and original. Of all great writers he least minds repeat- 
 ing himself, perhaps in the very same Avords ; so that a 
 simile, an illustration, a quotation pleases him, he returns 
 to it — he is never tired of it ; it obviously gives him satis- 
 faction to introduce it again and again. These collections 
 
24 BACON. [chap. 
 
 of odds and ends illustrate another point in his hterary 
 habits. His was a mind keenly sensitive to all analogies 
 and affinities, impatient of a strict and rigid logical groove, 
 hut spreading as it were tentacles on all sides in quest of 
 chance prey, and quickened into a Avhole system of imagi- 
 nation by the electric quiver imparted by a single word, 
 at once the key and symbol of the thinking it had led to. 
 And so he puts do^v^^ word or phrase, so enigmatical to us 
 Avho see it by itself, Avhich to him would wake up a whole 
 train of ideas, as he remembered the occasion of it — how 
 at a certain time and place this word set the whole moving, 
 seemed to breathe new life and shed new light, and has 
 remained the token, meaningless in itself, which reminds 
 him of so much. 
 
 When we come to read his letters, his speeches, his 
 works, we come continually on the results and proofs of 
 this early labour. Some of the most memorable and 
 familiar passages of his writings are to be traced from 
 the storehouses which he filled in these years of prepara- 
 tion. An example of this correspondence between the 
 note-book and the composition is to be seen in a paper 
 belonging to this period, written apparently to fonn part 
 of a masque, or as he himself calls it, a "Conference of 
 Pleasure," and entitled the Praise of Knowledge. It is 
 interesting because it is the first draught which we have 
 from him of some of the leading ideas and most charac- 
 teristic language about the defects and the improvement 
 of knowledge, which were afterAvards embodied in the 
 Advancement and the Novum Organum. The whole spirit 
 and aim of his great reform is summed up in the follow- 
 ing fine passage : — 
 
 " Facility to iDelieve, impatience to doiiLt, temerity to assever, 
 
T.] EAELY LIFE. 25 
 
 glory to know, doubt to contradict, end to gain, sloth to search, 
 seeking things in words, resting in a part of nature, — these and the 
 like have been the things ■which have forbidden the happy match 
 between the mind of man and the nature of things, and in place 
 thereof have married it to vain notions and blind experiments. . . . 
 Therefore, no doubt, the sova-cignty of ma iilieth hid in knowledge: 
 wherein many things are reserved which kings ^-ith their treasures 
 cannot buy nor with their force command ; their spials and intelli- 
 gencers can give no news of them ; their seamen and discoverers 
 cannot sail where they grow. Now we govern nature in opinions, 
 but we are thrall unto her in necessity ; but if we could be led by 
 her in invention, we should command her in action." 
 
 To the same occasion as the discourse on the Praise 
 of Knoidedge belongs, also, one in Praise of the Queen. 
 As one is an early specimen of his manner of writing on 
 philosophy, so this is a specimen of what was equally 
 characteristic of him — his political and historical writing. 
 It is, in form, necessarily a panegyric, as high-flown and 
 adulatory as such performances in those days were 
 bovmd to be. But it is not only flattery. It fixes 
 with true discrimination on the points in Elizabeth's 
 character and reign which were really subjects of admira- 
 tion and homage. Thus of her unquailing spirit at the 
 time of the Spanish invasion : — 
 
 "Lastly, see a Queen, that when her realm was to have been 
 invaded by an army the preparation whereof was like the travail 
 of an elephant, the provisions infinite, the setting forth whereof 
 was the terror and wonder of Europe ; it was not seen that her 
 cheer, her fashion, her ordinary manner, was anything altered ; 
 not a cloud of that storm did appear in that countenance wherein 
 peace doth ever shine ; but Arith excellent assurance and advised 
 security she inspired her council, animated her nobility, re- 
 doubled the courage of her people ; still having this noble 
 apprehension, not only that she would communicate her for- 
 tune with them, but that it was she that would protect them, and 
 
26 BACON. [chap. 
 
 not they her ; which she testified by no less demonstration than 
 her presence in camp. Therefore that magnanimity that neither 
 feareth greatness of alteration, nor tlie vows of conspirators, nor 
 the power of the enemy, is more than heroical. " 
 
 These papers, though he put his best workmanship 
 into them, as he invariably did with whatever he 
 touched, were of an ornamental kind. But he did more 
 serious work. In the year 1592 a pamphlet had been 
 published on the Continent in Latin and English, Re- 
 sponsio ad Edictum Reg'mce Anglice, with reference to the 
 severe legislation which followed on the Armada, making 
 si;ch charges against the Queen and the Government as it 
 was natural for the Roman Catholic party to make, and 
 making them with the utmost virulence- and unscrupu- 
 lousness. It was supposed to be written by the ablest 
 of the Roman pamphleteers. Father Parsons. The 
 Government felt it to be a dangerous indictment ; and 
 Bacon was chosen to write the answer to it. He had 
 additional interest in the matter, for the pamphlet made 
 a special and bitter attack on Burghley, as the person 
 mainly responsible for the Queen's policy. Bacon's 
 reply is long and elaborate, taking up every charge, and 
 reviewing from his own point of view the whole course 
 of the struggle between the Queen and the supporters 
 of the Roman Catholic interest abroad and at home. It 
 cannot be considered an impartial review ; besides that 
 it was written to order, no man in England could then 
 ^\Tite impartially in that quarrel ; but it is not more 
 one-sided and uncandid than the pamphlet which it 
 answers, and Bacon is able to recriminate Avith effect, 
 and to show gross credulity and looseness of assertion 
 on the part of the Roman Catholic advocate. But reli- 
 
I.] EARLY LIFE. 27 
 
 gion had too much to do witli the politics of both sides 
 for either to be able to come into the dispute with clean 
 hands : the Eoman Catholics meant much more than 
 toleration, and the sanguinary punishments of the 
 English law against priests and Jesuits were edged 
 by something even keener than the fear of treason. 
 But the paper contains some large surveys of public 
 aftairs, Avhich probably no one at that time coidd "WTite 
 but Bacon, Bacon never liked to waste anything good 
 which he had written ; and much of what he had written 
 in the panegyric in Praise of the Queen is made use 
 of again, and transferred with little change to the pages 
 of the Ohsei-vations on a Libel. 
 
CHAPTER II. 
 
 BACON AND ELIZABETH. 
 
 The last decade of the centuiy, and almost of Elizabeth's 
 reign (1590-1600), was an eventful one to Bacon's 
 fortunes. In it the vision of his great design disclosed 
 itself more and more to his imagination and hopes, and 
 with more and more irresistible fascination. In it he 
 made his first literary venture, the first edition of his 
 Essays (1597), ten in number, the first-fruits of his 
 early and ever watchful observation of men and affairs. 
 These years, too, saw his first steps in public life, the 
 first efforts to bring him into importance, the first great 
 trials and tests of his character. They saw the begin- 
 ning and they saw the end of his relations with the only 
 friend who, at that time, recognised his genius and his 
 purposes, certainly the only friend who ever pushed his 
 claims ; they saw the growth of a friendship which was 
 to have so tragical a close, and they saw the beginnings 
 and causes of a bitter personal rivalry which Avas to last 
 through life, and which was to be a potent element 
 hereafter in Bacon's ruin. The friend was the Earl of 
 Essex. The competitor was the ablest, and also the 
 most truculent and unscrupulous of English lawyers, 
 Edward Coke. 
 
CHAP. II.] BACON AXD ELIZABETH. 29 
 
 While Bacon, in the shade, had been hxying the 
 foundations of his philosophy of nature, and vainly suing 
 for legal or political employment, another man had 
 been steadily rising in the Queen's favour and carrying 
 all before him at Court, Robert Devereux, Lord Essex ; 
 and ^vith Essex Bacon had formed an acquaintance which 
 had ripened into an intimate and affectionate friendship. 
 We commonly think of Essex as a vain and insolent 
 favourite, vrlio did ill the greatest Avork given him to do 
 ^the reduction of Ireland; who did it ill from some un- 
 explained reason of spite and miscliief ; and who, when 
 called to account for it, broke out into senseless and idle 
 rebellion. This was the end : but he was not always thus. 
 He began life with great gifts and noble m cls : h e was a 
 serious, modest, and large-minded student both of books 
 a nd thing s ; and h e turned his studies to full account. 
 He had imagination and love of enterprise, Avhicli 
 gave him an insight into Bacon's ideas such as none of 
 Bacon's contemporaries had. He was a man of simple 
 and earnest religio n ; he s^nnpathised most with t he 
 P urita ns, because they were seri ous and because the y 
 we re hardly used . Those who most condemn him 
 acknowledge his nobleness and generosity of nature. 
 Bacon in after days, when all was over between them, 
 spoke of him as a man alyvays j^ticntissimus veri; "the 
 more plainly and frankly you shall deal with my lord," 
 he writes elsewhere, "not only in disclosing particulars, 
 but in giving him caveats and admonishing him of any 
 error which in this action he may commit (such is his 
 lordship's nature), the better he will take it." "He 
 must have seemed," says j\Ir. Spodding, a little too 
 grandly, "in the eyes of Bacon like the hope of the 
 
30 BACON. [chap. 
 
 world." The two men, certainly, became warmly at- 
 tached. Their friendship came to be one of the closest 
 kind, full of mutual services, and of genuine affection 
 on both sides. It was not the relation of a great patron 
 and useful dependant ; it was, what might be expected 
 in the two men, that of affectionate equality. Each man 
 was equally capable of seeing what the other was, and 
 saw it. What Essex's feelings were towards Bacon the 
 results showed. Bacon, in after years, repeatedly claimed 
 to have devoted his whole time and labour to Essex's 
 service. Holding him, he says, to be "the fittest instru- 
 ment to do good to the State, I applied myself to him in 
 a manner which I think rarely happeueth among men ; 
 neglecting the Queen's service, mine ow^n fortune, and, in 
 a sort, my vocation, I did nothing but advise and rumin- 
 ate with myself . . . anything that might concern his lord- 
 I ship's honour, fortune, or service." The claim is far too 
 wide. The " Queen's service " had hardly as yet come 
 much in Bacon's Avay, and he never neglected it when it 
 did come, nor his o-vvn fortune or vocation : his letters 
 remain^Jia-JiMestJiis care in these respects. But, no 
 doubt. Bacon was then as ready to be of use to Essex, 
 the one man who seemed to understand and value him, 
 as Essex was desirous to be of use to Bacon. 
 
 And it seemed as if Essex would have the ability as 
 well as the wish. Essex was, without exception, the 
 most brilliant man_ who ev er_apppared at Elizabeth's 
 Court, and it seemed as if he we re_ going to b eJJiOJxiQst 
 po wertui . I:efcestgrwas dead~ Burghley was growing 
 old, and indisposed for the adventures and levity which, 
 with all her grand power of ruling, Elizabeth loved. She 
 needed a favourite, and Essex was unfortunately marked 
 
II.] BACON AND ELIZABETH. 31 
 
 out for what she ■wanted. He had Leicester's fascination 
 ■without his mean and cruel selfishness. He ■was as 
 generous, ^^allant, as quick to descry all great things 
 in art and life, as Philip Sidn ey, -w ith jnorejdgour and 
 fitness for active ^life than ^idney. He Jiadjiot^^eigh's 
 sad, dark depths of thought, but he had a daring courage 
 equal to Ealeigh's, ■without Raleigh's cynical contempt 
 for mercy and honour. He had every personal advan- 
 tage requisite for a time ■when intellect and ready wit, 
 and high -tempered valour, and personal beauty, and 
 skill in affairs, with equal skill in amusements, were ex- 
 pected to go together in the accomplished courtier. 
 And Essex was a man not merely to be courted and 
 admired, to shine and dazzle, but to be loved. Eliza- 
 beth, with her strange and perverse emotional constitu- 
 tion, loved him, if she ever loved any one. Every one 
 who served him loved him : and he was as much as any 
 one could be in those days, a popular favourite. Under 
 better fortune he might have risen to a great height of 
 character : i n E lizabetb/ s Cou rt he was fated to be 
 ruined. 
 
 For in that Court all the qualities in him which needed 
 control received daily stimulus, and his ardour and 
 high-aiming temper turned into impatience and restless 
 irritability. He had a mistress who was at one time in 
 the humour to be treated as a tender woman, at another 
 as an outrageous flirt, at another as the haughtiest and 
 most imperious of queens : her mood varied, no one 
 could tell how, and it was most dangerous to mistake it. 
 It was part of her pleasure to find in her favourite a 
 spirit as high, a humour as contradictory and determined, 
 as her own : it was the charming contrast to the obsequi- 
 
32 BACON. [cHAi-. 
 
 ousness or tlic prudence of the rest ; but no one could 
 be sure at what unlooked-for moment, and how fiercely, 
 she might resent in earnest a display of Avhat she had 
 herself encouraged. Essex was ruined for all real great- 
 ness by having to suit himself to this be'svildering and 
 most unwholesome and degrading Avaywardness. She 
 taught him to think himself irresistible in opinion and 
 in claims : she amused herself in teaching him hoAv 
 completely he was mistaken. Alternately si^oiled and 
 crossed, he learned to be exacting, unreasonable, absurd 
 in his pettish resentments or brooding sullenucss. He 
 learned to think that she must be dealt with by the 
 same methods which she herself employed. The effect 
 was not produced in a moment ; it was the result of a 
 courtiership of sixteen years. But it ended in corrupting 
 a noble nature. Essex came to believe that she Avho 
 cowed others must be frightened herself : that the sting- 
 ing injustice which led a proud man to expect, only to 
 see how he would behave when refused, deserved to be 
 brought to reason by a counter-bufFet as rough as her 
 own insolent caprice. He drifted into discontent, into 
 disaffection, into neglect of duty, into questionable 
 schemings for the future of a reign that must shortly 
 end, into criminal methods of guarding himself, of 
 humbling his rivals and regaining influence. A "fatal 
 impatience," as Bacon calls it, gave his rivals an advan- 
 tage which, perhaps in self-defence, they could not fail to 
 take ; and that career, so brilliant, so full of promise of 
 good, ended in misery, in dishonour, in remorse, on the 
 scafibld of the Tower. 
 
 AVith this attractive and powerful person Bacon's 
 fortunes, in the last years of the century, became more 
 
II.] BACON AXD ELIZABETH. 33 
 
 and more kiiit up. Bacon was now past thirty, Essex 
 a few years younger. In spite of Bacon's apparent 
 advantage and interest at Court, in spite of abilities, 
 which, though his genius was not yet kno"\vn, his con- 
 temporaries clearly recognised, he was still a struggling 
 and unsuccessful man : ambitious to rise, for no unworthy 
 reasons, but needy, in Aveak health, vnth. careless and 
 expensive habits, and embarrassed with debt. He had 
 hoped to rise by the favour of the Queen, and for the 
 sake of his father. For some ill-explained reason he was 
 to the last disappointed. Though she used him "for 
 matters of state and revenue," she either did not like 
 him, or did not see in him the servant she wanted to 
 advance. He went on to the last pressing his uncle. Lord 
 Burghley : he applied in the humblest terms, he made 
 himself useful with his pen, he got his mother to vrrite for 
 him ; but Lord Burghley, probably because he thought 
 his nephew more of a man of letters, than a soimd lawyer 
 and practical public servant, did not care to bring him 
 forward. From his cousin, Robert Cecil, Bacon received 
 poHte words and friendly assurances ; Cecil may have 
 undervalued him, or have been jealous of him, or sus- 
 pected him as a friend of Essex : he certainly gave Bacon 
 good reason to think that his words meant nothing. 
 Except Essex, and perhaps his brother Antony — the most 
 affectionate and devoted of brothers — no one had yet 
 recognised all that Bacon was. Meanwhile time was 
 passing. The vastness, the difficulties, the attractions 
 of that conquest of all knowledge which he dreamed of, 
 were becoming greater every day to his thoughts. The 
 law, Avithout which he could not live, took up time and 
 brought in little. Attendance on the Court was ex- 
 
 D 
 
34 BACON. [cuAi'. 
 
 pensive, yet indispensable, if he wished for place. His 
 mother was never very friendly, and thought him 
 absurd and extravagant. Debts increased and creditors 
 grumbled. The outlook was discouraging, when his 
 friendship with Essex opened to him a more hopeful 
 prospect. 
 
 In the year 1593 the Attorney-General's place was 
 vacant, and Essex, who in that year became a Privy Coun- 
 cillor, determined that Bacon should be Attorney-General. 
 Bacon's reputation as a lawyer was overshadowed by his 
 philosophical and literary pursuits. He was thought 
 young for the office, and he had not yet served in any 
 subordinate place. And there was another man, who 
 was supposed to carry all English law in his head, full 
 of rude force and endless precedents, hard of heart, and 
 voluble of tongue, who also wanted it. An Attorney- 
 General was one who would bring all the resources and 
 hidden subtleties of English law to the service of the 
 Crown, and use them with thorough-going and unflinching 
 resolution against those whom the Crown accused of 
 treason, sedition, or invasion of the prerogative. It is 
 no wonder that the Cecils, and the Queen herself, thought 
 Coke likely to be a more useful public servant than 
 Bacon : it is certain what Coke himself thought about 
 it, and what his estimate Avas of the man whom Essex 
 was pushing against him. But Essex did not take up 
 his friends cause in the lukewarm fashion in which 
 Burghley had patronised his nephew. There was no- 
 thing that Essex pursued with greater pertinacity. He 
 importuned the Queen. He risked without scruple 
 offending her. She apparently long shrank from directly 
 refusing his request. The Cecils were for Coke — the 
 
II.] BACON AND ELIZABETH. 36 
 
 ^' Hiiddler," as Bacon calls him, in a letter to Essex; but 
 the appointment Avas delayed. All through 1593, and 
 until April 1594, the struggle went on. 
 
 "When Eobert Cecil suggested that Essex should be 
 content vnth the Solicitor's place for Bacon, "praying 
 him to be well advised, for if his Lordship had spoken 
 of that it might have been of easier digestion to the 
 Queen," he turned round on Cecil — 
 
 "Digest me no digesting (said the Earl) ; for the Attorneyship 
 is that I must have for Francis Bacon ; and in that I will spend 
 my uttermost credit, friendship, and authority against whomsoever, 
 and that whosoever went about to procure it to others, that it 
 should cost both the mediators and the suitors the setting on before 
 they came by it. And this be you assured of, Sir Eobert, quoth 
 the Earl, for now do I fully declare myself ; and for your own part, 
 Sir Robert, I do think much and strange both of my Lord your 
 father and you, that can have the mind to seek the preferment of 
 a stranger before so near a kinsman ; namely, considering if you 
 weigh in a balance his parts and sufficiency in any respect with 
 those of his competitor, excepting only four poor years of admit- 
 tance, which Francis Bacon hath more than recompensed with the 
 priority of his reading, in all other respects you shall find no com- 
 parison between them." 
 
 But the Queen's disgust at some very slight show of 
 independence on Bacon's part in Parliament, unforgiven 
 in spite of repeated apologies, together -with the influ- 
 ence of the Cecils and the pressure of so formidable 
 and so useful a man as Coke, turned the scale against 
 Essex. In April 1594, Coke was made Attorney. Coke 
 did not forget the pretender to law, as he would think 
 him, who had dared so long to dispute his claims ; and 
 Bacon was deeply wounded. "No man," he thought, "had 
 ever received a more exquisite disgrace," and he spoke 
 
36 BACON. [chap. 
 
 of retiring to Cambridge " to spend the rest of his life 
 in his studies and contemplations." But Essex Avas not 
 discouraged. He next pressed eagerly for the Solicitor- 
 ship. Again, after much waiting he was foiled. An 
 inferior man was put over Bacon's head. Bacon found 
 that Essex, who could do most things, for some reason 
 could not do this. He himself, too, had pressed his suit 
 with the greatest importunity on the Queen, on Burghley, 
 on Cecil, on every one who could help him ; he re- 
 minded the Queen how many years ago it was since he 
 first kissed her hand in her service, and ever since had used 
 his wits to please ; but it was all in vain. For once he lost 
 patience. He was angry Avith Essex ; the Queen's anger 
 Avith Essex had, he thought, recoiled on his friend. He 
 Avas angry Avith the Queen ; she held his long Avaiting 
 cheap; she played Avith him and amused herself Avith delay; 
 he Avould go abroad, and he " kncAV her Majesty's nature, 
 that she neither careth though the Avhole surname of 
 the Bacons travelled, nor of the Cecils neither." He Avas 
 very angry Avith Robert Cecil ; affecting not to believe 
 them, he tells him stories he has heard of his corrupt 
 and underhand dealing. He Avrites almost a fare- 
 Avell letter of ceremonious but ambiguous thanks to 
 Lord Burghley, hoping that he would impute any offence 
 that Bacon might have given to the " complexion of a 
 suitor and a tired sea-sick suitor," and speaking despair- 
 ingly of his future success in the laAv. The humiliations 
 of Avhat a suitor has to go through torment him : " It is 
 my luck," he Avrites to Cecil, " still to be akin to such 
 things as I neither like in nature nor Avould Avillingly 
 meet A^dth in my course, but yet cannot avoid Avithout 
 shoAv of base timorousness or else of imkind or suspicious 
 
11.] BACON AND ELIZABETH. 37 
 
 strangeness." And to his friend Fulke Greville, he thus 
 unburdens himself : — 
 
 "Sir— I understand of your pains to have visited me, for which 
 I thank you. My matter is an endless question. I assure you I 
 had said Requiesce anima mea ; but I now am otherwise put to my 
 psalter; Nolite confidcre. I dare go no further. Her Majesty had 
 by set speech more than once assured me of her intention to call 
 me to her service, which I could not understand but of the place 
 I had been named to. And now whether invidus Jiomo hoc fecit ; 
 or whether my matter must be an appendix to my Lord of Essex 
 suit ; or whether her Majestj', pretending to prove my ability, 
 meaneth but to take advantage of some errors which, like enough, 
 at one time or other I may commit ; or what is it ; but her Majesty 
 is not ready to despatch it. And what though the Master of the 
 Rolls, and my Lord of Essex, and yourself, and others, think my 
 case without doubt, yet in the meantime I have a hard condition, 
 to stand so that whatsoever service I do to her Majesty, it shall be 
 thought to be but servitium viscatum, lime-twigs and fetches to 
 place myself; and so I shall have tnvj, not thanks. This is a 
 course to quench all good spirits, and to corrupt every man's 
 nature ; which -vd]!, I fear, much hurt her Majestj^'s service in the 
 end. I have been like a piece of stuff bespoken in the shop ; and 
 if her Majesty \vill not take me, it may be the selliag by parcels 
 will be more gainful. For to be, as I told you, like a child follow- 
 ing a bu-d, which when he is nearest flieth away and lighteth a 
 little before, and then the child after it again, and so in infinitum, 
 I am weary of it ; as also of wearying my good friends : of whom, 
 nevertheless, I hope in one course or other gratefuUy to deserve. 
 And so, not forgetting your business, I leave to trouble you Avith 
 this idle letter; being hntjusta et moderata querimonia ; for indeed 
 I do confess, 'jrrimus amor will not easily be cast off. And thus 
 again I commend me to you. " 
 
 After one naore effort the chase was given up, at least 
 for the moment ; for it was soon resumed. But just now 
 Bacon felt that all the world was against him. He 
 would retire "out of the sunshine into the shade." One 
 
38 BACON. [CHAP. 
 
 friend only encouraged him. He did more. He helped 
 him when Bacon most wanted help, in his straightened 
 and embarrassed "estate." Essex, when he could do 
 nothing more, gave Bacon an estate worth at least 
 £1800. Bacon's resolution is recorded in the following 
 letter : — 
 
 " It may please your good Lordship — I pray God her Majesty's 
 weighing be not like the weight of a balance ; gravia deorsum levia 
 sursum. But I am as far from being altered in devotion towards 
 her, as I am from distrust that she will be altered in opinion towards 
 me, when she knoweth me better. For myself, I have lost some 
 opinion, some time, and some means ; this is my account ; but then 
 for opinion, it is a blast that goeth and cometh ; for time, it is 
 true it goeth and cometh not ; but yet I have learned that it may 
 be redeemed. For means, I value that most ; and the rather, 
 because I ain pi.irposcd not to folloio the practice of the law {if her 
 Majesty command me in any particular, I shall be ready to do her 
 ivilling service) ; and my reason is only, because it drinlceth too much 
 time, ivhich I have dedicated to better purposes. But even for that 
 point of estate and means, I partly lean to Thales' opinion. That a 
 philosopher may be rich if he will. Thus your Lordship seeth how I 
 comfort myself ; to the increase whereof I would fain please myself 
 to believe that to be true which my Lord Treasurer writeth ; which 
 is, that it is more than a philosopher morally can disgest. But with- 
 out any such high conceit, I esteem it like the pulling out of an 
 aching tooth, which, I remember, when I was a child, and had 
 little philosoph}', I was glad of when it was done. For your 
 Lordship, I do think myself more beholding to you than to any 
 man. And I say, I reckon myself as a common (not popular but 
 common) ; and as much as is lawful to be enclosed of a common, so 
 much your Lordship shall be sure to have. — Your Lordship's to 
 obey your honourable commands, more settled than ever." 
 
 It may be that, as Bacon afterwards maintained, the 
 closing sentences of this letter implied a significant re- 
 serve of his devotion. But during the brilliant and 
 stormy years of Essex's career which followed, Bacon's 
 
11.] BACOX AXD ELIZABETH. 39 
 
 relations to him continued unaltered. Essex pressed 
 Bacon's claims whenever a chance oftered. He did his 
 best to get Bacon a rich ^yiie — the young widow of Sir 
 Christopher Hatton — but in vain. Instead of Bacon 
 she accepted Coke, and became famous afterwards in the 
 great family quarrel, in which Coke and Bacon again 
 found themselves face to face, and which nearly ruined 
 Bacon before the time. Bacon worked for Essex when 
 he was wanted, and gave the advice which a shrewd and 
 cautious friend would give to a man who, by his success 
 and increasing pride and self-confidence, was running 
 into serious dangers, arming against himself deadly foes, 
 and exposing himself to the chances of fortune. Bacon 
 was nervous about Essex's capacity for war, a capacity 
 which perhaps was not proved, even by the most brilliant 
 exploit of the time, the capture of Cadiz, in which Essex 
 foreshadowed the heroic but well -calculated audacities 
 of Nelson and Cochrane, and showed himself as little 
 able as they to bear the intoxication of success, and to 
 work in concert with envious and unfriendly associates. 
 At the end of the year 1596, the year in which Essex 
 had won such reputation at Cadiz, Bacon wrote him a 
 letter of advice and remonstrance. It is a lively picture 
 of the defects and dangers of Essex's behaviour as the 
 Queen's favourite ; and it is a most characteristic and 
 worldly --^vise summary of the ways which Bacon would 
 have him take, to cure the one and escape the other. 
 Bacon had, as he says, " good reason to think that the 
 Earl's fortime comprehended his o\^ti." And the letter 
 may perhaps be taken as an indirect warning to Essex 
 that Bacon must, at any rate, take care of his own 
 fortune, if the Earl persisted in dangerous courses. 
 
40 BACON. [CHAP. 
 
 Bacon shows how he is to remove the impressions, 
 strong in the Queen's mind, of Essex's defects ; how he 
 is, by due submissions and stratagems, to catch her 
 humour : 
 
 "But whether I counsel j'ou the best, or for the best, dutj' 
 binileth me to offer to you my wishes. I said to your Lordship 
 last time, Martha, Martha, attcndis ad 2}lurima, unum sufficit ; win 
 the Queen : if this be not the beginning, of any other course I see 
 no end." 
 
 Bacon gives a series of minute directions how Essex 
 is to disarm the Queen's suspicions, and to neutralise 
 the advantage which his rivals take of them ; how he is 
 to remove "the opinion of his nature being ojnniastre 
 and not rulable ; " how, avoiding the faults of Leicester 
 and Hatton, he is, as far as he can, to " allege them for 
 authors and patterns." Especially, he must give up that 
 show of soldier-like distinction, which the Queen so dis- 
 liked, and take some quiet post at Court. He must not 
 alarm the Queen by seeking popularity; he must take 
 care of his estate ; he must get rid of some of his officers ; 
 and he must not be disquieted by other favourites. 
 
 Bacon wished, as he said afterwards, to see him 
 " with a white staff in his hand, as my Lord of Leicester 
 had," an honour and ornament to the Court in the eyes 
 of the people and foreign ambassadors. But Essex was 
 not fit for the part which Bacon urged upon him, that 
 of an obsequious and vigilant observer of the Queen's 
 moods and humours. As time went on, things became 
 more and more diflicult between him and his strange 
 mistress : and there were never wanting men who, like 
 Cecil and Ealeigh, for good and bad reasons, feared and 
 hated Essex, and who had the craft and the skill to 
 
II.] BACON AND ELIZABETH. 41 
 
 make the most of his inexcusable errors. At last he 
 allowed himself, from ambition, from the spirit of contra- 
 diction, from the blind passion for doing what he thought 
 would show defiance to his enemies, to be tempted into 
 the Irish campaign of 1599. Bacon at a later time 
 claimed credit for having foreseen and foretold its issue. 
 " I did as plainly see his overthrow, chained as it were 
 by destiny to that joiu'ney, as it is possible for any man 
 to ground a judgment on future contingents." He 
 warned Essex, so he thought in after years, of the 
 difficulty of the Avork ; he warned him that he would 
 leave the Queen in the hands of his enemies : " It 
 would be ill for her, ill for him, ill for the State." " I 
 am sure," he adds, "I never in anything in my life 
 dealt with him in like earnestness by speech, by writing, 
 and by all the means I could devise." But Bacon's 
 memory Avas mistaken. We have his letters. When 
 Essex went to Ireland, Bacon wrote only in the 
 language of sanguine hope : so little did he see " over- 
 throw chained by destiny to that journe}^," that " some 
 good spirit led his pen to presage to his Lordship 
 success : " he saw in the enterprise a great occasion of 
 honour to his friend : he gave prudent counsels, but he 
 looked forward confidently to Essex being as "fatal a 
 captain to that war, as Africanus was to the war of Car- 
 thage." Indeed, however anxious he may have been, he 
 could not have foreseen Essex's unaccountable and to 
 this day unintelligible failure. But failure was the end, 
 from whatever cause ; failure, disgraceful and complete. 
 Then followed wild and guilty but abortive projects for 
 retrieving his failure, by using his power in Ireland to 
 make himself formidable to his enemies at Court, and 
 
42 BACON. [CHAP. 
 
 even to the Queen herself. He intrigued with Tyrone : 
 he intrigued Avith James of Scotland : he plunged into 
 a whirl of angry and baseless projects, which came to 
 nothing the moment they were discussed How empty 
 and idle they Avere was shoAVTi by his return against 
 orders to tell his own story at jSTonsuch, and by thus 
 placing himself alone and undeniably in the Avrong, in 
 the poAA'er of the hostile Council. Of course it Avas not 
 to be thought of that Cecil should not use his adA^an- 
 tage in the game. It was too early, irritated though the 
 Queen Avas, to strike the final bloAA^. But it is impossible 
 not to see, looking back over the miserable history, that 
 Essex was treated in a way which Avas certain, sooner 
 or later, to make him, being what he was, plunge into a 
 fatal and irretrievable mistake. He AA^as treated as a 
 cat treats a mouse : he Avas Avorried, confined, disgraced, 
 publicly reprimanded, brought just within verge of the 
 charge of treason, but not quite, just enough to discredit 
 and alarm him, but to leave him still a certain amount 
 of play. He Avas made to see that the Queen's faA'our 
 Avas not quite hopeless ; but that nothing but the most 
 absolute and unreserA'ed humiliation could recoA'er it. 
 It Avas plain to any one avIio knew Essex that this 
 treatment Avould driA^e Essex to madness. "These same 
 gradations of yours " — so Bacon represents himself ex- 
 postulating AA'ith the Queen on her caprices — "are fitter 
 to corrupt than to correct any mind of greatness." 
 Thej^ made Essex desperate ; he became frightened for 
 his life, and he had reason to be so, though not in the 
 Avay Avhich he feared. At length came the stupid and 
 ridiculous outbreak of the 8th of February y§^» ^ 
 plot to seize the palace and raise the city against the 
 
II.] BACON AXD ELIZABETH. 43 
 
 ministers, by the help of a few gentlemen armed only 
 with their rapiers. As Bacon himself told the Queen, 
 "if some base and cruel -minded persons had entered 
 into such an action, it might have caused much blow 
 and combustion; but it appeared well that they were 
 such as knew not how to play the malefactors ! " But 
 it was sufficient to bring Essex within the doom of 
 treason. 
 
 Essex knew well what the stake was. He lost it, 
 and deserved to lose it, little as his enemies deserved to 
 y\^n it ; for they, too, were doing what would have cost 
 them their heads if Elizabeth had known it, — correspond- 
 ing, as Essex was accused of doing, with Scotland about 
 the succession, and possibly with Spain. But they 
 were playing cautiously and craftily ; he with bungling 
 passion. He had been so long accustomed to power and 
 place, that he could not endure that rivals should keep 
 him out of it. They were content to have their ovm. 
 way, while affecting to be the humblest of servants : he 
 would be nothing less than a Mayor of the Palace. He 
 Avas guilty of a great public crime, as every man is who 
 appeals to arms for anything short of the most sacred 
 cause. He was bringing into England, which had settled 
 down into peaceable ways, an imitation of the violent 
 methods of France and the Guises. But the crime as 
 well as the penalty belonged to the age, and crimes 
 legally said to be against the State mean morally very 
 different things according to the state of society and 
 opinion. It is an unfairness verging on the ridiculous, 
 when the ground is elaborately laid for keeping up the 
 impression that Essex was preparing a real treason 
 against the Queen like that of Norfolk. It was a treason 
 
44 BACON. [chap. 
 
 of the same sort and order as that for which Korthum- 
 berland sent Somerset to the block : the treason of being 
 an unsuccessful rival. 
 
 Meanwhile Bacon had been getting gradually into 
 the unofficial employ of the Government. He had be- 
 come one of the "Learned Counsel," la-nyers A\dth sub- 
 ordinate and intermittent work, used when wanted, but 
 without i^atent or salary, and not ranking Anth the 
 regular law officers. The Government had found him 
 useful in affairs of the revenue, in framing interrogatories 
 for prisoners in the Tower, in drawing up reports of 
 plots against the Queen. He did not in this way earn 
 enough to support himself; but he had thus come to 
 have some degree of access to the Queen, which he 
 represents as being familiar and confidential, though he 
 still perceived, as he says himself, that she did not like 
 him. At the first news of Essex's return to England, 
 Bacon greeted him : — 
 
 "My Lord — Conceiving that yonr Lordship came now up in 
 the person of a good servant to see your sovereign mistress, which 
 kind of compliments are many times instar magnorum merUoncm, 
 and therefore it would be hard for me to find you, I have com- 
 mitted to this poor paper the humble salutations of him that is 
 more yours than any man's, and more yours than any onan. To 
 these salutations I add a due and joyful gratulation, confessing 
 that your Lordship, in your last conference with me before your 
 journey, spake not in vain, God making it good, That you trusted 
 we should say Quis putasset I Which as it is found true in a happy 
 sense, so I Ansh you do not find another Quis putasset in the manner 
 c^ taking this so gi-eat a service. But I hope it is, as he said, 
 Nubecula est, cito transihit, and that your Lordship's Avisdom and 
 obsequious circumspection and patience will turn all to the best. 
 So referring all to some time that I may attend you, I commit you 
 to God's best preservation." 
 
II.] BACON AND ELIZABETH. 45 
 
 But when Essex's conduct in Ireland had to be dealt 
 ■with, Bacon's services were called for ; and from this time 
 his relations towards Essex were altered. Every one, no 
 one better than the Queen herself, knew all that he 
 owed to Essex. It is strangely illustrative of the time, 
 that especially as Bacon held so subordinate a position, 
 he should have been required, and should have been 
 trusted, to act against his only and most generous bene- 
 factor. It is strange, too, that however great his loyalty 
 to the Queen, however much and sincerely he might con- 
 demn his friend's conduct, he should think it possible 
 to accept the task. He says that he made some remon- 
 strance ; and he says, no doubt truly, that during the 
 first stage of the business he used the ambiguous 
 position in which he was placed to soften Essex's in- 
 evitable punishment, and to bring about a reconciliation_ 
 between him and the Queen. But he was required, as 
 the Queen's lawyer, to set forth in public Essex's offences; 
 and he admits that he did so "not over tenderly." Yet all 
 this, even if we have misgivings about it, is intelligible. If 
 he had declined, he could not, perhaps, have done the ser- 
 vice which he assui'es us that he tried to do to Essex ; and 
 it is certain that he would have had to reckon with the 
 terrible lady who in her old age still ruled England from 
 the throne of Henry YIIL, and Avho had certainly no great 
 love for Bacon himself. She had already shoAvn him in a| 
 much smaller matter what was the forfeit to be paid for 
 any resistance to her Avill. All the hopes of his life musti 
 perish ; all the grudging and suspicious favours which he 
 had Avon with such unremitting toil and patient Avaiting 
 Avould be sacrificed, and he Avould henceforth live under 
 the Avrath of those Avho never forgave. And AA'hatever he 
 
46 BACON. [chap. 
 
 did for himself, he believed that he was serving Essex. 
 His scheming imagination and his indefatigable pen 
 were at work. He tried strange indirect methods ; he 
 invented a correspondence between his brother and 
 Essex, which was to fall into the Queen's hands in order 
 to soften her wrath and show her Essex's most secret 
 feelings. When the Queen proposed to dine Avith him 
 at his lodge in Twickenham Park, " though I profess 
 not to be a poet," he " prepared a sonnet tending and 
 alluding to draw on her Majesty's reconcilement to my 
 Lord." It was an awkward thing for one who had been 
 so intimate with Essex to be so deep in the counsels of 
 those who hated him. He complains that many people 
 thought him ungrateful and disloyal to his friend, and 
 that stories circulated to his disadvantage, as if he were 
 poisoning the Queen's ear against Essex. But he might 
 argue fairly enough that, \nliul and wrong-headed as Essex 
 had been, it was the best that he could now do for him; and 
 as long as it was only a question of Essex's disgrace and 
 enforced absence from Court, Bacon could not be bound 
 to give up the prospects of his life, indeed, his public 
 duty as a subordinate servant of government, on account 
 of his friend's inexcusable and dangerous follies. Essex 
 did not see it so, and in the subjoined correspondence 
 had the advantage ; but Bacon's position, though a higher 
 one might be imagined, where men had been such friends 
 as these two men had been, is quite a defensible one : — 
 
 " My Lokd— No man can iDettcr expound my doings than your 
 Lordship, which maketh me need to say the less. Only I humbly 
 pray you to believe that I aspire to the conscience and commendation 
 first of bo7ius civis, which with us is a good and true servant to the 
 Queen, and next of bonus vir, that is an honest man. I desii-e your 
 
II.] BACON AND ELIZABETH. 47 
 
 Lordship also to tliiuk that though I confess I love some things much 
 better than I love your Lordship, as the Queen's service, her quiet 
 and contentment, her honour, her favom-, the good of my country, 
 and the like, yet I love few persons better than yourself, both for 
 gratitude's sake and for your own virtues, which cannot hurt but 
 by accident or abuse. Of which my good affection I was ever ready 
 and am ready to jield testimony by any good offices, but with such 
 reservations as yourself cannot but allow : for as I was ever sorry 
 that your Lordship should fly -with waxen wings, doubting Icarus' 
 fortune, so for the growing up of your own feathers, specially 
 ostrich's, or any other save of a bird of prey, no man shall be more 
 glad. And this is the axletree whereupon I have turned and shall 
 turn, which to signify to you, though I think you are of yourself per- 
 suaded as much, is the cause of my writing ; and so I commend 
 your Lordship to God's goodness. From Gray's Inn, this 20th 
 day of July, 1600. 
 
 ' ' Your Lordship's most humbly, 
 
 "Fk. Baco-v." 
 
 To this letter Essex returned an answer of dignified 
 reserve, such as Bacon might himself have dictated. 
 
 "Mr. Bacon — I can neither expound nor censure your late 
 actions : being ignorant of all of them, save one ; and having du-ected 
 my sight inward only, to examine myself. You do pray me to believe 
 that you only aspire to the conscience and commendation of boiius 
 civis and io7ius vir ; and I do faithfully assure j'ou, that while that 
 is your ambition (though your course be active and mine contem- 
 plative), yet we shall both convenirc in codem tcrtio and convenire 
 inter nosipsos. Your profession of affection and offer of good offices 
 are welcome to me. For answer to them I will say but this, that 
 you have believed I have been kind to you, and you may believe 
 that I cannot be other, either upon humour or my own election. I 
 am a stranger to all poetical conceits, or else I should say somewhat 
 of your poetical example. But this I must say, that I never flew 
 with other wings than desire to merit and confidence in my Sove- 
 reign's favour ; and when one of these wings failed me I would 
 light nowhere but at my Sovereign's feet, though she suffered me 
 to be bruised vnth. my fall. And till her Majesty, that knows I 
 was never bird of prey, finds it to agree with her will and her 
 
48 BACON. [cHAi'. 
 
 service that my Aviugs should be iiiipi-d again, I have committed 
 myself to the mire. No power but my God's aud my Sovereign's 
 can alter this resolution of 
 
 " Your retired friend, 
 
 " Essex." 
 
 But after Essex's mad attempt in the city a new state 
 of things arose. The inevitable result was a trial ior high 
 treason, a trial of which no one could doubt the jiurpose 
 and end. The examination of accomplices revealed 
 speeches, proposals, projects, not very intelligible to us 
 in the still imperfectly understood game of intrigue that 
 was going on among all parties at the end of Elizabeth's 
 reign, but quite enough to place Essex at the mercy of 
 the Government and the offended Queen. " The new in- 
 formation," says Mr. Spedding, "had been immediately 
 communicated to Coke and Bacon." Coke, as Attorney- 
 General, of course conducted the prosecution ; and the 
 next prominent person on the side of the CroAvn Avas not 
 the Solicitor, or any other regular law officer, but Bacon, 
 though holding the very subordinate place of one of the 
 "Learned Counsel." 
 
 It does not appear that he thought it strange, that he 
 showed any pain or reluctance, that he sought to be ex- 
 cused. He took it as a matter of course. The part 
 assigned to Bacon in the prosecution was as important as 
 that of Coke : and he played it more skilfully and effec- 
 tively. Trials in those days were confused affairs, often 
 passing into a mere A\Tangle between the judges, lawyers, 
 and lookers-on, and the prisoner at the bar. It was so 
 in this case. Coke is said to have blundered in his way 
 of presenting the evidence, and to have been led away 
 from the point into an altercation Avith Essex. Probably 
 
II.] BACON AND ELIZABETH. 49 
 
 it really did not much matter : but the trial was getting 
 out of its course and inchning in favour of the prisoner, 
 till Bacon — Mr. Spedding thinks, out of his regular 
 turn — stepped forward and retrieved matters. This is 
 ^Mr. Spedding's account of what Bacon said and did : — 
 
 " By this time the argument had drifted so far a^vay from the point 
 that it must have been difficiUt for a listener to remember what it 
 was that the prisoners were charged \\-ith, or how much of the 
 charge had been proved. And Coke, who was all this time the sole 
 speaker on behalf of the Crown, was still following each fresh topic 
 that rose before him, without the sign of an intention or the inti- 
 mation of a wish to return to the main question and reform the 
 broken ranks of his evidence. Luckily he seems to have been now 
 at a loss what point to take next, and the pause gave Bacon an 
 opportunity of rising. It can hardly have been in pursuance of 
 previous arrangements ; for though it was customary in those days 
 to distribute the evidence into parts and to assign several parts to 
 several coiuisel, there had been no appearance as yet of any part 
 being concluded. It is probable that the course of the trial had 
 upset previous arrangements and confused the parts. At any rate 
 so it was, however it came to pass, that when Cecil and Essex had 
 at last finished their expostulation and parted with charitable 
 prayers, each that the other might be forgiven, then (says 
 our reporter) Mr. Bacon entered into a speech much after this 
 fashion : — 
 
 " ' In speaking of this late and horrible rebellion which hath been 
 in the eyes and ears of all men, I shall save myself much labour iu 
 opening and enforcing the points thereof, insomuch as I speak not 
 before a country juiy of ignorant men, but before a most honourable 
 assembly of the greatest Peers of the land, whose wisdoms conceive 
 far more than my tongue can utter ; yet with your gracious and 
 honourable favours I will presume, if not for information of your 
 Honours, yet for the discharge of my duty, to say thus much. No 
 man can be ignorant, that knows matters of former ages, and all 
 history makes it plain, that there was never any traitor heard of 
 that durst directly attempt the seat of his liege prince but he 
 always coloured his practices with some plausible pretence. For 
 God hath imprinted such a majesty in the face of a prince that no 
 
 E 
 
50 BACOX. [CHAP. 
 
 private man dare approach the person of his sovereign with a 
 traitorous intent. And therefore they run another side course, 
 oblique ct d latere : some to reform corruptions of the State and 
 religion ; some to reduce the ancient liberties and customs pre- 
 tended to be lost and worn out ; some to remove those persons that 
 being in high places make themselves subject to envy ; but all of 
 them aim at the overthrow of the State and destruction of the pre- 
 sent rulers. And this likewise is the use of those that work mis- 
 chief of another quality ; as Cain, that first murderer, took up an 
 excuse for his fact, shaming to outface it with impudency, thus 
 the Earl made his colour the severing some great men and coun- 
 cillors from her Majestj^'s favour, and the fear he stood in of his 
 pretended enemies lest they should murder him in his house. There- 
 fore he saith he was compelled to fly into the City for succour and 
 assistance ; not much unlike Pisistratus, of whom it was so anciently 
 wTitten how he gashed and wounded himself, and in that sort ran 
 crying into Athens that his life was sought and like to have been 
 taken away ; thinking to have moved the people to have pitied 
 him and taken his part by such counterfeited harm and danger ; 
 whereas his aim and drift was to take the government of the city 
 into his hands and alter the form thereof. AVith like pretences of 
 dangers and assaults the Earl of Essex entered the Citj' of London 
 and passed through the bowels thereof, blanching rumours that he 
 should have been murdered and that the State was sold ; whereas 
 he had no such enemies, no such dangers : persuading themselves 
 that if they could prevail all woxild have done well. But now 
 magna scelcra terminantur in Jicercsin : for you, my Lord, should 
 know that though princes give their subjects cause of discontent, 
 though they take away the honours they have heaped upon them, 
 though they bring them to a lower estate than they raised them 
 from, yet ought they not to be so forgetful of their allegiance that 
 they should enter into any uudutiful act ; much less upon rebellion, 
 as you, my Lord, have done. All whatsoever you have or can say in 
 answer hereof are but shadows. And therefore methinks it were 
 best for you to confess, not to justify.' " 
 
 Essex was provoked by Bacon's incredulous sneer 
 about enemies and dangers — "I call forth Mr. Bacon 
 against Mr. Bacon," and referred to the letters which 
 
II.] BACON AND ELIZABETH. 51 
 
 Bacon had Avi-itten in his name, and in Avhich these dan- 
 gerous enmities were taken for granted. Bacon, in 
 answer, repeated what he said so often — " That he had 
 spent more time in vain in studying how to make the 
 Earl a good servant to the Queen and State, than he had 
 done in anything else." Once more Coke got the pro- 
 ceedings into a tangle, and once more Bacon came for- 
 ward to repair the miscarriage of his leader. 
 
 " ' I have never yet seen in any case such favour shown to any 
 prisoner ; so many digressions, such delivering of evidence by frac- 
 tions, and so silly a defence of such gi-eat and notorious treasons. 
 May it jilease your Grace, you have seen how weakly ho hath 
 shadowed his jjurpose and how slenderly he hath answered the 
 objections against him. But, my Lord, I doubt the variety of 
 matters and the many digressions may minister occasion of forget- 
 fulness, and may have severed the judgments of the Lords ; and 
 therefore I hold it necessary briefly to recite the Judges' opinions. ' 
 
 "That being done, he proceeded to this effect: — 
 
 " ' Now put the case that the Earl of Essex's intents were, as he 
 would have it believed, to go only as a suppliant to her Majesty. 
 Shall their petitions be presented by armed petitioners ? This must 
 needs bring loss of property to the prince. Neither is it any point 
 of law, as my Lord of Southampton would have it believed, that 
 condemns them of treason. To take secret counsel, to execute it, to 
 run together in numbers armed ^^•ith weapons, — what can be the 
 excuse ? Warned by the Lord Keeper, by a herald, and yet persist ! 
 Will any simple man take this to be less than treason ? ' 
 
 "The Earl of Essex answered that if ho had purposed anything 
 against others than those his private enemies, he would not have 
 stirred with so slender a company. Whereuuto Mr. Bacon an- 
 swered : — 
 
 " ' It was not the company you carried with you but the assist- 
 ance you hoped for in the City which you trusted unto. The Duke 
 of Guise thrust himself into the streets of Paris on the day of the 
 Barricades in his doublet and hose, attended only with eight gentle- 
 men, and found that help in the city which (thanks be to God) you 
 failed of here. And what followed ? The King was forced to put him- 
 
52 BACON. [chap. 
 
 self into a pilgrim's weeds, and in that disgiiise to steal away to scape 
 their fury. Even such was my Lord's confidence too, and his pre- 
 tence the same — an all-hail and a kiss to the City. But the end 
 was treason, as hath been sufficiently proved. But when he had 
 once delivered and engaged himself so far into that which the 
 shallowness of his conceit could not accomplish as ho expected, the 
 Queen for her defence taking arms against him, he was glad to yield 
 himself ; and thinking to colour his practices, turned his pretexts, 
 and alleged the occasion thereof to proceed from a private quarrel.' 
 " To this " (adds the reporter) "the Earl answered little. Nor 
 was anything said afterwards by either of the prisoners, either in 
 the thrust-and-parry dialogue with Coke that followed, or when 
 they spoke at large to the question why judgment should not be 
 pronounced, which at all altered the complexion of the case. They 
 were both found guilty and sentence passed in the usual form." 
 
 Bacon's legal position was so subordinate a place that 
 there must have been a special reason for his employ- 
 ment. It is difficult to avoid the conclusion that, on the 
 part of the Government, Bacon was thus used for the very 
 reason that he had been the friend of Essex. He was 
 not commonly called upon in such prosecutions. He 
 was not employed by Cecil in the Winchester trials of 
 Ealeigh, Grey, and Cobham, three years afterwards, nor 
 in those connected with the Gunpowder Plot. He was 
 called upon now because no one could so much damage 
 Essex; and this last proof of his ready service Avas required 
 by those whose favour, since Essex had gone hopelessly 
 wrong, he had been diligently seeking. And Bacon 
 acquiesced in the demand, apparently without surprise. 
 No record remains to show that he felt any difficult}^ in 
 playing his part. He had persuaded himself that his 
 public duty, his duty as a good citizen to the Queen and 
 the commonwealth, demanded of him that he should obey 
 the call to do his best to bring a traitor to punishment. 
 
II.] BACON AND ELIZABETH. 53 
 
 Public duty has claims on a man as well as friend- 
 ship, and in many conceivable cases, claims paramount to 
 those of friendship. And yet friendship, too, has claims, 
 at least on a man's memory. Essex had been a dear 
 friend, if words could mean anything. He had done 
 more than any man had done for Bacon, generously and 
 nobly, and Bacon had acknowledged it in the amplest 
 terms. Only a year before he had written, " I am as 
 much youi'S as any man's, and as much yoiu-s as any man." 
 It is not, and it was not, a question of Essex's guilt. It 
 may be a question whether the whole matter was not 
 exaggerated as to its purpose, as it certainly Avas as to its 
 real danger and mischief. We at least know that his 
 rivals dabbled in intrigue and foolish speeches as Avell as 
 he ; that little more than two years afterwards Ealeigh 
 and Grey and Cobham were condemned for treason in 
 much the same fashion as he Avas; that Cecil to the end 
 of his days — "wdth whatever pui'pose — was a pensioner of 
 Spain. The question was not Avhether Essex was guilty. 
 The question for Bacon was, whether it was becoming in 
 him, having been what he had been to Essex, to take a 
 leading part in proceedings wliich Avere to end in his 
 ruin and death. He was not a judge. He Avas not a 
 regular laAv officer like Coke. His only employment had 
 been casual and occasional. He might, most naturally, on 
 the score of his old friendship, haA'e asked to be excused. 
 Condemning, as he did, his friend's guilt and folly, he 
 might have refused to take part in a cause of blood, in 
 Avhich his best friend must perish. He might honestly 
 have given up Essex as incorrigible, and have retired to 
 stand apart in sorroAv and silence Avhile the inevitable 
 tragedy Avas played out. The only ansAver to this 
 
54 BACON. [cuAP. 
 
 is, that to have declincil -would have incurred the 
 Queen's displeasure : ho would have forfeited any 
 chance of advancement; nay, closely connected as he 
 had been with Essex, he might have been involved in 
 his friend's ruin. But inferior men have marred their 
 fortunes by standing by their friends in not imdeserved 
 trouble, and no one knew better than Bacon what Avas 
 worthy and noble in human action. The choice lay be- 
 fore him. He seems hardly to have gone through any 
 straggle. He persuaded himself that he could not help 
 himself, under the constraint of his duty to the Queen : 
 and he did liis best to get Essex condemned. 
 
 And this was not all. The death of Essex was a 
 shock to the popularity of Elizabeth greater than any- 
 thing that had happened in her long reign. Bacon's 
 name also had come into men's mouths as that of a 
 time-server, Avho played fast and loose with Essex and 
 his enemies, and who, when he had got what he could 
 from Essex, turned to see what he could get from those 
 who put him to death. A justification of the whole 
 affair was felt to be necessary ; and Bacon was fixed upon 
 for the distinction and the dishonour of doing it. No 
 one could tell the story so well, and it was felt that he 
 would not shrink from it. Nor did he. In cold blood 
 he sat down to blacken Essex, using his intimate personal 
 knowledge of the past to strengthen his statements 
 against a friend who was in his grave, and for whom 
 none could answer but Bacon himself. It is a well- 
 compacted and forcible account of Essex's misdoings, on 
 which of course the coloiu- of deliberate and dangerous 
 treason was placed. Much of it, no doubt, Avas true ; 
 but even of the facts, and much more of the colour, there 
 
II.] BACON AND ELIZAKETH. 55 
 
 was no check to be had, and it is certain that it was an 
 object to the Government to make out the worst. It 
 is characteristic that Bacon records that he did not lose 
 sight of the claims of courtesy, and studiously spoke of 
 " my Lord of Essex " in the draft submitted for correc- 
 tion to the Queen; but she was more unceremonious, 
 and insisted that the " rebel" shoidd be spoken of simply 
 as "Essex." 
 
 After a business of this kind, fines and forfeitures 
 flowed in abundantly, and were " usually bestowed on de- 
 serving servants or favoured suitors by way of reward ; " 
 and Bacon came in for his share. Out of one of the 
 fines he received £1200. "The Queen hath done some- 
 thing for me," he Avrites to a friendly creditor, "■ though 
 not in the proportion I had hoped," and he afterwards 
 asked for something more. It Avas rather under the 
 value of Essex's gift to him in 1594. But she still 
 refused him all promotion. He Avas AAathout an official 
 place in the Queen's service, and he neA-er was alloAved 
 to have it. It is clear that the "Declaration of the 
 Treason of the Earl of Essex," if it justified the Govern- 
 ment, did not remove the odium Avhich had fallen on 
 Bacon. Mr. Spedding says that he can find no signs of 
 it. Tlie proof of it is found in the " Apology " which 
 Bacon found it expedient to write after Elizabeth's death 
 and early in James's reign. He found that the recollec- 
 tion of the Avay in Avliich he had dealt Avith his friend 
 hung heavy upon him : men hesitated to trust him in 
 spite of his noAV recognised ability. Accordingly, he 
 drew up an apology, Avhich he addressed to Lord 
 Mountjoy, the friend, in reality half the accomplice, of 
 Essex, in his AA-ild, ill-defined plan for putting pressui-e 
 
56 BACON. [(HAP. 
 
 on Elizabeth. It is a clear, able, of course ex parte state- 
 ment of the doings of the three chief actors, two of whom 
 could no longer answer for themselves, or correct and 
 contradict the third. It represents the Queen as implac- 
 able and cruel, Essex as incorrigibly and outrageously 
 wilfid, proud, and undutiful. Bacon himself as using 
 every effort and device to appease the Queen's anger 
 and suspiciousness, and to bring Essex to a Aviser and 
 humbler mind. The picture is indeed a vivid one, and 
 full of dramatic force, of an unrelenting and merciless 
 mistress bent on breaking and bowing down to the dust 
 the haughty spirit of a once - loved but rebellious 
 favourite, Avhom, though he has deeply offended, she 
 yet Anshes to bring once more under her yoke ; and of 
 the calm, keen-Avitted looker-on, watching the dangerous 
 game, not without personal interest, but with undis- 
 turbed presence of mind, and doing his best to avert an 
 irreparable and fatal breach. How far he honestly did 
 his best for his misguided friend Ave can only knoAv from 
 his OAvn report ; but there is no reason to think that he 
 did Essex ill service, though he notices in passing an 
 allegation that the Queen in one of her angry fits had 
 charged him Avith this. But his interest clearly Avas 
 to make up the quarrel betAveen the Queen and 
 Essex. Bacon Avould have been a greater man Avith 
 both of them if he had been able to do so. He had 
 been too deeply in Essex's intimacy to make his neAv 
 position of mediator, Avith a strong bias on the Queen's 
 side, quite safe and easy for a man of honourable mind ; 
 but a cool-judging and prudent man may Avell have 
 acted as he represents himself acting Avithout forgetting 
 Avhat he OAved to his friend. Till the last great moment 
 
II.] BACON AND ELIZABETH. 57 
 
 of trial there is a good deal to be said for Bacon : a man 
 keenly alive to Essex's faults, with a strong sense of 
 ^\-hat he OAved to the Queen and the State, and Avith his 
 own reasonable chances of rising greatly prejudiced by 
 Essex's folly. But at length came the crisis Avhich 
 showed the man, and threw light on all that had passed 
 before, when he was picked out, out of his regular 
 place, to be charged with, the task of bringing home the 
 capital charge against Essex. He does not say he 
 hesitated. He does not say that he asked to be excused 
 the terrible office. He did not flinch as the minister of 
 vengeance for those who required that Essex should die. 
 He did his work, Ave are told by his admiring biographer, 
 better than Coke, and repaired the blunders of the 
 prosecution. He passes over very shortly this part of 
 the business : " it Avas laid upon me Avith the rest of my 
 fellows ; " yet it is the knot and key of the Avhole, as 
 far as his OAvn character is concerned. Bacon had his 
 public duty : his public duty may have compelled him 
 to stand apart from Essex. But it Avas his interest, it Avas 
 no part of his public duty, A\^hich required him to accept 
 the task of accuser of his friend, and in his friend's direst 
 need calmly to drive home a Avell- directed stroke that 
 should extinguish chances and hopes, and make his ruin 
 certain. No one Avho reads his anxious letters about 
 preferment and the Queen's favour, about his disap- 
 pointed hopes, about his straitened means and distress 
 for money, about his difficulties A\dth his creditors — he 
 Avas tAvice arrested for debt — can doubt that the question 
 Avas betAveen his own prospects and his friend ; and that 
 to his oAATi interest he sacrificed his friend and his oa\ti 
 honour. 
 
CHAPTER III. 
 
 BACON AND JAMES I. 
 
 Bacon's life was a double one. There Avas the life of 
 high thinking, of disinterested aims, of genuine enthu- 
 siasm, of genuine desire to delight and benefit mankind, 
 hy opening new paths to wonder and knowledge and 
 power. And there was the put on and worldly life, 
 the life of supposed necessities for the provision of 
 daily bread, the Hfe of ambition and self-seeking, which 
 he followed, not without interest and satisfaction, but at 
 bottom because he thought he must — must be a great 
 man, must be rich, must live in the favour of the great, 
 because without it his great designs could not be 
 accomplished. His original plan of life Avas disclosed 
 in his letter to Lord Burghley : to get some office Avith 
 an assured income and not much work, and then to 
 devote the best of his time to his own subjects. But 
 this, if it was really his plan, Avas gradually changed : 
 first, because he could not get such a place ; and next 
 because his connection A\nth Essex, the efforts to gain 
 him the Attorney's place, and the use Avhich the Queen 
 made of him after Essex could do no more for him, 
 drcAv him more and more into public Avork, and specially 
 the career of the laAv. We knoAv that he Avould not by 
 
CHAP. III.] BACON AND JAMES I. 59 
 
 preference have chosen the law, and did not feel that his 
 vocation lay that way. But it was the only way open 
 to him for mending his fortunes. And so the two lives 
 went on side by side, the worldly one — he would have 
 said, the practical one — often interfering "with the life 
 of thought and discovery, and partly obscuiing it, but 
 yet always leaving it pai'amoimt in liis own mind. His 
 dearest and most cherished ideas, the thoughts with 
 which he was most at home and happiest, his deepest 
 and truest ambitions, were those of an enthusiastic and 
 romantic believer in a great discovery just within his 
 grasp. They Avere such as the dreams and visions of 
 his great Franciscan namesake, and of the imaginative 
 seekers after knowledge in the middle ages, real or mythi- 
 cal, Albert the Great, Cornelius Agrippa, Dr. Faustus ; 
 they were the eager undoubting hopes of the physical 
 students in Italy and England in his own time, Gior- 
 dano Bruno, Telesio, Campanella, Gilbert, Galileo, or 
 the founders of the Italian prototype of " Solomon's 
 House " in the Neio Atlantis, the precursor of our Eoyal 
 Societies, the Academy of the Lincei at Eome. Among 
 these meditations Avas his inner life. But however he 
 may have originally planned his coiu'se, and though at times 
 under the influence of disappointment he threatened to re- 
 tire to Cambridge or to travel abroad, he had bound him- 
 self fast to public life, and soon ceased to think of quitting 
 it. And he had a real taste for it, for its shoAvs, its prizes, 
 for the laAvs and turns of the game, for its debates and 
 Aicissitudes. He Avas no mere idealist or recluse to 
 underA'alue or despise the real grandeur of the Avorld. 
 He took the keenest interest in the nature and ways of 
 mankind ; he liked to observe, to generalise in shrcAvd 
 
60 BACON. [chap. 
 
 and sometimes cynical epigrams. He liked to apply his 
 powerful and fertile intellect to the practical problems 
 of society and government, to their curious anomalies, 
 to their paradoxical phenomena ; he liked to address 
 himself, either as an expounder or a reformer, to the 
 principles and entanglements of English law ; he aspired, 
 both as a lecturer and a legislator, to improve and 
 simplify it. It Avas not beyond his hopes to shape a 
 policy, to improve administration, to become powerful 
 by bringing his sagacity and largeness of thought to the 
 service of the State, in reconciling conflicting forces, in 
 mediating between jealous parties and dangerous claims. 
 And he liked to enter into the humours of a Court ; to 
 devote his brilliant imagination and affluence of inven- 
 tion either to devising a pageant which should throw 
 all others into the shade, or a compromise which should 
 get great persons out of some difficulty of temper or 
 pique. 
 
 In all these things he was as industrious, as laborious, 
 as calmly persevering and tenacious, as he Avas in his 
 pursuit of his philosophical speculations. He was a com- 
 pound of the most adventurous and most diversified 
 ambition, with a placid and patient temper, such as we 
 commonly associate with moderate desires and the love of 
 retirement and an easy life. To imagine and dare any- 
 thing, and never to let go the object of his pursuit, is one 
 side of him ; on the other, he is obsequiously desirous to 
 please and fearful of giving offence, the humblest and 
 most grateful and also the most importunate of suitors, 
 ready to bide his time with an even cheerfulness of spirit, 
 which yet it was not safe to provoke by ill offices and 
 the wish to thwart him. He never misses a chance of 
 
III.] BACON AND JA1\IES I. 61 
 
 proffering his services : he never lets pass an opportunity 
 of recommending himself to those who could help him. 
 He is so bent on natiu-al knowledge that we have a sense 
 of incongruity when we see him engaging in politics as 
 if he had no other interest. He throws himself with 
 such zest into the language of the moralist, the theo- 
 logian, the historian, that we forget we have before us 
 the author of a new departure in physical inquiry, and 
 the unwearied compiler of tables of natural history. 
 WheiLhejsjJawj'er>ii£_seeBis only a lawyer. If he had 
 not been the author of the Tnstawafio, his life would not 
 have looked very different from that of any other of the 
 shrewd and supple lawyers who hung on to the Tudor 
 and Stuart Courts, and who unscrupulously pushed their 
 way to preferment. He claimed^to be, in spite of the 
 misgivings of Elizabeth and her ministers, as de^•oted to 
 public work and as capable of it as any of them. He 
 was ready for anything, for any amount of business, 
 ready, as in everything, to take infinite trouble about it. 
 The law, if he did not like it, was yet no by-work with. 
 him; he was as truly ambitious as the men witli Avliom 
 he maintained so keen and for long so unsuccessful a 
 rivalry. He felt bitterly the disappointment of seeing 
 men like Coke and Fleming and Doddridge and Hobart 
 pass before him ; he could not, if he had been only a 
 lawyer, have coveted more eagerly the places, refused to 
 him, which they got ; only, he had besides a whole train 
 of purposes, an inner and supreme ambition, of which 
 they knew nothing. And \vith all this, there is no 
 apparent consciousness of these manifold and varied 
 interests. He never affected to conceal from himself his. 
 superiority to other men in his aims and in t he grasp of 
 
62 BACON. [chap. 
 
 his intelligence. But there is no trace that he prided 
 himself on the variety and versatility of these powers, or 
 that he even distinctly realised to himself that it was 
 anything remarkable that he should have so many dis- ^ 
 similar objects and be able so readily to pursue them in 
 such different directions. ) 
 
 It is doubtful whether, as long as Elizabeth lived. 
 Bacon could ever have risen above his position among 
 the " Learned Counsel," an office withovit patent or salary 
 or regular employment. She used him, and he was Availing 
 to be used ; but he plainly did not appear in her eyes to 
 be the kind of man who would suit her in the more 
 prominent posts of her Government. Unusual and 
 original ability is apt, till it is generally recognised, to 
 carry with it suspicion and mistrust, as to its being really 
 all that it seems to be. Perhaps she thought of the possi- 
 bility of his flying out unexpectedly at some inconvenient 
 pinch, and attempting to serve her interests, not in her 
 Avay, but in his own ; perhaps she distrusted in business 
 and state affairs so brilliant a discourser, whose heart was 
 known, first and above all, to be set on great dreams of 
 knowledge ; perhaps those interviews with her in which 
 he describes the counsels which he laid before her, and 
 in which his shrewdness and foresight are conspicuous, 
 may not have been so welcome to her as he imagined ; 
 perhaps, it is not impossible, that he may have been too 
 compliant for her capricious taste, and too visibly anxious 
 to please. Perhaps, too, she could not forget, in spite of 
 what had happened, that he had been the friend, and not 
 the very generous friend, of Essex. But, except as to a 
 share of the forfeitures, Avith which he was not satisfied, 
 his fortunes did not rise under Elizabeth. 
 
III.] BACON AND JAMES I. 63 
 
 Whatever may have been the Queen's feelings towards 
 him, there is no doubt that one powerful influence, which 
 lasted into the reign of James, was steadily adverse 
 to his advancement. Burghley had been strangely 
 niggardly in what he did to help his brilliant nephew ; 
 he was going off the scene, and probably did not care to 
 trouble himself about a younger and uncongenial aspirant 
 to service. But his place was taken by his son, Kobert 
 Cecil ; and Cecil might naturally have been expected to 
 welcome the co-operation of one of his ovm family, who 
 was foremost among the rising men of Cecil's own genera- 
 tion, and who certainly was most desirous to do him ser- 
 vice. But it is plain that he early made up his mind to keep 
 Bacon in the background. It is easy to imagine reasons, 
 though the apparent shortsightedness of the policy may 
 surprise us ; but Cecil was too reticent and self-controlled 
 a man to let his reasons appear, and his words, in answer 
 to his cousin's applications for his assistance, were always 
 kind, encouraging, and vague. But we must judge by 
 the event, and that makes it clear that Cecil did not 
 care to see Bacon in high position. Nothing can ac- 
 count for Bacon's strange failure for so long a time to 
 reach his due place in the public service but the secret 
 hostility, whatever may have been the cause, of Cecil. 
 
 There was also another difficulty. Coke was the great 
 lawj'er of the day, a man Avhom the Government could 
 not dispense with, and whom it was dangerous to oflend. 
 And Coke thoroughly disliked Bacon. He thought 
 lightly of his law, and he despised his refinement and his 
 passion for knowledge. He cannot but have resented 
 the impertinence, as he must have thought it, of Bacon 
 having been for a whole year his rival for office. It is 
 
64 BACOK [chap. 
 
 possible that if people then agreed Avith Mr. Spedding's 
 opinion as to the management of Essex's trial, he may- 
 have been irritated by jealousy ; but a couple of months 
 after the trial (April 29, IGOl) Bacon sent to Cecil, with 
 a letter of complaint, the following account of a scene in 
 Court between Coke and himself : — 
 
 " A true remembrance of the abuse I received of Mr. Attorney-General 
 publicly in the Exchequer the first day of term; for the truth 
 whereof I refer myself to all that were present. 
 
 "I moved to have a reseizurc of the lands of Geo. Moore, a re- 
 lapsed recusant, a fugitive and a practising traytor ; and showed 
 better matter for the Queen against the discharge by plea, which is 
 ever with a salvo jure. And this I did in as gentle and reasonable 
 terms as might be. 
 
 "Mr. Attorney kindled at it, and said, ' 3Ir. Bacon, if you have 
 any tooth against me ;pliick it out ; for it will do you more hurt than 
 all the teeth in your head will do you good.' I answered coldly in 
 these very words: 'Mr. Attorney, I respect you; I fear you iiot; 
 and the less you speak of your own greatness, the more I mil think 
 of it.' 
 
 ' ' He replied, 'I think scorn to stand upon terms of greatness toicards 
 you, who are less than little; less than the least;' and other such 
 strange light terms he gave me, with that insulting which cannot 
 be expressed. 
 
 "Herewith stirred, yet I said no more but this : '3lr. Attorney, 
 do not depress me so far; for I have been your better, and may be 
 again, when it please the Queen. ' 
 
 "With this he spake, neither I nor himself could tell what, as 
 if he had been born Attorney-General ; and in the end bade me not 
 meddle ^\•ith the Queen's business, but with mine own ; and that I 
 was unsworn, etc. I told him, sworn or unsworn was all one to 
 an honest man ; and that I ever set my service first, and myself 
 second ; and wished to God that he would do the like. 
 
 "Then he said, it were good to clap a cap. ultegatum upon my 
 back ! To which I only said he could not ; and that he was at fault, 
 for he hunted upon an old scent. He gave me a number of dis- 
 
III.] BACON AND JAMES I. 65 
 
 gi-aceful words besides ; which I answered with silence, and showiu" 
 that I was not moved with them." 
 
 The threat of the cajnas ultegatuin was probably in 
 reference to the arrest of Bacon for debt in September 
 1593. After this, we are not surprised at Bacon writing 
 to Coke, " who take to yourself a liberty to disgrace and 
 disable my law, my experience, my discretion," that, 
 " since I missed the Sohcitor's place (the rather I think 
 by your means) I cannot expect that you and I shall ever 
 serve as Attorney and Solicitor together, but either serve 
 with another on your remove, or step into some other 
 coiu'se." And Coke, no doubt, took care that it should 
 be so. Cecil, too, may possibly have thought that Bacon 
 gave no proof of his fitness for aifairs in thus bringing 
 before him a squabble in "which both parties lost their 
 tempers. 
 
 Bacon was not behind the rest of the world in " the 
 posting of men of good quality towards the King ;" in the 
 rush which followed the Queen's death, of those who were 
 eager to proffer their services to James, for whose peace- 
 ful accession Cecil had so skilfully prepared the way. 
 He wrote to every one who, he thought, could help him : 
 to Cecil, and to Cecil's man — " I pray you, as you find 
 time let him know that he is the personage in the State 
 which I love most ; " to Northumberland, " If I may be 
 of any use to your Lordship, by my head, tongue, pen, 
 means, or friends, I hiunbly pray you to hold me your 
 own ; " to the King's Scotch friends and servants, even to 
 Southampton, the friend of Essex, who had been shut up 
 in the Tower since his condemnation Avith Essex, and 
 who was now released. "This great change," Bacon 
 assured him, " hath wrought in me no other change 
 
 F 
 
66 BACON. [niAP. 
 
 towards your Lordship than this, that I ma}' safely be now 
 that which I truly was before." Bacon found in after 
 years that Southampton was not so easily conciliated. 
 But at present Bacon was hopeful : " In mine ow'n par- 
 ticular," he writes, "I have many comforts and assur- 
 ances ; but in mine own opinion the chief is, that the 
 canvassing uvrld is gone, and the deserving irorld is 
 come." He asks to be recommended to the King — " I 
 commend myself to your love and to the "well-using of 
 my name, as well in repressing and answering for me, 
 if there be any biting or nibbling at it in that place, as 
 in impressing a good conceit and opinion of me, chiefly 
 in the King, as otherwise in that Court." His pen had 
 been used under the government of the Queen, and he 
 had offered a draft of a proclamation to the King's 
 advisers. But though he obtained an interview^ ■with the 
 King, James's arrival in England brought no immediate 
 prospect of improvement in Bacon's fortunes. Indeed, his 
 name was at first inadvertently passed over in the list of 
 Queen's servants who were to retain their places. The 
 first thing we hear of is his arrest a second time for 
 debt, and his letters of thanks to Cecil, who had rendered 
 him assistance, are Avritten in deep depression. 
 
 " For my purpose or course, I desire to meddle as little as I can 
 in the King's causes, his Majesty now abounding in counsel ; and to 
 follow my private thrift and practice, and to marry with some con- 
 venient advancement. For as for any ambition, I do assure your 
 Honour, mine is quenched. In the Queen's, my excellent Mistress's, 
 time the qiwrum was small : her service was a kind of freehold, and 
 it was a more solemn time. All those points agreed with my nature 
 and judgement. My ambition now I shall only put upon my pen, 
 whereby I shall be able to maintain memory and merit of the times 
 succeeding. 
 
in.] BACON AND JAMES I. - 67 
 
 " Lastly, for this divulged and almost prostituted title of knight- 
 hood, I could without charge, by your Honour's mean, be content 
 to have it, both because of this late disgrace and because I have 
 three new knights in my mess in Gray's Inn's commons ; and because 
 I have found out an alderman's daughter, an handsome maiden, to 
 my liking." 
 
 Cecil, however, seems to have required that the money 
 should be repaid by the day ] and Bacon only makes a 
 humble request, which, it might be supposed, could have 
 been easily granted. 
 
 " It mat please your good Lordship — In answer of your 
 last letter, your money shall be ready before your day : prin- 
 cipal, interest, and costs of suit. So the sheriff promised, when 
 I released errors ; and a Jew takes no more. The rest cannot 
 be forgotten, for I cannot forget your Lordship's dum mcmor iiKc 
 niei : and if there have been aliquid nimis, it shall be amended. 
 And, to be plain with j'our Lordship, that will quicken me now 
 wliich slackened me before. Then I thought you might have had 
 more use of me than now I suppose you are like to have. Not but 
 I think the impediment will be rather in my mind than in the matter 
 or times. But to do you service I ^viU come out of my religion at 
 any time. 
 
 " For my knighthood, I wish the manner might be such as might 
 grace me, since the matter vdlL not ; I mean, that I might not be 
 merely gregarious in a troop. The coronation is at hand. It may 
 please j'our Lordship to let me hear from you speedily. So I con- 
 tinue your Lordship's ever much bounden, 
 
 "Fr. Bacox. 
 
 "From Gorhamburj-, this 16th of July 1603." 
 
 But it was not done. He " obtained his title, but 
 not in a manner to distinguish him. He was knighted 
 at "Whitehall two days before the coronation, but had to 
 share the honour with 300 others." 
 
 It was not quite true that his " ambition was 
 quenched." For the rest of Cecil's life Cecil was the 
 
68 BACON. [(.iiAi'. 
 
 first man at James's Court ; and to the last there was 
 one thing that Bacon would not appear to believe — he 
 did not choose to believe that it was Cecil who kept 
 him back from employment and honour. To the last 
 he persisted in assuming that Cecil Avas the person 
 who would help, if he could, a kinsman devoted to his 
 interests and profoundly conscious of his worth. To 
 the last he commended his cause to Cecil in terms of 
 unstinted affection and confiding hope. It is difficult 
 to judge of the sincerity of such language. The mere 
 customary language of compliment employed by every 
 one at this time was of a kind which to us sounds in- 
 tolerable. It seems as if nothing that ingenuity could 
 I debase was too extravagant for an honest man to use, 
 and for a man who respected himself to accept. It 
 must not, indeed, be forgotten that conventionalities, as 
 well as insincerity, differ in their forms in different 
 times ; and that insincerity may lurk behind frank and 
 clear words, Avhen they are the fashion, as mvich as in 
 what is like mere fulsome adulation. But words mean 
 something, in spite of forms and fashions. When a 
 man of great genius writes his private letters, we wish 
 generally to believe on the whole what he says ; and there 
 are no Umits to the esteem, the honour, the confidence, 
 which Bacon continued to the end to express towards 
 Cecil. Bacon appeared to trust him — appeared, in spite 
 of continued disappointments, to rely on his goodwill 
 and good offices. But for one reason or another Bacon 
 still remained in the shade. He was left to employ his 
 time as he would, and to work his way by himself. 
 
 He was not idle. He })repared papers Avhich he meant 
 should come before the King, on the pressing subjects of 
 
III.] BACON AND JAMES I. 69 
 
 the day. The Hampton Coui't conference between the 
 Bishops and the Puritan leaders was at hand, and he 
 drew up a moderating paper on the Pacification of the 
 Church. The feeling against him for his conduct to- 
 wards Essex had not died away, and he addressed to 
 Lord ^Moimtjoy that Apology concerning the Earl of 
 Essex, so full of interest, so ski lfully and forcib ly 
 written, s o vivid a picture of the Queen's ways with 
 her servants, which has every merit except that of 
 clearing Bacon from the charge of disloyalty to his 
 best friend. The various questions arising out of the 
 relations of the two kingdoms, now united under James, 
 were presenting themselves. They were not of easy 
 solution, and great mischief would follow if they were 
 solved wrongly. Bacon turned his attention to them. 
 He addressed a discourse to the King on the union of 
 the two kingdoms, the first of a series of discussions on 
 the subject which Bacon made peculiarly his own, and 
 Avhich, no doubt, first drew the King's attention and 
 favour to him. 
 
 But for the first year of James's reign he was 
 unnoticed by the King, and he was able to give his 
 attention more freely to the great thought and hope of 
 his hfe. This time of neglect gave him the opportunity 
 of leisurely calling together and examining the ideas 
 which had long had hold of his mind about the state of 
 human knowledge, about the possibilities of extending 
 it, about the hopes and powers which that new know- 
 ledge opened, and about the methods of reahsing this 
 great prospect. This, the passion of his life, never 
 asleep even in the hottest days of business, or the 
 most hopeless days of defeat, must have had full play 
 
70 BACON. [chap. 
 
 during these days of suspended public employment. He 
 was a man who was not easily satistied with his attempts 
 to arrange the order and proportions of his plans for 
 mastering that new world of unkno"\\Ti truth, which 
 he held to be within the grasp of man, if he would only 
 dare to seize it ; and he was much given to vary the 
 shape of his work, and to try experiments in composition 
 and even style. He wrote and rewrote. Besides what 
 Avas finally published, there remains a larger quantity of 
 work which never reached the stage of publication. He 
 repeated over and over again the same thoughts, the 
 same images and characteristic sayings. Among these 
 papers is one which sums up his convictions about the 
 work before him, and the vocation to which he had been 
 called in respect of it. It is in the form of a "Proem" 
 to a treatise on the Interpretation of Nature. It was never 
 used in his published works ; but, as Mr. Spedding says, 
 it has a peculiar value as an authentic statement of what 
 he looked upon as his special business in life. It is 
 this mission which he states to himself in the following- 
 paper. It is drawn up in "stately Latin." Mr. 
 Spedding's translation is no unworthy representation of 
 the words of the great Prophet of Knowledge :— 
 
 " Believing that I was born for the service of mankind, and 
 regarding the care of the Commonwealth as a kind of common 
 property which, like the air and water, belongs to everybody, I set 
 myself to consider in what way mankind might be best served, and 
 what service I was myself best fitted bj' nature to perform. 
 
 "Now among all the benefits that could be conferred upon 
 mankind, I J^ound none s o great as the discovery of new arts , 
 endownnents, and commodit ies for the bettering of man's lif e. . . . 
 But if a man could succeed, not in striking out some particular 
 invention, however useful, but in kindling a light in nature — a 
 
111.] BACOX AND JAMES I. 71 
 
 light that shoukl in its very rising touch ami illuminate all the 
 border regions that confine upon the circle of our present knowledge ; 
 and so spreading further and further should presently disclose and 
 bring into sight all that is most hidden and secret in the world, — 
 that man (I thought) would be the benefactor indeed of the human 
 race, — the propagator of man's empire over the universe, the 
 champion of liberty, the conqueror and subduer of necessities. 
 
 " For myself, I found that I was fitted for nothing so well as 
 for the study of Truth ; as having a mind nimble and versatile 
 enough to catch the resemblances of things (which is the chief 
 point), and at the same time steady enough to fix and distinguish 
 their subtler differences ; as.beiu g gifted by nature withdes ire to 
 seek, patience to doubt, foml ness to meditate, slo wness to assert , 
 readiness to reconsider, ca refulness to dispose and set in order ; and 
 aTbeing a man that neither afl'ects what is new nor admires what 
 is old, and that hates every kind of impostur e. So I thought my 
 nature had a kind of familiarity and relationship with Truth. 
 
 "Nevertheless, because my birth and education had seasoned 
 me in business of State ; and because opinions (so young as I was) 
 would sometimes stagger me ; and because I thought that a man's 
 own country has some special claims upon him more than the rest 
 of the world ; and because I hoped that, if I rose to any place of 
 honour in the State, I should have a larger command of industry 
 and ability to help me in my work ; — for these reasons I both 
 applied myself to acquire the arts of civil life, and commended my 
 service, so far as in modesty and honesty I might, to the favour of 
 such friends as had any influence. In which also I had another 
 motive : for I felt that those things I have spoken of— be they great 
 or small — reach no further than the condition and culture of this 
 mortal life ; and I was not without hope (the condition of religion 
 being at that time not very prosperous) t hat if I came to hold office 
 in th e State. I might get so mething done too for the good of men's 
 souls. When I found, however, that my zeal was mistaken I'oJ- 
 ambition, and my life had already reached the turning-point, and 
 niyTireaking health reminded me how ill I could afford to be so 
 slow, and I reflected moreover that in leaving undone the good that 
 I could do by myself alone, and applying myself to that which 
 could not be done without the help and consent of otliers, I was by 
 no means discharging the duty that lay upon me, — I put all those 
 
72 BACON. [CHAP. 
 
 thoughts aside, ami (in pursuance of my old detiTiiiinatiouj betook 
 myself wholly to this work. Nor am I discouraged from it because 
 I see signs iu the times of the decline and overthrow of that know- 
 ledge and erudition which is now in use. Not that I apprehend 
 any more barbarian invasions (unless possibly the Spanish empire 
 should recover its strength, and having crushed other nations by 
 arms should itself sink under its own weight) : but the civil wars 
 which may be expected, I think (judging from certain fashions 
 which have come in of late), to spread through many countries — 
 together with the malignity of sects, and those compendious arti- 
 fices and devices Avhich have crept into the place of solid 
 erudition — seem to portend for literature and the sciences a 
 tempest not less fatal, and one against which the Printing office 
 will be no effectual security. And no doubt but that fair-weather 
 learning which is nursed by leisure, blossoms under reward and 
 praise, which cannot withstand the shock of opinion, and is liable 
 to be abused by tricks and quackery, will sink under such impedi- 
 ments as these. Far otherwise is it with that knowledge, whose 
 dignity is mainta ined by works of utititv^nur power. For the 
 injuries, therelore, which should proceed from the tinfts, I am not 
 afraid of them ; and for the injuries which proceed from men, I am 
 not concerned. For if any one charge me with seeking to be wise 
 over-much, I answer simply that modesty and civil respect are fit 
 for civil matters ; _ in contempl ations nothing is to be respected but 
 Jlmth. If any one call on me for works, arid that presently ; I tell 
 him frankly, without any imposture at all, that for me — a man 
 not old, of weak health, my hands full of civil business, entering 
 without guide or light upon an argument of all others the most 
 obscure, — I hold it enough to have constructed the machine, though 
 I may not succeed in setting it on work. ... If, again, any one ask 
 me, not indeed for actual works, yet for definite promises and fore- 
 casts of the works that are to be, I would have him know that the 
 knowledge which we now possess will not teach a man even what 
 to wis?t,. Lastly — though this is a matter of less moment — if any 
 of our politicians, who use to make their calculations and con- 
 jectures according to persons and precedents, must needs interpose 
 his judgment in a thing of this nature, I would but remind him 
 how (according to the ancient fable) the lame man keeping the 
 course won the race of the swift man who left it : and that there is 
 
Til.] BACON AND JAMES I. 73 
 
 no thought to be taken about precedents, for the thing is without 
 precedent. 
 
 ' ' For myself, my heart is not set upon any of those things 
 ■which depend upon external accidents. I am not hunting for 
 fame : I have no desire to found a sect, after the fashion of 
 heresiarchs ; and to look for any private gain from such an un- 
 dertaking as this, I count both ridiculous and base. Enough for 
 me the consciousness of well-deserving, and those real and effectual 
 results with which Fortune itself cannot interfere." 
 
 In 1604 James's first Parliament met, and Antli it 
 Bacon returned to an industrious public life, which was 
 not to be interrupted till it finally came to an end viith 
 his strange and irretrievable fall. The opportunity had 
 come ; and Bacon, patient, vigilant, and conscious of 
 great powers and indefatigable energy, fully aware of all 
 the conditions of the time, pushed at once to the front 
 in the House of Commons. He lost no time in showing 
 that he meant to make himself felt. The House of Com- 
 mons had no sooner met than it was involved in a contest 
 with the Chancery, Avith the Lords, and finally with the 
 King himself, about its pri^^leges — in this rase, its exclu - 
 s ive right to j udge of the returns of its members. Bacon's 
 time Avas come for showing the King both that he was 
 willing to do him service, and that he was worth being 
 employed. He took a leading part in the discussions, 
 and Avas trustedljy t he House^ as their spokesman an d 
 reporter in the various conferences. The King, in his 
 overweening confidence in his absolute prerogative, had, 
 indeed, got himself into serious difficulty ; for the privi- 
 lege was one which it Avas impossible for the Commons 
 to give up. But Bacon led the House to agre e to a n 
 arrangement which saved their rights ; and under a 
 cloud of Avords of extravagant flattery, he put the King in 
 
74 BACON. [rnAi'. 
 
 good humonr, and elicited from him the spontaneous 
 proposal of a compromise whicli ended a verj^ dangerous 
 dispute. " The King's voice," said Bacon, in his report 
 to the House, " was the voice of God in man, the good 
 spirit of God in the mouth of man : I do not say the 
 voice of God, and not of man : I am not one of Herod's 
 flatterers : a curse fell upon him that said it, a curse on 
 him that suffered it. "We might say, as was said to 
 Solomon, "We are glad King that we give account to 
 you, because you discern what is spoken." 
 
 The course of this Parliament, in which Bacon was 
 active and prominent, showed the King, probably for the 
 first time, what Bacon was. The session was not so 
 stormy as some of the later ones ; but occasions arose 
 which revealed to the King and to the House of Com- 
 mons the deeply discordant assumptions and purposes by 
 which each party was influenced, and which brought out 
 Bacon's powers of adjusting difficulties and harmonising 
 claims. He never wavered in his loyalty to his o^ni 
 House, where it is clear that his authority was great. 
 But there was no limit to the submission and reverence 
 which he expressed to the King, and, indeed, to his 
 desire to bring about what the King desired, as far as it_ 
 could be safely done. Dealing Math the Commons, his 
 policy was " to be content with the substance and not to 
 stand on the form." Dealing with the King, he was 
 forward to recognise all that James wanted recognised 
 of his kingcraft and his absolute sovereignty. Bacon 
 assailed with a force and keenness, which showed what he 
 could do as an opponent, the amazing and intolerabl e 
 grievances arisins; out of the survival of such feudal cus- 
 toms as "Wardship and Purveyance ; customs which made 
 
III.] BACOX AXD JAMES I. 75 
 
 over a man's eldest son and property, during a minority, 
 to the keeping of the King, that is, to a King's favourite, 
 and allowed the King's servants to cut down a man's 
 timber before the windows of his house. But he urged 
 that these grievances should be taken away with the utmost 
 tenderness for the King's honour and the King's purse. 
 In the great and troublesome questions relating to the 
 Union he took care to be fully prepared. He was equally 
 strong on points of certain and substantial importance, 
 equally quick to suggest accommodations where nothing 
 substantial was touched. His attitude was one of friendly 
 and respectful independence. It was not misunderstood 
 by the King. Bacon, who had hitherto been an unsworn 
 and unpaid member of the Learned Counsel, now received 
 his office by patent, with a small salary, and he Avas 
 charged with the grave business of preparing the work 
 for the Commissioners for the Union of the Kingdoms, in 
 which, when the Commission met, he took a foremost and 
 successful part. 
 
 But the Parliament before which their report was to 
 be laid did not meet till ten months after the work of 
 the Commission was done (Dec. 1604 — Nov. 1605). For 
 nearly another year Bacon had no public work. The leisure 
 was used for his own objects. He was interested in his- 
 tory in a degree only second to his interest in nature ; 
 indeed, but for the engrossing claims of his philosophy 
 of nature, he might have been the first and one of the 
 greatest of our historians. He addressed a letter to the 
 Chancellor Ellesmere on the deficiencies of British his- 
 tory, and on the opportunities Avhich offered for supplying 
 them. He himself could ut present do nothing; "but 
 because there be so many good painters, both for hand 
 
76 BACON. [chap. 
 
 and colours, it ncedcth but encouragement and instruc- 
 tions to give life and light unto it." But he mistook, in 
 this as in other instances, the way in which such things 
 are done. Men do not accomplish such things to order, 
 but because their souls compel them, as he himself was 
 building up his great philosophical structure, in the midst 
 of his ambition and disappointment. And this interval 
 of quiet enabled him to bring out his first public appeal 
 on the subject which most filled his mind. He com- 
 pleted in English the Tico Bouks of the Advancement of 
 Knowledge, which were published at a book shop at the 
 gateway of Gray's Inn in Holborn (Oct. 1605). He in- 
 tended that it should be published in Latin also ; but he 
 was dissatisfied with the ornate translation sent him from 
 Cambridge, and probably he was in a hurry to get the book 
 out. It M'as dedicated to the King, not merely by way 
 of compliment, but "sWth the serious hope that his interest 
 might be awakened in the subjects which Avere nearest 
 Bacon's heart. Like other of Bacon's hopes, it was dis- 
 appointed. The King's studies and the King's humours 
 were not of the kind to make him care for Bacon's visions 
 of the future, or his eager desire to begin at once a novel 
 method of investigating the facts and laws of nature ; 
 and the appeal to him fell dead. Bacon sent the book 
 about to his friends with explanatory letters. To Sir 
 T. Bodley he writes: — 
 
 "I tliink no man may more truly say with the Psalm, MuUum 
 incolafuit aniina meet [Ps. 120] than myself. For I do confess since 
 I was of any understanding, my mind hath in effect been absent 
 from that I have done; and in absence are many errors which I 
 willingly acknowledge : and among them, this great one which led 
 the rest ; that knowing myself by inward calling to be fitter to 
 hold a book than to play a part, I have led my life in civil causes, 
 
III.] BACON AXD JAMES I. 77 
 
 for wliich I was not very fit by uaturc, and more unfit by the pre- 
 occupation of my mirnl. Therefore, calling myself home, I have 
 now enjoyed myself; whereof like\\'ise I desii'e to make the world 
 partaker." 
 
 To Lord Salisbury, in a note of elaborate compliment, 
 he describes his pmpose by an image which he repeats 
 more than once. "I shall content myseK to awake 
 better spirits, like a bell-ringer, icJtich is first i(p to call 
 others to church." But the two friends whose judgment 
 he chiefly valued, and who, as on other occasions, were 
 taken into his most intimate literary confidence, were 
 Bishop Andrewes, his "inquisitor," and Toby Matthews, 
 a son of the Archbishop of York, who had become a 
 Roman Catholic, and lived in Italy, seeing a good deal 
 of learned men there, apparently the most trusted of all 
 Bacon's friends. 
 
 When Parliament met again in November 160-5, the 
 Gunpowder Plot and its consequences filled all minds. 
 Bacon was not employed about it by Government, and 
 his Avork in the House was confined to carrying on 
 matters left unfinished from the previous session. On 
 the rumour of legal promotions and vacancies Bacon once 
 more applied to Salisbury for the Solicitorship (March 
 1606). But no changes were made, and Bacon was "still 
 next the door." In May 1606 he did what had for some 
 time been in his thoughts : he married ; not the lady 
 whom Essex had tried to van for him, that Lady Hatton 
 who became the wife of his rival Coke, but one whom 
 Salisbury helped him to gain, an alderman's daughter, 
 Alice Barnham, "an handsome maiden," "with some money 
 and a disagreeable mother, by her second marriage. Lady 
 Packington. Bacon's curious Ioa'o of pomp amused the 
 
7S BACON. [fHAP. 
 
 gossips of the day. " Sir Francis Bacon," writes Carleton 
 to Chamberlain, " was married yesterday to his yoimg 
 wench, in Maribone Chapel. He^waa^clad ^rom top to 
 toe in purple, and hath made himself and his wife suc h 
 store of raiments of cloth of_ silver and gold that it draw s 
 deep into lier portion ?' Ofhis married life we hear next 
 to nothing : in his Essay on Marringe, he is not enthusi- 
 astic in its praise ; almost the only thing we know is that 
 in his aWII, twenty years afterwards, he showed his dis- 
 satisfaction with his vrde, who after his death married 
 again. But it gave him an additional reason, and an 
 additional plea, for pressing for preferment : and in the 
 summer of 1606 the opening came. Coke was made 
 Chief-Justice of the Common Pleas, leaving the Attorney's 
 place vacant. A favourite of Salisbury's, Hobart, became 
 Attorney, and Bacon hoped for some arrangement by 
 which the Solicitor Doddridge might be otherwise pro- 
 vided for, and he himself become Solicitor. Hopefvd as 
 he Avas, and patient of disappointments, and of what other 
 men would have thought injustice and faithlessness, he 
 felt keenly both the disgrace and the inconvenience of 
 so often expecting place, and being so often passed over. 
 While the question was pending, he wrote to the King, 
 the Chancellor, and Salisbury. His letter to the King is 
 a record in his o'nati words of his public serA^ices. To the 
 Chancellor, whom he believed to be his supporter, he 
 represented the discredit which he suffered — " he was a 
 common gaze and a speech;" "the little reputation which 
 by his industry he gathered, being scattered and taken 
 away by continual disgraces, every neio man coming 
 ahore me ,•" and his ^\\{Q and his wife's friends were 
 making him feel it. The letters show what Bacon 
 
III.] BACON AXD JAMES I. 79 
 
 thought to be liis claims, and how hard he found it to 
 get them recognised. To the Chancellor he urged, 
 among otlier things, that time was slipping by : 
 
 "I lu;mbly praj- your Lordship to consider that time groweth 
 precious with me, and that a married man is seven years elder 
 in his thoughts the first day. , . . And were it not to satisfy my 
 ■wife's friends, and to get myself out of being a common gaze and a 
 speech, I protest before God I would never speak word for it. But 
 to conclude, as my honourable Lady your wife Avas some mean to 
 make me to change the name of another, so if it please you to help 
 me to change my own name, I can be but more and more bounden 
 to you ; and I am much deceived if your Lordship find not the 
 King well inclined, and my Lord of Salisbuiy forward and affec- 
 tionate." 
 
 To Salisbury he ■vnites : — 
 
 " I may say to your Lordship, in the confidence of your poor 
 kinsman, and of a man by you advanced, Tu idem fer opem, 
 qui spcm dcdisti ; for I am sure it was not possible for any living 
 man to have received from another more significant and com- 
 fortable words of hope ; your Lordship being pleased to tell me, 
 during the course of my last service, that you would raise me ; 
 and that when you had resolved to raise a man, you were more care- 
 ful of him than himself ; and that what you had done for me in my 
 marriage was a benefit to me, but of no use to your Lordship. . . . 
 And I know, and all the world knoweth, that your Lordship is no 
 dealer of holy water, but noble and real ; and on my part I am of 
 a sure ground that I have committed nothing that may deserve 
 alteration. And therefore my hope is your Lordship will finish a 
 good work, and consider that time groweth precious with me, and 
 that I am now vercjentihis annis. And although I know your for- 
 tune is not to need an hundred such as I am, yet I shall be ever 
 ready to give you my best and first fruits, and to supply (as much 
 as in me lieth) worthiness by thankfulness." 
 
 Still the powers were deaf to his appeals ; at any rate 
 he had to be content with another promise. Consider- 
 
80 BACON. [chap. hi. 
 
 ing the al)ility which he had sho^\^l in Parliament, the 
 wisdom and zeal ^\^th which he had supported the 
 Government, and the important position which he held 
 in the House of Commons, the neglect of him is unin- 
 telligible, except on two suppositions : that the Govern- 
 ment, that is Cecil, were afraid of anything but the mere 
 routine of law, as represented by such men as Hobart 
 and Doddridge ; or that Coke's hostility to him was un- 
 abated, and Coke still too important to be offended. 
 
 Bacon returned to work when the Parliament met, 
 November 1606. The questions arising out of the Union, 
 the question of naturalisation, its grounds and limits, the 
 position of Scotchmen born before or since the King's 
 accession, the Antenati and Fostnati, the question of a 
 union of laws, with its consequences, were discussed with 
 great keenness and much jealous feeling. On the ques- 
 tion of naturahsation Bacon took the liberal and larger 
 view. The immediate union of laws he opposed as 
 premature. He was a Avilling servant of the House, 
 and the House readily made use of him. He reported 
 the result of conferences, even when his own opinion 
 Avas adverse to that of the House. And he reported 
 the speeches of such persons as Lord Salisbury, probably 
 throwing into them both form and matter of his own. 
 At length, "silently, on the 25th of June," 1607, he 
 was appointed Solicitor -General. He was then forty- 
 seven. 
 
 " It was also probably about this time," writes Mr. 
 Spedding, "that Bacon finally settled the plan of his 
 * Great Listauration,' and began to call it by that name." 
 
CHAPTER IV. 
 
 BACON SOLICITOR-GENERAL. 
 
 The great thinker and idealist, the great seer of a world 
 of knowledge to Avhich the men of his own generation 
 were blind, and which they could not, even with his 
 help, imagine a possible one, had now won the first step 
 in that long and toilsome ascent to success in life, in 
 which for fourteen years he had been baffled. He had 
 made himself, for good and for evil, a servant of the 
 Government of James I. He was prepared to discharge 
 with zeal and care all his duties. He Avas prepared to 
 perform all the services Avhich that Government might 
 claim from its servants. He had sought, he had pas- 
 sionately pressed to be admitted Anthin that circle in 
 Avhich the Avill of the King Avas the supreme laAv ; after 
 that, it Avould have been ruin to have withdraAvn or 
 resisted ; but it does not appear that the thought or 
 wish to resist or AvithdraAv ever presented itself ; he had 
 thoroughly com-inced himself that in doing what the 
 King required he Avas doing the part of a good citizen 
 and a faithful servant of the State and Commonwealth. 
 The two lives, the two currents of purpose and effort, Avere 
 still there. Behind all the Avrangle of the courts and the 
 devising of questionable legal subtleties to support some 
 
 G 
 
82 BACON. [chap. 
 
 unconstitutional encroachment, or to outflank the defence 
 of some obnoxious prisoner, the high philosophical medi- 
 tations still went on ; the remembrance of their sweetness 
 and grandeur wrung more than once from the jaded 
 lawyer or the baffled counsellor the complaint, in words 
 which had a great charm for him, Mnltuin incola fuit 
 anima men, — " My soul hath long dwelt," where it would 
 not be. But opinion, and ambition, and tlie immense 
 convenience of being great, and rich, and powerful, and 
 the supposed necessities of his condition, were too strong 
 even for his longings to be the interpreter and the ser- 
 vant of nature. There is no trace of the faintest reluc- 
 tance on his part to be the willing minister of a court of 
 which not only the principal figure, but the arbiter and 
 governing spirit, Avas to be George Villiers, Duke of 
 Buckingham. 
 
 The first leisure that Bacon had after he was appointed 
 Solicitor he used in a characteristic way. He sat down 
 to make a minute stock-taking of his position and its 
 circumstances. In the summer of 1608 he devoted a 
 week of July to this survey of his life, its objects and 
 its appliances ; and he jotted down, day by day, through 
 the week, from his present reflections, or he transcribed 
 from former note-books, a series of notes in loose order, 
 mostly very rough and not always intelligible, about 
 everything that could now concern him. This curious 
 and intimate record, which he called Commentarius Solutus, 
 was discovered by Mr. Spedding, who not unnaturally 
 had some misgivings about publishing so secret and so 
 ambiguous a record of a man's most private confidences 
 with himself. But there it Avas, and, as it Avas knoAvn, 
 he no doubt decided Avisely in publishing it as it stands ; 
 
IV.] P.ACOX SOLICITOR-OEXERAL. 83 
 
 he has done his best to make it intelligible, and he has 
 also done his best to remove any unfavourable impres- 
 sions that might arise from it. It is singularly interest- 
 ing as an evidence of Bacon's way of working, of his 
 watchfulness, his industry, his care in preparing himself 
 long beforehand for possible occasions, his readiness to 
 take any amount of trouble about his present duties, his 
 self-reliant desire for more important and difficult ones. 
 It exhibits his habit of self -observation and self -correction, 
 his care to mend his natural defects of voice, manner, 
 and delivery ; it is even more curious in sho^unng him 
 watching his own physical constitution and health, in the 
 most minute details of symptoms and remedies, equally 
 with a scientific and a practical object. It contains his 
 estimate of his income, his expenditure, his debts, sche- 
 dules of lands and jewels, his miles for the economy of 
 his estate, his plans for his new gardens, and terraces, 
 and ponds, and buildings at Gorhambury. He was now a 
 rich man, valuing his property at £24,155 and his in- 
 come at £4975, burdened Avith a considerable debt, but 
 not more than he might easily look to wipe out. But, 
 besides all these points, there appear the two large in- 
 terests of his life, the reform of philosophy, and his ideal 
 of a great national policy. The "greatness of Britain" 
 was one of his favourite subjects of meditation. He 
 puts down in his notes the outline of what should be 
 aimed at to secure and increase it; it is to make the 
 various forces of the great and growing empire work to- 
 gether in harmonious order, without Avaste, without 
 jealousy, Anthout encroachment and collision ; to unite 
 not only the interests but the sympathies and aims of 
 the Crown with those of the people and Parliament ; and 
 
84 BACON. [chap. 
 
 SO to make Britain, now in peril from nothing but from 
 the strength of its o'wti discordant elements, that 
 " Monarchy of the West " in reality, which Spain was in 
 show, and, as Bacon always maintained, only in show. 
 The survey of the condition of his philosophical enter- 
 prise takes more space. He notes the stages and points 
 to which his plans have reached ; he indicates, vnth. a 
 favourite quotation or apophthegm — ''Plus vlfm" — 
 " ausus vana contemnere " — " aditus non nisi sub persona 
 infantis" soon to be familiar to the world in his published 
 writings — the lines of argument, sometimes alterna- 
 tive ones, which were before him ; he draws out schemes 
 of inquiry, specimen tables, distinctions and classifica- 
 tions about the subject of Motion, in English interlarded 
 with Latin, or in Latin interlarded with English, of his 
 characteristic and practical sort ; he notes the various 
 sources from which he might look for help and co- 
 operation — "of learned men beyond the seas" — "to 
 begin first in France to print it " — " laying for a place to 
 command wits and pens :" he has his eye on rich and 
 childless bishops, on the enforced idleness of State 
 prisoners in the Tower, like Northumberland and 
 Ealeigh, on the great schools and universities, where 
 he might perhaps get hold of some college for " Inven- 
 tors " — as we should say, for the endowment of research. 
 These matters fill up a large space of his notes. But 
 his thoughts were also busy about his OAvn advancement. 
 And to these sheets of miscellaneous memoranda Bacon 
 confided not only his occupations and his philosophical 
 and political ideas, but, with a curious innocent unre- 
 serve, the arts and methods which he proposed to use 
 in order to win the favour of the great and to pull dovm. 
 
IV.] BACOX SOLICITOR-GENERAL. 85 
 
 the reputation of his rivals. He puts down in detail 
 how he is to recommend himself to the King and the 
 King's favourites : — 
 
 "To set on foot and maintain access ^vith his Majesty, Dean 
 of the Chapel, May, Murray. Keeping a course of access at the 
 beginning of every term and vacation, with a memorial. To attend 
 some time liis repasts, or to fall into a course of familiar discourse. 
 To find means to win a conceit, not open, but private, of being 
 affectionate and assured to the Scotch, and fit to succeed Salisbury 
 in his manage in that kind ; Lord Dunbar, Duke of Lennox, and 
 Daubiny : secret." 
 
 Then, again, of Salisbury : — 
 
 "Insinuate myself to become privy to my Lord of Salisbury's 
 estate." "To correspond with Salisbury in a habit of natural but 
 no ways perilous boldness, and in vivacity, invention, care to cast 
 and enterprise (but with due caution), for this manner I judge 
 both in his nature freeth the stands, and in his ends pleaseth him 
 best, and promiseth more use of me. I judge my standing out, and 
 not favoured by Northampton, must needs do me good with Salis- 
 bury, specially comparative to the Attorney." 
 
 The Attorney Hobart filled the place to which Bacon 
 had so long aspired, and which he thought, perhaps 
 reasonably, that he could fill much better. At any rate 
 one of the points to which he recurs frequently in his 
 notes, is to exhort himself to make his own service a 
 continual contrast to the Attorney's ; " to have in mind 
 and use the Attorney's weakness;" enumerating a list 
 of instances. "Too full of cases and distinctions. 
 Nibbling solemnly ; he distinguisheth but apprehends 
 not." " Xo gift with his pen in proclamations and the 
 like," and at last he draws out in a series of epigrams 
 his \ieAv of " Hubbard's disadvantages " : — 
 
 " Better at shift than at drift. . . Suhdlilas sincaa-ivwnia. . . 
 
86 BACON. [(HAP. 
 
 Ko power with the judge. . . lie will alter a thing but not mend. 
 . . He puts into patents and deeds words not of hnv but of com- 
 mon sense and discourse. . . Sociable save in profit. . . He doth 
 depopulate mine oflioe ; otherwise called inclo.se. . . I never 
 knew any one of so good a speech with a worse pen." , . 
 
 Then in a marginal note — "Solemn goose. Stately, 
 leastAvise nodd (1) crafty. They have made him believe 
 that he is wondrous wise." And, finally, he draws up a 
 paper of counsels and rules for his own conduct, 
 " Custumce aptce ad Individuum" — which might supply an 
 outline for an essay on the arts of behaviour proper for 
 a rising official ; a sequel to the biting irony of the 
 essays on Cunning and JVisdomfor a Alan's Self. 
 
 "To furnish my L. of S. with ornaments for public speeches. 
 To make him think how he should be reverenced by a Lord 
 Chancellor, if I were ; Princelike. 
 
 "To prej^are him for matters to be handled in Council or before 
 the King aforehand, and to show him and yield him the fruits of 
 my care. 
 
 " To take notes in tables, when I attend the Council, and some- 
 times to move out of a memorial shew-ed and seen. To have par- 
 ticular occasions, fit and graceful and continual, to maintain private 
 speech with every the great persons, and sometimes drawing more 
 than one together. Ux imitationc Alt. This specially in public 
 places, and without care or affectation. At Council table to make 
 good my L. of Salisb. motions and speeches, and for the rest some- 
 times one sometimes another ; chiefly his, that is most earnest and 
 in affection. 
 
 "To suppress at once my speaking, with panting and labour of 
 breath and voice. Not to fall upon the main too sudden, but to 
 induce and intermingle speech of good fashion. To use at once 
 upon entrance given of speech, though abrupt, to compose and 
 draw in myself. To free myself at once from pay t. ( ?) of formality 
 and compliment, though with some show' of carelessness, pride, 
 and rudeness." 
 
 (And then follows a long list of matters of business to be at- 
 tended to. ) 
 
IV.] BACON SOLICITOR-GENERAL. 87 
 
 These arts of a court were not new ; it was not new 
 for men to observe them in their neighbours and rivals. 
 AYhat was new was the writing them down, with deliber- 
 ate candour, among a man's private memoranda, as things 
 to be done and with the intention of practising them. 
 This of itself, it has been suggested, shows that they 
 were unfamiliar and uncongenial to Bacon j for a man 
 reminds himself of what he is apt to forget. But a man 
 reminds himself also of what seems to him, at the mo- 
 ment, most important, and what he lays most stress 
 upon. And it is clear that these are the rules, rhetorical 
 and ethical, which Bacon laid down for himself in 
 pursuing the second great object of his life — his official 
 advancement; and that, whatever we think of them, 
 they were the means which he deliberately approved. 
 
 As long as Salisbury lived, the distrust which had 
 kept Bacon so long in the shade kept him at a distance 
 from the King's ear, and from influence on his counsels. 
 Salisbury was the one Englishman in whom the King 
 had become accustomed to confide, in his own conscious 
 strangeness to English ways and real dislike and sus- 
 picion of them ; Salisbury had an authority which no 
 one else had, both from his relations Avith James at the 
 end of Elizabeth's reign, and as the representative of 
 her policy and the depositary of its traditions; and if he 
 had lived, things might not, perhaps, have been better in 
 James's government, but many things, probably, would 
 have been different. But while Salisbuiy was supreme. 
 Bacon, though very alert and zealous, was mainly 
 busied with his official work ; and the Solicitor's place 
 had become, as he says, a "mean thing" compared 
 with the Attorney's, and also an extremely laborious 
 
88 15AC0X. [vnw. 
 
 place, "one of the painfullest places in the kingdom." 
 Much of it -was routine ; but responsible and fatiguing 
 routine. But if he was not in Salisbury's confidence, he 
 was prominent in the House of Commons. The great 
 and pressing subject of the time was the increasing 
 difficulties of the revenue, created partly by the inevit- 
 able changes of a growing state, but much more by the 
 King's incorrigible wastefulness. It was impossible to 
 realise completely the great dream and longing of the 
 Stuart kings and their ministers, to make the Crown 
 independent of parliamentary supplies ; but to dispense 
 with these supplies as much as possible, and to make as 
 much as possible of the revenue permanent, was the 
 continued and fatal policy of the Court. The "Great 
 Contract" — a scheme by which, in return for the surren- 
 der by the CroA\Ti of certain burdensome and dangerous 
 claims of the Prerogative, the Commons were to assure 
 a large compensating yearly income to the Crown — was 
 Salisbury's favourite device during the last two j-ears of 
 his life. It was not a prosperous one. The bargain Avas 
 an ill-imagined and not very decorous transaction between 
 the King and his people. Both parties were naturally 
 jealous of one another, suspicious of underhand dealing 
 and tacit changes of terms, prompt to resent and take 
 offence, and not easy to pacify Avhen they thought 
 advantage had been taken ; and Salisbury, either by his 
 OAVTi fault, or by yielding to the King's canny shiftiness, 
 gave the business a more haggling and huckstering look 
 than it need have had. Bacon, a subordinate of the 
 Government, but a very important person in the Com- 
 mons, did his part, loyally, as it seems, and skilfully in 
 smoothing differences, and keeping awkward questions 
 
IV.] BACON SOLICITOR-GENERAL. 89 
 
 from making their appearance. Tlius he tried to stave 
 off the risk of bringing definitely to a point the King's 
 cherished claim to levy "impositions," or custom duties, 
 on merchandise, by virtue of his prerogative — a claim 
 which he warned the Commons not to dispute, and 
 which Bacon, maintaining it as legal in theory, did his 
 best to prevent them from discussing, and to persuade 
 them to be content -ndth restraining. "Whatever he 
 thought of the "Great Contract," he did what was 
 expected of him in trying to gain for it fair play. But 
 he made time for other things also. He advised, and 
 ad^^sed soundly, on the plantation and finance of Ireland. 
 It was a subject in which he took deep interest. A few 
 years later, -ndth only too sure a foresight, he gave the 
 warning, "lest Ireland civil become more dangerous to 
 us than Ireland savage." He advised — not soundly in 
 point of law, but curiously in accordance Avith modern 
 notions — about endowments ; though, in this instance, 
 in the famous will case of Thomas Sutton, the founder 
 of the Charter House, his argument probably covered 
 the scheme of a monstrous job in favour of the needy 
 Court. And his own work went on in spite of the 
 pressure of the Solicitor's place. To the first years of 
 his ofiicial life belong three very interesting fragments, 
 intended to find a provisional place in the plan of the 
 " Great Instauration." To his friend Toby Matthews, at 
 Florence, he sent in manuscript the great attack on the 
 old teachers of knowledge, which is perhaps the most 
 l)rilliant, and also the most insolently unjust and un- 
 thinking piece of rhetoric ever composed by him, — the 
 Redargutio Philosophiarum. 
 
 " I sund you at this time the only part wliicli hatli any harshness ; 
 
90 BACON. ['HAi'. 
 
 and yet 1 I'ranicd to niyself an opinion, that whosoever allowed well 
 of that preface whicli you so much commend, will not dislike, or at 
 least ought not to dislike, this other speech of preparation ; for it 
 is written out of the same spirit, and out of the same necessity. 
 Nay it doth more fully lay open that the question between me and 
 the ancients is not of the virtue of the race, but of the tightness of 
 the way. And to speak truth, it Is to the other but aspalma to 
 pugntis, part of the same thing more large. . . . ]\Iyself am like 
 the miller of Huntingdon, that was wont to pray for peace amongst 
 the willows ; for while the winds blew, the wind-mills wrought, 
 and the water-mill was less customed. So I see that controversies 
 of religion must hinder the advancement of sciences. Let me con- 
 clude with my perpetual wish towards yourself, that the approba- 
 tion of yourself by your own discreet and temperate carriage, may 
 restore you to your country, and your friends to your society. 
 And so I commend you to God's goodness. 
 " Gray's Inn, this 10th of October 1609." 
 
 To Bishop Andrewes he sent, also in manuscript, 
 another piece, belonging to the same plan — the deeply 
 impressive treatise called Visa et Cogiiata — what Francis 
 Bacon had seen of nature and knowledge, and what he 
 had come by meditation to think of Avhat he had seen. 
 The letter is not less interesting than the last, in respect 
 to the writer's purposes, his manner of writing, and his 
 relations to his correspondent. 
 
 " My vert good Lokd — Now your Lordship hath been so long 
 in the church and the palace disputing between kings and popes, 
 methinks you should take pleasure to look into the field, and re- 
 fresh your mind with some matter of philosophy ; though that 
 science be now through age waxed a child again, and left to boys 
 and young men ; and because you were wont to make me believe 
 you took liking to my writings, I send you some of this vacation's 
 fruits ; and thus much more of my mind and purpose. I hasten 
 not to publish ; perishing I would prevent. And I am forced to 
 respect as well my times as the matter. For with me it is thus, 
 and 1 think with all men in my case, if I bind myself to an argu- 
 
IV.] BACON SOLICITOR-GEXERAL. 91 
 
 ment, it loadeth my mind ; but if I rid my miud of tlie present 
 cogitation, it is rather a i-ecreation. This hath put me into these 
 miscellanies ; which I purpose to suppress, if God give me leave 
 to write a just and perfect volume of philosophy, which I go on 
 with, though slowly. I send not your Lordship too much, lest it 
 may glut you. Now let me tell you what my desire is. If your 
 Lordship be so good now, as when you were the good Dean of "West- 
 minster, my recjuest to you is, that not by pricks, but by notes, 
 you would mark unto me whatsoever shall seem unto you either not 
 current in the style, or harsh to credit and opinion, or inconvenient 
 for the person of the writer ; for no man can be judge and party : 
 and when our minds judge by reflection of ourselves, they are more 
 subject to error. And though for the matter itself my judgement 
 be in some things fixed, and not accessible by any man's judgement 
 that goeth not my way, yet even in those things, the admonition 
 of a friend may make me express myself diversly. I would have 
 come to your Lordship, but that I am hastening to my house in 
 the country. And so I commend your Lordship to God's good- 
 ness." 
 
 There was yet another production of this time, of 
 Avhich we have a notice from himself in a letter to Toby 
 MattheAvs, the curious and ingenious little treatise on 
 the JFisdom of the Ancients, "one of the most popular of 
 his works," says Mr. Spedding, " in his own and in the 
 next generation," but of value to us mainly for its quaint 
 poetical colour, and the unexpected turns, like answers 
 to a riddle, given to the ancient fables. When this work 
 Avas published, it was the third time that he had appeared 
 as an author in print. He thus writes about it and him- 
 self :— 
 
 "Mil. JIatthew— I do heartily thank you for your letter of 
 the 24th of August from Salamanca ; and in recompense thereof, 1 
 send you a little work of mine that hath begun to pass the world. 
 They tell me my Latin is turned into silver, and become current. 
 Had you been here, you should have been my inquisitor before it 
 came forth ; but I think the gi-catest inquisitor in Spain will allow 
 
92 BACON. [chap. 
 
 it. . . . My great work goetli forward : and, after my manner, I 
 alter ever -when I add. So that nothing is linished till all bo 
 finished. 
 
 'From Gray's Inn, the 17th of February 1610." 
 
 In the autumn of 1611 the Attorney -General was ill, 
 and Bacon reminded both the King and Salisbury of his 
 claim. He was afraid, he writes to the King, with an 
 odd forgetfulness of the persistency and earnestness of 
 his applications, "that hj reason of my slowness to sue, and 
 apprehend occasions upon the sudden, keeping one plain 
 course of painful service, I may in fine dierum be in 
 danger to be neglected and forgotten." The Attorney 
 recovered; but Bacon, on New Year's Tide of 16^, 
 wrote to Salisbury to thank him for his good^vill. It is 
 the last letter of Bacon's to Salisbury which has come 
 do^\Ti to us. 
 
 "It may ple.\sk your good Loedship — I would entreat the 
 new year to answer for the old, in my humble thanks to your Lord- 
 ship, both for many your favours, and chiefly that upon the occa- 
 sion of Mr. Attorney's infirmity I found your Lordship even as I 
 would wish. This doth increase a desire in me to express my thank- 
 ful mind to your Lordship ; hoping that though I find age and 
 decays gi-ow upon me, yet I may have a flash or two of spirit left 
 to do you service. And I do protest before God, without compli- 
 ment or any light vein of mind, that if I knew in what course of 
 life to do you best service, I would take it, and make my thoughts, 
 which now fly to many pieces, be reduced to that center. But all 
 this is no more than I am, which is not much, but yet the entire 
 of him that is " 
 
 In the folloA^nng May (May 24, 1612) Salisbmy died. 
 From this date James passed from government by a 
 minister, who, whatever may have been his faults, was 
 laborious, public-spiinted, and a statesman, into his own 
 keeping and into the hands of favourites, who cared only 
 
IV.] BACON SOLICITOR-GENERAL. 93 
 
 for themselves. With Cecil ceased the traditions of the 
 days of Elizabeth and Burghley, in many ways evil and 
 cruel traditions, but not ignoble and sordid ones ; and 
 James was left without the stay, and also without the 
 check, which Cecil's power had been to him. The field 
 was open for new men and new ways ; the fashions and 
 ideas of the time had altered during the last ten years, 
 and those of the Queen's days had gone out of date. 
 "Would the new turn out for the better or the worse 1 
 Bacon, at any rate, saw the significance of the change 
 and the critical eventfulness of the moment. It was his 
 habit of old to send memorials of advice to the heads of 
 the Government, apparently without such suggestions 
 seeming more intrusive or officious than a leading article 
 seems now, and perhaps with much the same effect. It 
 was now a time to do so, if ever; and he was in an 
 official relation to the King which entitled him to proffer 
 advice. He at once prepared to lay his thoughts before 
 the King, and to suggest that he could do far better 
 ser\ace than Cecil, and was ready to take his place. 
 The policy of the "Great Contract" had certainly 
 broken down, and the King, under Cecil's guidance, had 
 certainly not known how to manage an English parlia- 
 ment. In writing to the King, he found it hard to 
 satisfy himself. Several draft letters remain, and it is 
 not certain which of them, if any, was sent. But 
 immediately on Salisbury's death he began. May 29th, 
 a letter in which he said that he had never yet been 
 able to show his affection to the King, "having been as 
 a hawk tied to another's fist;" and if, "as was said to 
 one that spake great words. Amice, verba tiia desiderant 
 dvitatetn, your Majesty say to me. Bacon, your W(yrds 
 
94 BACON". [cnAP. 
 
 require a place to speak them" yet that "place or nut 
 place " was with tlie King. But the draft breaks off 
 abruptly, and with the date of the 31st we have the 
 following : — 
 
 "Your jrajesty liath lost a great si:bject and a great .servant. 
 But if I should praise him in proprictj', I should say that he was 
 a fit man to keep things from growing worse, but no verj' fit man 
 to reduce things to be much better. For he loved to have the eyes 
 of all Israel a little too much upon himself, and to have all busi- 
 ness still irnder the hammer, and like clay in the hands of the 
 potter, to mould it as he thought good ; so that he was more in 
 operatione than in opere. And though he had fine passages of 
 action, yet the real conclusions came slowly on. So that although 
 your Majesty hath grave counsellors and worthy persons left, yet 
 you do as it were turn a leaf, wherein if your Jtlajesty shall give a 
 frame and constitution to matters, before you place the persons, in 
 my simple opinion it were not amiss. But the gi'eat matter and 
 most instant for the present, is the consideration of a Parliament, 
 for two effects : the one for the supply of yom- estate, the other for 
 the better knitting of the hearts of your subjects unto your Majesty, 
 according to your infinite merit ; for both which, Parliaments have 
 been and are the antient and honourable remedy. 
 
 " Now because I take myself to have a little skill in that region, 
 as one that ever affected that your Majesty mought in all your 
 causes not only prevail, but prevail with satisfaction of the inner 
 man ; and though no man can say but I was a perfect and peremp- 
 tory royalist, yet every man makes me believe that I was never one 
 hour out of credit with the lower house ; my desire is to know, 
 whether your Majesty will give me leave to meditate and propound 
 unto you some preparative remembrances touching the future Par- 
 liament." 
 
 Whether he sent this or not, he prepared another 
 draft. What had happened in the meamvhile we know 
 not, but Bacon was in a bitter mood, and the letter 
 reveals, for the first time, what was really in Bacon's 
 heart about the "great subject and great servant," of 
 
lY.] BACOX SOLICITOR-GEXERAL. 9& 
 
 whom he had just written so respectfully, and with 
 whom he had been so closely connected for most of his 
 life. The fierceness which had been gathering for years 
 of neglect and hindrance under that placid and patient 
 exterior broke out. He offered himself as Cecil's suc- 
 cessor in business of State. He gave his reason for 
 being hopeful of success. Cecil's bitterest enemy could 
 not have given it more bitterly. 
 
 "My principal end being to do your Majesty service, I crave 
 leave to make at this time to your ilajesty this most humble obla- 
 tion of myself. I may truly say with the psalm, Multum incola 
 fuit anima mca ; for my life hath been conversant in things 
 wherein I take little pleasure. Your Majesty may have heard 
 somewhat that my father was an honest man, and somewhat you 
 ma}' have seen of myself, though not to make any true judgement 
 by, because I have hitherto had only potcstatcm vcrborum, nor that 
 neither. I was three of my young years bred with an ambassador 
 in France, and since I have been an old truant in the school-house 
 of your council-chamber, though on the second form ; yet longer 
 than any that now sitteth hath been upon the head form. If your 
 Majesty find any aptness in me, or if you find any scarcity in others, 
 whereby you may think it fit for your service to remove me to 
 business of State ; although I have a fair way before me for profit 
 (and by your Majesty's grace and favour for honour and advance- 
 ment), and in a course less exposed to the blasts of fortune, yet ncno 
 that he is gone, quo vivente virtutihus certissiimtm exilium, I will 
 be ready as a chessman to be wherever your Majest3''s royal hand 
 shall set me. Your Majesty will bear me witness, I have not sud- 
 denly opened myself thus far. I have looked upon others, I see 
 the exceptions, I see the distractions, and I fear Tacitus will be a 
 prophet, magis alii homines q^iam alii mores. I know mine own 
 heart, and I know not whether God that hath touched my heart 
 with tlie affection may not touch your royal heart to discern it. 
 Howsoever, I shall at least go on honestly in mine ordinary course, 
 and supply the rest in prayers for you, remaining, etc." 
 
 This is no hasty outburst. In a later paper on the 
 
96 BACON. [chap. 
 
 true way of retrieving the disorders of the King's finances, 
 full of large and Avise counsel, after advising the King 
 not to be impatient, and assuring him that a state of 
 debt is not so intolerable — " for it is no new thing for 
 the greatest Kings to be in debt," and all the great men 
 of the Court had been in debt without any " manner of 
 diminution of their greatness " — he returns to the charge 
 in detail against Salisbury and the Great Contract. 
 
 "My second prayer is, that your Majesty — in respect of the 
 hasty freeing of your state — would not descend to any means, or 
 degree of means, which carrieth not a symmetry with your Ma- 
 jesty and greatness. He is gone from wliom those courses did 
 wholly floiv. To have your wants and necessities in particular as 
 it were hanged up in two tablets before the eyes of your lords and 
 commons, to be talked of for four months together ; To have all 
 your courses to help yourself in revenue or profit put into printed 
 books, which were wont to be held arcana imperii : To have such 
 worms of aldermen to lend for ten in the hundred upon good assur- 
 ance, and with such entreaty (?) as if it should save the bark of your 
 fortiuie : To contract still where mouglit be had the readiest pay- 
 ment, and not the best bargain : To stir a number of projects for 
 your profit, and then to blast them, and leave your Majesty nothing 
 but the scandal of them : To pretend even carriage between your 
 Majesty's rights and the ease of the people, and to satisfy neither : 
 These courses and others the like I hope are gone with the deviser 
 of them ; which have turned your Majesty to inestimable prejudice. " 
 
 And what he thought of saying, but on further con- 
 sideration struck out, was the following. It is no won- 
 der that he struck it out, but it shows what he felt 
 towards Cecil. 
 
 ' ' I protest to God, though I be not superstitious, when I saw 
 your M.'s book against Vorstius and Arminius, and noted 3'our 
 zeal to deliver the majesty of God from the vain and indign com- 
 prehensions of heresy and degenerate philosophy, as you had by 
 your pen fonnerly endeavoured to deliver kings from the usurpation 
 
IV. 1 BACON SOLICITOR-GENERAL. 97 
 
 of Rome, pcrculsit illico animum that God would set shortly upon 
 you some visible favour, and let me not live if I tJiought not of the 
 taking away of that man." 
 
 And from this time omvarcls he scarcely ever men- 
 tions Cecil's name in his correspondence with James but 
 with words of condemnation, which imply that Cecil's 
 mischievous pohcy was the result of private ends. Yet 
 this was the man to whom he had written the " New 
 Year's Tide " letter six months before ; a letter which is 
 but an echo to the last of all that he had been accustomed 
 to ^vrite to Cecil, when asking assistance or offering 
 congratulation. Cecil had, indeed, little claim on Bacon's 
 gratitude ; he had spoken him fair in public, and no 
 doubt in secret distrusted and thwarted him. But to 
 the last Bacon did not choose to acknowledge this. Had 
 James disclosed something of his dead servant, who left 
 some strange secrets behind him, which showed his un- 
 suspected hostility to Bacon 1 Except on this supposition 
 (but there is nothing to support it), no exaggeration of 
 the liberty allowed to the language of compliment is 
 enough to clear Bacon of an insincerity which is almost 
 inconceivable in any but the meanest tools of power. 
 
 "I assure myself," wrote Bacon to the King, "your 
 Majesty taketh not me for one of a busy nature ; for my 
 estate being free from all difficulties, and I having such a 
 large field for contemplation, as I have partly and shall 
 much more make manifest unto your Majesty and the 
 world, to occupy my thoughts, nothing could make me 
 active but love and affection." So Bacon described his 
 position with questionable accuracy — for his estate was not 
 "free from diflSculties" — in the new time coming. He was 
 still kept out of the inner circle of the Council ; but from 
 
 II 
 
98 BACON. [cH.vr. 
 
 the moment of Salisbury's death, he became a much more 
 important person. He still sued for advancement, and 
 .still met Avith disappointment; the " mean men" still rose 
 above him. The lucrative place of Master of the Wards 
 was vacated by Salisbury's death. Bacon Avas talked of 
 for it, and probably expected it, for he drew up new 
 rules for it, and a speech for the new master ; but the 
 office and the speech went to Sir George Carey. Soon after 
 Sir George Carey died. Bacon then applied for it through 
 the new favourite, Kochester. " He was so confident of 
 the place that he put most of his men into new cloaks ;" 
 and the world of the day amused itself at his disappoint- 
 ment, when the place was given to another " mean man," 
 Sir "Walter Cope, of whom the gossips \n'ote that if the 
 " last two Treasurers could look out of their graves to see 
 those successors in that place, they would be out of coun- 
 tenance with themselves, and say to the world quantum 
 mutaius." But Bacon's hand and counsel appear more 
 and more in important matters — the improvement of 
 the revenue ; the defence of extreme rights of the pre- 
 rogative in the case against Whitelocke ; the great ques- 
 tion of calling a parliament, and of the true and "princely" 
 Avay of dealing with it. His confidential advice to the 
 King about calling a parliament was marked by his keen 
 perception of the facts of the situation ; it was marked 
 too by his confident reliance on skilful indirect methods 
 and trust in the look of things ; it bears traces also of 
 his bitter feeling against Salisbury, whom he charges with 
 treacherously fomenting the opposition of the last Par- 
 liament. There was no want of worldly Avisdom in it ; 
 certainly it was more adapted to James's ideas of state- 
 craft than the simpler plan of Sir Henry Nevill, that the 
 
IV.] BACOX SOLICITOR-GEXERAL. 99 
 
 King should throw himself frankly on the loyalty and 
 good\vill of Parliament. And thus he came to be on 
 easy terms with James, who was quite capable of under- 
 standing Bacon's resource and nimbleness of wit. In 
 the autumn of 1613, the Chief- Justiceship of the King's 
 Bench became vacant. Bacon at once gave the King 
 reasons for sending Coke from the Common Pleas — 
 where he was a check on the prerogative — to the 
 King's Bench, Avhere he could do less harm ; while 
 Hobart went to the Common Pleas. The promotion was 
 obvious ; but the Common Pleas suited Coke better, 
 and the place was more lucrative. Bacon's advice was 
 followed. Coke, very reluctantly, knowing Avell who 
 had given it, and wh}-, "not only weeping himself but 
 followed by the tears " of all the Court of Common 
 Pleas, moved up to the higher post. The Attorney 
 Hobart, succeeded ; and Bacon at last became Attorney 
 (October 27, 1613). In Chamberlain's gossip we have 
 an indication, such as occurs only accidentally, of the 
 A-iew of outsiders : " There is a strong apprehension 
 that little good is to be expected by this change, and 
 that Bacon may prove a dangerous instrument." 
 
CHAPTER V. 
 
 BACON ATTORNEY- GENERAL AND CHANCELLOR. 
 
 Thus, at last, at the age of fifty-tAvo, Bacon had gained the 
 place which Essex had tried to get for him at thirty-two. 
 The time of waiting had been a weary one, and it is impos- 
 sible not to see that it had been hurtful to Bacon. A strong 
 and able man, very eager to have a field for his strength 
 and ability, who is kept out of it, as he thinks unfairly, 
 and is driven to an attitude of suppliant dependencj* in 
 pressing his claim on great persons who amuse him vnih 
 words, can hardly help suffering in the himiiliating pro- 
 cess. It does a man no good to learn to beg, and to 
 have a long training in the art. And further, this long 
 delay kept vip the distraction of his mind between the 
 noble work on which his soul was bent, and the necessities 
 of that "civil" or professional and political life by which 
 he had to maintain his estate. All the time that he was 
 " canvassing " (it is his ovna. Avord) for office, and giving 
 up his time and thoughts to the work which it involved, 
 the great Instauration had to wait his hours of leisure ; 
 and his exclamation, so often repeated, Multum incola 
 fuit anima mea, bears witness to the longings that haunted 
 him in his hours of legal drudgery, or in the ser■^^ce of 
 his not very thankful employers. Not but that he found 
 
CHAP, v.] ATTORXEY-GENERAL AXD CHANCELLOR. 101 
 
 compensation in the interest of public questions, in the 
 company of the great, in the excitement of state-craft 
 and state employment, in the pomp and enjoyment of 
 court life. He found too much compensation ; it was 
 one of his misfortunes. But his heart was ahvays sound 
 in its allegiance to knowledge ; and if he had been for- 
 tunate enough to have risen earlier to the greatness 
 which he aimed at as a vantage ground for his true work, 
 o r if he had had self-control to have dispprK^pil wnt'h 
 wealth and position — if he had escaped the long necessity 
 of being a persistent and still baffled suitor — we might ' 
 have had as a completed whole what we have now only 
 in great fragments, and we should have been spared the 
 blots which mar a career which ought to have been a 
 noble one. 
 
 The first important matter that happened atter Bacon's 
 new appointment was the Essex divorce case, and the 
 marriage of Lady Essex with the favourite whom Cecil's 
 death had left at the height of power, and who from 
 Lord Rochester was noAv made Earl of Somerset. AVith 
 the divorce, the beginning of the scandals and tragedies 
 of James's reign, Bacon had nothing to do. At the mar- 
 riage which followed, Bacon presented as his offering a 
 masque, performed by the members of Gray's Inn, of 
 which he bore the charges, and which cost him the 
 enormous sum of £2000. AVhether it were to repay his 
 obligations to the Howards, or in lieu of a " fee " to 
 Rochester, who levied toll on all favours from the King, 
 it can hardly be said, as has been suggested, to be a 
 protest against the great abuse of the times, the sale of 
 oflBces for money ; the " very splendid trifle, the Masque 
 of Flowers," was one form of the many extravagant 
 
102 BACON. [CHAP. 
 
 tributes paid but too willingly to high-handed Avorth- 
 Icssness, of which the deeper and darker guilt was to 
 fill all faces with shame two years afterwards. 
 
 As Attorney, Bacon had to take a much more promi- 
 nent part in affairs, legal, criminal, constitutional, ad- 
 ministrative, than he had yet been allowed to have. We 
 knoAv that it was his great object to show how much 
 more active and useful an Attorney he could be than 
 either Coke or Hobart ; and as far as unflagging energ}' 
 and high ability could make a good public servant, he 
 fully carried out his purpose. In Parliament, the " addled 
 Parhament" of 1614, in which he sat for the Univer- 
 sity of Cambridge, he did his best to reconcile what were 
 fast becoming irreconcilable, the claims and prerogatives 
 of an absolute king, irritable, suspicious, exacting, pro- 
 digal, ^"ith the ancient rights and liberties, growing 
 stronger in their demands by being denied, resisted, or 
 outA^dtted, of the popular element in the State. In the 
 trials, which are so large and disagreeable a part of the 
 history of these years, trials arising out of violent words 
 provoked by the violent acts of power, one of which, 
 Peacham's, became famous, because in the course of it 
 torture was resorted to — or trials which witnessed to the 
 corruption of the high society of the day, like the astound- 
 ing series of arraignments and condemnations folloAnng on 
 the discoveries relating to Overbury's murder, which had 
 happened just before the Somerset marriage — Bacon had 
 to make the best that he could for the cruel and often 
 unequal policy of the Court ; and Bacon must take his 
 share in the responsibility for it. An effort on James's 
 part to stop duelling brought from Bacon a worthier piece 
 of service, in the shape of an earnest and elaborate argu- 
 
v.] ATTORNEY-GENERAL AND CHANCELLOR. 103 
 
 ment against it, full of good sense and good feeling, but 
 hopelessly in advance of the time. On the many ques- 
 tions which touched the prerogative, James found in his 
 Attorney a ready and skilful advocate of his claims, who 
 knew no limit to them, but in the consideration of what 
 was safe and prudent to assert. He was a better and mor e 
 statesmanlike cou nsellor, in his unceasing endeavour s to 
 reconcile James to the expediency of establishing^Qlid 
 au^ good relations vnth. his Parliament, and in Jiis adA'ice 
 as ^o~the~wSe^andriiopeful ways of dealings jwith^it, 
 BacoiThadnTo sympaSfy withTpopular wants and claims ; 
 of popularity, of all that was called popular, he had the 
 deepest suspicion and dislike ; the opinions and the 
 judgment of average men he despised, as a thinker, a 
 politician, and a courtier ; the " malignity of the people " 
 he thought great. " I do not love," he says, " the word 
 peq)le." But he had a high idea of what was worthy of 
 a king, and was due to the public interests, and he saw 
 the folly of the petty acts and haughty words, the use of 
 which James could not resist. In his neAv office, he once 
 more urged on, and ui'ged in vain, his favourite project 
 for revising, simplifying, and codifying the law. This 
 was a project which would find little favour with Coke, 
 and the crowd of lawyers who venerated him, men Avhom 
 Bacon viewed with mingled contempt and apprehension 
 both in the courts and in Parliament where they were 
 numerous, and whom he more than once advised the 
 King to bridle and keep " in awe." Bacon presented his 
 scheme to the King in a Proposition, or, as we should call 
 it, a Eeport. It is very able and interesting ; marked 
 with his characteristic comprehensiveness and sense of 
 practical needs, and with a confidence in his own know- 
 
1 04 BACON. [chap. 
 
 ledge of la-\v Avhich contrasts curiously with the current 
 opinion about it. He speaks with the utmost honour of 
 Coke's work ; but he is not afraid of a comparison ^nth 
 him. "I do assure your Majesty," he says, "I am in 
 good hope, that when Sir Edward Coke's Reports and 
 my Eules and Decisions shall come to posterity, there 
 will be (whatever is now thought) question who was the 
 greater lawyer." But the project, though it was enter- 
 tained and discussed in Parliament, came to nothing. 
 No one really cared about it except Bacon. 
 
 But in these years (1615 and 1616) two things hap- 
 pened of the utmost consequence to him. One was the 
 rise, more extravagant than anything that England had 
 seen for centuries, and in the end more fatal, of the new 
 favourite, who from plain George Villiers became the 
 all-powerful Duke of Buckingham. Bacon, like the rest 
 of the world, saw the necessity of boAving before him ; 
 and Bacon persuaded himself that Yilliers was pre-emi- 
 nently endowed with all the gifts and virtues which a 
 man in his place would need. "We have a series of his 
 letters to Villiers ; they are of course in the complimen- 
 tary vein which was expected ; but if their language is 
 only compliment, there is no language left for expressing 
 what a man wishes to be taken for truth. The other 
 matter was the humiliation, by Bacon's means and in his 
 presence, of his old rival Coke. In the dispute about 
 jurisdiction, always slumbering and lately awakened and 
 aggravated by Coke, between the Common Law Courts 
 and the Chancery, Coke had threatened the Chancery 
 with Praemunire. The King's jealousy took alarm, and 
 the Chief-Justice was called before the Council. There 
 a decree, based on Bacon's advice and probably dra^ni 
 
v.] ATTORNEY-GENERAL AND CHANCELLOR. 105 
 
 up by him, peremptorily overruled the legal doctrine 
 maintained by the greatest and most self-confident judge 
 whom the English courts had seen. The Chief-Justice 
 had to acquiesce in this reading of the law ; and then, as 
 if such an afi'ront were not enough, Coke was suspended 
 from his office, and, further, enjoined to review and amend 
 his published reports, where they were inconsistent with 
 the view of law which on Bacon's authority the Star 
 Chamber had adopted (Jime 1616). This he affected to 
 do ; but the corrections were manifestly only colourable ; 
 his explanations of his legal heresies against the preroga- 
 tive, as these heresies were formulated by the Chancellor 
 and Bacon, and presented to him for recantation, were 
 judged insufficient ; and in a decree, prefaced by reasons 
 dra'\\'n up by Bacon, in Avhich, besides Coke's errors of 
 law, his "deceit, contempt, and slander of the Govern- 
 ment," his " perpetual turbulent carriage," and his affec- 
 tation of popularity, Avere noted, — he was removed from 
 his office (Nov. 1616). So, for the present, the old rivalry 
 had ended in a triumph for Bacon, Bacon, whom Coke\ 
 had so long headed in the race, whom he had sneered at 
 as a superficial pretender to law, and whose accomplish- 
 ments and enthusiasm for knowledge he utterly despised, 
 had not only defeated him, but driven him from his seat 
 with dishonour. AMien we remember what Coke was, 
 what he had thought of Bacon, and how he prized his 
 ovra unique reputation as a representative of English law, 
 the effects of such a disgrace on a man of his temper 
 cannot easily be exaggerated. 
 
 But for the present Bacon had broken through the 
 spell which had so long kept him back. He won a great 
 deal of the King's confidence, and the King was more 
 
106 BACON. [chap. 
 
 and more ready to make use of him, though by no means 
 equally willing to think that Bacon knew better than 
 himself. Bacon's view of the law, and his resource s of 
 argument and expression to make it good, could be de- 
 
 pended upon m the keen struggle to secure and enlarg e 
 th ^ prerog ative which was j i ow bftc/imih] g In this 
 prerogative both James and Bacon saw the safety of 
 the State and the only reasonable hope of good 
 government ; but in Bacon's larger and more elevated 
 views of policy, of a policy worthy of a great king, 
 and a king of England, James was not likely to take 
 much interest. The memorials which it was Bacon's 
 habit to present on public affairs were wasted on one 
 who had so little to learn from others, — so he thought 
 and so all assured him, — about the secrets of empire. 
 Still they were proofs of Bacon's ready mind ; and James, 
 even when he disagreed vnth Bacon's opinion and argu- 
 ments, was too clever not to see their difference from the 
 work of other men. Bacon rose in favour ; and from 
 the first he was on the best of terms ^nth Villiers. He 
 professed to Villiers the most sincere devotion. Accord- 
 ing to his custom he presented him with a letter of wise 
 advice on the duties and behaviour of a favourite. He 
 at once began, and kept up -with him to the end, a con- 
 fidential correspondence on matters of public importance. 
 He made it clear that he depended upon Villiers for his 
 OATO personal prospects, and it had now become the most 
 natural thing that Bacon should look forward to succeed- 
 ing the Lord Chancellor, Ellesmere, who was fast failing. 
 Bacon had already (Feb. 1 2, 1 6^), in terms which seem 
 strange to us, but were less strange then, set forth in a 
 letter to the King the reasons Avhy he should be Chan- 
 
v.] ATTORNEY-GENERAL AND CHANCELLOB. 107 
 
 cellor ; criticising justly enough, only that he Avas a party 
 interested, the qualifications of other possible candidates. 
 Coke, Hobart, and the Archbishop Abbott. Coke Avould 
 be "an overruling nature in an overruling place," and 
 " popular men were no sure mounters for your Majesty's 
 saddle." Hobart was incompetent. As to Abbott, the 
 Chancellor's place required "a whole man," and to have 
 both jurisdiction, spiritual and temporal, "was fit only for 
 a king." The promise that Bacon should have the place 
 came to him three days afterwards through Villiers. He 
 acknowledged it in a burst of gratitude (Feb. 15, 16^). 
 " I will now wholly rely on your excellent and happy 
 self. ... I am yours surer to you than my own life. 
 For, as they speak of the Turquois stone in a ring, I will 
 break into twenty pieces before you bear the least fall." 
 They were unconsciously prophetic words. But Elles- 
 mere lasted longer than was expected. It was not till 
 a year after this promise that he resigned. On the 
 7th of March IG^Y ^^^on received the seals. He ex- 
 presses his obligations to Villiers, now Lord Buckingham, 
 in the following letter : — 
 
 " My dearest Lord — It is both in cares and kindness, that small 
 ones float up to the tongue, and gi'eat ones sink down into the heart 
 with silence. Therefore I could speak little to your Lordship to-day, 
 neither had I fit time : but I must profess thus much, that in this 
 day's work you are the truest and perfectest mirror and example of 
 firm and generous friendship that ever was in court. And I shall 
 count every day lost, wherein I shall not either study your well 
 doing in thought, or do youi' name honour in speech, or perform 
 you service in deed. Good my Lord, account and accept me, your 
 most bounden and devoted friend and servant of all men living, 
 
 "March 7, 1616 {i.e. IHr)- Fr. Bacon, C.S." 
 
 He himself believed the appointment to l)e a popular 
 
103 BACON. [chap. 
 
 one. "I know I am come in," he writes to the King 
 soon after, " with as strong an env}^ of some particulars, 
 as with the love of the general." On the 7th of May 
 1617 he took his seat in Chancery with unusual pomp 
 and magnificence ; and set forth, in an opening speech, 
 with all his dignity and force, the duties of his great 
 office, and his sense of their obligation. But there was 
 a curious hesitation in treating him as other men were 
 treated in like cases. He was only " Lord Keeper." It 
 was not till the following January (16^) that he re- 
 ceived the office of Lord Chancellor. It was not till half 
 a year afterwards that he was made a Peer. Then he 
 became Baron Verulam (July 1618), and in January 
 16|-0- Viscount St. Alban's. 
 
 From this time Bacon must be thought of, first and 
 foremost, as a Judge in the great seat which he had so 
 earnestly sought.. It was the place not merel}" of law , 
 which often tied the judge's hands painfull', but of 
 tru e justice, when law failed to give it. Bacon's ideas 
 of the duties of a judge were clear and strong, as he 
 showed in various admirable speeches and charges : 
 his duties as regards his ovm. conduct and reputation ; 
 his duties in keeping his subordinates free from the 
 taint of corruption. He was not ignorant of the subtle 
 and unacknowledged ways in which imlawful gains 
 may be covered by custom, and an abuse goes on be- 
 cause men will not choose to look at it. He entered 
 on his office with t he full purpose of doing its work 
 b etter than it had pvpv bpp.n d one. He saw where it 
 Avanted reforming, and set himself at once to reform. 
 The accumulation and delay of suits had become grievous ; 
 at once he threw his Avhole energy into the task of 
 
v.] ATTORNEY-GENERAL AND CHANCELLOR. 109 
 
 wiping out the arrears which the bad heakh of his pre- 
 decessor, and the traditional shiggishness of the court, 
 had heaped up. In exactly three months from his 
 appointment he was able to report that these arrears had 
 been cleared off. "This day" (June 8, 1617), he writes 
 to Buckingham : "I have made even with the business 
 of the kingdom for common justice. Not one cause 
 unheard. The la^n'yers di-awn dry of all the motions 
 they were to make. Not one petition unheard. And 
 this I think could not be said in our time before." 
 
 The performance was splendid, and there is no reason 
 to think that the work so rapidly done was not well 
 done. " We are assured that Bacon's decisions wer e 
 unquestioned and were not complained of. At the same 
 time, before this allegation is accepted as conclusive 
 proof of the public satisfaction, it must be remembered 
 that the question of his administration of justice, which 
 was at last to assume such strange proportions, has never 
 been so thoroughly sifted as, to enable us to pronounce^ 
 upon it, it should be. The natural tendency of Bacon's 
 mind would undoubtedly be to judge rightly and justly ; 
 but the negative argument of the silence at the time of 
 complainants, in days when it was so dangerous to 
 question authority, and when we have so little evidence 
 of what men said at their firesides, is not enough to show- 
 that he never failed. 
 
 But the serious thing is that Bacon subjected himself 
 to two of the most dangerous influences which can act on 
 the mind of a judge — the influence of the most powerful 
 and most formidable man in England, and the influence 
 of presents, in money and other gifts. From first to 
 last, he allowed Buckingham, whom no man, as Bacon 
 
110 BACON. [chap. 
 
 soon found, could displease except at his own peril, to 
 write letters to him on behalf of suitors whose causes 
 were before him ; and he allowed suitors, not often 
 while the cause was pending, but sometimes even then, 
 to send him directly, or through his servants, large sums 
 of money. Both these things are explained. It would . 
 have been characteristic of Bacon to be confident that 
 he could defy temptation : t hese habits were the fashio n ' 
 of thetime , and everybody took them for graf ted ; 
 BucMngham ne\'^rr_jjke d his good oflS.ces beyond w jiat *- 
 Bacon_thoug ht j ust and right^ and_ asked them rather 
 for the sake of expedition, than to influence his judg- 
 ment. And as to the money presents — e very office was i 
 underpaid ; this wa s the common way of acknowledgi ng 
 pains and trouble ; it was .qnnl ogous to a doctor's o i-a — 
 law yer's tee now . And there is no proof that either 
 influence ever led Bacon to do An-oug. This has been said, 
 and said with some degree of force. But if it shows that 
 Bacon Avas not in this matter below his age, it shows that 
 I he was not above it. Xo one knew better than Bacon 
 that there were no more certain dan gers to hones ty 
 an d justice, than the interference anTsolicitation of the 
 g reat, and the old famous pe st of bribes, of which all 
 histo ries and laws were ful l And yet on the highest 
 seat of justice in the realm he, th e great reformer o f its 
 abuse s, allowed them to make the ir customary haunt . 
 He did not mean to do wrong : his conscience was clear ; 
 he had not given thought to the mischief they must do, 
 sooner or later, to all concerned with the Court of 
 Chancery. With a magnificent carelessness he could 
 afford to run safely a course closely bordering on crime, 
 in which meaner men would sin and be ruined. 
 
v.] ATTORNEY-GENERAL AXD CHANCELLOR. Ill 
 
 Before six months were over Bacon found on what 
 terms he must stand with Buckingham. By a strange 
 fatality, quite unintentionally, he became dragged into 
 the thick of the scandalous and grotesque dissensions of 
 the Coke family. The Court was away from London 
 in the North; and Coke had been trying, not with- 
 out hope of success, to recover the King's favour. 
 Coke was a rich man, and Lady Compton, the mother 
 of the Yilliers, thought that Coke's daughter would 
 be a good match for one of her younger sons. It 
 was really a great chance for Coke ; but he haggled 
 about the portion ; and the opportunity, which might 
 perhaps have led to his taking Bacon's place, passed. 
 But he found himself in trouble in other ways ; his 
 fiiends, especially Secretary "VVinwood, contrived to bring 
 the matter on again, and he consented to the Villiers's 
 terms. But his wife, the young lady's mother, Lady 
 Hatton, would not hear of it, and a furious quarrel fol- 
 lowed. She carried off her daughter into the country. 
 Coke, with a warrant from Secretary Winwood, which 
 Bacon had refused to give him, pursued her : " with 
 his son, 'Fighting Clem,' and ten or eleven servants, 
 weaponed, in a violent manner, he repaired to the house 
 where she was remaining, and with a piece of timber or 
 form broke open the door and dragged her along to his 
 coach." Lady Hatton rushed off the same afternoon for 
 help to Bacon. 
 
 After an overturn by the way, ' ' at last to my Lord Keeper's 
 they come, but could not have instant access to him for that his 
 people told them he was laid at rest, being not welL Then my 
 La. Hatton desired she might be in the next room where my Lord 
 lay, that she might be the first that [should] speak with him after 
 he was stirring. Tlie door-kct-per fultilli-d her desire, and in the 
 
112 BACON. [CHAP. 
 
 meantime gave her a chair to rest herself in, and there left her 
 alone ; but not long after, she rose up and bounced against my 
 Lord Keeper's door, and waked him and affrighted him, that he 
 called his men to him ; and they opening the door, she thrust in 
 •with them, and desired his Lp. to pardon her boldness, but she 
 was like a cow that had lost her calf, and so justified [herself] and 
 pacified ray Lord's anger, and got his warrant and my Lo. Trea- 
 surer's warrant and others of the Council to fetch her daughter 
 from the father and bring them both to the Council." 
 
 It was a chance that the late Chief-Justice and his 
 wife, with their armed parties, did not meet on the road, 
 in which case "there were like to be strange tragedies." 
 At length the Council compelled both sides to keep 
 the peace, and the young lady was taken for the present 
 out of the hands of her raging parents. Bacon had 
 assumed that the affair was the result of an intrigue 
 between Winwood and Coke, and that the Coyxt would 
 take part against Coke, a man so deep in disgrace and 
 so outrageously violent. Supposing that he had the ear 
 of Buckingham, he wrote earnestly persuading him to 
 put an end to the business : and in the meantime the 
 Council ordered Coke to be brought before the Star 
 Chamber "for riot and force," to "be heard and sen- 
 tenced as justice shall appertain." They had not the 
 slightest doubt that they were doing what would please 
 the King. A few days after they met, and then the)'' 
 learned the truth. 
 
 "Coke and his friends," writes Chamberlain, "complain of 
 hard measure from some of the greatest at that board, and that he 
 was too much trampled upon with ill language. And our friend 
 [i.e. Winwood] passed out scot free for the warrant : which the 
 greatest [ivord illegible] there said was subject to a, 2)^cc7nunirc ; 
 and withal told the Lady Compton that they wished well to her 
 and her sons, and would be ready to serve the Earl of Buckingham 
 Mith all true affection, whereas others did it out of faction and 
 
v.] ATTORXEY-GEXERAL AXD CIIAXCELLOE. 113 
 
 ambition : — which words glancing directly at onr good friend 
 (Winwood), he was driven to make his apology ; and to show how 
 it was put upon him from time to time by the Queen and other 
 parties ; and, for conclusion, showed a letter of approbation of all 
 his courses from the King, making the whole table judge what 
 faction and ambition appeared in this carriage. Ad quod non 
 fuit respons^im," 
 
 None indeed, but blank faces, and thoughts of what 
 might come next. The Council, and Bacon foremost, 
 had made a desperate mistake. " It is evident," as Mr. 
 Spedding says, " that he had not divined Buckingham's 
 feelings on the subject." He was now to learn them. 
 To his utter amazement and alarm he found that the 
 King was strong for the match, and that the proceeding 
 of the Council was condemned at Court as gross mis- 
 conduct. In vain he protested that he was c^uite willing 
 to forward the match; that in fact he had helped it. 
 Bacon's explanations and his warnings against Coke the 
 King "rejected with some disdain"; he justified Coke's 
 action; he charged Bacon with disrespect and ingrati- 
 tude to Buckingham : he put aside his arguments and 
 apologies as worthless or insincere. Such reprimands 
 had not often been addressed, even to inferior Servants. 
 Bacon's letters to Buckingham remained at first ^nthout 
 notice : when Buckingham answered, he did so with 
 scornful and menacing curtness. Meanwhile Bacon 
 heard from Yelverton how things were going at Court. 
 
 "Sir E. Coke," he wrote, "hath not forborne by any engine to 
 heave at both your Honour and myself, and he works the weightiest 
 instrument, the Earl of Buckingham, who, as I see, sets him as 
 close to him as his shirt, the Earl speaking in Sir Edward's phrase, 
 and as it were menacing in his spirit." 
 
 Buckingham, he Avent on to say, "did nobly and 
 [ 
 
11. J BACON. [chap. 
 
 l)liiinly tell me he would not secretly bite, but M'hosoever 
 had had any interest, or tasted of the opposition to his 
 brother's marriage, he would as openly oppose them to 
 their faces, and they should discern what favour he had 
 b}- the power he would iise." The Court, like a pack 
 of dogs, had set upon Bacon. " It is too common in 
 every man's mouth in Court, that your greatness shall 
 be abated, and as your tongue hath been as a razor unto 
 some, so shall theirs be to you." Buckingham said to 
 every one that Bacon had been forgetful of his kindness, 
 and unfaithful to him : "not forbearing in open speech 
 to tax you, as if it were an inveterate custom with you, 
 to be unfaithful unto him, as you were to the Earls of 
 Essex and Somerset." 
 
 All this while Bacon had been clearly in the right. 
 He had thrust himself into no business that did not 
 concern him. He had not, as Buckingham accuses 
 him of having done, — " overtroubled " himself with the 
 marriage. He had done his simple duty as a friend, as 
 a covmcillor, as a judge. He had been honestly zealous 
 for the Villiers's honour, and warned Buckingham of 
 things that were beyond question. He had curbed 
 Coke's scandalous violence, perhaps with no great re- 
 gret, but with manifest reason. But for this, he was 
 now on the very edge of losing his office ; it Avas clear 
 to him, as it is clear to us, that nothing could save him 
 but absolute submission. He accepted the condition. 
 How this submission was made and received, and Avith 
 what gratitude he foimd that he was forgiven, may be 
 seen in the two following letters. Buckingham thus 
 extends his grace to the Lord Keeper, and exliorts him 
 to better behaviour ; — 
 
v.] ATTORXEY-GENERAL AND CHANCELLOR. 115 
 
 " But his Majestj-'s direction in answer of your letter hath given 
 ine occasion to join liereunto a discovery unto you of mine in- 
 ward thoughts, proceeding upon the discourse you had with me 
 this day. For I do freely confess that your offer of submission 
 unto me, and in writing (if so I would have it), battered so the 
 unkindness that I had conceived in my heart for your behaviour 
 towards me in my absence, as out of the sparks of my old affection 
 toward you I went to sound his JLajesty's intention how he means 
 to behave liimself towards you, specially in any public meeting ; 
 where I found on the one part his Majesty so little satisfied with 
 your late answer unto him, which he counted (for I protest I use 
 his own terms) confused and childish, and his vigorous resolution 
 on the other part so fixed, that he would put some public exem- 
 plary mark upon you, as I protest the sight of his deep-conceived 
 indignation quenched ray passion, making me upon the instant 
 change from the person of a party into a peace-maker ; so as I was 
 forced upon my knees to beg of his Majesty that he would put no 
 public act of disgi-ace upon you, and, as I dare say, no other 
 person would have been patiently heard in this suit by his ilajesty 
 but myself, so did I (though not without difficulty) obtain thus 
 much : — that he would not so far disable you from the merit of your 
 future service, as to put any jjarticular mark of disgi-ace upon your 
 person. Only thus far his Majesty protesteth, that upon the con- 
 science of his office he cannot omit (though laying aside all passion) 
 to give a kingly reprimand at his first sitting in council to so many 
 of his councillors as were then here behind, and were actors in this 
 business, for their ill behaviour in it. Some of the particular errors 
 committed in this business he will name, but without accusing any 
 particular persons by name. 
 
 "Thus your Lordship seeth the fruits of my natural inclination ; 
 and I protest all this time past it was no small grief unto me to 
 hear the mouth of so many upon this occasion open to load you 
 with iimumerable malicious and detracting speeches, as if no 
 music were more pleasing to my ears than to rail of you : which 
 made me rather regret the ill nature of mankind, that like dogs 
 love to set upon him that they see once snatched at. And to con- 
 clude, my Lord, you have hereby a fair occasion so to make good 
 hereafter your reputation by your sincere service to his Majesty, as 
 also by your firm and constant kindness to your friends, as I may 
 
116 r.ACON. [CHAP. 
 
 (your Lordship's old friend) participate of the comfort and honour 
 tliat will thereby conic to you. Thus I rest at last 
 
 " Your Lordship's faithful friend and servant, 
 
 "G. B." 
 
 " JIy ever best Lord, now better than yourself — Your Lord- 
 ship's pen, or rather pencil, hath pourtrayed towards me such 
 magnanimity and nobleness and true kindness, as methinketh I 
 see the image of some ancient virtue, and not anything of these 
 times. It is the line of mj' life, and not the lines of my letter, that 
 must express my thankfulness : wherein if I fail, then God fail me, 
 and make me as miserable as I think myself at this time happy by 
 this reviver, through his Majesty's singular clemency, and your 
 incomparable love and favour. God preserve you, prosper you, 
 and reward you for your kindness to 
 
 ' ' Your raised and infinitely obliged friend and servant, 
 <'Sept. 22, 1G17. Fit. Bacon, C.S." 
 
 Thus he had tried his strength with Buckingham. 
 He had found that this, " a little parent-like " manner of 
 advising him, and the doctrine that a true friend " ought 
 rather to go against his mind than his good," was not 
 what Buckingham expected from him. And he never 
 ventured on it again. It is not too much to say that a 
 man who could write as he now did to Buckingham, could 
 not trust himself, in any matter in which Buckingham 
 was interested. 
 
 But the reconciliation was complete, and Bacon took 
 his place more and more as one of the chief persons in 
 the Government. James claimed so much to have his 
 own Avay, and had so little scruple in putting aside, in his 
 superior wisdom, sometimes very curtly, Bacon's or any 
 other person's recommendations, that though his services 
 were great, and were not unrecognised, he never had the 
 power and influence in affairs to which his boundless 
 devotion to the Crown, his grasp of business, and his 
 
v.] 
 
 ATTORNEY-GENERAL AND CHANCELLOi;. 
 
 117 
 
 willi ng industry, oug;ht to have entitled him . He was 
 still a servant, and made to feel it, though a servant in 
 the "first form." It was James and Buckingham who 
 determined the policy of the country, or settled the 
 course to be taken in particular transactions ; when this 
 was settled, it Avas Bacon's business to carry it through 
 successfidly. In this he was like all the other servants 
 of the CroAvn, and like them, he was satisfied with giving 
 his advice, whether it were taken or not ; but unlike 
 many of them, he was zealous in executing with the 
 utmost vigour and skill the instructions which were 
 given him. Thus he was required to find the legal means 
 for punishing Ealeigh ; and, as a matter of duty, he 
 found them. He Avas required to tell the Government 
 side of the story of Raleigh's crimes and punishment — 
 which really was one side of the story, onl}- not by anj- 
 means the whole ; and he told it, as he had told the 
 Government story against Essex, with force, moderation, 
 and good sense. Himself, he never would have made 
 James's miserable blimders about Ealeigh ; but the / 
 blunders being made, it was his business to do his best 
 to help the King out of them. When Sufiblk, the 
 Lord Treasurer, Avas disgraced and brought before the 
 Star Chamber for corruption and embezzlement in his 
 office. Bacon thought that he was doing no more than 
 his duty in keeping Buckingham inforaied day by day 
 how the trial Avas going on ; hoAv he had taken care that 
 Suffolk's submission should not stop it — " for all Avould 
 1)0 but a play on the stage if justice Avent not on in the 
 right course " — hoAv he had taken care that the evidence 
 Avent Avell — " I Avill not say I sometime holp it, as far 
 as Avas fit for a judge " — hoAv " a little to Avarm the 
 
 ^Jlu^ 
 
 S^f^ 
 
118 
 
 BACON. 
 
 [cnAP. 
 
 business "... "I spake .a word, that he that did draw 
 or milk treasure from Ireland, did not, cmulgere, milk 
 money, but blood." This, and other "little things " like 
 it, -while he was sitting as a judge to tr}-, if the word 
 may be used, a personal enemy of Buckingham, however 
 bad the case might be against SufiFolk, sound strange 
 indeed to us ; and not less so when, in reporting the 
 sentence and the various opinions of the Council about 
 it, he, for once, praises Coke for the extravagance of his 
 severity : — " Sir Edward Coke did his part. I have not 
 heard him do better; and began Anth a fine of £100,000, 
 but the judges first, and most of the rest, reduced it to 
 £30,000. I do not dislike that thing passed moderately ; 
 and all things considered, it is not amiss, and might 
 easily have been worse." 
 
 In all this, Avhich Avould have been perfectly natural 
 from an Attorney -General of the time. Bacon saAv but his 
 duty, even as a judge between the CroAATi and the subject. 
 It was Avhat was expected of those Avhom the King chose 
 to employ, and Avhom Buckingham chose to favour. But a 
 worse and more cruel case, illustrating the system which 
 a man like Bacon could think reasonable and honour- 
 able, Avas the disgrace and punishment of Yelverton, the 
 Attorney -General, the man who had stood by Bacon, 
 and in his defence had faced Buckingham, knoAA-ing 
 well Buckingham's dislike of himself, when all the 
 Court turned against Bacon in his quarrel Avith Coke 
 and Lady Compton. ToAvards the end of the year 1620, 
 on the eve of a probable meeting of Parliament, there 
 was great questioning about Avhat Avas to be done about 
 certain patents and monopolies — monopolies for making 
 'cold and silk thread and for licensing inns and ale- 
 
v.] ATTORlSrEY-GENERAL AND CHANCELLOR. 119 
 
 houses — which were in the hands of Buckingham's 
 brothers and their agents. The monopolies were very 
 unpopular ; there was always doubt as to their legality ; 
 they were enforced oppressively and vexatiously by men 
 like Michell and Mompesson, who acted for the Villiers ; 
 and the profits of them went, for the most part, not into 
 the Exchequer, but into the pockets of the hangers-on of 
 Buckingham. Bacon defended them both in law and 
 policy, and his defence is thought hy Mr. Gardiner to 
 be not without grounds ; but he saw the danger of 
 obstinacy in maintaining what had become so hateful in 
 the country, and strongly recommended that the more 
 indefensible and unpopular patents should be spon- 
 taneously given up, the more so as they were of " no 
 great fruit." But Buckingham's insolent perversity 
 "refused to be convinced."' The Comicil, when the 
 question was before them, decided to maintain them. 
 Bacon, Avho had rightly voted in the minority, thus 
 explains his own vote to Buckingham: — "The King 
 did wisely put it upon and consult, whether the patents 
 were at this time to be removed by Act of Council 
 before Parliament. I ojnned {but yet somewhat like 
 Ovid's mistress, that strove, but yet as one that would he 
 overcome), that yes ! " But in the various disputes which 
 had arisen about them, Yelverton had shown that he 
 very much disliked the business of defending mono- 
 polies, and sending London citizens to jail for infringing 
 them. He did it, but he did it grudgingly. It was a 
 great offence in a man whom Buckingham had always 
 disliked ; and it is impossible to doubt that what 
 followed was the consequence of his displeasure. 
 
 " In drawing up a new charter for tlie city of London," writes Mr. 
 
1-jO BACON. [<HAi\ 
 
 (iardiiuT, Yelvcrtou inserted clauses for whieli lie was unalile to 
 produce a warrant. The worst that could be said was that he had, 
 through inadvertence, misunderstood the verbal directions of the 
 King. Although no imputation of corruption was brought against 
 him, yet he was suspended from his office, and prosecuted in the 
 Star Chamber. He was then sentenced to dismissal from his post, 
 to a fine of £4000, and to imprisonment during the Royal pleasui-c." 
 
 In the management of this business Bacon had the 
 chief part. Yelverton, on his suspension, at once sub- 
 mitted. The obnoxious clauses are not said to have 
 been of serious importance ; but they were new clauses 
 which the King had not sanctioned, and it would be a 
 l>ad precedent to pass over such unauthorised additions 
 even by an Attorney -General. "I mistook many things," 
 said Yelverton afterwards in words Avhich come back 
 into our minds at a later period, " I was improvident 
 in some things, and too credulous in all things." It 
 might have seemed that dismissal, if not a severe repri- 
 mand, was punishment enough. But the sxibmission 
 was not enough, in Bacon's opinion, "for the King's 
 honour." He dwelt on the greatness of the offence, and 
 the necessity of making a severe example. According 
 to his advice, Yelverton was prosecuted in the Star 
 Chamber. It was not merely a mistake of judgment. 
 " Herein," said Bacon, " I note the A\asdom of the law of 
 England, which termeth the highest contempt and exces- 
 ses of authority, Misjmsions; which (if you take the sound 
 and derivation of the words) is but mistaken ; but if you 
 take the use and acceptation of the word, it is high and 
 heinous contempt and usurpation of authority ; whereof 
 the reason I take to be and the name excellently imposed, 
 for that main mistaking, it is ever joined with contempt ; 
 for he that reveres will not easily mistake ; but he that 
 
v.] ATTORNEY-GENERAL AND CHANCELLOR. 1-21 
 
 slights, and thinks more of the greatness of his place 
 than of the duty of his place, will soon commit mis- 
 prisions." The day "svoiild come when this doctrine 
 woidd be pressed "\Adth ruinous effect against Bacon him- 
 self. B ut now he expounded with admirable cl earn es s 
 th e wrongness of carelessness about warrmita nnd of 
 ta king things for granted . He acquitted his former 
 colleague of "corruption of rcAvard"; but "in truth that 
 makes the offence rather divers than less ; " for some 
 offences "are black, and others scarlet, some sordid, 
 some presumptuous." He pronounced his sentence — the 
 fine, the imprisonment; "for his place, I declare him 
 unfit for it." "And the next day," says Mr. Spedding, 
 " he reported to Buckingham the result of the proceed- 
 ing," and takes no small credit for his own part in it. 
 
 It was thus that the Court used Bacon, and that 
 Bacon submitted to be used. He covdd have done, if he 
 had l)een listened to, much nobler service. He had from 
 the first seen, and urged as far as he could, the paramount 
 necessity of retrenchment in the King's profligate expen- 
 diture. Even Buckingham had come to feel the necessity 
 of it at last ; and now that Bacon filled a seat at the 
 Council, and that the prosecution of Suffolk and an in- 
 quiry into the abuses of the Navy had forced on those in 
 power the urgency of economy, there was a chance of 
 something being done to bring order into the confusion 
 of the finances. Retrenchment began at the King's 
 kitchen and the tables of his servants ; an effort was 
 made, not unsuccessfully, to extend it Avider, imder the 
 direction of Lionel Cranfield, a self-made man of busi- 
 ness from the city ; but with such a Court the task was 
 uu impossible one. It was not Bacon's fault, though he 
 
122 BACON. [chap. 
 
 sadl}' mi.snianiigecl liis own private affairs, that the King's 
 expenditure was not managed soberly and wisely. Nor 
 was it Bacon's fault, as far as advice went, that James 
 was always tiying either to evade or to outwit a Parlia- 
 ment Avhich he could not, like the Tudor.s, overawe. 
 'Bacon's uniform counsel had been — L ook on a Pnri la- 
 m ent as a certain necessity, but not only as a necessity ; 
 as also a luiigue and most precious means for uniting 
 the Crow n with the nation^^ and proving to the world 
 
 o utside hOAV P]ng:lishmcn love and limmnr ihmr TCi'nrr 
 
 an d their King trusts his subjects . Deal with it frankl}- 
 
 an d noblv as b e f-miifg n VintTj nnf ynt-pininmly l i 'l i r i 
 
 hii ^ster in a bargai n. D o not be afraid of Parliamen t. 
 B e skilful in calling i t ; but don't attempt to " pack " it. 
 Use all due adr oi tn es s and knowledge of human natu re, 
 an d necessary firmness and majesty, in managing it ; 
 k eep unruly and m ischievous i;)eople i n their place ; bu t 
 do not be too anxious to meddle, " let nature work ;" and 
 above all, tho ugh of cour se you want money from it, do 
 no t let that appear as the chief or real cause of callin g 
 it. T a.kp. tbft ]9:\ f\ in legislation . Be ready with some 
 interesting or imposing points of reform or policy, about 
 which you ask your Parliament to take counsel with j^ou. 
 Take care to " frame and have ready some commonwealth 
 bills, that may add respect to the King's government, 
 and acknowledgment of his care ; not wooing bills to 
 make the King and his graces cheap ; but good matter 
 to set the Parliament on work, that an empty stomach 
 do not feed on humour." — 80 from the first had Bacon 
 always thought ; so he thought when he watched, as a 
 spectator, James's blunders with his first Parliament of 
 1604; so had he earnestly counselled James, when ad- 
 
v.] ATTORNEY-GENERAL AND CHANCELLOR. 123 
 
 mitted to his confidence, as to the Parliaments of 1614 
 and 1615; so again, but in vain, as Chancellor, he 
 advised him to meet the Parliament of 1620. It was 
 wise, and from his point of view, honest advice, though 
 there rims all through it too much reliance on appear- 
 ances which were not all that they seemed ; there was 
 too much thought of throwing dust in the eyes of 
 troublesome and inconvenient people. But whatever 
 motives there might have been behind, it would have 
 been well if James had learned from Bacon how to deal 
 with Englishmen. But he could not. " I wonder," said \ ' 
 James one day to Gondomar, "that my ancestors should 
 ever have permitted such an institution as the House of 
 Commons to have come into existence. I am a stranger, 
 and foimd it here when I arrived, so that I am obliged 
 to put up with what I cannot get rid of." James was 
 the only one of our many foreign kings who, to the last, 
 struggled to avoid submitting himself to the conditions 
 of an English throne. 
 
 (.J ex 
 
CHAPTEK VI. 
 
 bacon's fall. 
 
 AYhen Parliament met on January 30, 16|5^, and Bacon, 
 as Lord Chancellor, set forth m his ceremonial speeches, 
 to the King and to the Speaker, the glories and blessings 
 of James's reign, no man in England had more reason 
 to think himself fortunate. He had reached the age of 
 sixty, and had gained the object of his ambition. More 
 than that, he was conscious that in his great office he 
 was finding full play for his powers, and his high public 
 purposes. He had won greatly on the confidence of the 
 King. He had just received a fresh mark of honour 
 from him ; a few days before he had been raised a step 
 in the peerage, and he was now Viscount St. Alban's. 
 With Buckingham he seemed to be on terms of the 
 most affectionate familiarity, exchanging opinions freely 
 with him on every subject. And Parliament met in 
 good humour. They voted money at once. One of the 
 matters which interested Bacon most — the revision of 
 the Statute Book — they took up as one of their first 
 measures, and appointed a Select Committee to report 
 upon it. And what, amid the apparent felicity of the 
 time, was of even greater personal happiness to Bacon, 
 the first step of the "Great lustauration " had been 
 
cnAi'. VI.] BACON'S FALL. 125 
 
 taken. During the previous autumn, Oct. 12, 1G20, the 
 Novum Organum, the first instalment of his vast design, 
 was pubhshed, the result of the work of thirty years ; 
 and copies were distributed to great people, among 
 others to Coke. He apprehended no evil ; he had noth- 
 ing to fear, and much to hope from the times. 
 
 His sudden and unexpected fall, so astonishing and 
 so irreparably complete, is one of the strangest events of 
 that still imperfectly comprehended time. There had 
 been, and were still to be, plenty of instances of the 
 downfall of power, as ruinous and even more tragic; 
 though scarcely any one more pathetic in its surprise 
 and its shame. But it is hard to find one of which 
 so little warning was given, and the causes of which are 
 at once in part so clear, and in part so obscure and un- 
 intelligible. Such disasters had to be reckoned upon as 
 possible chances by any one who ventured into public 
 life. Montaigne advises that the discipline of pain 
 should be part of every boy's education, for the reason 
 that every one in his day might be called upon to under- 
 go the torture. And so every public man, in the England 
 of the Tudors and Stuarts, entered on his career with 
 the perfectly familiar expectation of possibly closing it, 
 it might be in an honourable and ceremonious fashion, 
 in the Tower and on the scaffold ; just as he had to look 
 forward to the possibility of closing it by smallpox or 
 the plague. So that when disaster came, though it 
 might be unexpected as death is unexpected, it was a 
 turn of things which ought not to take a man by surprise. 
 But some premonitory signs usually gave warning. 
 There was nothing to warn Bacon that the work which 
 he believed he was doing so well would be interrupted. 
 
126 BACON. [riiAi\ 
 
 "We look in vain for any thrcatcnings of the storm. 
 What the men of his time thought and felt about Bacon 
 it is not easy to ascertain. Aiipearances are faint and 
 contradictory ; he himself, though scornful of judges Avho 
 sought to be " popular," believed that he " came in with 
 the favour of the general ;" that he *' had a little popular 
 reputation, which followeth me, whether I will or no." 
 No one, for years, had discharged the duties of his office 
 with greater efficiency. Scarcely a trace remains of any 
 suspicion, previous to the attack upon him, of the justice 
 of his decisions ; no instance was alleged that, in fact, im- 
 pure motives had controlled the strength and lucidity of 
 an intellect which loved to be true and right for the mere 
 pleasure of being so. Nor Avas there anything in Bacon's 
 political position to make him specially obnoxious above 
 all others of the King's Council. He maintained the 
 highest doctrines of prerogative ; but they Avere current 
 doctrines, both at the Council board and on the bench ; 
 and they Avere not discredited nor extinguished by his 
 fall. To be on good terms Avith James and Buckingham 
 meant a degree of subservience which shocks us noAv ; 
 but it did not shock people then, and he did not differ 
 from his felloAA'-s in regarding it as part of his iluty as a 
 public servant of the Crown. No doubt he had enemies 
 — some Avith old grudges like Southampton, Avho had 
 been condemned with Essex; some like Suffolk, smarting 
 under recent reprimands and the biting edge of Bacon's 
 tongue ; some, like Coke, hating him from constitutional 
 antipathies and the strong antagonism of professional 
 doctrines, for a long course of rivalry, and for mortifying 
 defeats. But there is no appearance of preconcerted 
 efforts among them to bring about his overthroAv. He 
 
VI.] BACON'S FALL. 127 
 
 did not, at the time, seem to be identified with anything 
 dangerous or odious. There was no doubt a good deal 
 of dissatisfaction with Chancery — among the common 
 lawy-ers, because it in^JRered with their business ; in 
 the public, partly from the traditions of its slowness, 
 partly from its expensiveness, partly because being in- 
 tended for special redress of legal hardship it was sure 
 to disappoint one party to a suit. But Bacon thought 
 that he had reformed Chancery. He had also done a 
 great deal to bring some kind of order, or at least hope- 
 fulness of order, into the King's desperate finances. 
 And ji e had never set himseK against Parliament . On 
 the contrary, he had always been forward to declare that 
 the King could not do without Parhament, and that 
 Parliament only needed to be dealt with generously, and 
 as " became a King," to be not a danger and hindrance to 
 the Cro wn, but its most since re and trust worthy suppo rt. 
 What was then to portend danger to Bacon when 
 the Parliament of 16?^^ met 1 The House of Commons 
 at its meeting was thoroughly loyal and respectful ; it 
 meant to be henedidum et pacijicum parliamentum. 
 Every one knew that there would be "grievances" 
 which would not be welcome to the Court; but they 
 did not seem likely to touch him. Every one knew that 
 there would be questions raised about unpopular patents 
 and oppressive monopolies, and about their legality ; 
 and it was pretty well agreed upon at Court, that they 
 should be given up as soon as complained of. But 
 Bacon was not implicated more than the Cro^vn lawyers 
 before him, in what all the Crown lawyers had always 
 defended. There was dissatisfaction about the King's 
 extravagance and wastefulness, about his indecision in 
 
T28 r.ACOX. [chap. 
 
 the cause of the Elector Palatine, about his supi)osccl 
 intrigues with Papistical and tyrannical Spain; but Bacon 
 had nothing to do with all this except, as far as he 
 could, to give wise counsel and Avarning. The person 
 who made the King despised and hated was the splendid 
 and insolent favourite, Buckingham. It might have 
 been thought that the one thing to be set against much 
 that was wrong in the State Avas the just and enlightened 
 and speedy administration of equity in the Chancery. 
 
 "When Parliament met, though nothing seemed to 
 threaten mischief, it met Avith a sturdy purpose of bring- 
 ing to account certain delinquents whose arrogance and 
 vexations of the subjects had provoked the country, and 
 who were supjDosed to shelter themselves under the 
 countenance of Buckingham. Michell and Mompesson 
 were rascals Avhose misdemeanours might Avell try the 
 patience of a less spirited body than an English House of 
 Commons. Buckingham could not protect them, and 
 hardly tried to do so. But just as one electric current 
 " induces " another by neighbourhood, so all this deep in- 
 dignation against Buckingham's creatiu'es created a fierce 
 temper of suspicion about corruption all through the public 
 j5I^^service. Two Committees were early appointed by the 
 — ""House of Commons ; on e a Committee on Grievances , 
 su ch as the monopoli es ; th e other, a Committee to i n- 
 qu ire into abuses in the Courts of Justice and recei ve 
 pe titions about them . In the course of the proceedings, 
 the question arose in the House as to the authorities or 
 "Referees" who had certified to the legality of the 
 Cro\ATi patents or grants Avhich had been so grossly 
 abused ; and among these " referees " Avere the Lord 
 Chancellor and other high officers, both legal and political. 
 
VI.] BACOX'S FALL. 129 
 
 It Avas the little cloud. But lookers-on like Cliamber- 
 lain did not think much of it. " The referees," he wrote 
 on Feb. 29, " who certified the legality of the patents 
 are glanced at, but they are chiefly above the reach of 
 the House ; they attempt so much that they will accom- 
 plish little." jCoke , who was now the chief leader in 
 Pa rliament , began to talk ominously of precedents, and 
 to lay do-\^Ti rules about the power of the House to 
 pumsh' — rules which were afterwards foimd to have n o 
 authority for them. Cranfield, the representative of 
 severe economy, insisted that the honoiu' of the King 
 required that the referees, whoever they were, should be 
 called to account. The gathering clouds shifted a little, 
 when the sense of the House seemed to incline to giving 
 up all retrospective action, and to a limitation for the 
 future by statute of the questionable prerogative — a 
 limitation which was in fact attempted by a bill thrown 
 out by the Lords. But they gathered again when 
 the Commons determined to bring the whole matter 
 before the House of Lords. The King wrote to warn 
 Bacon of what Avas coming. The proposed conference 
 was staved oflf by management for a day or two ; but 
 it could not be averted : and the Lords showed their 
 eagerness for it. And two things by this time, the 
 beginning of March, seemed now to have become clear, 
 first, that imder the general attack on the referees was 
 intended a blow against Bacon ; ne xt, that the person 
 whom he had most reason to fear was Sir Edward 
 Coka 
 
 TEe storm was growing ; but Bacon was still un- 
 alarmed, though Buckingham had been frightened into 
 throwing the blame on the referees. 
 
 K 
 
130 BACON. [chap. 
 
 " I do hear," lie writes to Buckingham (dating his letter on March 
 7, ' the day I received the seal '), " from divers of judgement, that 
 to-morrow's conference is like to pass in a calm, as to the referees. 
 Sir Lionel Cranfield, who hath been formerly the trumpet, said 
 yesterday, that he did now incline unto Sir John Walter's opinion 
 and motion not to have the referees meddled with, otherwise than 
 to discount it from the King ; and so not to look back, but to the 
 future. And I do hear almost all men of judgement in tlic 
 house wish now that way. I woo nobody ; I do but listen, and I 
 have doubt only of Sir Edward Coke, who I wish had some round 
 caveat given him from the King : for your Lordship hath no great 
 power with him. But a word from the King mates him." 
 
 But Coke's opportunity had come. The House of 
 Commons was disposed for gentler measures. But he 
 Avas able to make it listen to his harsher counsels, and 
 from this time his hand appears in all that Avas done. 
 The first conference was a tame and dull one. The 
 spokesmen had been slack in their disagreeable and 
 perhaps dangerous duty. But Coke and his friends 
 took them sharply to task. " The heart and tongue 
 of Sir Edward Coke are true relations," said one of his 
 fervent supporters ; " but his pains hath not reaped that 
 harvest of praise that he hath deserved. For the 
 Eeferees, they are as transcendent delinquents as any 
 other, and sure their souls made a wilful elopement 
 from their bodies when they made these certificates." 
 A second conference was held Avith the Lords, and this 
 time the charge Avas driven home. The referees Avere 
 named, the Chancellor at the head of them. When 
 Bacon rose to explain and justify his acts, he Avas sharply 
 stopped, and reminded that he Avas transgressing the 
 orders of the House in speaking till the Committees 
 were named to examine the matter. "What Avas even 
 more important, the King had come to the House of 
 
VI.] BACON'S FALL. 131 
 
 Lords (March 10), and frightened, perhaps, about his 
 subsidies, told them "that he "svas not guilty of those ' 
 grievances "which are now discovered, but that ho 
 grounded his judgement upon others Avho have misled 
 him." The referees would be attacked, people thought, 
 if the Lower House had courage. 
 
 All this was serious. As things were drifting, it 
 seemed as if Bacon might have to fight the legal question 
 of the prerogative in the form of a criminal charge, and 
 be called upon to answer the accusation of being the 
 minister of a crown which legal language pronounced 
 a bsolute, and of a King who interpreted legal language 
 to the letter ; and further, to meet h is accusers after the 
 
 "NMiat passed between Bacon and the King is confused 
 and imcertain ; but after his speech the King could 
 scarcely have thought of interfering with the inquiry. 
 The proceedings Avent on ; Committees were named for 
 the several points of inquiry ; and Bacon took part in 
 these arrangements. Itjsv as a dangerous position to have 
 to defend himself against an angry Ho use of Common s, 
 leJ~and animated by Coke and Cranfield. But though 
 the storm had rapidly thickened, the charges against 
 the referees were not against him alone. His mistake 
 in law, if it was a mistake, Avas shared by some of the 
 first lawyers and first councillors in England. There 
 was a battle before him, but not a hopeless one. " Modkoi 
 fidei, quare dubitasti," he Amtes about this time to an 
 anxious friend. 
 
 But in truth the thickening storm had been gathering 
 over his head alone. It was against him that the whole 
 attack was directed ; as soon as it took a diflcreut 
 
132 BACON. [chap. 
 
 shape, the complaints against the other referees, such 
 as the Chief -Justice, who was now Lord Treasurer, 
 though some attempt was made to press them, were 
 quietly dropped. "What Avas the secret history of these 
 Aveeks we do not know. But the result of Bacon's ruin 
 Avas that Buckingham was saved. " As they speak of 
 the Turquois stone in a ring," Bacon had said to Buck- 
 ingham, when he was made Chancellor, " I Avill break 
 into twenty pieces, before you have the least fall." 
 Without knowing what he pledged himself to, he was 
 taken at his Avord. 
 
 At length the lightning fell. During the early part 
 of March, while these dangerous questions were mooted 
 about the referees, a Committee, appointed early in the 
 session, had also been sitting on abuses in courts of 
 justice, and as part of their business, an inquiry had 
 been going on into the Avays of the subordinate officers 
 of the Coui't of Chancery. Bacon had early (Feb. 17) 
 sent a message to the Committee courting full inquiry, 
 "willingly consenting that any man might speak 
 anything of his Coiu't." On the 12th of March 
 the chairman, Sir R Philips, reported that he had 
 in his hands "divers petitions, many frivolous and 
 clamorous, many of Aveight and consequence." Cran- 
 field, who presided over the Court of Wards, had 
 quarrelled fiercely AA-ith the Chancery, A\'here he said 
 there Avas " neither LaAv, Equity, or Conscience," and 
 pressed the inquiry, partly, it may be, to screen his oavii 
 Court, which Avas found fault vnth. by the laAvyers. 
 Some scandalous abuses Avere brought to light in the 
 Chancery. They shoAved that " Bacon Avas at fault in 
 the art of goA'^ernment," and did not knoAv hoAV to keep 
 
VI.] BACON'S FALL. 133 
 
 his servants in order. One of them, John Churchill, an 
 infamous forger of Chancery orders, finding things going 
 hard -onth him, and "resolved," it is said, "not to sink 
 alone," offered his confessions of all that was going on 
 wrong in the Court. But on the 1 5th of March things 
 took another turn. It was no longer a matter of doubt- 
 ful constitutional law; no longer a question of slack 
 discipline over his officers. To the astonishment, if not'\ 
 of the men of his own daj^, at least to the unexhausted 
 astonishment of times following, a charge was suddenly 
 reported from the Committee to the Commons against 
 the Lord Chancellor, not of straining the prerogative, or 
 of conniving at his seiwants' misdoing s, but of being^ 
 
 himself a corrupt and venal judge . Two suitors charged 
 him ^^■iih receiving bribes. Bacon was beginning to feel 
 worried and anxious, and he wrote thus to Buckingham. 
 At length he had begun to see the meaning of all these 
 inquiries, and to what they were driving. 
 
 ' ' My very good Lord — Your Lordship spake of Purgatoiy. 
 I am now in it, but mj' mind is in a calm ; for my fortune is not 
 my felicity. I know I have clean hands and a clean heart ; and I 
 hope a clean house for friends or servants. But Job himself, or 
 whosoever was the justest judge, by such hunting for matters 
 against him as hath been used against me, may for a time seem 
 foul, specially in a time when greatness is the mark, and accusation 
 is the game. And if this be to be a Chancellor, I think if the 
 great seal lay upon Hounslow Heath, nobody would take it up. But 
 the King and your Lordship will, I hope, put an end to these miseries 
 one way or other. And in troth that which I fear most is lest 
 continual attendance and business, together with these cares, and 
 want of time to do my weak body right this spring by diet and 
 physic, will cast me down ; and then it will be thought feigning 
 or fainting. But I hope in God I shall hold out. God prosper 
 you." 
 
134 BACON. [<TiAr. 
 
 The first charges attracted others, which -svere made 
 formal matters of complaint by the House of Commons. 
 John Churchill, to save himself, was busy setting do^vn 
 cases of misdoing ; and probably suitors of themselves 
 became ready to volunteer evidence. But of this Bacon 
 as yet knew nothing. He was at this time only aware 
 that there were persons who were "hunting out com- 
 plaints against him," that the attack was changed from 
 his law to his private character ; he had found an un- 
 favourable feeling in the House of Lords : and he knew 
 well enough what it was to have powerful enemies in 
 those days when a sentence Avas often settled before a 
 trial. To any one, such a state of tilings was as formid- 
 able as the first serious symptoms of a fever. He was 
 uneasy, as a man might well be, on whom the House of 
 Commons had fixed its eye, and to whom the House of 
 Lords had sho^m itself unfriendly. But he was as yet 
 conscious of nothing fatal to his defence, and he knew 
 that if false accusations could be lightly made they could 
 also be exposed. 
 
 A few days after the first mention of corruption 
 the Commons laid their complaints of him before the 
 House of Lords, and on the same day (March 19), Bacon, 
 finding himself too ill to go to the House, wrote to the 
 Peers by Buckingham, requesting them that as some 
 "complaints of base bribery" had come before them, 
 they would give him a fair opportunity of defending 
 himself, and of cross-examining witnesses; especially 
 begging, that considering the number of decrees which 
 he had to make in a year, more than two thousand, and 
 " the courses which had been taken in hunting out com- 
 plaints against him," they would not let their opinion of 
 
VI.] BACON'S FALL. 135 
 
 him be affected by the mere number of charges that 
 might be made. Their short verbal answer, moved by- 
 Southampton (March 20), that they meant to proceed 
 by riglit rule of justice, and Avould be glad if he cleared 
 his honour, was not encouraging. And now that the 
 Commons had brought the matter before them, the 
 Lords took it entirely into their own hands, appointing 
 three Committees, and examining the witnesses tliem- 
 sehes. New witnesses came forward every day with 
 fresh cases of gifts and presents, "bribes," received by 
 the Lord Chancellor. When Parliament rose for the 
 Easter vacation (March 27 — April 17), the Committees 
 continued sitting. A good deal probably passed of 
 which no record remains. When the Commons met 
 again (April 17) Coke was full of gibes about Instauratio 
 Magna; the true Instauratio was to restore laws; and 
 two days after an Act was brought in for review and 
 reversal of decrees in Courts of Equity, It was now 
 clear that the case against Bacon had assumed formidable 
 dimensions, and also a very strange, and almost monstrous 
 shape. F or the Lords, who Avere to be the judges, had 
 by their Commi ttees taken the matter out of the hand s 
 of the Commons, the original accusers , and had become 
 themselves the^jjrosecutors, c ollecting and arranging 
 evidence, accepting or rej ecting depositions , and doing 
 all that c ounse l or the ^ committing magistrate would do 
 preliminary to a trial. There appears to have been no 
 cross-examining of witnesses on Bacon's behalf, or hear- 
 ing witnesses for him ; not unnaturally at this stage of 
 business, Avheu the prosecutors were engaged in making 
 out their own case; but considering that the future 
 judges had of their own accord turned themselves into 
 
136 BACOX. [chap. 
 
 the prosecutors, tlie unfairness "svas great. At the same 
 time it does not appear that Bacon did anything to watch 
 how things Avent in the Committees, which had his friends 
 in them as well as his enemies, and are said to have been 
 open courts. Towards the end of March Chamberlain 
 wrote to Carleton that "the Houses were working hard 
 at cleansing out the Augsean stable of monopolies, and 
 also extortions in Courts of Justice. The petitions against 
 the Lord Chancellor were too numerous to be got through : 
 his chief friends and brokers of bargains, Sir George 
 Hastings, and Sir Eichard Young, and others attacked, 
 are obliged to accuse him in their own defence, though 
 very reluctantly. His ordinary bribes were £300, £400, 
 and even £1000. . . . The Lords admit no evidence 
 except on oath. One Churchill, who was dismissed from 
 the Chancery Court for extortion, is the chief cause 
 of the Chancellor's ruin." ^ Bacon Avas greatly alarmed. 
 He wrote to Buckingham, who was "his anchor in these 
 floods." He wrote to the King ; he was at a loss to 
 account for the "tempest that had come on him": he 
 could not understand what he had done to oftend the 
 country or Parliament : he had never " taken rewards to 
 pervert justice, however he might be frail, and partake 
 of the abuse of the time." 
 
 "Time hath been -when I liave brought unto you gemitum 
 columhce from others. Now I bring it from myself. I fly unto 
 your Majesty with the wings of a dove, which once within these 
 seven days I thought would have carried me a higher flight. 
 
 ' ' When I enter into myself, I find not the materials of such a 
 tempest as is comen upon me. I have been (as your Majesty 
 knoweth best), never author of any immoderate counsel, but always 
 desired to have things carried suavibus modis. I have been no 
 
 ^ Calendar of Stale Papers (domestic), March 24, 1621. 
 
VI.] BACON'S FALL. 137 
 
 avaricious oppressoi* of the people. I have been no haughty or 
 intolerable or hateful man, in my conversation or carriage. I have 
 inherited no hatred from my father, but am a good patriot born. 
 Whence should this be ? For these are the things that use to raise 
 dislikes abroad." 
 
 And he ended by entreating the King to help him : 
 
 ' ' That which I thirst after, as the hart after the streams, is that 
 I may know by my matchless friend [Buckingham] that presenteth 
 to you this letter, your Majesty's heart (which is an abyssus of 
 goodness, as I am an abysstis of miserj') towards me. I have been 
 ever your man, and counted myself but an usufnictuary of myself, 
 the property being yours : and now making myself an oblation to 
 do with me as may best conduce to the lionour of your justice, the 
 honour of your mercy, and the use of your service, resting as 
 " Clay in j'our Majestj-'s gracious hands, 
 
 "Fe. St. alb ax. Cane. 
 "March 25, 1621." 
 
 To the -world he kept up an undismayed countenance : 
 he went do^vn to Gorhambury, attended by troops of 
 friends. " This man," said Prince Charles, when he met 
 his company, "scorns to go out like a snuflF." But at 
 Gorhambury he made his will, leaving " his name to the 
 next ages, and to foreign nations ; " and he wrote a prayer, 
 Avhich is a touching evidence of his state of mind : — 
 
 " Most gracious Lord God, my merciful Father, from my youth 
 up, my Creator, my Redeemer, my Comforter. Thou (0 Lord) 
 soundest and searchest the depths and secrets of all hearts ; thou 
 knowledgest the upright of heart, thou judgest the hj'pocrite, thou 
 ponderest men's thoughts and doings as in a balance, thou measurest 
 their intentions as with a line, vanity and crooked ways cannot be 
 hid from thee. 
 
 "Remember (0 Lord) how thy servant hath walked before 
 thee ; remember what I have first sought, and what hath been 
 principal in mine intentions. I have loved thy assemblies, I have 
 mourned for the divisions of thy Church, I have delighted in the 
 
138 BACON. [niAr. 
 
 biiglitness of thy sanctuary. This vine which thy right hand hath 
 planted in this nation, I liave ever prayed unto thee that it might 
 have the first and the latter rain ; and that it might stretch her 
 branches to the seas and to the floods. The state and bread of the 
 poor and oppressed have been precious in my eyes : I have hated 
 all cruelty and hardness of heart ; I have (though in a despised 
 weed) procured tlie good of all men. If any have been mine 
 enemies, I thought not of them ; neither hath the sun almost set 
 upon my displeasure ; but I have been as a dove, free from super- 
 fluity of maliciousness. Thy creatures have been my books, but 
 thy Scriptures much more. I have sought thee in the courts, 
 fields, and gardens, but I have found thee in thy temples. 
 
 "Thousand have been my sins, and ten thousand my trans- 
 gressions ; but thy sanctifications have remained with me, and my 
 heart, through thy grace, hath been an unquenched coal upon thy 
 altar. Lord, my strength, I have since my youth met Avith 
 thee in all my ways, by thy fatherly compassions, by thy comfort- 
 able chastisements, and by thy most visible providence. As thy 
 favours have increased upon me, so have thj' corrections ; so as 
 thou hast been ahvay near me, Lord ; and ever as my worldly 
 blessings were exalted, so secret darts from thee have pierced me ; 
 and when I have ascended before men, I have descended in humilia- 
 tion before thee. 
 
 "And now when I thought most of i)eace and honour, thy hand 
 is heavy upon me, and hath humbled me, according to thy former 
 loving-kindness, keeping me still in thy fatherly school, not as a 
 bastard, but as a child. Just are thy judgements upon me for my 
 sins, which are more in number than the sands of the sea, but 
 have uo proportion to thy mercies ; for what are the sands of the 
 sea, to the sea, earth, heavens ? and all these are nothing to thy 
 mercies. 
 
 " Besides my innumerable sins, I confess before thee that I am 
 debtor to thee for the gracious talent of thy gifts and graces, which 
 I have misspent in things for which I was least fit ; so as I may 
 truly say, my soul hath been a stranger in the course of my 
 pilgrimage. Be merciful unto me (0 Lord) for my Saviour's sake, 
 and receive me into thy bosom, or guide me in thy ways." 
 
 Bacou up to this time, strangely, if the Committees 
 
VI.] BACON'S FALL. 139 
 
 were " open CoiTrts," -was entirely ignorant of the 
 particulars of the charge which was accumulating 
 against him. He had an interview vnth the King, 
 Avhich Avas duly reported to the House, and he placed 
 his case before James, distinguishing between the 
 "three cases of bribery supposed in a judge — a corrupt 
 bargain ; carelessness in receiving a gift while the cause 
 is going on ; and, what is innocent, receiving a gift after 
 it is ended." And he meant in such words as these to 
 place himself at the Iving's disposal, and ask his direc- 
 tion : — 
 
 ' ' For my fortune, summa summarum ■svith me is, tliat I may 
 not be made altogether unprofitable to do your Majesty service or 
 honour. If your Majesty continue me as I am, I hope I shall be a 
 new man, and shall reform things out of feeling, more than another 
 can do out of example. If I cast part of my burden, I shall be 
 more strong and deliire to bear the rest. And, to tell your 
 Majesty what my thoughts run upon, I think of writing a story 
 of England, and of recompiling of your laws into a better digest." 
 
 The Iving referred him to the House ; and the House 
 noAV (April 19) prepared to gather up into "one brief" 
 the charges against the Lord Chancellor, still, however, 
 continuing open to receive fresh complaints. 
 
 Meanwhile the chase after abuses of all kinds was 
 growing hotter in the Commons — abuses in patents and 
 monopolies, which revived the complaints against referees, 
 among whom Bacon was frequently named, and abuses 
 in the Courts of Justice. The attack passed by and 
 spared the Common Law Courts, as was noticed in the 
 course of the debates ; it spared Cranfield's Court, the 
 Court of Wards. But it fell heavily on the Chancery 
 and the Ecclesiastical Coiu-ts. " I have neither power 
 
140 BACON. [ciiAr. 
 
 nor will to defend Chancery," said Sir John Bennett, the 
 judge of the Prerogative Court ; but a few weeks after 
 his turn came, and a series of as ugly charges as could 
 well be preferred against a judge, charges of extortion 
 as well as briberj^, were reported to the House by its 
 Committee. There can be no doubt of the grossness of 
 many of these abuses, and the zeal against them was 
 honest, though it would have shown more courage if it had 
 flown at higher game ; but the daily discussion of them 
 helped to keep alive and inflame the general feeling 
 against so great a " delinquent " as the Lord Chancellor 
 was supposed to be. And, indeed, two of the worst 
 charges against him were made before the Commons. 
 One was a statement made in the House by Sir George 
 / Hastings, a member of the House, who had been the 
 c hannel o f Awbry's gift, that when he had told Bacon 
 that if q uestioned he m ust admit it. Bacon's an swer 
 Avas : " George, if you do so, I must deny it upon my 
 ^ honoiu' — upon my oath." The other was that he had 
 given an opinion in favour of some claim of the Mastei^s 
 in Chancery for which he received £1200, and with 
 which he said that all the judges agreed — an assertion 
 which all the judges denied. Of these charges there is 
 no contradiction.^ 
 
 Bacon made one more appeal to the King (April 21). 
 He hoped that, by resigning the seal, he might be spared 
 the sentence : — 
 
 " But now if not per omnipotentiam (as tlie divines speak), but 
 per potestatem suaviter disponentem, your Majesty ^vill gi-aciously 
 save me from a sentence Avith the good liking of the House, and 
 that cup may pass from me ; it is the utmost of my desires. 
 
 1 Commom' Journals, March 17, April 27 ; iii. 560, 594-6. 
 
VI.] BACON'S FALL. 141 
 
 '• This I move -vvitli the more belief, because I assure myself that 
 if it be reformation that is sought, the very taking away the seal, 
 upon my general submission, will be as much in example for these 
 four hundi-ed years, as any furder severity." 
 
 At length, informallj-, but for the first time cli.stinctly, 
 the full nature of the accusation, with its overwhelming 
 list of cases, came to Bacon's knowledge (April 20 or 
 21). From the single charge, made in the middle of 
 March, it had SAvelled in force and volume like a 
 rising mountain torrent. That all these charges should 
 have sprung out of the ground from their long conceal- 
 ment is strange enough. How is it that nothing wa_s 
 heard of the m when the thin . gs ha]-)pene d 1 And what is 
 equally strange is that these charges were substantial ly 
 true and undeniable; th at this great Lord Chancellor, so 
 admirable in his de spatch of busine ss, hitherto so little 
 complained of f or wrong or unfair decisions, had been in 
 the habit of receiving largesum s of money from suitor s, 
 in some cases ce rtainly while the suit Avas pendin g. And 
 further, while receiving them, while perfectly aware of 
 the evil of receiving gifts on the seat of judgment, while 
 emphatically warning inferior judges against yielding to 
 the temptation, he seems really to have continued un- 
 conscious of any -WTong-doing while gift after gift was 
 offered and accepted. But nothing is so strange as the 
 Avay in which Bacon met the charges. Tremendous as 
 the accusation was, he made not the slightest fight about 
 it. Up to this time he had held himself innocent. 
 Now, overwhelmed and stunned, he maj:lejio_attemptjLt 
 d efence ; he threw up the game without a struggle, and 
 volunteered an absolute and unreserved confession of 
 his guilt — that is to say, he declined to stand his trial. 
 
14 2 BACON. [chap. 
 
 Only, he marlo an earnest application to the House of 
 Lords, in proceeding to sentence, to be content "svith a 
 general admission of guilt, and to spare him the humilia- 
 tion of confessing the separate facts of alleged "bribery " 
 which were contained in the twenty -ei ght articles o f 
 his accusation. This submission, "grounded only on 
 rumour,' for the Articles of charge had not yet been 
 communicated to him by the accusers, took the House 
 by surprise. " No Lord spoke to it, after it had been 
 read, for a long time." But they did not mean that he 
 should escape with this. The House treated the sug- 
 gestion with impatient scorn (April 24). "It is too 
 late," said Lord Saye. "No word of confession of any 
 corruption in the Lord Chancellor's submission," said 
 Southampton; " it stands with the justice and honour 
 of this House not to proceed without the parties' par- 
 ticular confession, or to have the parties to hear the 
 charge, and we to hear the parties answer." The 
 demand of the Lords was strictly just, but cruel ; the 
 Articles were now sent to him ; he had been charged 
 with definite offences ; he must answer yes or no, con- 
 fess them or defend himself. A further question arose 
 whether he should not be sent for to appear at the bar. 
 He still held the seals. " Shall the Great Seal come to 
 the bar 1" asked Lord Pembroke. It was agreed that he 
 was to be asked whether he would acknowledge the 
 particulars. His answer was " that he will make no 
 manner of defence to the charge, but meaneth to 
 acknowledge corruption, and to make a particular con- 
 fession to every point, and after that a humble sub- 
 mission. But he humbly craves libertj- that, when the 
 charge is more full than he finds the truth of the fact, he 
 
VI.] BACON'S FALL. 143 
 
 may make a declaration of the truth iu such particulars, 
 the charge being brief and containing not all the circum- 
 stances." And such a confession he made. " My 
 Lords," he said, to those who were sent to ask whether 
 he would stand to it, " it is my act, my hand, my heart. 
 I beseech your Lordships be merciful to a broken 
 reed." This was of course followed by a request to the 
 King from the House to " sequester" the Great Seal, A 
 commission was sent to receive it (^lay 1). " The worse, 
 the better," he answered to the wish " that it had been 
 better with him." " By the King's great favour I 
 received the Great Seal ; by my own great fault I have 
 lost it." They intended him now to come to the bar to 
 receive his sentence. But he was too ill to leave his bed. 
 They did not push this point farther, but proceeded to 
 settle the sentence (May 3). He had asked for mercy, 
 but he did not get it. There were men who talked of 
 every extremity short of death. Coke, indeed, in the 
 Commons, from his store of precede nts, had cited case s 
 where judges had been hanged t'oFbrib ery, But the Lords 
 would noThear of this. " His offences fou l," said Lord 
 Arundel; "h is confession pitifu l. L ife not to be touched ." 
 But Southampton, whom twenty years before he had 
 helped to involve in Essex's ruin, urged that he should 
 be degraded from the peerage ; and asked whether, at 
 any rate, "he whom this House thinks unfit to be a 
 constable shall come to the Parliament." He was fined \ 
 £40,000. He Avas to be imprisoned in the ToAver during 
 the King's pleasure. He was to be incapable of any 
 office, place, or employment in the State or Common- 
 wealth. He was never to sit in Parliament or come 
 within tlic verge of the Court. Tliis was agreed to, | 
 
114 BACON. [rjiAi-. 
 
 Buckiiigluuu only dissenting. " The Lord Chancellor is 
 so sick," he said, "that he cannot live long." 
 
 What is the history of this tremendons catastrophe 
 hy Avhich, in less than two months, Bacon was cast down 
 from the height of fortune to become a byword of shame? 
 He had enemies, who certainly were glad, but there is 
 no appearance that it was the residt of any plot or com- 
 bination against him. He_\ vas involved, accidentally, i t 
 may almost be said, in the burst of anger excited by the 
 intolerablede alings of othe rs. The indignation provoked 
 l)y Michell and Mompesson and their associates at that 
 l)articular moment found Bacon in its path, doing, as it 
 seemed, in his great seat of justice, even worse than they; 
 and when he threw up all attempt at defence, and his 
 judges had his hand to an unreserved confession of corrup- 
 tion, both generally, and in the long list of cases alleged 
 against him, it is not wonderful that they came to the 
 conclusion, as the rest of the world did, that he Avas as 
 bad as the accusation painted him — a dishonest and cor- 
 rupt judge. Yet it is strange that they should not have 
 observed that not a single charge of a definitely unjust 
 decision was brought, at any rate was proved, against 
 him. He had taken money, they argued, and therefore 
 he must be corrupt ; but if he had taken money to per- 
 vert judgment, some instance of the iniquity would cer- 
 tainly have been brought forward and proved. There 
 is no such instance to be found ; though, of course, there 
 Avere plenty of dissatisfied suitors ; of coiu'se the men 
 who had paid their money and lost their cause Avere 
 furious. But in vain do we look for any case of proved 
 injustice. The utmost that can be said is that in some 
 cases he showed favour in pushing forward and expedit- 
 
VI.] BACON'S FALL. 145 
 
 ing suits. So that the real charge against Bacon assumes, 
 to us who have not to deal practically with dangerous 
 abuses, but to judge conduct and character, a different 
 complexion. Instead of b eing the Avickedness of per- J 
 verting justic e and selling his judgments for bribes , it I 
 takes the shape of allow ing and sharing in a dishonou r-/ 
 able and mischievous system of payment for serAac e, I 
 which could not fail to bring Avith it temptation and I 
 dis credit, and in which fair rcAvard could not be distin- 
 guished from unlaAvful gain . Such a system it Avas high 
 time to stop ; and in this rough and harsh way, Avhich 
 also satisfied some personal enmities, it Avas stopped. 
 We may put aside for good the charge on Avhich he Avas 
 condemned, and AA-hich in Avords he admitted, of being 
 corrupt as a judge. His real fault, and it was a great 
 
 one, was that he did not in time open his eyes to the 
 wrongness and evil, patent to every one, and to himlelf 
 as s oon as pointed ou t, o f the traditional fashion in his 
 CO lU-t of ek in^^ lt by irregular mfts t he salary of snob an 
 office as his. 
 
 Thus Bacon Avas condemned both to suffering and to 
 dishonour ; and, as has been obsen'ed, condemned Avith- 
 out a trial. But it must also be observed, that it was 
 entirely owing to his OAvn act that he had not a trial, and 
 Avith a trial the opportunity of cross-examining Avitn esses 
 and of explaining openly the matters urged against him. 
 The proceedings in the Lords were preliminary to the 
 trial : when the time came. Bacon, of his oaati choice, 
 stopped them from going further by his confession and 
 subniission. ^Uoiisidenng the vieAv Avhich he claimed 
 to take of his own case, his behaA'iour AA-as Avanting in 
 courag e and spirit. From the moment that the attack 
 
 L, 
 
 /5cJ? 
 
146 BACON. [cHAi>. 
 
 I. a him shifted from a charge of authorising illegal 
 monopolies to a charge of personal corruption, he never 
 fairly met his accusers. The distress and anxiety, no 
 doubt, broke down his health ; and twice, when he was 
 called upon to be in his place in the House of Lords, he 
 was obliged to excuse himself on the ground that he was 
 too ill to leave his bed. But betAveen the time of the 
 first charge and his condemnation seven weeks elapsed : 
 and though he was able to go down to Gorhambury, he 
 never in that time showed himself in the House of Lords. 
 Whether or not, while the Committees were busy in 
 collecting the charges, he would have been allowed to take 
 part, to put questions to the witnesses, or to produce his 
 own, he never attempted to do so ; and by the course he 
 took there was no other opportunity. To have stood his 
 trial could hardly have increased his danger, or aggra- 
 vated his punishment ; and it would only have been 
 worthy of his name and place, if not to have made a 
 fight for his character and integrity, at least to have 
 bravely said Avhat he had made up his mind to admit, 
 and what no one could have said more nobly and 
 pathetically, in open Parliament. But he was cowed 
 at the fierceness of the disapprobation, manifest in both 
 Houses. He shrunk from looking his peers and his 
 judges in the face. His friends obtained for him that 
 I he should not be brought to the bar, and that all should 
 pass in writing. But they saved his dignity at the expense 
 of his substantial reputation. The observation that the 
 charges against him were not sifted by cross-examination 
 applies equally to his answers to them. The allegations 
 of both sides would have come down to us in a more 
 trustworthy shape if the case had gone on. But to give 
 
VI.] BACON'S FALL. 147 
 
 lip the Struggle, and to escape by any humiliation from 
 a regular public trial, seems to have been his only 
 thought, when he found that the King and Buckingham 
 could not or would not save him. 
 
 But the truth is that he knew th at a trial of this kind 
 Avas a trial only in naroe ! He knew that when a charge 
 of this sort was brought, it was not meant to be reaUy in- 
 vestigated in open court, but to be driven home by proofs 
 carefully prepared beforehand, against which the accused 
 had little chance. He knew, too, that in those days to 
 resist in earnest an accusation was apt to be taken as an 
 insult to the court which entertained it. And further, 
 for the prosecutor to accept a submission and confession 
 without pushing to the formality of a public trial, and 
 therefore a public exposure, was a favour. It was a 
 favour which by his advice, as against the King's honour, 
 had been refused to Suffolk ; it was a favour which, in 
 a much lighter charge, had by his advice been refused 
 to his colleague Yelverton only a few months before, 
 when Bacon, in sentencing him, took occasion to expatiate 
 on the heinous guilt of misprisions or mistakes in men 
 in high places. The humiliation was not complete with- 
 out the trial, but it was for humiliation and not fair in- 
 vestigation that the trial was wanted. Bacon knew that 
 the trial would only prolong his agony, and give a further 
 triumph to his enemies. 
 
 That there was any plot against Bacon, and much more 
 that Buckingham to save himself was a party to it, is of 
 course absurd. Buckingham, indeed, was almost the only 
 man in the Lords who said anything for Bacon, and, 
 alone, he voted against his punishment. But consider- 
 ing what Buckingham was, and what he dared to do 
 
148 BACON. [CHAP. 
 
 when he pleased, lie was singularly cool in helping Bacon. 
 Williams, the astute Dean of Westminster, who was to 
 be Bacon's successor as Lord Keeper, had got his ear, and 
 advised him not to endanger himself by trying to save 
 delinquents. He did not. Indeed, as the inquiry went on, 
 he began to take the high moral ground ; he was shocked 
 at the Chancellor's conduct ; he would not have believed 
 that it could have been so bad ; his disgrace was richly 
 deserved. Buckingham kept up appearances by saying 
 a Avord for him from time to time in Parliament, Avhich 
 he knew would be useless, and which he certainly took 
 no measures to make effective. It is sometimes said that 
 Buckingham never knew what dissimulation Avas, He 
 was capable, at least, of the perfidy and cowardice of 
 utter selfishness. Bacon's conspicuous fall diverted 
 men's thoughts from the far more scandalous wickedness 
 of the great favourite. But though there w^as no plot, 
 though the blow fell upon Bacon almost accidentally, 
 there were many who rejoiced to be able to drive it 
 home. We can hardly wonder that foremost among 
 them was Coke. This was the end of the long rivalry 
 between Bacon and Coke, from the time that Essex 
 pressed Bacon against Coke in vain, to the day when 
 Bacon as Chancellor drove Coke from his seat for his 
 bad law, and as Privy Councillor ordered him to be pro- 
 secuted in the Star Chamber for riotously breaking 
 open men's doors to get his daughter. The two men 
 thoroughly disliked and undervalued one another. Coke 
 made light of Bacon's law. Bacon saAv clearly Coke's 
 narrowness and ignorance out of that limited legal sphere 
 in Avhich he was supposed to know everything, his pre- 
 judiced and interested use of his knowledge, his coarse- 
 
VI. J BACON'S FALL. 149 
 
 ness and insolence. But now in Parliament Coke was 
 supreme, "om- Hercules," as his friends said. He posed 
 as the enemy of all abuses and corruption. He brought 
 his unrivalled though not always accm-ate knowledge of 
 law and history to the ser\ace of the Committees, and 
 took care that the Chancellor's name should not be for- 
 gotten when it could be connected vnth. some bad business 
 of patent or Chancery abuse. It was the great revenge 
 of the Common Law on the encroaching and insulting 
 Chancery which had now proved so foul. And he could 
 not resist the opportunity of marking the revenge of 
 professional knowledge over Bacon's airs of philosophical 
 superiority. "To restore things to their original" was 
 his sneer in Parliament, "this, Instauratio Magna. 
 Instaurare paras : — Instaura leges justitiamgue prius." ^ 
 
 The charge of corruption was as completely a surprise 
 to Bacon as it was to the rest of the world. And yet, 
 as soon as the blot was hit, he saw in a moment that his 
 position was hopeless— he knew that he had been doing 
 A\Tong; though all the time he had never apparently 
 given it a thought, and he insisted, what there is every 
 reason to believe, that no present had induced him to 
 give an unjust decision. It Avas the power of custom 
 over a character naturally and by habit too pliant to 
 
 1 Cmnmons' Journals, iii. 578. In liis copy of tlie Komvi 
 Organum, received ex dono audoris, Coke wrote tlie same words. 
 ' ' Auctori consilium. 
 Instaurare paras veterum documenta sophoruni : 
 Instaura leges justitiamque prius." 
 He added, with allusion to the ship in the frontispiece of the 
 Novum Organum, 
 
 '• It deser\-etli not to be read in schools, 
 But to be freighted iu the ship of Fools." 
 
150 BACON. [cuAi'. 
 
 circumstances. Custom made liim insensible to the 
 evil of receiving recommendations from Buckingham iu 
 favour of suitors. Custom made him insensible to the 
 evil of what it seems every one took for granted, — re- 
 ceiving gifts from suitors. In the Court of James I. the 
 atmosphere which a man in office breathed was loaded 
 ^vnth the taint of gifts and bribes. Presents Avere as 
 much the rule, as indispensable for those who hoped to 
 get on, as they are now in Turkey. Even in Elizabeth's 
 days, when Bacon was struggling to win her favour, and 
 was in the greatest straits for money, he borrowed £500 
 to buy a jewel for the Queen. When he was James's 
 servant the giving of gifts became a necessity. New 
 Year's Day brought round its tribute of gold vases and 
 gold pieces to the King and Buckingham. And this 
 was the least. Money was raised by the sale of offices 
 and titles. For £20,000, having previously offered 
 .£10,000 in vain, the Chief-Justice of England, Montague, 
 became Lord Mandeville and Treasiu-er. The bribe was 
 sometimes disguised : a man became a Privy Councillor, 
 like Cranfield, or a Chief-Justice, like Ley (afterwards 
 "the good Earl," "unstained AWth gold or fee," of 
 Milton's Sonnet), by marrying a cousin or a niece of 
 Buckingham. AVhen Bacon Avas made a Peer, he had 
 also given him "the making of a Baron " ; that is to 
 say, he might raise money by bargaining with some one 
 who Avanted a peerage ; Avhen, hoAA^ever, later on, he 
 asked Buckingham for a repetition of the favour, Buck- 
 ingham gave him a lecture on the impropriety of 
 prodigality, which should make it seem that " Avhile the 
 King was asking money of Parliament with one hand 
 he Avas giving Avith the other." Hoav things Avere iu 
 
VI.] BACON'S FALL. 151 
 
 Chancery in the days of the Queen, and of Bacon's 
 predecessors, we know little; but Bacon himself implies 
 that there was nothing new in what he did. " All my 
 lawyers," said James, "are so bred and nursed in cor- 
 ruption that they cannot leave it." Bacon's Chancellor- 
 ship coincided with the full bloom of Buckingham's 
 favour : and Buckingham set the fashion, beyond all 
 before him, of extravagance in receiWng and in spending. 
 Encompassed by such assumptions and such customs. 
 Bacon administered the Chancery. Suitors did there 
 what people did everywhere else ; they acknowledged 
 by a present the trouble they gave, or the benefit they 
 gained. It may be that Bacon's knoA^m diflSculties about 
 money, his expensive ways and love of pomp, his easi- 
 ness of nature, his lax discipline over his servants, 
 encouraged this profuseness of giving. And Bacon let 
 it be. He asked no questions ; he knew that he worked 
 hard and well; he knew that it could go on without 
 aflfecting his purpose to do justice "from the greatest to 
 the groom." A stronger character, a keener conscience, 
 would have faced the question, not only whether he was 
 not setting the most ruinous of precedents, but whether 
 any man could be so sure of himself as to go on dealing 
 justly with gifts in his hands. But Bacon, who never 
 dared to face the question, what James was, what Buck- 
 ingham Avas, let himself be spell-bound bj' custom. He 
 knew in the abstract that judges ought to have nothing 
 to do "snth gifts, and had said so impressively in his 
 charges to them. Yet he went on self-complacent, 
 secure, almost innocent, building up a great tradition of 
 corruption in the very heart of English justice, till the 
 challenge of Parliament, which began in him its terrible 
 
152 BACON. [cH.vi'. 
 
 and relentless but most unequal jirosecution of justice 
 against ministers who had betrayed the commonwealth in 
 serving the Crown, woke him from his dream, and made 
 him see, as others saw it, the guilt of a great judge who, 
 under whatever extenuating pretext, allowed the suspicion 
 to arise that he might sell justice. " In the midst of a state 
 of as great affliction as mortal man can endure," he vrrote 
 to the Lords of the Parliament, in making his submission, 
 — " I shall begin with the professing gladness in some 
 things. The first is that hereafter the greatness of a 
 judge or magistrate shall be no sanctuary or protection 
 of guiltiness, which is the beginning of a golden world. 
 The next, that after this example it is like that judges 
 will fly from anything that is in the likeness of corrup- 
 tion as from a serpent." Bacon's o^Yn judgment on 
 himself, deliberately repeated, is characteristic, and pro- 
 bably comes near the truth. " Howsoever I acknowledge 
 the sentence just and for reformation's sake fit," he 
 ■vvi'ites to Buckingham from the Tower, Avhere, for form's 
 sake, he was imprisoned for a few miserable days, he 
 yet had been "the justest Chancellor that hath been in 
 the five changes that have been since Sir Nicolas Bacon's 
 time." He repeated the same thing yet more deliber- 
 ately in later times. " / was (lie justest pidge that was in 
 England these fifty years. But it ivas the justest censure in 
 Parliament that tvas these two hundred years" 
 
 He might have gone on to add, " the Wisest Coun- 
 sellor ; and yet none on whom rested hea^ner blame ; 
 none of whom England might more justly complain." 
 Good counsels given, submissive acquiescence in the 
 worst, — this is the history of his statesmanship. 
 Bacon, whose eye was everywhere, Avas not sparing of 
 
vl] BACON'S FALL. 153 
 
 his counsels. On all the great questions of the time he 
 has left behind abundant eAidence, not only of what he 
 thought, but of what he advised. And , in every case 
 these memori als are _ marked Avith the insight, the in- 
 dep enden ce, the breadth of vie w, and the moderation of 
 a mind w hich is bent on truth . He started, of course, 
 from a basis which we are now hardly able to understand 
 or allow for, the idea of absolute royal power and pre- 
 rogative which James had enlarged and hardened out 
 of the Kingship of the Tudors, itself imperious and 
 arbitrary enough, but always seeking, with a tact of 
 which James was incapable, to be in touch and sympathy 
 "\nth popular feeling. But it was a basis which in prin- 
 ciple every one of any accoimt as yet held or professed 
 to hold, and which Bacon himself held on grounds of 
 philosophy and reason. He could see no hope for orderly 
 and intelligent government except in a nder whose 
 M-isdom had equal strength to assert itself; and he 
 looked dovro. viith incredulity and scorn on the notion 
 of anything good coming out of what the world then 
 knew or saw of popular opinion or parliamentary govern- 
 ment. But when it came to what Avas wise and fitting 
 for absolute power to do, in the way of general measures 
 and policy, he was for the most part right. Hq ^ saw the 
 inexorable and pressing necess it y of putting th<" financf ^ 
 of the k ingdom on a safe footing . He saw the neces sity •< 
 of a^ sound and honest policy in Tr^lan d. He .^amJliii ^ 
 mis chief of the Spanish alliance in s pite of h i§_p"T-ir>ng 
 friend ship wath Gondomar, and detected the real and 
 increasing weakness of the Spanish monarchy, Avhich still 
 awed mankind. He saw the growing d anger of abuses ^ 
 in Church and State which Avere left untouched, and 
 
1 
 
 154 BACON. [chap. 
 
 were protected by the punishment of those who dared 
 -to complam of them. He s-nw t.ho.iir mfnsirm andjnj ustice 
 of much of t hat common la w of which the lawyers were 
 so proud ; and would have attempted, if he had been 
 able, to emulate Justinian, and anticipate the Code 
 Xapoleon, by a rational and consistent digest. Above 
 ^ all, he never ceased to impress on James t he importanc e, 
 and, if wisely _used, the h mnense advantnaps^ nf bis Pnr]i> - 
 ments. Himself, for great part of his life, an active and 
 p opular member of the House of Commons , he saAv that 
 not onl}' it was im]30ssible to do without it, but that if 
 fairly , honourably , h onestly dealt with, it would become 
 a source of power an d confidence w hich would double the 
 strength of the Government both at home and abroad. 
 Yet of all this wisdom nothing came. The finance of the 
 kingdom was still ruined by extravagance and corruption 
 in a time of rapidly-developing prosperity and wealth. 
 The wounds of Ireland were unhealed. It Avas neither 
 peace nor war with Spain, and hot infatuation for its 
 friendship alternated with cold fits of distrust and 
 estrangement. Abuses flourished and multiplied under 
 great patronage. The King's one thought about Parlia- 
 ment Avas how to get as much money out of it as he 
 could, Avith as little other business as possible. Bacon's 
 counsels Avere the prophecies of Cassandra in that so 
 prosperous but so disastrous reign. All that he did Avas 
 to lend the authority of his presence, in James's mos t 
 in timate _ counaals, to policy and courses of Avhich he 
 saAV the imwisdo m and the perils. James and Bucking- 
 ham made use of him Avhen they A\'anted. But they 
 would have been very different in their measures and 
 their statesmanship if they had listened to him. 
 
 II 
 
VI.] BACON'S FALL. 165 
 
 Mirabeau said, what of course had beeu said before 
 him, "On ne vaut, dans la partie executive de la vie 
 hiimaine, que par le caractfere." This is the key to 
 Bacon's failiu'cs as a judge and as a statesman ; and 
 why, knowing so much more and judging so much 
 more wisely than James and Buckingham, he must be 
 identified vrith. the misdoings of that ignoble reign. He 
 had the coura ge of his opinion s, but a man wants more 
 than that ; h e needs the manliness and the public spirit 
 to enforce them, if they are true and salutary. But this 
 is Avhat Bacon had not. He did not mind being rebuffed ; 
 he knew that he Avas right, and did not care. But to 
 stand up against the King, to contradict him after he 
 had spoken, to press an opinion or a measure on a man 
 whose belief in his ovm AA-isdom was infinite, to risk not 
 onlj^ being set down as a dreamer, but the King's dis- 
 pleasure, and the ruin of being given over to the wall of 
 his enemies, this Bacon had not the fibre, or the stiffness, 
 or the self-assertion to do. He did not do what a man 
 of firm will and strength of purpose, a man of high in- 
 tegrity, of habitual resolution, Avould have done. Such 
 me n insist when they are responsible , and Avhen they 
 k now that they are right ; and t hey prevail, or accept 
 th e consequences . Bacon, knowing all that he did, 
 thinking all that he thought, was content to be the echo 
 and the instrument of the cleverest, the foolishest, the 
 vainest, the most pitiably unmanly of English kings. 
 
CHAPTEE VII 
 
 bacon's last years — 1621-1626. 
 
 The tremendous sentences of those days, with their 
 crushing fines, were often worse in sound than in reaHt}^ 
 They meant that for the moment a man was defeated and 
 disgraced. But it was quite understood that it did not 
 necessarily follow that they Avould be enforced in all their 
 severity. The fine might be remitted; the imprisonment 
 shortened; the ban of exclusion taken off. At another 
 turn of events or caprice, the man himself might return 
 to favour, and take his place in Parliament or the Coun- 
 cil, as if nothing had happened. But, of course, a man 
 might have powerful enemies, and the sentence might be 
 pressed. His fine might be assigned to some favourite ; 
 and he might be ruined, even if in the long run he was 
 pardoned; or he might remain indefinitely a prisoner. 
 Ealeigh had remained to perish at last in dishonour. 
 Northumberland, Ealeigh's fellow-prisoner, after fifteen 
 years' captivity, was released this year. The year after 
 Bacon's condemnation such criminals as Lord and Lady 
 Somerset were released from the Tower, after a six years' 
 imprisonment. Southampton, the accomplice of Essex, 
 Suffolk, sentenced as late as 1619 by Bacon for embezzle- 
 ment, sat in the House of Peers which judged Bacon, 
 
CHAP. VII.] BACOX'S LAST YEARS— 1621-1626. 157 
 
 and both of tlieni took a prominent part in judging 
 him. 
 
 To Bacon the sentence was ruinous. It proved an 
 irretrievable overthrow as regards public life, and though 
 some parts of it were remitted, and others lightened, it 
 plunged his private aifairs into trouble which weighed 
 heavily on him for his few remaining years. To his 
 deep distress and horror he had to go to the Tower to 
 satisfy the terms of his sentence. "Good my Lord," he 
 writes to Buckingham, May 31, "procure my warrant 
 for my discharge this day. Death is so far from being 
 unwelcome to me, as I have called for it as far as 
 Christian resolution would permit any time these two 
 months. But to die before the time of his Majesty's 
 grace, in this disgraceful place, is even the worst that 
 could be." He was released after two or three days, and 
 he thanks Buckingham (June 4) for getting him out to 
 do him and the King faithfid service — " wherein, by the 
 grace of God, your Lordship shall find that my adversity 
 hath, neither sjyent nor j^ent my spirits." In the autumn 
 his fine was remitted ; that is, it was assigned to persons 
 nominated by Bacon, who, as the Crown had the first 
 claim on all his goods, served as a protection against his 
 other creditors, who were many and some of them 
 clamorous ; and it was followed by his pardon. His 
 successor, WilUams, now Bishop of Lincoln, who 
 stood in gi'eat fear of Parliament, tried to stop the 
 pardon. The assignment of the fine, he said to Bucking- 
 ham, was a gross job : " it is much spoken against, not 
 for the matter (for no man objects to that), but for the 
 manner, which is full of knavery, and a wicked precedent. 
 For by this assignment he is protected from all his 
 
158 BACOX. [ciiAV. 
 
 creditors, which (I dare say) was neither liis Majesty's 
 nor your Lordship's meaning." It was an ill-natured 
 and cowardly piece of official pedantry, to plunge deeper 
 a drowning man: but in the end the pardon was passed. 
 It does not appear whether Buckingham interfered to 
 overrule the Lord Keeper's scruples. Buckingham was 
 certainly about this time very much out of humour ^^'ith 
 Bacon, for a reason which, more than anything else, 
 discloses the deep meanness which lurked under his show 
 of magnanimity and pride. He had chosen this moment 
 to ask Bacon for York House. This meant that Bacon 
 would never more want it. Even Bacon was stung by 
 such a request to a friend in his condition, and declined 
 to part with it : and Buckingham accordingly was 
 offended, and made Bacon feel it. Indeed, there is 
 reason to think with Mr. Spedding that for the sealing 
 of his pardon Bacon was indebted to the good offices 
 with the King, not of Buckingham, but of the Spaniard, 
 Gondomar, with whom Bacon had always been on terms 
 of cordiality and respect, and who at this time certainly 
 " brought, about something on his behalf, which his 
 other friends either had not dared to attempt, or had 
 not been able to obtain." 
 
 But though Bacon had his pardon, he had not 
 received permission to come within the verge of the 
 Court, which meant that he could not live in London. 
 His affairs were in great disorder, his health was bad, 
 and he was cut off from books. He MTote an appeal 
 to the Peers who had condemned him, asking them 
 to intercede with the King for the enlargement of 
 his liberty. "I am old," he wrote, "weak, ruined, in 
 want, a very subject of pity." The Tower at least gave 
 
VII.] BACOX'S LAST YEARS— 1621-1626. 159 
 
 him the neighbourhood of those who could help him. 
 " There I could have company, physicians, conference 
 ^^^th my creditors and friends about my debts and the 
 necessities of my estate, helps for my studies and the 
 ■writings I have in hand. Here I live upon the sword- 
 point of a sharp air, endangered if I go abroad, dulled 
 if I stay within, solitary and comfortless, without com- 
 pany, banished from all opportunities to treat with any 
 to do myself good, and to help out my Avrecks." If the 
 Lords would recommend his suit to the King, " You 
 shall do a work of charity and nobility, you shall do me 
 good, you shall do my creditors good, and it may be 
 you shall do posterity good, if out of the carcase of 
 dead and rotten greatness (as out of Samson's lion) 
 there may be honey gathered for the use of future times." 
 But Parliament was dissolved before the touching appeal 
 reached them ; and Bacon had to have recourse to other 
 expedients. He consulted Selden about the technical 
 legality of the sentence. He appealed to Buckingham, 
 who vouchsafed to appear more placable. Once more he 
 had recourse to Gondomar, "in that solitude of friends, 
 which is the base-court of adversity," as a man whom he 
 had " observed to have the magnanimity of his oAvn 
 nation, and the cordiality of ours, and I am sure, the 
 Avit of both," — and who had been equally kind to him 
 in " both his fortunes " ; and he proposed through Gon- 
 domar to present Gorhambury to Buckingham " for 
 nothing," as a peace-offering. But the purchase of his 
 liberty was to come in another way. Bacon had 
 reconciled himself to giving up York House ; but 
 now Buckingham would not have it : he had found 
 another house, he said, which suited him as well. That 
 
IGO r.ACOX. [ciiAi'. 
 
 is to say, he did not now choose to have York House 
 from Bacon himself; but he meant to have it. Accord- 
 ingly, Buckingham let Bacon know through a friend of 
 Bacon's, Sir Edward Sackville, that the price of his liberty 
 to live in London was the cession of York House — not 
 to Buckingham, but of all men in the world, to Lionel 
 Cranfield, the man who had been so bitter against Bacon 
 in the House of Commons. This is Sir Edward Sack- 
 ville's account to Bacon of his talk with Buckingham : 
 it is characteristic of every one concerned : — 
 
 "In the forenoon he laid the law, but in the afternoon lie 
 preached the gospel ; when, after some revivations of the old dis- 
 taste concerning York House, he most nobly opened his heart unto 
 me ; wherein I read that which augured much good towards you. 
 After which revelation the book was again sealed up, and must in 
 his own time only by himself be again manifested unto you. I 
 have leave to remember some of the vision, and am not forbidden 
 to AVTite it. He vowed (not court like), but constantly to appear 
 your friend so much, as if his Majesty should abandon the care of 
 you, you should share his fortune with him. He pleased to tell me 
 how much he had been beholden to you, how well he loved you, 
 how unkindly he took the denial of your house (for so he Mill needs 
 understand it) ; but the close for all this was harmonious, since he 
 protested he would seriously begin to study your ends, now that 
 the world should see he had no ends on you. He is in hand with 
 the work, and therefore will by no means accept of your offer, 
 though I can assure you the tender hath much won upon him, and 
 mellowed his heart towards you, and your genius directed you 
 aright when you writ that letter of denial to the Duke. The King 
 saw it, and all the rest, which made him say unto the Marquis, you 
 played an after-game well ; and tliat now he had no reason to be 
 much oft'ended. 
 
 " I have already talked of the Revelation, and now am to speak 
 in apocalyptical language, which I hope you will rightly comment : 
 whereof if you make difficulty, the bearer can help you with the 
 key of the cypher. 
 
 ' ' My Lord Falkland by this time hath sliowed you London from 
 
VII.] BACON'S LAST YEARS— 1621-1626. 161 
 
 Highgate. If York House imrc gone, the town v:erc yours, and all 
 your sti-aitest shackles clean off, besides more comfort than the city- 
 air only. The Marquis would be exceeding glad the Treasurer had 
 it. This I know ; j'et this you must not know from me. Bargain 
 with him presently, upon as good conditions as you can procure, so 
 you have direct motion from the JIarquis to let him have it. Seem 
 not to dive into the secret of it, though you are purblind if you see 
 not through it. I have told :\Ir. Meautys how I would wish your 
 Lordship now to make an end of it. From him I beseech you take 
 it, and from me only the advice to perform it. If you part not 
 speedily A\-ith it, you may defer the good which is approaching near 
 you, and disappointing other aims (which must either shortly 
 receive content or never), perhaps anew yield matter of discontent, 
 though you maybe indeed as innocent as before. Make the Treasurer 
 believe that since the Marquis will by no means accept of it, and 
 that you must part -vdih. it, you are more willing to pleasure him than 
 anybody else, because you are given to understand my Lord Marquis 
 so inclines ; which inclination, if the Treasurer shortly send unto 
 j'ou about it, desire maj' be more clearly manifested than as yet it 
 hath been ; since as I remember none hitherto hath told you in 
 terminis tcrminantibus that the Marquis desires you should gi-atify 
 the Treasurer. I know that way the hare runs, and that my Lord 
 Marquis longs until Cranfield hath it ; and so I -n-ish too, for your 
 good; J'et would not it were absolutely passed until my Lord 
 Marquis did send or write unto you to let him have it ; for then his 
 so disposing of it were but the next degree removed from the im- 
 mediate acceptance of it, and your Lordship freed from doing it 
 otherwise than to please him, and to comply with his own will and 
 way." 
 
 It need hardly he said that when Cranfield got it, it 
 soon passed into Buckingham's hands. " Bacon con- 
 sented to part with his house, and Buckingham in return 
 consented to give him his liberty." Yet Bacon could wnxtQ 
 to him, " low as I am, I had rather sojom-n in a college 
 in Cambridge than recover a good fortune by any other 
 but yourself." "As for York House," he bids Toby 
 Matthews to let Buckingham kuow, " that uhether in a 
 
 M 
 
162 T5AC0X. [chap. 
 
 straight line or a compass line, I meant it for liis Lordship, 
 in the way which I thought might please him best." 
 But liberty did not mean cither money or recovered 
 honour. All his life long he had made light of being in 
 debt ; but since his fall this was no longer a condition 
 easy to bear. He had to beg some kind of pension of 
 the King. He had to beg of Buckingham ; " a small 
 matter for my debts would do me more good now than 
 double a twelvemonth hence. I have lost six thousand 
 by the year, besides caps and courtesies. Two things I 
 may assure your Lordship. The one, that I shall lead 
 such a course of life as whatsoever the King doth for 
 me shall rather sort to his Majesty's and your Lordship's 
 honour than to envy : the other, that whatsoever men 
 talk, I can play the good husband, and the King's bounty 
 shall not be lost." 
 
 It might be supposed from the tone of these applica- 
 tions that Bacon's mind was bowed do^vn and crushed by 
 the extremity of his misfortune. Nothing could be 
 farther from the truth. In his behaviour during his 
 accusation there was little trace of that high spirit and 
 fortitude shown by far inferior men under like disasters. 
 But the moment the tremendous strain of his misfortunes 
 Avas taken off, the vigour of his mind recovered itself. The 
 buoyancy of his hopefulness, the elasticity of his energy, 
 are as remarkable as his profound depression. AVhen 
 the end was approaching his thoughts turned at once to 
 other work to be done, ready in plan, ready to be taken 
 up and finished. At the close of his last desperate letter 
 to the King he cannot resist finishing at once with a 
 jest, and with the prospect of two great literary under- 
 takings — 
 
yii.] r.ACOX'S LAST YEARS— 16-21 -]C26. 163 
 
 " This is my last suit which I shall make to }-our Majesty in this 
 business, prostrating myself at yoiu- mercy seat, after fifteen years 
 service, wherein I have served your Majesty in my poor endeavours 
 Avith an entire heart, and, as I presumed to say unto your Majesty, 
 am still a virgin for matters that concern your person and crown ; 
 and now only craving that after eight steps of honour I be not pre- 
 cipitated altogether. But because he that hath taken bribes is apt 
 to give bribes, I will go furder, and present your ilajesty with a 
 bribe. For if your Majesty \vill give me peace and leisure, and God 
 give me life, I will present your Majesty with a good history of 
 England, and a better digest of your laws." 
 
 The To-\ver did, indeed, to use a word of the time, 
 "mate" him. But the moment he was out of it, his 
 quick and fertile mind was immediately at Avork in all 
 directions, reaching after all kinds of plans, making 
 proof of all kinds of expedients to retrieve the past, 
 arranging all kinds of Avork according as events might 
 point out the way. His projects for history, for law, 
 for philosophy, for letters, occupy quite as much of his 
 thoughts, as his pardon and his debts ; and they, we have 
 seen, occupied a good deal. If he was pusillanimous in 
 the moment of the storm, his spirit, his force, his 
 varied interests, returned the moment the storm was 
 past. His self-reliance, which was boundless, revived. 
 He never allowed himself to think, however men of 
 his own time might judge him, that the future world 
 would mistake him. "Aliquis fid inter vivos," he writes 
 to Gondomar, "neque omnino intermm-iar apud ^osteros" 
 Even in his time he did not give up the hope of being 
 restored to honour and power. He compared himself to 
 Demosthenes, to Cicero, to Seneca, to Marcus Livius, 
 who had been condemned for corrupt dealings as he 
 had Ijeen, and had all recovered favour and position. 
 Lookers-on were puzzled and shocked. "He has," 
 
164 BACON. [iiiAP. 
 
 writes Chamberlain, " no manner of feeling of his fall, 
 but continuing vain and idle in all his humours as when 
 he was at the highest." "I am said," Bacon himself 
 writes, "to have a feather in my head." 
 
 Men were mistaken. His thoughts were, for the 
 moment, more than ever turned to the future ; but he 
 had not given up hope of having a good deal to say yet 
 to the affairs of the present. Strangely enough, as it 
 seems to us, in the very summer after that fatal spring 
 of 1621 the King called for his opinion concerning the 
 reformation of Courts of Justice ; and Bacon, just sen- 
 tenced for corruption and still unpardoned, proceeds 
 to give his advice as if he were a Privy Counsellor 
 in confidential emplojTnent. Early in the following 
 year he, according to his fashion, surveyed his position, 
 and drew up a paper of memoranda, like the notes of 
 the Commenfarius Sohfus of 1608, about points to be 
 urged to the King at an interview. AVhy should not 
 the King employ him again 1 " Your Majesty never chid 
 me;" and as to his condemnation, "as the fault was 
 not against your Majesty, so my fall Avas not your act." 
 "Therefore," he goes on, "if your Majesty do at any 
 time find it fit for your affairs to employ me publicly 
 upon the stage, I shall so live and spend my time as 
 neither discontinuance shall disable me nor adversity 
 shall discourage me, nor anything that I do give any 
 new scandal or envy upon me." He insists very strongly 
 that the King's service never miscarried in his hands, 
 for he simply carried out the King's wise counsels. 
 " That his Majesty's business never miscarried in my 
 hands I do not impute to any extraordinary ability in 
 myself, but to my freedom from any particular, either 
 
VII.] BACOX'S LAST YEARS— 1621-1626. 165 
 
 friends or ends, and my careful receipt of his directions, 
 being, as I have formerly said to him, but as a bucket 
 and cistern to that foimtain — a bucket to draw forth, 
 a cistern to preserve." He is not afraid of the apparent 
 slight to the censure passed on him by Parliament. 
 " For envy, it is an almanack of the old year, and as a 
 friend of mine said, Parliament died penitent tmvards me." 
 "What the King bestows on me -svill be further seen 
 than on Paul's steeple." "There be mountebanks, as 
 well in the ciAol body, as in the natural ; I ever served 
 his Majesty vnih modesty ; no shouting, no undertak- 
 ing." In the odd fashion of the time, a fashion in which 
 no one more delighted than himself, he lays hold of 
 sacred words to give point to his argument. 
 
 " I may allude to the three petitions of the Litany — Libera 7ios 
 Domini; parce nobis, Domine ; exaiuli nos, Domine. In the first, 
 I am persuaded that his Majesty had a mind to do it, and could not 
 conveniently in respect of his afT.urs. In the second, he hath done 
 it in my fine and pardon. In the third, he hath likewise per- 
 formed, in restoring to the light of his countenance." 
 
 But if the King did not see fit to restore him to public 
 emplojonent, he would be ready to give private counsel ; 
 and he would apply himself to any " literary province " 
 that the King appointed. " I am like ground fresh. If I 
 be left to myself I will graze and bear natui'al philo- 
 sophy ; but if the King will plough me up again, and sow 
 me with anything, I hope to give him some yield." 
 " Your Majesty hath power ; I have faith. Therefore 
 a miracle may be wrought." And he proposes, for 
 matters in which his pen might be useful, first, as 
 " active " works, the recompiling of laws ; the disposing 
 of wards, and generally the education of youth ; the 
 
Iti6 BACON. [(HAP. 
 
 regulation of the jurisdiction of Courts ; and the regula- 
 tion of Trade : and for " contemplative," the continuation 
 of the history of Henry VIII. ; a general treatise de 
 Lerjibus ct Justitia ; and the "Holy AVar," against the 
 Ottomans. 
 
 When he wrote this he had already sho^vn what his 
 unquelled energy could accomj^lish. In the summer 
 and autumn after his condemnation, amid all the worries 
 and inconveniences of that time, moving about from 
 place to place, without his books, and without free access 
 to papers and records, he had written his History of 
 Henry VII. The theme had, no doubt, been long in 
 his head. But the book was the first attempt at philo- 
 sophical history in the language, and it at once takes 
 rank with all that the world had yet seen, in classical 
 times and more recently in Italy, of such history. He 
 sent the book, among other persons, to the Queen of 
 Bohemia, ^vith a phrase, the translation of a trite Latin 
 commonplace, which may have been the parent of one 
 Avhich became famous in our time ; and with an expres- 
 sion of absolute confidence in the goodness of his own 
 work. 
 
 ' ' I have read in books that it is accounted a great bliss for a 
 man to have Leisure with Honour. That was never my fortune. 
 For time was, I had Honour without Leisure ; and now I have 
 Leisure ivithout Honour. . . . But my desire is now to have iewjwc 
 without Loitering, and not to become an abbey-hibber, as the okl 
 proverb was, but to yield some fruit of my private life. ... If 
 King Henry were alive again, I hope verily he would not be so 
 angi-y with me for not flattering him, as well pleased in seeing 
 himself so truly described in colours that will last and be be- 
 lieved." 
 
 But the tide had turned against him for good. A few 
 
VII.] BACON'S LAST YEARS— 1621-1626. 167 
 
 fair Avords, a few grudging doles of mone)' to relieve his 
 pressing wants, and those sometimes intercepted and 
 perhaps never rightly granted from an Exchequer which 
 even Cranfield's finance could not keep filled, were all the 
 graces that descended upon him from those foimtains of 
 goodness in which he professed to trust with such bound- 
 less faith. The King did not Avant him, perhaps did not 
 trust him, perhaps did not really like him. When the 
 Kovum Organum came out all that he had to say about it 
 was in the shape of a profane jest that "it was like 
 the peace of God — it passed all understanding." Other 
 men had the ear of Buckingham ; shrewd practical men 
 of business like Cranfield, who hated Bacon's loose and 
 careless ways, or the clever ecclesiastic AVilliams, whose 
 counsel had steered Buckingham safely through the tem- 
 pest that wrecked Bacon, and who, with no legal training, 
 had been placed in Bacon's seat. "I thought," said 
 Bacon, "that I should have known my successor." AVil- 
 liams, for his part, charged Bacon with trying to cheat 
 his creditors, when his fine was remitted. With no open 
 c|uarrel, Bacon's relations to Buckingham became more 
 ceremonious and guarded ; the " My singular good Lord" 
 of the former letters becomes, now that Buckingham had 
 risen so high and Bacon had sunk so low, " Excellent 
 Lord." The one friend to whom Bacon had once wished 
 to owe everything, had become the great man, now only 
 to be approached with " sweet meats " and elaborate 
 courtesy. But it was no use. His full pardon Bacon did 
 not get, though earnestly suing for it, that he might not 
 "die in ignominy." He never sat again in Parliament. 
 The Provostship of Eton fell vacant, and Bacon's hopes 
 were kindled. " It were a pretty cell for my fortune. 
 
168 ^ BACON. [chap. 
 
 The College and School I do not donbt but I shall make 
 to flourish."' But Buckingham had promised it to some 
 nameless follower, and by some process of exchange it 
 went to Sir Henry "Wotton. His English history was 
 offered in vain. His digest of the Laws was oftered in 
 vain. In vain he vrrote a memorandum on the regulation 
 of usury ; notes of advice to Buckingham ; elaborate 
 reports and notes of speeches about a war Avith Spain, 
 Avhen that for a while loomed before the countrj'. In 
 vain he affected an interest which he coidd hardly haA'e 
 felt in the Spanish marriage, and the escapade of Buck- 
 ingham and Prince Charles, Avhich "began," he wrote, 
 "like a fable of the poets, but deserved all in a piece a 
 worthy narration." In vain, when the Spanish marriage 
 was off and the French was on, he proposed to offer to 
 Buckingham " his service to live a summer as upon mine 
 own delight at Paris, to settle a fast intelligence between 
 France and us ; " "I have somewhat of the French," he 
 said, " I love birds, as the King doth." Public patronage 
 and public employment were at an end for him. His 
 petitions to the King and Buckingham ceased to be for 
 office, but for the clearing of his name, and for the means 
 of living. It is piteous to read the earnestness of his 
 requests. " Help me (dear Sovereign lord and master), 
 pity me so far as that I who have borne a liag be not 
 now in my age forced in effect to bear a wallet." The 
 words are from a carefully-prepared and rhetorical letter 
 which was not sent, but they express what he added to 
 a letter presenting the De Aiigmentis; ^'det Vcstra Majestas 
 obohuii Belisario." Again, " I prostrate myself at your Ma- 
 jesty's feet ; I your ancient servant, now sixty -four years 
 old in age, and three years and five months old in miser}'. 
 
VII.] BACON'S LAST YEARS— 1621-1626. 169 
 
 I desire not from your Majesty means, nor place, nor 
 employment, but only after so long a time of expiation, 
 a complete and total remission of the sentence of the 
 Upper House, to the end that blot of ignominy may be 
 removed from me and from my memory and posterity, 
 that I die not a condemned man, but may be to your 
 Majesty, as I am to God, nova creaiura." But the pardon 
 never came. Sir John Bennett, who had been condemned 
 as a corrupt judge by the same ParHament, and betAveen 
 whose case and Bacon's there was as much difference, 
 " I -w-ill not say as between black and white, but as be- 
 tween black and grey," had got his full pardon, " and 
 they say shall sit in ParHament." Lord Suffolk had been 
 one of Bacon's judges. " I hope I deserve not to be the 
 only outcast." But whether the Court did not care, or 
 Avhether, as he once suspected, there was some old enemy 
 like Coke, who "had a tooth against him," and Avas 
 watching any favour shoAATi him, he died Anthout his 
 ■ndsh being fulfilled, " to live out of want and to die out 
 of ignominy." 
 
 Bacon Avas undoubtedly an impoverished man, and 
 straitened in his means ; but this must be understood as 
 in relation to the rank and position which he still held, 
 and the work which he wanted done for the Insfaurafio. 
 His will, dated a few months before his death, shows 
 that it would be a mistake to suppose that he Avas in 
 penury. He no doubt often Avanted ready money, and 
 might be A^exed by creditors. But he kept a large 
 household, and Avas able to live in comfort at Gray's 
 Inn or at Gorhambury. A man Avho speaks in his Avill 
 of his "four coach geldings and his best caroache," 
 besides many legacies, and Avho proposes to found two 
 
170 BACOX. [chap. 
 
 lectures at the universities, ma}' have troubles about 
 debts and be cramped in his expenditure ; but it is only 
 relatively to his station that he can be said to be poor. 
 And to subordinate officers of the Treasury who kept 
 him out of his rights, he could still write a sharp letter, 
 full of his old force and edge. A few months before his 
 death he thus wrote to the Lord Treasurer Ley, who 
 probably had made some difficulty about a claim for 
 money : — 
 
 " My Lord — I humbly entreat j-our Lordship, and (if I may use 
 the ^Tord) advise your Lordship to make me a better answer. Your 
 Lordship is interessed in honour, in the opinion of all that hear how 
 I am dealt with. If your Lordship malice me for Long's cause, 
 surely it was one of the justest businesses that ever was in Chancery. 
 I will avouch it ; and how deeply I was tempted therein, your 
 Lordship knoweth best. Your Lordship may do well to think of 
 your grave as I do of mine ; and to beware of hardness of heart. 
 And as for fair words, it is a ■«'ind by which neither your Lordship 
 nor any man else can sail long. Howsoever, I am the man that 
 shall give all due respects and reverence to your great place. 
 
 " 20th June 1625. Fr. St. Alban." 
 
 Bacon always claimed that he was not "vindicative." 
 But considering how Bishop Williams, when he was 
 Lord Keeper, had charged Bacon -vnth "knavery" and 
 " deceiving his creditors " in the arrangements about his 
 fine, it is not a little strange to find that at the end of 
 his life Bacon had so completely made friends with him 
 that he chose him as the person to whom he meant to 
 leave his speeches and letters, which he was "willing 
 should not be lost," and also the charge of superintending 
 two foundations of £200 a year for Natural Science at 
 the universities. And the Bishop accepted the charge. 
 
 The end of this, one of the most pathetic of histories, 
 
VII. 1 BACON'S LAST YEAKS— 16-21-1626. 171 
 
 was at hand ; the end was not the less pathetic because it 
 came in so homely a fashion. On a cold day in ]\rarch, 
 he stopped his coach in the snow on his way to Highgate, 
 to try the effect of cold in arresting putrefaction. He 
 bought a hen from a woman by the way, and stuffed it 
 with snow. He Avas taken with a bad chill, which forced 
 him to stop at a strange house. Lord Arundel's, to whom 
 he wrote his last letter, a letter of apology for using 
 his house. He did not vrrite the letter as a dying 
 man. But disease had fastened on him. A few days 
 after, early on Easter morning, April 9th, 1626, he passed 
 away. He was buried at St. Albans, in the Church of 
 St. Michael, "the only Christian church Avithin the walls 
 of old Verulam." "For my name and memory," he 
 said in his will, " I leave it to men's charitable speeches, 
 and to foreign nations, and the next ages." So he 
 died : the brightest, richest, largest mind but one, in the 
 age which had seen Shakespeare and his fellows ; so 
 bright and rich and large that there have been found 
 those who identify him with the writer of Hamlet and 
 Othello. That is idle. Bacon could no more have AATitten 
 the plays than Shakespeare could have prophesied the 
 triumphs of natural philosophy. So ended a career, than 
 which no other in his time had grander and nobler aims, 
 aims, hoAvever mistaken, for the greatness and good of 
 England, aims for the enlargement of knowledge and 
 truth, and for the benefit of mankind. So ended a career 
 which had mounted slowly and painfully, but resolutely, 
 to the highest pinnacle of greatness, greatness full of 
 honour and beneficent activity, suddenly to plunge down 
 to depths where honour and hope were irrecoverable. So 
 closed, in disgrace and disappointment and neglect, the 
 
172 BACON. [CHAP. 
 
 last sail chapter of a life ^vhich had begun so brightly, 
 Avhich had achieved such permanent triumphs, which had 
 lost itself so often in the tangles of insincerity and evil 
 custom, Avhich was disfigured and marred by great mis- 
 fortimes and still more by great mistakes of his ovm, 
 Avhich -svas in many ways misunderstood not only by his 
 generation but by himself, but which he left in the con- 
 stant and almost unaccountable faith that it would be 
 understood and greatly honoured by posterity. With 
 all its glories, it was the greatest shipwreck, the greatest 
 tragedy, of an age which saw many. 
 
 But in these gloomy and dreary days of depression 
 and vain hope to which his letters bear Avitness — " three 
 years and five months old in misery," again later, "a 
 long cleansing week of five years' expiation and more" — 
 his interest in his great undertaking and his industry 
 never flagged. The King did not want what he offered, 
 did not want his histories, did not Avant his help about 
 law. Well, then, he had Avork of his OAvn on Avhich his 
 heart Avas set ; and if the King did not Avant his time, 
 he had the more for himself. Even in the busy daj's of 
 his Chancellorship he had prepared and carried through 
 the press the Nonnn Organum, A\'hich he published on the 
 very eve of his fall. It Avas one of those Avorks Avhich 
 quicken a man's poAvers, and prove to him Avhat he can 
 do ; and it had its effect. His mind AA\as never more alert 
 than in these years of adversity, his labour never more 
 indefatigable, his poAvers of expression never more keen 
 and versatile and strong. Besides the political Avritings 
 of grave argument for Avhich he found time, these fiAe 
 years teem Avith the results of work. In the year before 
 his death he sketched out once more, in a letter to a 
 
VII.] BACON'S LAST YEARS— 1621-1626. 173 
 
 Venetian correspondent, Fra Fulgenzio, the friend of 
 Sarpi, the plan of his great work, on which he was still 
 hus}', though with fast diminishing hopes of seeing it 
 finished. To another foreign correspondent, a professor 
 of philosophy at Annecy, and a distinguished mathemati- 
 cian. Father Baranzan, who had raised some questions 
 about Bacon's method, and had asked what was to be 
 done Anth metaphysics, he wrote in eager acknowledg- 
 ment of the interest which his AATitings had excited, and 
 insisting on the paramount necessity, above everything, of 
 the observation of facts and of natural history, out of 
 which philosophy may be built. But the most comprehen- 
 sive view of his intellectual projects in all directions, " the 
 fullest account of his ovm personal feelings and designs 
 as a writer which we have from his own pen," is given 
 in a letter to the venerable friend of his early days, 
 Bishop Andrewes, who died a few months after him. 
 Part, he says, of his Tnsfaurafio, " the Avork in mine own 
 judgement (si nunquam fallit imago) I do most esteem," 
 has been published: but because he "doubts that it 
 Hies too high over men's heads," he proposes " to draw it 
 down to the sense" by examples of Natural History. 
 He has enlarged and translated the Advancement into 
 the De Augmenfis. "Because he could not altogether 
 desert the civil person that he had borne," he had begun 
 a Avork on Laws, intermediate between philosophical 
 jurisprudence and technical law. He had hoped to com- 
 pile a digest of Enghsh laAv, but found it more than he 
 could do alone, and had laid it aside. The Instauratio 
 had contemplated the good of men "in the dowries of 
 nature:" the Lavs, their good "in society and the 
 dowries of government." As he owed duty to his 
 
174 BACOX. [chap. 
 
 country, and conld no longer do it semce, he meant to 
 do it honour by his history of Henry YII. His Essa>/s 
 were but " recreations ; " and remembering that all his 
 writings had hitherto " gone all into the Cit}" and none 
 into the Temple," he wished to make " some poor 
 oblation," and therefore had chosen an argument mixed 
 of religious and civil considerations, the dialogue of 
 " an Holy War " against the Ottoman, which he never 
 finished, but which he intended to dedicate to Andrewes, 
 " in respect of our ancient and private acquaintance, and 
 because amongst the men of our times I hold you in 
 special reverence." 
 
 The question naturally presents itself, in regard to a 
 friend of Bishop Andrewes, what was Bacon as regards 
 religion 1 And the answer, it seems to me, can admit of 
 no doubt. The obvious and superficial thing to say is 
 that his religion was but an official one, a tribute to cus- 
 tom and opinion. But it was not so. Both in his philo- 
 sophical thinking, and in the feelings of his mind in the 
 various accidents and occasions of life. Bacon was a 
 religious man, with a serious and genuine religion. His 
 sense of the truth and greatness of religion was as real 
 as his sense of the truth and greatness of nature ; they 
 were interlaced together, and could not be separated, 
 though they were to be studied separately and inde- 
 pendently. The call, repeated through all his works 
 from the earliest to the last, Da Fidel quce Fidei sunt, 
 was a warning against confusing the two, but was an 
 earnest recognition of the claims of each. The solemn 
 religious words in which his prefaces and general state- 
 ments often wind up with thanksgiving and hope and 
 prayer, are no mere words of course ; they breathe the 
 
VII.] BACON'S LAST YEARS— 1621-1626. 175 
 
 spirit of the deepest conviction. It is true that he takes 
 the rehgion of Christendom as he finds it. The grounds 
 of belief, the relation of faith to reason, the pi'ofounder 
 inquiries into the basis of man's knowledge of the 
 Eternal and Invisible, are out of the circle within Avhich 
 he works. What we now call the philosophy of religion 
 is absent from his writings. In truth, his mind was not 
 qualified to grapple with such questions. There is no 
 sign in his writings that he ever tried his strength 
 against them ; that he ever cared to go below the surface 
 into the hidden things of mind and what mind deals 
 with above and beyond sense — those metaphysical diffi- 
 cidties and depths, as we call them, which there is no 
 escaping, and which are as hard to explore and as dan- 
 gerous to mistake as the forces and combinations of 
 external nature. But it does not follow, because he had 
 not asked all the questions that others have asked, that 
 he had not thought out his reasonable faith. His reli- 
 gion was not one of mere vague sentiment ; it Avas the 
 result of reflection and deliberate judgment. It was 
 the discriminating and intelligent Church of England 
 religion of Hooker and Andrewes, which had gone back 
 to something deeper and nobler in Christianity than 
 the popular Calvinism of the earlier Reformation ; and 
 though sternly hostile to the system of the Papacy, both 
 on religious and political grounds, attempted to judge it 
 with knowledge and justice. This deliberate character 
 of his belief is shown in the remarkable Confession of 
 Faith which he left behind him : a closely-reasoned and 
 nobly-expressed survey of Christian theology — " a sum- 
 ma theologice, digested into seven pages of the iinest 
 English of the days when its tones were finest." " The 
 
176 BACON. [niAi-. vii. 
 
 entire scheme of Christian theology," as Mr. Spedding 
 says, "is constantly in his thoughts; underlies every- 
 thing ; defines for him the limits of human speculation ; 
 and, as often as the course of inquiry touches at any 
 point the boundary line, never fails to present itself. 
 There is hardly any occasion or any kind of argument 
 into which it does not at one time or another incidentally 
 introduce itself." Doubtless it was a religion Avhich in 
 him was compatible, as it has been in others, Avith 
 grave faults of temperament and character. But it is 
 impossible to doubt that it was honest, that it elevated 
 his thoughts, that it -was a refuge and stay in the times 
 of trouble. 
 
CHAPTER VIII. 
 
 bacon's philosophy. 
 
 Bacon was one of those men to whom posterity forgives 
 a great deal, for the greatness of what he has done and 
 attempted for posterity. It is idle, unless all honest 
 judgment is foregone, to disguise the many deplorable 
 shortcomings of his life ; it is unjust to have one measure 
 for him, and another for those about him and opposed 
 to him. But it is not too much to say that in temper, 
 in honesty, in labour, in humility, in reverence, he was 
 the most perfect example that the world had yet seen 
 of the student of nature, the enthusiast for kno"vvledge. 
 That such a man was tempted and fell, and suffered the 
 Nemesis of his fall, is an instance of the aM-ful truth 
 embodied in the tragedy of Faust. But his genuine 
 devotion, so unwearied and so paramount, to a great 
 idea and a great purpose for the good of all gene- 
 rations to come, must shield him from the insult of 
 Pope's famous and shallow epigram. "Whatever may 
 have been his sins, and they were many, he cannot have 
 been the "meanest of mankind," who lived and died, 
 holding unaltered, amid temptations and falls, so noble 
 a conception of the use and calling of his life : the duty 
 and service of helping his brethren to know as they had 
 
 N 
 
178 BACON. [ciiAi'. 
 
 never yet learned to know. That tliought never left 
 him ; the ol)]igations it imposed were never forgotten in 
 the crush and heat of business ; the toils, thankless at 
 the time, which it heaped upon him in addition to the 
 hurdens of public life, Avere never refused. Nothing 
 diverted him, nothing made him despair. He was not 
 discouraged because he was not imderstood. There 
 never was any one in whose life the '^SouveraineM du but" 
 was more certain and more apparent ; and that object 
 was the second greatest that man can have. To teach 
 men to know is only next to making them good. 
 
 The Baconian philosophy, the reforms of the jVovum 
 Orgamnn, the method of experiment and induction, are 
 commonplaces, and sometimes lead to a misconception of 
 what Bacon did. Bacon is, and is not, the founder of 
 modern science. What Bacon believed could be done, 
 what he hoped and divined, for the correction and 
 development of human knowledge, was one thing ; what 
 his methods were, and how far they were successful is 
 another. It would hardly be untrue to say that though 
 Bacon is the parent of modern science, his methods con- 
 tributed nothing to its actual discoveries ; neither hy 
 possibility could they have done so. The great and 
 wonderful work which the world owes to him was in 
 the idea, and not in the execution. The idea was that 
 the systematic and wide examination of facts was the 
 first thing to be done in science, and that till this had 
 been done faithfully and impartially, Anth all the appli- 
 ances and all the safeguards that experience and fore- 
 thought could suggest, all generalisations, all anticipa- 
 tions from mere reasoning, must be adjourned and 
 postponed ; and further, that sought on these conditions, 
 
VIII.] BACON'S PHILOSOPHY. 179 
 
 knowledge, certain and fruitful, beyond all that men 
 then imagined, could be attained. His was the faith of 
 the discoverer, the imagination of the poet, the voice of 
 the prophet. But his was not the warrior's arm, the 
 engineer's skill, the architect's crcativeness. "I only 
 soimd the clarion," he says, " but I enter not into the 
 battle ; " and, mth a Greek quotation very rare Avith 
 him, he compares himself to one of Homer's peaceful 
 heralds, ;^at'peTe K7//3VKes, Acos ayyeAot tjSe Kal dvSpwy. 
 Even he knew not the full greatness of his own enter- 
 prise. He underrated the vastness and the subtlety of 
 nature. He overrated his own appliances to bring it 
 under his command. He had not that incommunicable 
 genius and instinct of the investigator which in such 
 men as Faraday close hand to hand with phenomena. 
 His weapons and instruments wanted precision ; they 
 were powerful up to a certain point, but they had the 
 clumsiness of an impractised time. Cowley compared 
 him to Moses on Pisgah surveying the promised land ; 
 it was but a distant survey, and Newton was the 
 Joshua who began to take possession of it. 
 
 The idea of the great enterprise, in its essential 
 outline, and with a full sense of its originality and 
 importance, was early formed, and was even sketched 
 on paper with Bacon's characteristic self-reliance when 
 he was but twenty - five. Looking back, in a letter 
 written in the last year of his life, on the ardour and 
 constancy Avith which he had clung to his faith — " in 
 that purpose my mind never waxed old, in that long 
 interval of time it never cooled " — he remarks that it 
 was then "forty years since he put together a youthful 
 essay on these matters, which with vast confidence I 
 
180 BACON. f<HAP. 
 
 called by the high-sounding title, Tiie Greatest Birth of 
 Time." The "Greatest Birth of Time," whatever it was, 
 has perished, though the name, altered to " Partus Tem- 
 poris Mascuhis" has survived, attached to some frag- 
 ments of uncertain date and arrangement. But in very 
 truth the child was born, and, as Bacon says, for forty 
 years grew and developed, with many changes yet the 
 same. Bacon was most tenacious, not only of ideas, but 
 even of the phrases, images, and turns of speech in 
 which they had once flashed on him and taken shape in 
 his mind. The features of his undertaking remained 
 the same from first to last, only expanded and enlarged 
 as time went on and experience Avidened ; his conviction 
 that the knowledge of nature, and with it the power 
 to command and to employ nature, were within the 
 capacity of mankind and might be restored to them ; the 
 certainty that of this knowledge men had as yet acquired 
 but the most insignificant part, and that all existing 
 claims to philosophical truth Avere as idle and precarious 
 as the guesses and traditions of the vulgar; his belief 
 that no greater object could be aimed at than to sweep 
 away once and for ever all this sham knowledge and all 
 that supported it, and to lay an entirely new and clear 
 foundation to build on for the future ; his assurance that, 
 as it was easy to point out A\nth fatal and luminous 
 certainty the rottenness and hollowness of all existing 
 knowledge and philosophy, so it was equally easy to 
 devise and practically apply new and natural methods 
 of investigation and construction, Avhich should replace 
 it by knowledge of infallible ti'uth and boundless fruit- 
 fulness. His object, — to gain the key to the interpre- 
 tation of nature ; his method, — to gain it, not by the 
 
viii.] BACON'S PHILOSOPHY. 181 
 
 means common to all previous schools of philosophy, by 
 untested reasonings and imposing and high-sounding 
 generalisations, but hy a series and scale of rigorously 
 verified inductions, starting from the lowest facts of ex- 
 perience to discoveries which should prove and realise 
 themselves by leading deductively to practical results 
 — these, in one form or another, were the theme of his 
 philosophical writings from the earliest sight of them 
 that we gain. 
 
 He had disclosed what was in his mind in the letter 
 to Lord Burghley, written when he was thirty -one 
 (15|^), in which he announced that he had "taken all 
 knowledge for his province," to "purge it of 'frivolous 
 disputations' and 'blind experiments,' and that what- 
 ever happened to him, he meant to be a 'true pioner 
 in the mine of truth.'" But the first public step in the 
 opening of his great design was the publication in the 
 autumn of 1605 of the Advancement of Learning, a care- 
 ful and balanced report on the existing stock and de- 
 ficiences of human knowledge. His endeavours, as he 
 says in the Advancement itself, are " but as an image in 
 a cross-way, that may point out the way, but cannot go 
 it." But from this image of his purpose, his thoughts 
 greatly widened, as time went on. The Advancement, 
 in part at least, was probably a hurried work. It 
 shadowed out, but only shadoAved out, the lines of his 
 proposed reform of philosophical thought ; it showed 
 his dissatisfaction with much that was held to be sound 
 and complete, and showed the direction of his ideas and 
 hopes. But it was many years before he took a further 
 step. Active life intervened. In 1620, at the height 
 of his prosperity, on the eve of his fall, he published 
 
182 BACOlSr. [chap. 
 
 the long meditated Norum Organum, the avowed chal- 
 lenge to the old philosophies, the engine and instrument 
 of thought and discovery which was to put to shame 
 and supersede all others, containing, in part at least, the 
 principles of that new method of the use of exi)erience 
 which was to be the key to the interpretation and 
 command of nature, and, together with the method, an 
 elaborate but incomplete exemplification of its leading 
 processes. Here Avere summed up, and stated with the 
 most solemn earnestness, the conclusions to which long 
 study and continual familiarity with the matters in 
 question had led him. And vnih. the Novum Organum 
 was at length disclosed, though only in outline, the 
 whole of the vast scheme in all its parts, object, method, 
 materials, results, for the " Instauration " of human 
 knowledge, the restoration of powers lost, disused, neg- 
 lected, latent, but recoverable by honesty, patience, 
 courage, and industry. 
 
 The Instauratio, as he planned the work, "is to be divided," 
 says Mr. Ellis, ' ' into six portions, of which the first is to contain 
 a general survey of the present state of knowledge. In the second, 
 men are to be taught how to use their understanding aright in the 
 investigation of nature. In the third, all the phenomena of the 
 universe are to be stored up as in a treasure-house, as the materials 
 on which the new method is to be employed. In the fourth, ex- 
 amples are to be given of its operation and of the results to which 
 it leads. The fifth is to contain what Bacon had accomplished in 
 natural philosophy without the aid of his own method ; ex eodcm 
 intelledHs iisu quern alii in inquirendo et inveniendo adhibcre cmi- 
 sueverunt. It is therefore less important than the rest, and Bacon 
 declares that he will not bind himself to the conclusions which it 
 contains. Moreover, its value will altogether cease when the sio'th 
 part can be completed, wherein will be set forth the new philosophy 
 — the results of the application of the new method to all the 
 
VIII.] BACON'S PHILOSOPHY. 183 
 
 plieuomeua of the universe. But to complete tliis, the last part of 
 the Iiisktiiratio, Bacon does not hope ; he speaks of it as a thing, 
 et supra I'^ires ct ultra spcs nostras collocata." — Works, i. 71. 
 
 The Xovum Organum, itself imperfect, was the crown 
 of all that he lived to do. It was followed (1622) by 
 the publication, intended to be periodical, of materials 
 for the new philosophy to work upon, particular sections 
 and classes of observations on phenomena — the History of 
 the Winds, the Histarij of Life and Death. Others were 
 partly pi*epai'ed but not published by him. And finally, 
 in 1623, he brought out in Latin a greatly enlarged 
 recasting of the Advancement ; the nine books of the 
 " De Augmentis." But the great scheme was not com- 
 pleted : portions were left more or less finished. Much 
 that he purposed was left undone, and could not have 
 been yet done at that time. 
 
 But the works which he published represent im- 
 perfectly the labour spent on the undertaking. Besides 
 these, there remains a vast amoimt of unused or rejected 
 work, which shows how it was thought out, rearranged, 
 tried first in one fashion and then in another, recast, 
 developed. Separate chapters, introductions, "experi- 
 mental essays and discarded beginnings," treatises with 
 picturesque and imaginative titles, succeeded one another 
 in that busy workshop; and these first draughts and 
 tentative essays have in them some of the freshest and 
 most felicitous forms of his thoughts. At one time his 
 enterprise, connecting itself with his o^vn life and mission, 
 rose before his imagination and kindled his feelings, and 
 embodied itself in tlie lofty and stately "Proem " already 
 quoted. His quick and brilliant imagination saw shadows 
 and figures of his ideas in the ancient mythology, which 
 
184 BACON. [rHAV. 
 
 he worked out with curious ingenuity and often m\icli 
 poetry, in his Jl'isdom of the Ancients. Towards the end 
 of his life he began to embody his thoughts and plans in 
 a philosophical tale, which he did not finish, the New 
 Atlantis, a charming example of his graceful fancy and of 
 his power of easy and natural story-telling. Between the 
 Advancement and the Noimm (h-gamna (1605-20) much 
 underground Avork had been done. " He had finally 
 (about 1607) settled the plan of the Grreat Instauration, 
 and began to call it by that name." The plan, first in 
 three or four divisions, had been finally digested into 
 six. Vague outlines had become definite and clear. 
 Distinct portions had been worked out. Various modes 
 of treatment had been tried, abandoned, modified. Pre- 
 faces were Avritten to give the sketch and purpose of 
 chapters not yet composed. The Novum Organum had 
 been written and rewritten twelve' times over. Bacon 
 kept his papers, and we can trace in the unused portion 
 of those left behind him much of the progress of his 
 work, and the shapes Avhich much of it went through. 
 The Aclvancement itself is the filling out and perfecting 
 of what is found in germ, meagre and rudimentary, in 
 a Discourse in Praise of Knon-ledge, written in the days 
 of Elizabeth, and in some Latin chapters of an early 
 date, the Cogitationes de Scientia Humana, on the 
 limits and use of knowledge, and on the relation of 
 natural history to natural philosophy. These early 
 essays, with much of the same characteristic illustration, 
 and many of the favourite images and maxims and texts 
 and phrases, which continue to appear in his writings 
 to the end, contain the thoughts of a man long accus- 
 tomed to meditate and to see his way on the new 
 
viii] BACON'S PHILOSOPHY. 185 
 
 aspects of knowledge, opening upon him. And before 
 the Advancement, he had ah-eady tried his hand on a 
 work intended to be in two books, which Mr. EUis 
 describes as a "great work on the Interpretation of 
 Natixre," the " earliest type of the Instauntfio," and 
 which Bacon called by the enigmatical name of Valerius 
 Terminus. In it, as in a second draft, which in its turn 
 was superseded by the Aclvancement, the line of thought 
 of the Latin Cogitationes reappears, expanded and more 
 carefully ordered ; it contains also the first sketch of his 
 certain and infallible method for Avhat he calls the 
 " freeing of the direction" in the search after Truth, and 
 the first indications of the four classes of " Idols " 
 which were to be so memorable a portion of Bacon's 
 teaching. And between the Adcancement and the Novum 
 Organum at least one unpublished treatise of great 
 interest intervened, the Visa et Cogitata, on which he 
 was long employed, and which he brought to a finished 
 shape, fit to be submitted to his friends and critics, Sir> 
 Thomas Bodley and Bishop Andrewes. It is spoken of 
 as a book to be " imparted sicut ridehifur," in the review 
 which he made of his life and oljjects soon after he was 
 made Solicitor in 1G08. A number of fragments also 
 bear witness to the fierce scorn and wrath which 
 possessed him against the older and the received philo- 
 sophies. He tried his hand at declamatory onslaughts 
 on the leaders of human wisdom from the early Greeks 
 and Aristotle down to the latest "novellists ;" and he 
 certainly succeeded in being magnificently abusive. 
 But he thought wisely that this was not the best way 
 c>f doing what in the Commentarius Solutus he calls on 
 himself to do — " taking a greater confidence and 
 
186 BACON. [chap. 
 
 authority in discourses of this nature, tai}qumn sui 
 certus et de alto desjnciens; " and the rhetorical Redargutio 
 Philosophiarum, and ^vl"itings of kindred nature were 
 laid aside by his more serious judgment. But all 
 these fragments witness to the immense and unwearied 
 labour bestowed in the midst of a busy life on his under- 
 taking ; they suggest, too, the suspicion that there was 
 much waste from interruption, and the doubt whether 
 his work would not have been better if it could have 
 been more steadily continuous. But if ever a man had 
 a great object in life and pursued it through good and 
 evil report, through ardent hope and keen disappoint- 
 ment, to the end, with unwearied patience and un- 
 shaken faith, it was Bacon, when he sought the 
 improvement of human knowledge "for the glory of 
 God and the relief of man's estate." It is not the least 
 part of the pathetic fortune of his life that his oavti 
 success was so imperfect. 
 
 When a reader first comes, from the vague popular 
 notions of Bacon's work, to his definite proposals, 
 the effect is startling. Every one has heard that he 
 contemplated a complete reform of the existing con- 
 ceptions of human knowledge, and of the methods by 
 which knowledge was to be sought ; that rejecting them 
 as vitiated by the loose and untested way in which they 
 had been formed, he called men from verbal generalisa- 
 tions and unproved assumptions to come down face to 
 face with the realities of experience ; that he substituted 
 for formal reasoning from baseless premisses and un- 
 meaning principles a methodical s}' stem of cautious and 
 sifting inference from wide observation and experiment ; 
 and that he thus opened the path which modern science 
 
VIII.] BACON'S PHILOSOPHY. 187 
 
 thenceforth followed, with its amazing and unexhausted 
 discoveries, and its vast and beneficent practical results. 
 We credit all this to Bacon, and assuredly not without 
 reason. All this is what was embraced in his vision of 
 a changed world of thought and achievement. All this 
 is what was meant by that Bcgnum Hominis, which, with 
 a play on sacred words which his age did not shrink 
 from, and which he especially pleased himself with, 
 marked the coming of that hitherto unimagined empire 
 of man over the powers and forces which encompassed 
 him. But the detail of all this is multifarious and com- 
 plicated, and is not always what we expect ; and when 
 Ave come to see how his work is estimated by those who, 
 by greatest familiarity Avith scientific ideas and the 
 liistory of scientific inquiries, are best fitted to judge of 
 it, many a surprise awaits us. 
 
 For we find that the greatest differences of opinion 
 exist on the value of what he did. Not only very 
 unfavourable judgments have been passed upon it, on 
 general gi'ounds, as an irreligious, or a shallow and 
 one-sided, or a poor and " utilitarian " philosophy, and 
 on a definite comparison of it with the actual methods 
 and processes Avhich as a matter of history haA'e been 
 the real means of scientific discovery — but also some 
 of those who have most admired his genius, and Avith 
 the deepest love and reverence have spared no pains 
 to do it full justice, have yet come to the conclusion 
 that jvs an instrument and real method of Avork Bacon's 
 attempt Avas a failure. It is not only De Maistre 
 and Lord Macaulay Avho dispute his philosophical emi- 
 nence. It is not only the depreciating opinion of a con- 
 temporary like Harvey, Avho Avas actually doing Avhat 
 
188 BACON. [chap. 
 
 Bacon was Avriting about. It is not only that men who 
 after the long history of modern science have won 
 their place among its leaders, and are familiar by daily 
 experience with the Avays in which it works — a chemist 
 like Liebig, a physiologist like Claude Bernard — say 
 that they can find nothing to help them in Bacon's 
 methods. It is not only that a clear and exact critic 
 like M. de Remusat looks at his attempt with its success 
 and failure as characteristic of English massive practical 
 good sense rather than as marked by real philosophical 
 depth and refinement, such as Continental thinkers point 
 to and are proud of in Descartes and Leil^nitz. It is 
 not even that a competent master of the Avhole domain 
 of knowledge, Whewell, filled Avith the deepest sense of 
 all that the Avorld owes to Bacon, takes for granted that 
 "though Bacon's general maxims are sagacious and 
 animating, his particular precepts failed in his hands, 
 and are noAV practically useless ;" and assuming that 
 Bacon's method is not the right one, and not complete 
 as far as the progress of science up to his time could 
 direct it, proceeds to construct a Noinim Organum 
 Renovatum. But Bacon's Avritings have recently under- 
 gone the closest examination by tAvo editors, whose care 
 for his memory is as loyal and affectionate as their 
 capacity is undoubted, and their Avillingness to take 
 trouble boundless. And Mr. Ellis and Mr. Spedding, 
 Avith all their interest in every detail of Bacon's work, 
 and admiration of the Ava}' in Avhich he performed it, 
 make no secret of their conclusion that he failed in the 
 very thing on Avhich he Avas most bent — the discovery of 
 practical and fruitful Avays of scientific inquiry. " Bacon," 
 says Mr. Spedding, " failed to devise a practicable method 
 
viii.] BACON'S PHILOSOPHY 189 
 
 for the discovery of the Forms of Nature because he 
 misconceived the conditions of the case. . . . For the 
 same reason he failed to make any single discovery 
 which holds its place as one of the steps by which 
 science has in any direction really advanced. The clue 
 \nth which he entered the labyrinth did not reach far 
 enough ; before he had nearly attained his end he was 
 obliged either to come back or to go on Avithout it." 
 
 "His peculiar system of philosophy," says Mr. Spedding in 
 another preface, "that is to say, the peculiar method of investiga- 
 tion, the " orgamim," the "formula" the " clavis," i)xe. " ars ipsa 
 interpretandi naturam," the "Jilum Labyrinthi," or by whatever of 
 its many names we choose to call that artificial process by which alone 
 he believed man could attain a knowledge of the laws and a com- 
 mand over the powers of nature — of this jMlosophy wc can make 
 nothing. If we have not tried it, it is because we feel confident 
 that it would not answer. We regard it as a curious piece of 
 machinerj', very subtle, elaborate, and ingenious, but not worth 
 constnacting, because all the work it could do may be done more 
 easily another way." — Works, ni. 171. 
 
 "What his method really was is itself a matter of ques- 
 tion. Mr. Ellis speaks of it as a matter " but imper- 
 fectly apprehended." He differs from his fellow-labourer 
 Mr. Spedding, in what he supposes to be its central and 
 characteristic innovation. Mr. Ellis finds it in an improve- 
 ment and perfection of logical machiner}-. Mr. Spedding 
 finds it in the formation of a great " natural and experi- 
 mental history," a vast collection of facts in every de- 
 partment of nature, which was to be a more important part 
 of his philosophy than the Novum Organuni itself. Both 
 of them think that as he went on the difficulties of the 
 work grew upon him, and caused alterations in his plans, 
 and we are reminded that "there is no didactic exposi- 
 
190 BACON. [ciiAi'. 
 
 tion of liis method in tlic Avholc of liis wiiliiigs," iind 
 that " this has not been sutlicicntly remarked l)y those 
 who have spoken of his philosophy." 
 
 In the first })lace, tlie kind of intellectual instrument 
 "which he proposed to construct was a mistake. His 
 great object was to place the human mind " on a level 
 with things and nature " {ut faridinus intdhdnia humannm 
 rebus et nalurce jMTcm), and this could only be done by a 
 revolution in methods. The ancients had all that genius 
 could do for man ; but it Avas a matter, he said, not of 
 the strength and fleetness of the running, but of the 
 Tightness of the way. It was a new method, abso- 
 lutely difierent from anything known, which he proposed 
 to the world, and which should lead men to knowledge, 
 with the certainty and with the impartial facility of a 
 high road. The Induction which he imagined to himself 
 as the contrast to all that had yet been tried was to have 
 two qualities. It was to end, by no very prolonged or 
 difficult processes, in absolute certainty. And next, it 
 was to leave very little to the differences of intellectual 
 power : it was to level minds and capacities. It was to 
 give all men the same sort of power which a pair of 
 compasses gives the hand in drawing a circle. " Absolute 
 certainty, and a mechanical mode of procedure" says 
 Mr. Ellis, " such that all men should he capable of em- 
 ploying it, are the tioo great features of tlie Baconian 
 system." This he thought possible, and this he set 
 himself to expound — " a method imiversally applicable, 
 and in all cases infallible." In this he saw the novelty 
 and the vast importance of his discovery. "By this 
 method all the knowledge which the human mind was 
 capable of receiving might be attained, and attained 
 
Yiu.] BACON'S PHILOSOPHY. 191 
 
 without unnecessary labour." It was a method of " a 
 demonstrative character, Avith the power of reducing all 
 minds to nearly the same level." The conception, in- 
 deed, of a "great Art of knoAvledge," of an "Instaura- 
 tion " of the sciences, of a " Clavis " Avhich should un- 
 lock the difficulties which had hindered discovery — was 
 not a new one. This attempt at a method, which 
 should be certain, which should level capacities, which 
 should do its work in a short time, had a special attrac- 
 tion for the imagination of the wild spirits of the South, 
 from Eaimond Lulli in the thirteenth century to the 
 audacious Calabrians of the sixteenth. With Bacon 
 it was something much more serious and reasonable and 
 business-like. But such a claim has never yet been 
 verified ; there is no reason to think that it ever can be ; 
 and to have made it shows a fundamental defect in 
 Bacon's conception of the possibilities of the human 
 mind and the field it has to work in. 
 
 In the next place, though the prominence which 
 he gave to the doctrine of Induction was one of those 
 novelties wdiich are so obvious after the event, though 
 so strange before it, and was undoubtedly the element 
 in his system which gave it life and power and influence 
 on the course of human thought and discovery, his 
 account of Induction was far from complete and satis- 
 factory. Without troubling himself about the theory of 
 Induction, as De R6musat has pointed out, he contented 
 himself with applying to its use the precepts of com- 
 mon-sense and a sagacious perception of the circum- 
 stances in which it was to be employed. But even these 
 precepts, notable as they were, wanted distinctness and 
 the qiialities needed for working rules. The change is 
 
192 BACON. [chap. 
 
 great when in fifty }ear.s we pass from the poetical 
 science of Bacon to the mathematical and precise science 
 of Newton. His own time may well have been struck 
 by the originality and com}>rehensiveness of snch a dis- 
 criminating arrangement of proofs as the " Prerogative 
 Instances " of the Novum Organum, so natural and real, 
 yet never before thus compared and systematized. But 
 there is a great interval between his method of experi- 
 menting, his ^^ Hunt of Pan" — the three tables of Instan- 
 ces, ^^ Presence" "Ahsence," and "Degrees, or Comparisons," 
 leading to a process of sifting and exclusion, and to the 
 First Vintage, or beginnings of theory — and say, for 
 instance, Mill's four methods of experimental inquiry, 
 the method of agreement, of differences, of residues, and 
 of concomitant variations. The course which he marked 
 out so laboriously and so ingeniously for Induction to 
 follow was one which was found to be impracticable, and 
 as barren of results as those deductive philosophies on 
 Avhich he lavished his scorn. He has left precepts and 
 examples of what he meant by his cross-examining and 
 sifting processes. As admonitions to cross-examine and 
 to sift facts and phenomena they are valuable. Many 
 of the observations and classifications are subtle and in- 
 structive. But in his hands nothing comes of them. 
 They lead at the utmost to mere negative conclusions ; 
 they show what a thing is not. But his attempt to elicit 
 anything positive out of them breaks down, or ends at 
 best in divinations and guesses, sometimes — as in con- 
 necting Heat and Motion — very near to later and more 
 carefully-grounded theories, but always unverified. He 
 had a radically false and mechanical conception, though 
 in words he earnestly disclaims it, of the way to deal 
 
vni.] BACON'S PHILOSOPHY. 193 
 
 with the facts of nature. He looked on them as things 
 which told their own story, and suggested the questions 
 which ought to be put to them ; and with this idea half 
 his time was spent in collecting huge masses of indigested 
 facts of the most various authenticity and value, and he 
 thought he was collecting materials Avhich his method 
 had only to touch in order to bring forth from them light 
 and truth and power. He thought that, not in certain 
 sciences, but in all, one set of men could do the observ- 
 ing and collecting, and another be set on the work of 
 Induction and the discovery of "axioms." Doubtless in 
 the arrangement and sorting of them his versatile and 
 ingenious mind gave itself full play ; he divides and dis- 
 tinguishes them into their companies and groups, differ- 
 ent kinds of Motion, "Prerogative" instances with 
 their long tale of imaginative titles. But we look in 
 vain for any use that he was able to make of them, 
 or even to suggest. Bacon never adequately realised 
 that no promiscuous assemblage of even the most 
 certain facts could ever lead to knowledge, could ever 
 suggest their own interpretation, without the action on 
 them of the living mind, without the initiative of an idea. 
 In truth he was so afraid of assumptions and " anticipa- 
 tions " and prejudices — his great bugbear was so much 
 the " intelledus sibi jpermissus," the mind given liberty to 
 guess and imagine and theorise, instead of, as it ought, 
 absolutely and servilely submitting itself to the control 
 of facts, that he missed the true place of the rational and 
 formative element in his account of Induction. He does 
 tell us, indeed, that "truth emerges sooner from error 
 than from confusion." He indulges the mind, in the 
 course of its investigation of "Instances," with a first 
 
 o 
 
194 BACON. [riiAP. 
 
 "vintage" of provisional gt'iicnilisations. But of the 
 ■way in Avhich the living mind of the discoverer Avorks, 
 ■with its ideas, and insight, and thoughts that come no 
 one kno-ws whence, ■working hand in hand -with -what 
 comes before the eye or is tested by the instrument, he 
 gives us no picture. Compare his elaborate investiga- 
 tion of the "Form of Heat" in the Novum Organum -with 
 such a record of real inquiry as Wells' Treatise on Deu; 
 or Herschel's analysis of it in his Introduction to Natural 
 PhiJosophy. And of the difference of genius bet-ween a 
 Faraday or a Ne-wton, and the crowd of average men 
 Avho have used and finished off their -work, he takes no 
 account. Indeed, he thinks that for the future such 
 difference is to disappear. 
 
 "That his method is impracticable," saj's Mr. Ellis, "cannot, I 
 think, be denied, if we reflect not only that it never has produced 
 any result, but also that the process by which scientific truths have 
 been established cannot be so presented as even to appear to be in 
 accordance with it. In all cases this process involves an element 
 to which nothing corresponds in the Tables of ' Comparence ' and 
 ' Exclusion,' namely, the application to the facts of obsen'ation of 
 a principle of arrangement, an idea, existing in the mind of the 
 discoverer antecedently to the act of induction. It may be said 
 that this idea is precisely one of the naturce into which the facts of 
 observation ought in Bacon's system to be analysed. And this is 
 in one sense true ; but it must be added that this analysis, if it be 
 thought right so to call it, is of the essence of the discovery which 
 results from it. In most cases the act of induction follows as a 
 matter of course as soon as the appropriate idea has been intro- 
 duced." — (Ellis, Ge-iieral Preface, i. 38.) 
 
 Lastly, not only -was Bacon's conception of philosophy 
 so narro-w as to exclude one of its greatest domains ; for, 
 says Mr. Ellis, " it cannot be denied that to Bacon all 
 sound philosophy seemed to be included in what we now 
 
VII r.] BACON'S PHILOSOPHY. 195 
 
 call the natural sciences," and in all its parts was claimed 
 as the subject of his inductive method ; but Bacon's 
 scientific knowledge and scientific conceptions were often 
 very imperfect — more imperfect than they ought to have 
 been for his time. Of one large part of science, which 
 was just then beginning to be cultivated with high 
 promise of success, the knowledge of the heavens, he 
 speaks -Nnth a coldness and suspicion which contrasts 
 remarkably with his eagerness about things belonging to 
 the sphere of the earth, and within reach of the senses. 
 He holds, of course, the unity of the world ; the laws of 
 the whole visible universe are one order; but the heavens, 
 wonderful as they are to him, are — compared with other 
 things — out of his track of inquiry. He had his astro- 
 nomical theories ; he expounded them in his " Deicnjptio 
 Globi InteUectiialis" and his Thenia Cceli. He was not 
 altogether ignorant of what Avas going on in days when 
 Copernicus, Kepler, and GaUleo were at work. But he 
 did not know how to deal with it, and there were men 
 in England, before and then, who understood much better 
 than he the problems and the methods of astronomy. 
 He had one conspicuous and strange defect for a man 
 who undertook what he did. He was not a mathema- 
 tician : he did not see the indispensable necessity of 
 mathematics in the great Instauration which he projected ; 
 he did not much believe in Avhat they could do. He 
 cared so little about them that he takes no notice of 
 Napier's invention of Logarithms. He was not able to 
 trace how the direct information of the senses might be 
 rightly subordinated to the rational, but not self-evident 
 results of geometry and arithmetic. He was impatient 
 of the subtleties of astronomical calcidations : they only 
 
196 BACOX. [PHAP. 
 
 attempted to satisfy problems about tlie motion of bodies 
 in the sky, and told us nothing of j^hysical fact : they 
 gave us, as Prometheus gave to Jove, the outside skin 
 of the ofTering, "which was stuffed inside with straw and 
 rubbish. He entirely failed to see that before dealing 
 with physical astronomy, it must be dealt with mathe- 
 matically. "It is well to remark," as Mr. Ellis sa3's, 
 " that none of Newton's astronomical discoveries could 
 have been made if astronomers had not continued to 
 render themselves liable to Bacon's censure." Bacon 
 little thought that in navigation the compass itself 
 would become a subordinate instrument compared with 
 the helps given by mathematical astronomy. In this, 
 and in other ways, Bacon rose above his time in his con- 
 ceptions of what might he, but not of what was; the list 
 is a long one, as given by Mr. Spedding (iii. 511), of the 
 instances which show that he was ill-informed about 
 the advances of knowledge in his own time. And his 
 mind was often not clear when he came to deal Anth 
 complex phenomena. Thus, though he constructed a 
 table of specific gravities — " the only collection," says 
 Mr. Ellis, " of quantitative experiments that we find in 
 his works," and " wonderfully accurate considering the 
 manner in which they were obtained ; " yet he failed to 
 understand the real nature of the famou.s experiment of 
 Archimedes. And so with the larger features of his 
 teaching it is impossible not to feel how imperfectly he 
 had emancipated himself from the power of words, and 
 of common prepossessions ; how for one reason or 
 another he had failed to call himself to account in the 
 terms he employed, and the assumptions on Avhich he 
 argued. The caution does not seem to have occurred to 
 
VIII.] BACON'S PHILOSOPHY. 197 
 
 him that the statement of a fact maj', in nine cases out 
 of ten, involve a theory. His whole doctrine of "Forms," 
 and "Simple natures," which is so prominent in his method 
 of investigation, is an example of loose and slovenly 
 use of unexamined and untested ideas. He allowed 
 himself to think that it would be possible to arrive at 
 an alphabet of nature, which, once attained, would suffice 
 to spell out and constitute all its infinite combinations. 
 He accepted, Anthout thinking it worth a doubt, the 
 doctrine of appetites, and passions, and inclinations, and 
 dislikes, and horrors, in inorganic natui'e. His whole 
 physiology of life and death depends on a doctrine of 
 animal spirits, of which he traces the operations and 
 qualities as if they Avere as certain as the nerves or the 
 blood, and of Avhich he gi^^es this account — " that in 
 every tangible body there is a spirit covered and 
 enveloped in the grosser body;" "not a virtue, not an 
 energy, not an actuality, nor any such idle matter, but 
 a body thin and invisible, and yet having place, and 
 dimension, and real." . . . "a middle nature between 
 flame, which is momentary, and air which is permanent." 
 Yet these are the very things for which he holds up 
 Aristotle and the Scholastics and the Itahan speculators 
 to reprobation and scorn. The clearness of his thinking 
 was often overlaid by the immense profusion of decor- 
 ative material Avhich his meditation brought along Avith 
 it. The defect was greater than that which even his 
 ablest defenders admit. It Avas more than that in that 
 "greatest and radical diff'erence, Avhich he himself ob- 
 serA'es" betAA-een minds, the difference betAveen minds 
 Avhich Avere apt to note distinctions, and those Avhich Avere 
 apt to note likenesses, he Avas, AAnthout knoAving it, defec- 
 
198 BACOX. [niAP. 
 
 tivc in the first. It was that in many instances, he 
 exemplified in his own work the very faults which he 
 charged on the older philosophies : haste, carelessness, 
 precipitancy, using Avords without thinking them out, 
 assuming to know when he ought to have perceived his 
 real ignorance. 
 
 What then, with all these mistakes and failures, not 
 always creditable or pardonable, has given Bacon his 
 pre-eminent place in the history of science ? 
 
 1. The answer is that with all his mistakes and 
 failures, the principles on which his mode of attaining a 
 knowledge of nature was based were the only true ones ; 
 and they had never before been propounded so systemati- 
 cally, so fully, and so earnestly. His was not the first 
 mind on whom these principles had broken. Men Avere, 
 and had been for some time, pursuing their inquiries 
 into various departments of nature precisely on the 
 general plan of careful and honest observation of real 
 things which he enjoined. They had seen, as he saw, 
 the futility of all attempts at natural philosophy by mere 
 thinking and arguing, without coming into contact with 
 the contradictions, or corrections, or verifications of 
 experience. In Italy, in Germany, in England there were 
 laborious and successful Avorkers, AA^ho had long felt that 
 to be in touch AAdth nature Avas the only Avay to knoAv. 
 But no one had yet come before the Avorld to proclaim 
 this on the house-tops, as the key of the only certain 
 path to the secrets of nature, the Avatchword of a revolu- 
 tion in the methods of interpreting her ; and this Bacon 
 did with an imposing authority and power Avhich enforced 
 attention. He spoke the thoughts of patient toilers like 
 Harvey with a largeness and richness Avhich they could 
 
VIII.] BACON'S PHILOSOPHY. 199 
 
 not command, and which they perhaps smiled at. He 
 disentangled and spoke the vague thoughts of his age, 
 which other men had not the courage and clearness of 
 mind to formulate. What Bacon did, indeed, and what 
 he meant, are separate matters. He meant an infallible 
 method by Avhich man should be fully equipped for a 
 struggle with nature : he meant an irresistible and im- 
 mediate conquest, within a definite and not distant time. 
 It Avas too much. He himself saw no more of what he 
 meant than Columbus did of America. But what he did 
 was, to persuade men for the future that the intelligent, 
 patient, persevering cross-examination of things, and the 
 thoughts about them, was the only, and was the success- 
 ful road to know. No one had yet done this, and he 
 did it. His A\Titings were a public recognition of real 
 science, in its humblest tasks about the commonplace 
 facts before our feet, as well as in its loftiest achieve- 
 ments. " The man who is grooving great and happy by 
 electrifying a bottle," says Dr. Johnson, " wonders to 
 see the world engaged in the prattle about peace and 
 war," and the world was ready to smile at the simplicity 
 or the impertinence of his enthusiasm. Bacon impressed 
 upon the world for good, with every resource of subtle 
 observation and forcible statement, that " the man who 
 is growing great by electrifying a bottle," is as important 
 a person in the world's aftairs as the arbiter of peace and 
 war. 
 
 2. Yet this is not all. An inferior man might have 
 made himself the mouthpiece of the hopes and aspira- 
 tions of his generation after a larger science. But to 
 Bacon these aspirations embodied themselves in the form 
 of a great and absorbing idea ; an idea which took pos- 
 
200 BACON. [chap. 
 
 session of the Avhole man, kindling in him a faith which 
 nothing could quench, and a passion which nothing could 
 dull ; an idea which, for forty years, was his daily com- 
 panion, his daily delight, his daily business; an idea 
 which he was never tired of placing in ever fresh and 
 more attractive lights, from Avhich no trouble could 
 wean him, about which no disaster could make him 
 despair; an idea round which the instincts and intui- 
 tions and obstinate convictions of genius gathered, which 
 kindled his rich imagination, and was invested by it Avith 
 a splendour and magnificence like the dreams of fable. 
 It is this idea which finds its fitting expression in the 
 grand and stately aphorisms of the Nomim Organuniy in 
 the varied fields of interest in the De Augmentls, in 
 the romance of the Neiv Atlantis. It is this idea, this 
 certainty of a new unexplored Kingdom of Knowledge 
 within the reach and grasp of man, if he Avill be humble 
 enough, and patient enough, and truthful enough to 
 occupy it — this announcement not only of a new system 
 of thought, but of a change in the condition of the world, 
 a prize and possession such as man had not yet imagined, 
 this belief in the fortunes of the human race and its issue, 
 " such an issue, it may be, as in the present condition of 
 things and men's minds cannot easily be conceived or 
 imagined," yet more than verified in the wonders which 
 our eyes have seen — it is this which gives its prerogative 
 to Bacon's work. That he bungled about the processes 
 of Induction, that he talked about an unintelligible doc- 
 trine of Fiyrms, did not affect the weight and solemnity 
 of his call to learn, so full of wisdom and good sense, so 
 sober and so solid, yet so audaciously confident. There 
 had been nothing like it in its ardour of hope, in the 
 
VIII.] BACON'S PHILOSOPHY. 201 
 
 glory which it threw around the investigation of nature. 
 It was the presence and the power of a great idea — long 
 become a commonplace to iis, but strange and perplexing 
 at first to his OAvn generation, Avhich probably shared 
 Coke's opinion that it qualified its champion for a place 
 in the company of the " Ship of Fools," which expressed 
 its opinion of the man who wrote the Novum Organ um 
 in the sentiment that " a fool caiild not have written it, 
 and a wise man tiwtld not " — it is this which has placed 
 Bacon among the great discoverers of the human race. 
 
 It is this imaginative yet serious assertion of the vast 
 range and possibilities of human knowledge which, as M. 
 de R^musat remarks, the keenest and fairest of Bacon's 
 judges, gives Bacon his claim to the undefinable but very 
 real character of greatness. Two men stand out, " the 
 masters of those who know," without equals up to their 
 time, among men — the Greek Aristotle and the English- 
 man Bacon. They agree in the universality and compre- 
 hensiveness of their conception of human knowledge ; 
 and they were absolutely alone in their serious practical 
 ambition to work out this conception. In the separate 
 departments of thought, of investigation, of art, each is 
 left far behind by numbers of men, who in these separate 
 departments have gone far deeper than they, have soared 
 higher, have been more successful in what they attempted. 
 But Aristotle first, and for his time more successfully, 
 and Bacon after him, ventured on the daring enterprise 
 of "taking all knowledge for their province;" and in 
 this they stood alone. This present scene of man's 
 existence, this that we call nature, the stage on which 
 mortal life begins and goes on and ends, the faculties 
 with which man is equipped to act, to enjoy, to create, 
 
202 BACOX. [cum: 
 
 to hold his way amid or against the circumstances and 
 forces round him — this is what each wants to know, as 
 thoroughly and really as can be. It is not to reduce 
 things to a theory or a system that they look around 
 them on the place where they find themselves ^^'ith life 
 and thought and power : that were easily done, and has 
 been done over and over again, only to prove its futility. 
 It is to know, as to the whole and its parts, as men 
 understand knowing in some one subject of successful 
 handling, whether art, or science, or practical craft. 
 This idea, this effort, distinguishes these two men. 
 The Greeks — predecessors, contemporaries, successors of 
 Aristotle — Avere speculators, full of clever and ingenious 
 guesses, in Avhich the amount of clear and certain fact 
 was in lamentable disproportion to the schemes blown 
 up from it ; or they devoted themselves more profitably 
 to some one or two subjects of inquiry, moral or purely 
 intellectual, with absolute indifference to what might be 
 asked, or Avhat might be kno^^ai, of the real conditions 
 under which they were passing their existence. Some 
 of the Romans, Cicero and Pliny, had encyclopaedic 
 minds; but the Roman mind was the slave of precedent, 
 and was more than satisfied with partially understanding 
 and neatly arranging what the Greeks had left. The 
 Arabians looked more widely about them ; but the 
 Arabians were essentially sceptics, and resigned subjects 
 to the inevitable and the inexplicable ; there was an 
 irony, open or covert, in their philosophy, their termino- 
 log}', their transcendental mj'sticism, which showed 
 how little they believed that they really knew. The 
 vast and mighty intellects of the schoolmen never came 
 into a real grapple with the immensity of the facts of the 
 
VIII.] BACON'S PHILOSOPHY. 203 
 
 natural or even of tlie moral world ; within the M'orld 
 of abstract thought, the world of language with its in- 
 finite growths and consequences, they have never had 
 their match for keenness, for patience, for courage, for 
 inexhaustible toil ; but they Avere as much disconnected 
 from the natural world, which Avas their stage of life, as 
 if they had been disembodied spirits. The Renaissance 
 brought Anth it not only the desire to know, but to 
 know comprehensively and in all possil^le directions ; it 
 brought with it temptations to the awakened Italian 
 genius, renewed, enlarged, refined, if not strengthened 
 by its passage through the Middle Ages, to make thought 
 deal viith. the real, and to understand the scene in which 
 men were doing such strange and wonderfid things ; but 
 Giordano Bruno, Telesio, Campanella, and their fellows, 
 were not men capable of more than short flights, though 
 they might be daring and eager ones. It required more 
 thoroughness, more humble-minded industry, to match 
 the magnitude of the task. And there have been men 
 of universal minds and comprehensive knowledge since 
 Bacon, Leibnitz, Goethe, Humboldt, men whose thoughts 
 were at home everywhere, Avhere there was something 
 to be known. But even for them the Avorld of know- 
 ledge has grown too large. We shall never again see 
 an Aristotle or a Bacon, because the conditions of know- 
 ledge have altered. Bacon, like Aristotle, belonged to 
 an age of adventui'e, which Avent to sea little knowing 
 whither it Avent, and ill furnished Avith knoA\dedge and 
 instruments. He entered Avith a vast and vague scheme 
 of discovery on these unknoAvn seas and neAv Avorlds, 
 Avhich to us are familiar and daily traversed in every 
 direction. This ncAv Avorld of knoAvledge has turned out 
 
204 BACOX. [chap. 
 
 in luuuy ways very different from what Aristotle or 
 Bacon supposed, and has been conquered by implements 
 and weapons very different in precision and power from 
 what they purposed to rely on. But the combination of 
 patient and careful industry, with the courage and 
 divination of genius, in doing what none had done 
 before, makes it equally stupid and idle to impeach their 
 greatness. 
 
 3. Bacon has been charged with bringing philosophy 
 down from the heights, not as of old to make men know 
 themselves, and to be the teacher of the highest form 
 of truth, but to be the purveyor of material utility. It 
 contemplates only, it is said, the " commoda vifce ;" about 
 the deeper and more elevating problems of thought it 
 does not trouble itself. It concerns itself only about 
 external and sensible nature, about what is "of the 
 earth, earthy." But Avhen it comes to the questions 
 which have attracted the keenest and hardiest thinkers, 
 the question, what it is that thinks and wills, — what is 
 the origin and guarantee of the faculties by which men 
 know anything at all and form rational and true con- 
 ceptions about nature and themselves, whence it is that 
 reason draws its powers and materials and rules — 
 what is the meaning of words Avhich all use but few 
 can explain — Time and Space, and Being and Cause, and 
 consciousness and choice, and the moral law — Bacon is 
 content with a loose and superficial treatment of them. 
 Bacon certainly Avas not a metaphysician, nor an exact 
 and lucid reasoner. With wonderful flashes of sure in- 
 tuition or haj^py anticipation, his mind Avas deficient in 
 the powers which deal with the deeper problems of 
 thought, just as it was deficient in the mathematical 
 
VIII.] BACON'S PHILOSOPHY. 205 
 
 facility. The subtlety, the intuition, the penetration, 
 the severe precision, even the force of imagination, which 
 make a man a great thinker on any abstract subject 
 were not his; the interest of questions which had in- 
 terested metaphysicians had. no interest for him: he 
 distrusted and undervalued them. "When he touches the 
 " ultimities " of knowledge he is as obscure and hard to 
 be understood as any of those restless Southern Itahans 
 of his own age, who shared Avith him the ambition of 
 reconstructing science. Certainly the science which 
 most interested Bacon, the science which he found as he 
 thought in so desperate a condition, and to which he 
 gave so great an impulse, was physical science. But 
 physical science may be looked at and pursued in difier- 
 ent ways, in different tempers, with different objects. 
 It may be followed in the spirit of Xewton, of Boyle, of 
 Herschel, of Faraday ; or with a confined and low hori- 
 zon it may be dwarfed and shrivelled into a mean utili- 
 tarianism. But Bacon's horizon was not a narrow one. 
 He believed in God, and immortality, and the Christian 
 creed and hope. To him the restoration of the Eeign 
 of Man Avas a noble enterprise, because man was so 
 great and belonged to so great an order of things, 
 because the things which he was bid to search into with 
 honesty and truthfulness were the works and laws of 
 God, because it was so shameful and so miserable that 
 from an ignorance which industry and good sense could 
 remedy, the tribes of mankind passed their days in self- 
 imposed darkness and helplessness. It was God's 
 appointment that men should go through this earthly 
 stage of their being. Each stage of man's mysterious 
 existence had to be dealt with, not according to his own 
 
206 BACON. [CHAP. 
 
 fancies, but according to the conditions imi^osed on it ; 
 and it was one of man's first duties to arrange for liis 
 stay on earth according to the real laws which he could 
 find out if he only sought for them. Doubtless it was 
 one of Bacon's highest hopes that from the growth of 
 true knowledge Avould follow in surprising ways the re- 
 lief of man's estate ; this, as an end, runs through all 
 his yearning after a fuller and surer method of inter- 
 preting nature. The desire to be a great benefactor, 
 the spirit of sympathy and pity for mankind, reign 
 through this portion of his work — pity for confidence so 
 greatly abused by the teachers of man, pity for ignor- 
 ance which might be dispelled, pity for pain and misery 
 which might be relieved. In the quaint but beautiful 
 picture of courtesy, kindness, and wisdom, which he 
 imagines in the Neiu Atlantis, the representative of true 
 philosophy, the " Father of Solomon's House," is intro- 
 duced as one who " had an aspect as if he pitied men." 
 But unless it is utilitarianism to be keenly alive to the 
 needs and pains of life, and to be eager and busy to 
 lighten and assuage them. Bacon's philosophy was not 
 utilitarian. It may deserve many reproaches, but not 
 this one. Such a passage as the following — in which 
 are combined the highest motives and graces and passions 
 of the soul, love of truth, humility of mind, purity of 
 purpose, reverence for God, sympath}- for man, compas- 
 sion for the sorrows of the world and longing to heal 
 them, depth of conviction and faith — fairly represents 
 the spirit which runs through his works. After urging 
 the mistaken use of imagination and authority in science, 
 he goes on : — 
 
 " There is not and never •will be an end or limit to this ; one 
 
VIII.] BACON'S PHILOSOPHY. 207 
 
 catches at one thing, another at another ; each has his favourite 
 fancy ; pure and open light there is none ; every one philosophises 
 out of the cells of his own imagination, as out of Plato's cave ; the 
 higher wits with more acuteness and felicity, the duller, less happily 
 but with equal pertinacity. And now of late by the regulation of 
 some learned and (as things now are) excellent men (the former 
 licence having, I suppose, become wearisome), the sciences are con- 
 fined to certain and prescribed authors, and thus restrained are 
 imposed upon the old and instilled into the young ; so that now (to 
 use the sarcasm of Cicero concerning Cesar's year), the constellation 
 of Lyra rises by edict, and authority is taken for truth, not truth 
 for authority. Which kind of institution and discipline is excellent 
 for present use, but precludes all prospect of improvement. For we 
 copy the sin of our iirst parents while we suffer for it. They wished 
 to be like God, but their posterity wish to be even greater. For 
 we create worlds, we direct and domineer over nature, we will have 
 it that all things are as in our folly we think they should be, not 
 as seems fittest to the Divine wisdom, or as they are found to be in 
 fact ; and I know not whether we more distort the facts of nature 
 or of our own wits ; but we clearly impress the stamp of our owii 
 image on the creatures and works of God, instead of carefully ex- 
 amining and recognising in them the stamp of the Creator himself. 
 Wherefore our dominion over creatures is a second time forfeited, 
 not undeservedly ; and whereas after the fall of man some power 
 over the resistance of creatures was still left to him — the power of 
 subduing and managing them by true and solid arts — yet this too 
 through our insolence, and because we desire to be like God and to 
 follow the dictates of our own reason, we in great part lose. If, 
 therefore, there be any humility towards the Creator, any reverence 
 for or disposition to magnify His works, any charity for man and 
 anxiety to relieve his sorrows and necessities, any love of truth in 
 nature, any hatred of darkness, any desire for the purification of 
 the understanding, we must entreat men again and again to discard, 
 or at least set apart for a while, these volatile and preposterous 
 philosophies which have preferred theses to hypotheses, led experi- 
 ence captive, and triumphed over the works of God ; and to ap- 
 jiroach with humility and veneration to unroll the volume of 
 Creation, to linger and meditate therein, and with minds washed 
 clean from opinions to study it in purity and integrity. For this 
 
208 BACON. [cHAi>. VIII. 
 
 is that Kouiid and language which ''went forth into all lands," and 
 did not incur the confusion of Babel ; this should men study to be 
 l)erfect in, and becoming again as little children condescend to take 
 the alphabet of it into their hands, and spare no pains to search 
 and unravel the interpretation thereof, but pursue it strenuously 
 and persevere even unto death." — (Preface to Historia Natural is : 
 translated, Works, v. 132-3.) 
 
CHAPTER IX. 
 
 BACON AS A WRITER. 
 
 Bacon's name belongs to letters as avcII as to philo- 
 sophy. In his own day, whatever his contemporaries 
 thought of his rnstauration of Knoidedge, he was in the 
 first rank as a speaker and a writer. Sir Walter Raleigh, 
 contrasting him \n.th. Salisbury, Avho could speak but 
 not write, and Xorthampton, who could write but not 
 speak, thought Bacon eminent both as a speaker and a 
 writer. Ben Jonson, passing in review the more famous 
 names of his own and the preceding age, from Sir 
 Thomas More to Sir Philip Sidney, Hooker, Essex and 
 Raleigh, places Bacon Avithout a rival at the head of the 
 company as the man who had "fulfilled all numbers," 
 and "stood as the mark and ctK/i^ of our language." 
 And he also records Bacon's power as a speaker, "Xo 
 man," he says, " ever spoke more neatly, more pressly, 
 or sufi"ered less emptiness, less idleness, in what he 
 uttered."' . . . "His hearers could not cough or look 
 aside from him Avithout loss. He commanded when he 
 spoke, and had his judges angry and pleased at his 
 devotion . , . the fear of every man that heard him 
 was that he should make an end. " He notices one feature 
 for which we are less prepared, though we know that 
 
 r 
 
210 BACON. [chap. 
 
 the edge of Bacon's sarcastic tongue was felt and resented 
 in James's Court. " His speech," says Ben Jonson, 
 " was nobly censorious when he could spare and pass by 
 a jest." The unpopularitj' which certainly seems to 
 have gathered rountl liis name may have had something 
 to do with this reputation. 
 
 Yet as an English writer Bacon did not expect to be 
 remembered, and he hardly cared to be. He wrote 
 much in Latin, and his first care was to have his books 
 put into a Latin dress. " For these modern languages," 
 he wrote to Toby Matthew towards the close of his life, 
 " will at one time or another play the bank-rowte \vith 
 books, and since I have lost much time with this age, I 
 would be glad if God would give me leave to recover it 
 with posterity." He wanted to be read by the learned 
 out of England, who were supposed to appreciate his 
 philosophical ideas better than his ovm. countrymen, and 
 the only way to this was to have his books translated 
 into the "general language." He sends Prince Charles 
 the Advancement in its new Latin dress. " It is a book," 
 he says, " that will live, and be a citizen of the world, 
 as English books are not." And he fitted it for conti- 
 nental reading by carefully weeding it of all passages 
 that might give offence to the censors at Eome or Paris. 
 "I have been," he writes to the King, "mine oa\ti Index 
 Exinirgatorius, that it may be read in all places. For 
 since my end of putting it in Latin Avas to have it read 
 everyAvhere, it had been an absurd contradiction to free 
 it in the language and to pen it up in the matter." 
 Even the Essays and the Histori/ of Henry VII. he had 
 put into Latin "by some good pens that do not forsake 
 me." Amono- these translators are said to have been 
 
IX.] BACOX AS A WRITER. 211 
 
 George Herbert and Hobbes, and on more doubtful 
 authorit}', Ben Jonson and Selden. The Essai/s vreve 
 also translated into Latin and Italian Avith Bacon's 
 sanction. 
 
 Bacon's contemptuous and hopeless estimate of "these 
 modern languages," forty years after Spenser had pro- 
 claimed and justified his faith in his own language, is 
 only one of the proofs of the short-sightedness of the 
 wasest and the limitations of the largest-minded. Per- 
 haps we ought not to wonder at his silence about 
 Shakespeare. It was the fashion, except among a set 
 of clever but not always very reputable people, to think 
 the stage, as it was, below the notice of scholars and 
 statesmen ; and Shakespeare took no trouble to save his 
 works from neglect. Yet it is a curious defect in Bacon 
 that he should not have been more alive to the powers 
 and future of his own language. He early and all along 
 was profoundly impressed with the contrast, which the 
 scholarship of the age so abundantly presented, of words 
 to things. He dwells in the Advancement on that "first 
 distemper of learning, when men study words and not 
 matter." He illustrates it at large from the reaction of 
 the new learning and of the popular teaching of the 
 Eeforraation against the utilitarian and unclassical 
 terminology of the schoolmen ; a reaction which soon 
 grew to excess and made men "hunt more after choice- 
 ness of the phrase, and the round and clean composition 
 of the sentence and the sweet falling of the clauses," 
 than after worth of subject, soundness of argument, " life 
 of invention or depth of judgment." "I have repre- 
 sented this," he says, " in an example of late times, but 
 it hath been and will be secundum majiis et minus in all 
 
212 BACON. [chap. 
 
 times ; " and he likens this " vanity " to " Pygmalion's 
 frenzy," — " for to fall in love with words which are but 
 the images of matter, is all one as to fall in love with a 
 picture." He was dissatisfied with the first attempt at 
 translation into Latin of the Advancement by Dr. 
 Playfer of Cambridge, because he " desired not so much 
 neat and polite, as clear, masculine, and apt expression." 
 Yet, with this hatred of circumlocution and prettiness, 
 of the cloudy amplifications, and pompous flourishings, 
 and " the flowing and watery vein," which the scholars 
 of his time aff"ected, it is strange that he should not have 
 seen that the new ideas and widening thoughts of which 
 he was the herald would want a much more elastic and 
 more freely-working instrument than Latin could ever 
 become. It is wonderful indeed what can be done Avith 
 Latin. It was long after his day to be the language of the 
 exact sciences. In his History of the fFinds, which is full 
 of his irrepressible fancy and picturesqueness. Bacon 
 describes in clear and intelligible Latin the details of the 
 rigging of a modern man-of-war, and the mode of sailing 
 her. But such tasks impose a yoke, sometimes a rough 
 one, on a language which has " taken its ply " in very 
 diff"erent conditions, and of which the genius is that of 
 indirect and circuitous expression, " full of majesty and 
 circumstance." But it never, even in those days of scholar- 
 ship, could lend itself to the frankness, the straight- 
 forwardness, the fullness and shades of suggestion and 
 association, with which, in handling ideas of subtlety and 
 difficulty, a writer would "svish to speak to his reader, and 
 which he could find only in his mother tongue. It might 
 have been thought that with Bacon's contempt of form and 
 ceremony in these matters, his consciousness of the powers 
 
IX.] BACON AS A WRITER. 213 
 
 of English in his hands might have led him to anticipate 
 that a flexible, and rich, and strong language might 
 create a literature, and that a literature, if worth stud}- 
 ing, would be studied in its own language. But so great 
 a change was beyond even his daring thoughts. To him, 
 as to his age, the only safe language was the Latin. For 
 familiar use English was well enough. But it could not 
 be trusted; "it would play the bankrupt with books." 
 And yet Galileo was Amting in Italian as well as in 
 Latin; only within twenty -five years later, Descartes 
 was writing De la Mdhode, and Pascal was writing in 
 the same French in which he wrote the Provincial Letters, 
 his Nouvelles Experiences touchant le Vide, and the con- 
 troversial pamphlets which followed it; showing how 
 in that interval of five-and-twenty years an instrument 
 had been fashioned out of a modern language such as for 
 lucid expression and clear reasoning. Bacon had not yet 
 dreamed of. From Bacon to Pascal is the change from 
 the old scientific way of writing to the modern ; from a 
 modern language as learned and used in the 16th century, 
 to one learned in the 17 th. 
 
 But the language of the age of Elizabeth was a rich 
 and noble one, and it reached a high point in the hands 
 of Bacon. In his hands it lent itself to many uses, and 
 assumed many forms, and he valued it, not because he 
 thought highly of its equalities as a language, but 
 because it enabled him with least trouble "to speak 
 as he would," in thro^ving off the abundant thoughts 
 that rose within his mind, and in going through the 
 variety of business which could not be done in Latin. 
 But in all his writing it is the matter, the real thing that 
 he wanted to say, Avhich Avas uppermost. He cared how 
 
214 BACON. [chap. 
 
 it wa.s said, not for the sake of form or ornament, but 
 because the force and clearness of what Avas said depended 
 so much on how it was said. Of course, what he wanted 
 to say varied indefinitely with the various occasions of 
 his life. His business may merely be to Avritc " a device " 
 or panegyric for a pageant in the Queen's honour, or for 
 the revels of Gray's Inn. But even these trifles are 
 the result of real thought, and are full of ideas, ideas 
 about the hopes of knowledge or about the policy of 
 the State; and though, of course, they have plenty of the 
 flourishes and quaint absurdities indispensable on such 
 occasions, yet the " rhetorical afTectation " is in the thing 
 itself, and not in the way it is handled : he had an 
 opportunity of saying some of the things Avhich were to 
 him of deep and perpetual interest, and he used it to 
 say them, as forcibly, as strikingly, as attractively as he 
 could. His manner of ■\\Titing 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 Avanted 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, Avhicli cost him at last so 
 dear. 
 
 The book by which English readers, from his own time 
 to ours, have knoAvn him best, better than by the origin- 
 ality and the eloquence of the Adrancement, or than by 
 the political weight and historical imagination of the 
 Histurij of Henri/ FIL, is the first book which he published, 
 
IX.] BACON AS A AVRITEK. 215 
 
 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. But he saw how much could 
 be done by leaving the beaten track of set treatise and 
 discourse, and setting down unceremoniously the obser- 
 vations which he had made and the real rules which he 
 had felt to be true, on various practical matters which 
 come home to men's "business and bosoms." He was 
 very fond of these moral and political generalisations, 
 both of his own collecting and as found in -writers 
 who, he thought, had the right to make them, like 
 the Latins of the Empire and the Italians and Span- 
 iards of the Renaissance. But a mere string of 
 maxims and c^uotations would have been a poor thing 
 and not new; and he cast what he had to say into 
 connected wholes. But nothing can be more loose than 
 the structure of the essays. There is no art, no style, 
 almost, except in a few, the political ones, no order : 
 thoughts are put down and left unsupported, unproved, 
 undeveloped. In the first form of the ten, which com- 
 posed the first edition of 1597, they are more like notes 
 of analysis or tables of contents ; they are austere even 
 to meagreness. But the general character continues in 
 the enlarged and expanded ones of Bacon's later years. 
 They are like chapters in Aristotle's Ethics and Rhetoric 
 on virtues and characters ; only Bacon's takes Aristotle's 
 
216 BACON. [<iiAP. 
 
 broad marking lines as drawn, and proceeds witli the 
 subtler ami more refined obscrvationsof a much longer and 
 wider experience. But these shoi't papers say what they 
 have to say without preface, and in literary undress, with- 
 out a superfluous Avord, without the joints and bands of 
 structure : they say it in brief, rapid sentences, Avhich come 
 down, sentence after sentence, like the strokes of a great 
 hammer. No wonder that in their disdainful brevity they 
 seem rugged and aljrupt, " and do not seem to end, but 
 fall." But with their truth and piercingness and delicacy 
 of observation, their roughness gives a kind of flavour 
 which no elaboration could give. It is none the less that 
 their wisdom is of a someAvhat cynical kind, fully alive 
 to the sli{)periness and self-deceits and faithlessness which 
 are in the world and rather inclined to be amused at 
 them. In some we can see distinct records of the 
 writer's own experience : one contains the substance of a 
 charge delivered to Judge Hutton on his appointment ; 
 another of them is a sketch dra^vn from life of a character 
 Avhich had crossed Bacon's path, and in the essay on 
 Seeming JFise we can trace from the impatient notes 
 put down in his Cominentarius Solutus, the picture of 
 the man who stood in his way, the Attorney-General 
 Hobart. Some of them are memorable oracular utter- 
 ances not inadequate to the subject, on Truth, or Death, 
 or Uniti/. Others reveal an utter incapacity to come near 
 a subject, except as a strange external phenomena, like the 
 essay on Love. There is a distinct tendency in them to 
 the Italian school of political and moral wisdom, the 
 Avisdom of distrust and of reliance on indirect and 
 roundabout Avays. There is a group of them, "of Delays," 
 " of Cunning," " of msdom fur a iVaii's Self," " of Des- 
 
IX.] BACON AS A WHITKH. 217 
 
 patcli," which show how vigihmtly and to what purpose 
 he had watched the treasurers and secretaries and 
 intriguers of EHzabeth's and James's Courts ; and there 
 are curious self-revelations, as in the essay on Friendship. 
 But there are also currents of better and larger feeling, 
 such as those which show his own ideal of " Great Place" 
 and what he felt of its dangers and duties. And mixed 
 with the fantastic taste and conceits of the time, there 
 is evidence in them of Bacon's keen delight in nature, 
 in the beauty and scents of flowers, in the charm of open 
 air life, as in the essay on Gardens, "The purest of 
 human pleasures, the greatest refreshment to the spirits 
 of man." 
 
 But he had another manner of writing for what he 
 held to be his more serious work. In the philosophical 
 and historical works there is no want of attention to the 
 flow and order and ornament of composition. When 
 Ave come to the Advancement of Learning, we come to a 
 book which is one of the landmarks of what high thought 
 and rich imagination have made of the English language. 
 It is the first great book in English prose of secular in- 
 terest ; the first book which can claim a place beside the 
 Latcs of Ecclesiastical Foliti/. As regards its sul)ject- 
 matter, it has been partly thrown into the shade by the 
 greatly enlarged and elaborate form in which it ulti- 
 mately appeared, in a Latin dress, as the first portion 
 of the scheme of the Instanratio, the De Augmentis 
 Scieniiarum. Bacon looked on it as a first effort, a kind 
 of call-bell to awaken and attract the interest of others 
 in the thoughts and hopes which so interested himself. 
 But it contains some of his finest writing. In the Essays 
 he writes as a looker-on at the game of human affairs, 
 
218 BACON. [chap. 
 
 who, according to his frequent illustration, sees more of 
 it than the gamesters themselves, and is able to give 
 wiser and faithful counsel, not without a touch of kindly 
 irony at the mistakes which he observes. In the 
 Advancement he is the enthusiast for a great cause and 
 a great hope, and all that he has of passion and power 
 is enlisted in the effort to advance it. The Advancement 
 is far from being a perfect book. As a survey of the 
 actual state of knowledge in his day, of its deficiencies 
 and what was wanted to supply them, it is not even 
 up to the materials of the time. Even the improved 
 De Avgmentis is inadequate ; and there is reason to 
 think the Advancement was a hurried book, at least in 
 the later part, and it is defective in arrangement and 
 l)roportion of parts. Two of the great divisions of 
 knowledge — history and poetry — are despatched in 
 comparatively short chapters ; Avhile in the division on 
 "Civil Knowledge," human knowledge as it respects 
 society, he inserts a long essay, obviously complete in 
 itself and clumsily thrust in here, on the ways of 
 getting on in the world, the means by which a man may 
 be " Faber fortunce suce" — the architect of his own success; 
 too lively a picture to be pleasant of the arts with which 
 he had become acquainted in the process of rising. The 
 book, too, has the blemishes of its own time ; its want 
 of simplicity, its inevitable though very often amusing 
 and curious pedantries. But the Advancement was the 
 first of a long line of books which have attempted to 
 teach English readers how to think of knoAvledge ; to 
 make it really and intelligently the interest, not of the 
 school or the study or the laboratory only, but of society 
 at large. It was a book with a })iupose, new then, but 
 
IX. 1 BACON AS A WHITER. 219 
 
 of which we have seen the fulfihneiit. Fie wanted to 
 impress on his generation, as a very practical matter, all 
 that knowledge might do in w^ise hands, all that know- 
 ledge had lost by the faults and errors of men and the 
 misfortunes of time, all that knowdedge might be pushed 
 to in all directions by faithful and patient industry and 
 well-planned methods for the elevation and benefit of 
 man in his highest capacities as well as in his humblest. 
 And he further sought to teach them how to know; to 
 make them understand that difficult achievement of self- 
 knowledge, to know ivhat it is to know ; to give the first 
 attempted chart to guide them among the shallows and 
 rocks and whirlpools Avhich beset the coiu-se and action 
 of thought and inquiry ; to reveal to them the " idols " 
 Avhich unconsciously haunt the minds of the strongest as 
 Avell as the weakest, and interpose their delusions when 
 w^e are least aware, — "the fallacies and false appearances 
 inseparable from our nature and our condition of life." 
 To induce men to believe not nuly that there was much 
 to know that was not yet dreamed of, but that the way 
 of knowing needed real and thorough improvement, that 
 the knoAving mind bore along AA-ith it all kinds of snares 
 and disqualifications of Avhich it is unconscious, and that 
 it needed training quite as much as materials to Avork 
 on, was the object of the Advancement. It Avas but a 
 sketch ; but it was a sketch so truly and forcibly draAvn, 
 that it made an impression w^hich has never been weak- 
 ened. To us its use and almost its interest is passed. 
 But it is a book Avhich we can never open Avithout coming 
 on some noble interpretation of the realities of nature 
 or the mind ; some unexpected discovery of that quick 
 and keen eye Avhich arrests us by its tmth ; some felici- 
 
220 BACON. [niAi'. 
 
 tons and nntliought-of illustration, yet so natural as 
 almost to be doomed to become a commonplace ; some 
 bright touch of his incoi-rigible imaginativeness, ever 
 ready to force itself in amid the driest details of his 
 argument. 
 
 The Advancevi^nt "was only one shape out of many 
 into which he cast his thoughts. Bacon was not easily 
 satisfied with his work ; oxen when he published he did 
 so, not because he had brought his work to the desired 
 point, but lest anything should happen to him and it 
 should "perish." Easy and unstudied as his writing 
 seems, it was, as we have seen, the result of uninter- 
 mitted trouble and varied modes of working. He was 
 quite as much a talker as a writer, and beat out his 
 thoughts into shape in talking. In the essay on Friend- 
 ship he describes the process with a vividness which 
 tells of his o^vn experience : — 
 
 ' ' But before you come to that [tlic faithful counsel that a man 
 receiveth from his friend], certain it is that whosoever hath Iiis 
 mind fraught mth many thoughts, his wits and understanding do 
 clarify and break up in the communicating and discoursing with 
 another. He tosseth his thoughts more easily ; he marshalleth 
 them more orderly ; he seeth how they look when they are turned 
 into words ; finally, he waxetli wiser than himself, and that more 
 liy an hour's discourse than by a day's meditation. It was well 
 said by Themistocles to the King of Persia, ' That speech was like 
 cloth of arras opened and put abroad, whereby the imagery doth 
 appear in figiire ; whereas in thought, they lie in packs. ' Neither 
 is this second fruit of friendship, in opening the understanding, 
 restrained only to such friends as are able to give a man counsel. 
 (They are, indeed, best.) But even without that, a man learneth 
 of himself, and bringeth his own thoughts to light, and whetteth 
 his ^\•its against a stone which itself cuts not. In a word, a man 
 were better relate himself to a statua or a picture, than to suffer his 
 thoughts to pass in smother." 
 
IX.] BACON AS A WRITER. 221 
 
 Bacon, as has been said, was a great maker of notes 
 and note-books : he was careful not of the thought only 
 but of the very words in which it presented itself; 
 eYer}i:hing was collected that might turn out useful in 
 his AYi'iting or speaking, down to alternative modes of 
 beginning or connecting or ending a sentence. He 
 watched over his intellectual appliances and resources 
 much more strictly than over his money concerns. He 
 never threw away and never forgot what could be turned 
 to account. He Avas never afraid of repeating himself, 
 if he thought he had something apt to say. He was 
 never tired of re-casting and re-Avriting, from a mere 
 fragment or preface to a finished paper. He has 
 favourite images, favourite maxims, favourite texts, 
 which he cannot do without, "Da Fidei qnce sunt 
 Fklei," comes in from his first book to his last. The 
 illustrations which he gets from the myth of Scylla, 
 from Atalanta's ball, from Borgia's saying about the 
 French marking their lodgings with chalk, the saying 
 that God takes delight, like the "innocent play of 
 children," "to hide his works in order to have them 
 found out," and to have kings as "his playfelloAvs in 
 that game," these, with many others, reappear, however 
 varied the context, from the first to the last of his 
 compositions. An edition of Bacon Avith marginal 
 references and parallel passages would show a more 
 persistent recurrence of characteristic illustrations and 
 sentences than perhaps any other AATiter, 
 
 The Advancement Avas folloAved by attempts to give 
 serious effect to its lesson. This Avas nearly all done in 
 Latin, He did so, because in these Avorks he spoke to a 
 larger and, as he thought, more interested audience ; the 
 
222 BACON. [chap. 
 
 use of Latin marked the gravity of his subject as one that 
 touched all mankind ; and the majesty of Latin suited 
 his taste and his thoughts. Bacon spoke, indeed, impress- 
 ively on the necessity of entering into the realm of know- 
 ledge in the spirit of a little child. He dwelt on the para- 
 mount importance of beginning from the very bottom of 
 the scale of fact, of understanding the commonplace things 
 at our feet, so full of wonder and mystery and instruction, 
 before venturing on theories. The sun is not polluted 
 by shining on a dunghill, and no facts were too ignoble 
 to be beneath the notice of the true student of nature. 
 But his own genius was for the grandeur and pomp of 
 general views. The practical details of experimental 
 science were, except in partial instances, yet a great way 
 off ; and what there was, he either did not care about or 
 really understand, and had no aptitude for handling. 
 He knew enough to give reality to his argument ; he 
 knew, and insisted on it, that the labour of observation 
 and experiment would have to be very heavy and quite 
 indispensable. But his own business was with great 
 principles and new truths ; these were what had the 
 real attraction for him ; it was the magnificent thoughts 
 and boundless hopes of the approaching kuigdom of 
 man " which kindled his imagination and fired his ambi- 
 tion, " He wi-ites philosophy," said Harvey, who had 
 come to his own great discoverj- through patient and 
 obscure experiments on frogs and monkeys, " he ■wiites 
 philosophy like a Lord Chancellor." And for this part 
 of the work, the stateliness and dignity of the Latin 
 corresponded to the proud claims which he made for his 
 conception of the knowledge which Avas to be. English 
 seemed to him too homely to express the hopes of the 
 
IX.] BACON AS A WKITER. 223 
 
 world, too unstable to be trusted with them. Latin was 
 the language of connuand and law. His Latin, without 
 enslaving itself to Ciceronian types, and with a free in- 
 fusion of barbarous but most convenient words from the 
 vast and ingenious terminology of the schoolmen, is 
 singularly forcible and expressive. It is almost always 
 easy and clear ; it can be vague and general, and it can 
 be very precise where precision is wanted. It can, on 
 occasion, be magnificent, and its gravity is continuall}- 
 enlivened by the pla}' upon it, as upon a background, of 
 his picturesque and unexpected fancies. The exposition 
 of his philosophical principles was attempted in tAvo 
 forms. He began in English. He began, in the shape 
 of a personal account, a statement of a series of conclu- 
 sions to which his thinking had brought him, which he 
 called the " Clue of the Labyrinth," i^i/w?n Lahyrinthi. 
 But he laid this aside unfinished, and re-Avrote and com- 
 pleted it in Latin, with the title Cogitata et Visa. It 
 gains by being in Latin ; as Mr. Spedding says, " it must 
 certainly l)e reckoned among the most perfect of Bacon's 
 productions." The personal form with each paragraph 
 begins and ends. " Frandsms Bacon sic cogitarit . . . 
 itaque visum est ei" gives to it a special tone of serious 
 conviction, and brings the interest of the subject more 
 keenly to the reader. It has the same kind of personal 
 interest, only more solemn and commanding, which there 
 is in Descartes's Discours cle la Methode. In this form 
 Bacon meant at first to p\;blish. He sent it to his usual 
 critics, Sir Thomas Bodley, Toby Matthew, and Bishop 
 Andrewes. And he meant to follow it up with a prac- 
 tical exemplification of his method. But he changed 
 his plan. He had more than once expressed his pre- 
 
224 BACON. [.iiAi'. 
 
 fcrence for the form of apJwrwns over the argumentative 
 and didactic continuity of a set discourse. Ho had, in- 
 deed, already twice begun a series of aphorisms on the 
 true methods of interpreting nature, and directing the 
 mind in the true path of knowledge, and had begun 
 them ■svith the same famous aphorism with which the 
 Novum Organum opens. He now reverted to the form 
 of the aphorism, and resolved to throw the materials of 
 the Cogitata et Visa into this shape. The result is the 
 Novum Organum. It contains, with large additions, the 
 substance of the treatise, but broken up and re-arranged 
 in the new form of separate impersonal generalised 
 observations. The points and assertions and issues 
 which, in a continuous discourse, careful readers mark 
 and careless ones miss, are on'i by one picked out and 
 brought separately to the light. It begins with brief, 
 oracular, unproved maxims and propositions, and goes 
 on gradually into larger developments and explanations. 
 The aphorisms are meant to strike, to awaken questions, 
 to disturb prejudices, to let in light into a nest of un- 
 suspected intellectual confusions and self-misunderstand- 
 ings, to be the mottoes and watchwords of many a 
 laborious and difficult inquiry. They form a connected 
 and ordered chain, though the ties between each link are 
 not given. In this Avay Bacon put forth his proclama- 
 tion of war on all that then called itself science ; his 
 annovmcement that the whole work of solid knowledge 
 must be begun afresh, and by a neAv, and, as he thought, 
 infallible method. On this work Bacon concentrated 
 all his care. It was twelve years in hand, and twelve 
 times underwent his revision. " In the first book especi- 
 ally," says Mr. Ellis, " every word seems to have been 
 
IX. 1 BACON AS A WRITER. 225 
 
 carefully -weighed ; and it would be hard to omit or 
 change anything without injuring the meaning which 
 Bacon intended to convey." Severe as it is, it is instinct 
 "with enthusiasm, sometimes with passion. The Latin 
 in which it is Avritten answers to it ; it has the concise- 
 ness, the breadth, the lordliness of a great piece of 
 philosophical legislation. 
 
 The world has agreed to date from Bacon the system- 
 atic reform of natm-al philosophy, the beginning of an 
 intelligent attempt, which has been crowned by such 
 signal success, to place the investigation of nature on a 
 solid foundation. On purely scientific grounds his title 
 to this great honour may require considerable qualifica- 
 tion. What one thing, it is asked, would not have been 
 discovered in the age of Galileo and Harvey, if Bacon 
 had never written 1 What one scientific discovery can 
 be traced to him, or to the observance of his peculiar 
 rules 1 It was something, indeed, to have conceived, as 
 clearly as he conceived it, the large and comprehensive 
 idea of what natural knowledge must be, and must rest 
 upon, even if he were not able to realise his idea, and 
 were mistaken in his practical methods of reform. But 
 great ideas and great principles need their adequate 
 interpreter, their rates sacer, if they are to influence the 
 history of mankind. This was what Bacon was to 
 science, to that great change in the thoughts and activity 
 of men in relation to the world of nature around them : 
 and this is his title to the great place assigned to him. 
 He not only imderstood and felt what science might be, 
 but he was able to make others — and it was no easy task 
 beforehand, while the wonders of discovery were yet in 
 the future — understand and feel it too. And he was 
 
 Q 
 
226 P.ACON. [riiAP. 
 
 ,iblo to do this because he was one of the most wonderful 
 of thinkers and one of the gi'eatest of writers. The 
 disclosure, the interpretation, the development of that 
 great intellectual revolution which was in the air, and 
 Avhich was practically carried forward in obscurity, day 
 by day, by the fathers of modem astronomy and 
 chemistry and physiology, had fallen to the task of 
 a genius, second only to Shakespeare. He had the 
 power to tell the story of what they were doing and 
 were to do with a force of imaginative reason of which 
 they were utterly incapable. He was able to justify 
 their attempts and their hopes as they themselves could 
 not. He was able to interest the world in the great pro- 
 spects opening on it, but of which none but a few students 
 had the key. The calculations of the astronomer, the 
 investigations of the physician, were more or less a sub- 
 ject of talk, as curious or possibly useful employments. 
 But that which bound them together in the unity of 
 science, which gave them their meaning beyond them- 
 selves, Avhich raised them to a higher level and gave them 
 their real dignity among the pursuits of men, which 
 forced all thinking men to see what new and unsuspected 
 possibilities in the knowledge and in the condition of 
 mankind were opened before them, was not Bacon's 
 own attempts at science, not even his collections of 
 facts and his rules of method, but that great idea of the 
 reality and boundless worth of knowledge which Bacon's 
 penetrating and sure intuition had discerned, and 
 Avhich had taken possession of his whole nature. The 
 impxdse which he gave to the progress of science came 
 from his magnificent and varied exposition of this idea ; 
 from his series of grand and memorable generalisations 
 
IX. 1 BACON AS A WRITER. 227 
 
 on the habits and faults of the human mind — on the 
 difficult and yet so obvious and so natural precautions 
 necessary to guide it in the true and hopeful track. It 
 came from the attractiveness, the enthusiasm, and the 
 persuasiveness of the pleading ; from the clear and 
 forcible statements, the sustained eloquence, the gene- 
 rous hopes, the deep and earnest purpose of the Advance- 
 ment and the Be Augmentis ; from the nobleness, the 
 originality, the picturesqueness, the impressive and 
 irresistible truth of the great aphorisms of the Novum 
 Orgamnn. 
 
 THE END. 
 
 Printed by R. S: R. Clark, Edinburgh, 
 
Now Publishing, in Crown Svo, price 2s. 6d. each. 
 
 ENGLISH MEN OF LETTERS. 
 
 Edited by JOHN MORLEY. 
 
 " Enioyable and excellent little hodk^."—Aca,hmy. 
 
 ''TA^'Mhmr:ih\Q^tvit%."— British Quarterly Aevir.v ^^ 
 
 " The.e excellent biographies should be made class-books for school.. 
 — Westinitister Revino. 
 
 JOHNSON. 
 
 By Leslie Stephen, 
 SCOTT. 
 
 By R. H. HUTTON. 
 GIBBON. 
 
 By J. C. MoRisoN. 
 SHELLEY. 
 
 By J. A. Symonds, 
 HUME. 
 
 By Professor Huxley, F.R.S. 
 
 GOLDSMITH. 
 
 By William Black. 
 DEFOE. 
 
 By W. MiNTO. 
 BURNS. 
 
 By Principal Shairp. 
 Sl^ENSER. 
 
 By R. W. Church, Dean of 
 St, Paul's. 
 THACKERAY. 
 
 By Anthony Trollope. 
 BURKE, 
 
 By John Morley. 
 MILTON. 
 
 By Mark Pattison. 
 HAWTHORNE. 
 
 By Henry James, Jan. 
 SOUTHEY. 
 
 By Edward Dowden. 
 CHAUCER. 
 
 By A. W. Ward. 
 COWPER. 
 
 By GoLDwiN Smith. 
 
 BUNYAN. 
 
 By J. A. Froude, 
 
 BYRON 
 
 By John Nichol. 
 
 LOCKE. 
 
 By Thomas Fowler. 
 
 POPE. 
 
 By Leslie Stephen. 
 
 CHARLES LAMB. 
 
 By Rev. Alfred Ainger. 
 
 DE QUINCEY. 
 
 By David Masson, 
 
 LANDOR. 
 
 By Sidney Colvin, 
 
 DRYDEN. 
 
 By George Saintsbury. 
 
 WORDSWORTH. 
 
 By F, W. H. Myers. 
 
 BENTLEY. 
 
 By Professor R. C. J ebb. 
 
 SWIFT. 
 
 By Leslie Stephen, 
 
 DICKENS, 
 
 By A. W. Ward. 
 GRAY, 
 
 By E, W, GossE. 
 
 STERNE. 
 
 By H. D, Traill. 
 MACAULAY. 
 
 By J. C. MoRisoN 
 
 FIELDING. 
 
 By Austin Dobson. 
 
 SHERIDAN. 
 
 By Mrs. Oliphant. 
 
 \_Jttst ready 
 
 Other Volumes to follow. 
 
 MACMILLAN & CO., LONDON. 
 
MACMILLAN'S 4s. 6d. SERIES. 
 
 hi L'rou'ii 8vo, 
 
 Price FOUR SHILLINGS and SIXPENCE each Volume. 
 
 MEMOIR OF SIR CHARLES REED. By Charles E. B. 
 
 iiKED, M.A. Willi a Portiait. Crown svo. 4s 6d. [Heady. 
 
 MEMOIR OF ANNIE KEARY. By Her Sister. With 
 
 a roitiait. New and Clienrer KUitioii. TlLird Tliousand. Crown bvo. 4«. 6J. 
 
 [Ready. 
 
 MEMOIR OF DANIEL MACMILLAN. By Thomas Hughes, 
 
 Q.C. Witli a rorlr.iit engraved on Steel by C. H. Jekns, from a Painting hy 
 Lowes Dickinson. Fourth Thousand. Crown 8vo. 4«. 6d. [lieady. 
 
 STRAY PEARLS: Memoirs of Margaret de Ribaumont, 
 
 Viscountess of IScllaise. Bj' CHARLOTTE JL YONGB, Author of "The Heir of 
 Redclytle," &c. 2 Vols. Crown 8vo. 98. [Heady. 
 
 UNKNOWN TO HISTORY. By Charlotte M. Yonge, 
 
 Author of " The Heir of Redclyffe." 2 Vols. Crown 8vo. ds. [Ready. 
 
 ONLY A WORD. By Dr. Georg Ebers, Author of " The 
 
 K^iyjitian Prineess," "The Bui'gomaster's Wife," &c. Translated by Claba Bell. 
 Crown Hvo. 4s. dd. [Ready. 
 
 THE BURGOMASTER'S WIFE. A Tale of the Siege of 
 
 Leyden. By Dr. GEORG ERERS, Author of "The Egyptian Princess," Ac. 
 Translated by Clara Bell. Crown 8vo. 4s, 6d. [Ready. 
 
 MR. ISAACS. A Tale of Modern India. By F. Marion 
 
 CRAWFORD. Crown 8vo. 4s. Gd. [Ready. 
 
 DOCTOR CLAUDIUS. A True Story. By F. Marion 
 
 CUAWFORD, Author of '■ Mr. Isaacs." Crown 8vo. 43. e<i. [In the i)ress. 
 
 DEMOCRACY. An American Novel. Crown 8vo. 4s. 6d. 
 
 Popular Edition. Paper Covers. Is. [Ready. 
 
 THE STORY OF MELICENT. By Fayr Madoc. Crown 
 
 8vo. 48. 6d. [Ready. 
 
 A GREAT TREASON. A Story of the War of Independence. 
 
 By MARY HOPPUS. '2 Vols. Crown 8vo. Os. [In the press 
 
 LECTURES ON ART. Delivered in support of the Society 
 
 for Protection of Ancient Buildings. By REGD. STUART POOLE, Professt r 
 W. B. RICHMOND, E. J. POYNTER, R.A., J. T. MICKLETHWAITE. ai;d 
 WILLIAM MORRIS. Crown 8vo. is. 6d. [Ready. 
 
 THE BURMAN. His Life and Notions. By Shway Yoe. 
 
 2 Vols. Crown 8vo. 9s. [Ready. 
 
 THE EXPANSION OF ENGLAND. By Professor J. K. 
 
 SEELEY, M.A. Crown Svo. is. 6d. [In the press. 
 
 ESSAYS. By F. W. H. Myers, IM.A. 2 Vols. I.— Ancient. 
 
 IL— Modem. Crown Svo. 48. 0<i. each Volume. [Iji the press. 
 
 *,* OtJier Volumes will follow. 
 
 MACMILLAN AND CO., LONDON. 
 
MACMILLAN'S GLOBE LIBRARY. 
 
 Price 3J. 6d. per volume, in cloth. Also kept in a variety of calf and 
 morocco bindings at moderate prices. 
 
 " The ' Globe ' Editions are admirable for their scholarly editing, their typo- 
 graphical excellence, their compendious form, and their cheapness." — Saturday 
 Review. 
 
 Shakespeare's Complete Works. — Edited by W G. Clark, 
 M.A., and W. Aldis Wright, M.A., Editors of the 
 "Cambridge Shakespeare." With Glossary. 
 
 Spenser's Complete Works. — Edited, from the Original 
 Editions and Manuscripts, by R. Morris, with a Memoir by 
 J. W. Hales, M.A. With Glossary. 
 
 Sir W^alter Scott's Poetical Works. — Edited, with a Biogra- 
 phical and Critical Memoir, by Francis Turner Palgrave, 
 and copious Notes. 
 
 Complete Works of Robert Bums. — Edited from the best 
 Printed and Manuscript authorities, with Glossarial Index, 
 Notes, and a Biographical Memoir by Alexander Smith. 
 
 Robinson Crusoe. — Edited after the Original Editions, with a 
 Biographical Introduction by Henry Kingsley 
 
 Goldsmith's Miscellaneous Works. — Edited, with Biographical 
 Introduction, by Professor Masson. 
 
 Pope's Poetical Works.— Edited, with Notes and Introductory 
 Memoir, by A. W. Ward, M.A., Professor of History in 
 Owens College, Manchester. 
 
 Dryden's Poetical Works.— Edited, with a Memoir, Revised 
 Text and Notes, by W. D. Christie, M. A., of Trinity College, 
 Cambridge. 
 
 Cowper's Poetical Works. — Edited, with Notes and Biographi- 
 cal Introduction, by William Benham, B.D. 
 
 Morte d'Arthur.— SIR THOMAS MALLORY'S BOOK OF 
 KING ARTHUR AND OF HIS NOBLE KNIGHTS OF 
 THE ROUND TABLE. — The original Edition of Caxton, 
 Revised for Modem Use. With an Introduction by Sir 
 Edward Strachey, Bart. 
 
 The Works of Virgil. — Rendered into English Prose, with 
 Introductions, Notes, Running Analysis, and an Index. By 
 James Lonsdale, M.A., and Samuel Lee, M.A. 
 
 The W^orks of Horace. — Rendered into Engli-h Prose, with 
 Introductions, Running Analysis, Notes, and Index. By James 
 Lonsdale, M.A., and Samuel Lee, M.A. 
 
 Milton's Poetical W^orks. — Edited, with Introductions, by 
 Professor Masson. 
 
 MACMILLAN & CO., LONDON. 
 
Now Publishing in Crown Zvo. Price y. 6d. each. 
 
 THE ENGLISH CITIZEN. 
 
 A Series of Short Books on 
 
 HIS RIGHT S AND RESPONS IBILITIES. 
 
 This series is intended to meet the demand for accessible information of 
 the ordinary conditions, and the current terms, of our pohtical hfe. 
 Ignorance of tliese not only takes from the study of history the interest 
 which comes from a contact with practical politics, but, still worse, it unfits 
 men for their place as intelligent citizens. 
 
 The .'-eries deals with the details of the machinery whereby our Con- 
 stitution works, and the broad lines upon which it has been constructed. 
 
 The books are not intended to interpret disputed points in Acts of 
 Parliament, nor to refer in detail to clauses or sections of those Acts ; but 
 to select and .sum up the salient features of any branch of lejfislation, so 
 as to place the ordinary citizen in possession of the main points of the 
 law. They are intended further to show how such legislation arose, and 
 (without going into minute historical or antiquarian details) to show how 
 it has been the outcome of our history, how circumstances have led up to 
 it, and what is its significance as affecting the relation between the individual 
 and the state. 
 
 The following are the titles of the volumes : — • 
 
 1. CENTRAL GOVERNMENT. H. D. Traill, D.C.L., late 
 
 Fellow of St. John's College, Oxford. [Ready. 
 
 2. THE ELECTORATE ANDTHE LEGISLATURE. Spencer 
 
 WALPOLE, Author of "The History of England from 1815." [Ready. 
 
 3. LOCAL GOVERNMENT. M. D. Chalmers. [ReaJy. 
 
 4. JUSTICE AND POLICE. F. Pollock, late Fellow of Trinity 
 
 CoUcEe. Cambridge. ____ 
 
 5 THE NATIONAL BUDGET: THE NATION AL DEBT, 
 
 TAXES AND RATES. A. J. WILSON. [Ready. 
 
 6 THE STATE AND EDUCATION. Henry Craik, M.A. 
 7' THE POOR LAW. Rev. T W. Fowle. [Reaiy. 
 8. THE STATE IN ITS RELATION TO TRADE. T. H. 
 
 FARRER [Ready. 
 
 Q. THE STATE IN RELATION TO LABOUR. W. Stanley 
 
 TEVONS, LL.D., MA., F.R.S. [Ready. 
 
 10. THE STATE AND THE LAND. F. Pollock, late Fellow 
 
 of Trinity College, Cambridge. [I n the press. 
 
 II THE STATE AND THE CHURCH. Hon. A. D. Elliot, M. P. 
 
 [Ready^ 
 
 12. FOREIGN RELATIONS. Spencer Walpole, Author of " The 
 
 History of England from 1815." [Readv. 
 
 13 (i) INDIA, y. S. Cotton, late Fellow of Queen's College, Oxford. 
 (2) COLONIES AND DEPENDENCIES. E. J. Payne, 
 
 Fellow of University College, Oxford. [/« tkepress. 
 
 MACMILLAN & CO., LONDON. 
 
14 DAY USE 
 
 RETURN TO DESK FROM WHICH BORROWED 
 
 LOAN DEPT. 
 
 This book is due on the last date stamped below, or 
 
 on the date to which renewed. 
 
 Renewed books are subject to immediate recall. 
 
 13iv1ar'64i3B 
 
 REC'D LD 
 
 FEB 2 5 '64 -2 PM 
 
 ^^c^feS^ 
 
 [nqV2 5'66-4PM 
 
 LOA N P^P^' 
 
 
 .0/:.N AHC 
 
 H£C.CIR.!^OV 4 76 
 
 LD 2]A-40m-ll,'63 
 (E1602slO)476B 
 
 General Library 
 
 Univetsity of California 
 
 Berkeley 
 
R rl 
 
 ft- 
 ♦ • * , ' 
 
 '11 tfn"",/ . '/-^ I 
 
 Jiff'?:' ^if 
 i4y r ' 
 
 
 W 'Tvry:''^^; 
 
 L M ?. - . .- ^-. .- - >t ( 
 
 -:^Vr.L- "'